This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/3799

The BBC As The Hamas Broadcasting Corporation - How their propanda incites to attacks against Jews

January 7, 2009

Hamas Broadcasting Corporation (ctd) Tuesday, 6th January 2009
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3210031/the-hamas-broadcasting-corporation-ctd.thtml


Last night's BBC TV News at Ten featured a highly partisan report about Gaza by Jeremy Bowen. Making no mention of the direct hit yesterday by a Hamas rocket on a kindergarten in Ashdod (which was empty for fear of precisely such an occurrence) Bowen concentrated heavily on the growing civilian casualty toll among Palestinians, making no acknowledgement of any Hamas operatives among these figures. The piece de resistance of this item was a report from Gaza's Shifa hospital by a Gazan BBC producer, Rushdi abu Alouf. He claimed that ‘hundreds of kids, women and children' had been brought to the hospital for medical treatment. Undoubtedly there are many casualties -- tragically, including children -- and the hospital is obviously under pressure. This though may help explain some of that pressure:

Hamas has set up an independent hospital in the Gaza Strip to treat its operatives wounded in fighting with the IDF - and, according to Israeli estimates, it is pilfering a significant portion of the medicine allowed into the Strip.

But the BBC did not tell its viewers the important fact that every single journalist and media utterance coming out of Gaza is controlled by Hamas. In other words, you can't believe a thing that anyone there tells you.

More notable still was the interview this producer conducted with a Norwegian doctor treating the wounded at Shifa, Dr Mads Gilbert. Gilbert painted an appalling picture. There were many amputations and head injuries; more and more patients were arriving; there were so many they were dying waiting for surgery. Asked how he was coping, he replied: ‘I'm not coping; the Palestinians are coping and they do all they can'.

Gilbert was presented as just an ordinary doctor. But Gilbert appears not to be just an ordinary doctor. He is a political activist and member of the Norwegian Maoist ‘Red' party. Not only is he viscerally hostile to Israel and a long-standing activist in the Palestinian ‘solidarity' movement, but he even supported the 9/11 attacks. A reader posting on this website -- which features a video of further inflammatory remarks by Gilbert -- provided his own translation of Gilbert's remarks to this effect, as well as Gilbert's Wikipedia entry which contained the following (translated from Norwegian):

Shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center in the United States in September 2001 stirred the excitement when Gilbert defended oppressed moral right to attack the United States. ‘If the U.S. government has a legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, they have also suppressed a moral right to attack the United States with the weapons they had to create. Dead civilians are the same whether they are Americans, Palestinians or Iraqis.' On the direct question whether he supported the terrorist attacks on the United States, Gilbert said: ‘Terror is a bad weapon, but the answer is yes, within the context I have mentioned.'

These remarks, sourced to ‘Dagbladet: Forsvarets attack on the U.S. (30.09.2001)', no longer appear on Gilbert's Wikipedia entry.

Gilbert has been giving interview after interview across the western media, which clearly can't get enough of him. The Times this morning reported him texting friends back home:
‘We are wading in death, blood, and amputees. Many children. A pregnant woman. I have never experienced anything so terrible. Now we hear tanks. Pass it on, send it around, shout it out. Anything. DO SOMETHING! DO MORE! We are living in a history book now, all of us.'
He has not only claimed that Israel is deliberately targeting Gaza's civilians but has also accused it of using unconventional weapons. The evidence of that, he told Press TV, was that
Almost all of the patients we have received have these sever [sic] amputations.
But the pictures of casualties being admitted to Shifa show no such thing; many bodies in the morgue are intact. Indeed, one commentator observed of the dead children that they 'looked like sleeping dolls'.

In a longer version of the interview with abu Alouf on the BBC website, Gilbert says he has only seen two Hamas ‘fighters' in the hospital; all the rest of the casualties have been civilians. Of the 2400-plus people injured, he says, 45 per cent have been women and children; plus civilian men, that means the majority of the wounded have been civilians. But the UN says it estimates that 25 per cent of the dead are civilians, because that's the number of women and children who have been killed; the Israelis say the proportion of civilians is smaller still. So if 75%-plus of the dead were Hamas terrorists, is it likely that Shifa would only have only seen two terrorists who were wounded? And if 25% of those killed are women and children, how come that total is almost doubled when it comes to the number of wounded?

And what neither Gilbert nor Bowen chose to say was that, as described here and here, although the Israeli forces are – remarkably – warning targeted terrorist households to evacuate their families because they are about to be hit, their response is often to stay put or even to move families onto the roofs as human shields. It is Hamas therefore which is responsible for the deaths of these civilians – indeed, guilty of war crimes in deliberately using civilians as bomb fodder for propaganda purposes, while Israel clearly tries to avoid their being killed. Yet the BBC does not tell us this. Instead it gives a platform to a man delivering libellous incitement against Israel.

Moreover, it was at Shifa hospital that Hamas gunmen prowling the corridors actually gunned down in cold blood five Gazans suspected of being ‘collaborators'.Yet Gilbert makes no mention of this atrocity perpetrated by Palestinians upon Palestinians which occurred in the very hospital where he is working. Instead he tells the world that Israel has turned the hospital into ‘Dante's inferno'. Nor -- mysteriously -- has he apparently treated any of the further 75 Fatah activists whom Hamas has shot (in addition to the 35 Palestinians it is known to have murdered in the past ten days); as Khaled abu Toameh reports in the Jerusalem Post:

Fatah officials in Ramallah told the Jerusalem Post that Hamas militiamen had been assaulting many Fatah activists since the beginning of the operation last Saturday. They said at least 75 activists were shot in the legs while others had their hands broken.

Did none of these wounded Gazans turn up at Shifa hospital for treatment for their wounded hands and legs? And if we're talking numbers here, aren't these 75 to be counted in the tally of ‘civilian' Gazan casualties -- who Gilbert claims were targeted by the Israelis for slaughter?

It is beyond appalling that the BBC should have presented this apologist for Hamas as a dispassionate first-hand observer of the situation in Shifa hospital. Whether it is cynical, malicious or just plain incompetent, the BBC's coverage of Gaza is a national disgrace. Given that such propaganda will invariably incite people to hatred, hysteria and even violence, the case for Parliament debating the BBC's performance is overwhelming.

An MP is shocked by al Beeb

Monday, 5th January 2009
Melanie Phillips
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3206981/an-mp-is-shocked-by-al-beeb.thtml


Three cheers for Tory MP Michael Fabricant, who says he has been ‘horrified and angered' by the BBC's coverage of the Gaza conflict, and will be making a formal complaint to the Chairman of the BBC Trust about it:
While paying scant regard to the provocation of 10,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilians from Gaza over the last seven years, the BBC has chosen to broadcast 'human interest' stories reminiscent of salacious photos in the cheaper red top newspapers. Thus I heard a heart rending report from a Palestinian in Cyprus how he imagined - yes: IMAGINED! - Gaza's streets would be running with the blood of dead Arab children. After that, the BBC located individuals in Gaza who have taken the opportunity of repeating over the BBC what they have already said on Al Jazeera. No balance there then. And today I heard an ‘unbiased report from a British aid worker in Gaza, from Islamic Relief'. Oh come on!

But perhaps the worst interview of all was with the Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic who dared to suggest that every country has a right to defend its citizens, that Hamas had walked away from negotiations, that they had resumed firing rockets into Israel unprovoked, and that Israel's actions are therefore defensive and not offensive. The ire and vitriol of the BBC interviewer was extraordinary. Paxman and Humphreys are pussy cats in comparison. The Czech minister sounded shell shocked. And so was I.


Commendable as is Fabricant's reaction, it is not enough for him to write to the Chairman of the BBC Trust. The BBC's collusion with Hamas, along with coverage whose incendiary distortions cannot but have incited hatred of Israel among its viewers and listeners, should be the subject of an emergency debate in Parliament. It would be interesting to know whether the Tory front bench agree with Michael Fabricant -- or think there is nothing wrong with the BBC's coverage. Those MPs from whatever party who understand just what is at stake in Gaza for western civilisation – alas, there aren't many of them but there are some -- and the deeply alarming role being played in this by the BBC should now raise the alarm.

This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/3799