The BBC's bias against Israel

Mideast Dispatch has a shocking piece that may help to explain why the BBC and especially Jeremy Bowen have such anti-Israel views. I have quoted the article in full because I think this sort of bias needs exposing - The key paragraph I have emphasised:

"REVEALED: UNRWA SPOKESMAN WHO LIED ABOUT ISRAEL PREVIOUSLY WORKED AT THE BBC WITH JEREMY BOWEN

I have previously outlined on this website the concoctions of the well-funded UN body UNRWA which have resulted in defamations of Israel and physical attacks on Jews in many different countries around the world.

For example, UNRWA has now admitted that their claim that Israel shelled a school in Gaza in January and killed 32 Palestinian civilians is completely false. The shell in question, it turns out, was in response to Palestinian mortar fire at civilians in Israel and killed nine Palestinian adults, none of whom were in the school. Seven of those killed were armed operatives and two were civilians.

The sensational and false claims of UNRWA led to headlines around the world such as “UN accuses Israel of herding 110 Palestinians into a house then shelling it, leaving 30 dead” (London Daily Mail Online UK, Jan 9 2009 11:59AM GMT).

The false reports led to anti-Israel riots and attacks on Jews in all six continents of the world.

A JOINT WAR CRIMES ALLEGATION BY UNRWA AND THE BBC

Now, it turns out that Chris Gunness, the UNWRA spokesman who went on several different international TV networks in January to accuse Israel of “war crimes” on account of the supposed school incident, is in fact a former BBC journalist and a close colleague of the BBC’s notoriously anti-Israel Chief Jerusalem Correspondent Jeremy Bowen.

In a diary article which Jeremy Bowen posted on BBC online, he states:

“I just broke off writing for a couple of minutes to take a call from Chris Gunness, who is the spokesman for Unrwa, the UN agency that looks after Palestinian refugees.

“He was ringing to say that Unrwa wanted an investigation into whether Israel has committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip. Civilians are protected by the laws of war.

“I have known Chris for years, as he used to be a BBC foreign correspondent. He wanted to make sure that we knew he was using the phrase for the first time. He said that the attack this morning on a UN school in Gaza looked as if it was a war crime.”

Tom Gross continues:

In three occasions in the past when I have criticized the BBC, the BBC online editors have then subtly changed their website so as to delete the part I criticized without letting readers know it had ever been there in the first place.

For the record, at the end of this dispatch, I attach Jeremy Bowen’s full diary entry (in which he makes the remarks above), together with two biographies of Chris Gunness. Gunness worked for the BBC for 23 years in senior editorial positions in both television and radio.

So it turns out that the UNWRA spokesman condemning Israel for “war crimes” that in fact never happened, is a former BBC World Service correspondent and producer who is a close friend of the current BBC Chief Middle East Correspondent who helped spread these allegations. Can it be that the false claims about Israel coming from two august institutions, the BBC and UNWRA, are in the hands of two friends who might just have a world view not sympathetic to Israel?

The BBC World Service and UNRWA are both funded by the British government. UNRWA receives huge amounts of money from many other countries too. Earlier this month, the Obama administration announced it would add hundreds of millions of dollars to the considerable funds it has already supplied UNRWA, an organization accused of allowing the promotion of suicide bombing and martyrdom to be taught at the schools it pays for and administers.



THIS IS THE BBC’S IDEA OF A CORRECTION?

In January, Jews in Britain suffered a level of anti-Semitic attacks on a level not seen since the 1930s. This can be attributed to at least in part by the inflammatory and false coverage of Israel by the BBC and other British media.

The BBC has finally added a small footnote correction to the end of one of its stories that falsely claimed Israel shelled a school in Gaza.

The BBC wrote that “40 Palestinian civilians sheltering at the Fakhura school in Jabaliya” had been killed by Israel, and also broadcast that false statement on countless occasions on its multitude of domestic and international radio and television networks. BBC radio broadcasts in dozens of languages around the world.

Below is the BBC’s small correction, which they placed at the foot of one of their online stories, a correction that fails to state that nine Palestinians died, not 40; that none were at the school; that seven of the nine killed were militants; and that Israel had not fired first but was responding to rocket fire by those militants at towns and villages in Israel.

BBC UPDATE:

BBC update

BBC Update: In February 2009, the United Nations said that a clerical error had led it to report that Israeli mortars had struck a UN-run school in Jabaliya, Gaza, on 6 January killing about 40 people. Maxwell Gaylord, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator in Jerusalem, said that the Israeli Defense Force mortars fell in the street near the compound, and not on the compound itself. He said that the UN “would like to clarify that the shelling and all of the fatalities took place outside and not inside the school”.

Maybe the time is ripe for the BBC to publish the Balen report, surely there cannot be worse cases of anti-Israel bias than we already know about...