The British Broadcasting Company, BBC, refused last week to broadcast a message to help for Gaza relief sponsored by the British Red Cross and 10 other international and British humanitarian organizations. The broadcast is intending to collect donations for the benefit of the victims in Gaza. The BBC reason for not airing was that it wants to be neutral and this broadcast would contradict its impartiality.
From the outset, it is true, and heartening that the BBC should be neutral and impartial, something we in the US could only dream of when the story or the issue involves Israel and Palestinians.
That said, however, BBC’s attempt to be neutral for refusing to air a humanitarian broadcast renders it “un neutral” pro Israel, against the Palestinians. Because the broadcast is for humanitarian relief, not political relief, it is not on behalf of Hamas, it is on behalf of British and international humanitarian organizations. It appears that the BBC in its attempts to look “objective” and neutral” have joined the Israeli army propaganda machine.
First, the civilians in Gaza, children and women in particular, whom the humanitarian broadcast was trying to help, were not combatants, or militias or fighters. Those were not member of Hamas, and did not have a say so in the war that was imposed on them by Israel.
The BBC with this action is equating the Israeli army who committed war crimes with the victims it murdered.
White-centric, most of the Western media is biased and sees the world through the prism of Western European standards. As for the Palestinian victims, they are not white, they are brown and Muslims. The BBC or the CNN or FOX and the rest of those White World media could care less about the victimization of Palestinians or their mass murder and devastation at the hands of a European implant in the heart of the Arab world.
A VP of international news of a national mainstream media organization have told me, when I discussed with him the nature of his coverage of the war on Gaza, by saying” this is a contentious issue”. He was right, giving that no matter how much devastation and destruction Israel can wreck on an entire segment of humanity of 1.5 million people, still this could be debated as to whether those who were killed by Israel deserve to have their story told as victims, or they should be held accountable and treated as equal to their murderer.
American media in general is pro-Israel no matter what Israel do. With the exception of notable few on the regional level particularly Chicago media that I a most familiar with. The Israeli government could count on army of American journalists to do its bidding and justify its crimes no matter how heinous those crimes were.
Israel’s murder of young Palestinian children, bombing their schools and shelters were justified on Fox, ABC and CNN to name a few, as “retaliation” of Hamas firing on Israel. This is illogical logic of course, and renders most of the US and European Media as an Israeli propaganda machines that lack any real credibility when it comes to this conflict. It is like if a distraught parent went to his daughter school, and barricaded himself inside the school which is still full of children, would the US media “understand” or be in favor of the local police department bombing the entire school out and killing all of the students so they can extract the parent who is held up inside of it? According to the way the media covered Israel’s war crimes, the US and European media went along with this logic.
Israel for its part prevented the Western media from entering Gaza, specifically, so it can control and manage the Western coverage of its war that was largely waged on defenseless population.
CNN’s Campbell Brown, whose husband is former AIPAC (which is a pro-Israeli lobbying outfit) operative and Fox news analyst, issued a statement on her show stating that Israel prevented journalists from entering Gaza which was bad for Israel and the journalists. It was clear that the main or perhaps the only concern for Brown was to show Israel side and perspective on the issue. As for Palestinians, they would have to be content with crumbs of coverage which is biased against them anyway.
Al-jazeera both Arabic and English were the only media organizations (English) present in Gaza with none stop coverage that captivated the entire Arab and Muslim world.
This war will go down, from a media perspective as the war that ended the Western media dominance on world stage.
BBC, CNN comparing to Al-jazeera’s global reach look like child play. Al-jazeera English and Arabic carried the day from Gaza, and have presence in every corner of the world and can bring the news from anywhere to everywhere without the arrogance and pretentiousness of the national western media.
As for Al-jazeera Arabic, it solidified its place as the number one news organization in the Arab World and proved that it can still be an Arab media organization that covers stories and event about Arabs and wars against them, yet it has the confidence of letting the Israeli leaders speak whatever lie they want to, and say it in cold blood. We saw for example Israel’s president a nd the father of its nuclear bomb, Shimon Perez, who told us in a 45 minutes interview that looked like a documentary into the mind of pathological liar and cold blooded mass murderer that Israelis are “defending themselves against the women and children of Gaza, and they actually “have a loving care” for the Palestinians in Gaza. Israel killed over 1330 Palestinian in Gaza, among hem were 400 children and over 100 women, and destroyed over 20,000 house, several mosques, and the entire civic and service infrastructure of Gaza, and used many banned weapons and ammunitions such as depleted uranium bombs and phosphors bombs, and dropped over 2 million tons of explosive on the hapless open air prison called Gaza.
