DEAR EDITOR
Even as we must afford some degree of latitude to the likes of the BBC and Sky News in their unenviable task of covering the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East in real time, may I suggest that their coverage last week was of great concern.
A dreadful week began with the reporting, on 27 July, of a rocket attack which killed 12 children in the Golan village of Majdal Shams, while the IDF hit a school facility in Gaza, which, according to Hamas, killed 30. The BBC ran with two headlines which could only be described as chalk and cheese: “Children dead in attack on football pitch in Israeli-occupied Golan”, read one. “Israeli strike on Gaza school killed 30 – health ministry”, the other.
Several thoughts jump to mind. The former incident was an “attack” which left “children dead”, the latter an “Israeli strike” which “killed” 30 people. There was enough room to call the Golan “Israeli-occupied”, but no room to state that the “health ministry” source in Gaza is run by Hamas. It is not mentioned that the rocket hit a playground, while it is implied that Israel struck just an ordinary, functioning school in Gaza. As Lord Wolfson put it, “Israel appears in both headlines, striking and occupying”.
Then, on 29 July, the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen wrote that while Hezbollah’s denials were unconvincing, it was “hard to see why it would target” Druze children playing football, and it “might have been aiming for the extensive Israeli… military positions on Mount Hermon”, in line with its apparent aims of “mostly… trying to kill soldiers, not civilians”. All of this analysis is torn to pieces when one recalls that this was a rocket, of which Hezbollah have fired hundreds into Israeli territory. These rockets are not precision weapons. They are lobbed over land borders, aimed at a wider vicinity, but without any particular “target” that Bowen seems keen to speculate on, and in flagrant breach of international law maxims that Bowen doesn’t once mention.
The same day, Sky News’s Special Correspondent, Alex Crawford, also reported Hezbollah’s denials, somehow with more conviction than scepticism. Crawford then wrote online that in the aftermath, Israel might be pressured to “reign in their lust for revenge”. When challenged on this by the Editor of the JC, she told him she would get the phrase changed to “lust for revenge as demonstrated over the last 9 months”, before audaciously taking a dig at his own partiality.
At this point, one would think it could hardly get much worse. The reporting of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh’s death on 31 July, however, saw eyebrows shoot right up through hairlines. Crawford and Sky, Bowen and BBC, together with other outlets, described Haniyeh variously as a perceived “moderate”, “pragmatic”, “less hard line” Hamas figure, with a critical role in negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza.
I am at a loss to understand how someone can be seen as the more “moderate” face of a terrorist organisation he himself leads. A moderate leader does not celebrate live footage of a massacre he helped to mastermind from the comfort of his Qatar hotel room. A moderate leader does not try to end a war his own group began and persists with to this day, with rockets still fired and hostages still held. A moderate leader is not recently filmed leading supporters into a rousing rendition of “Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud” and then calling for the destruction of Israel – both genocidally antisemitic aims of Hamas (whether in its 1988 charter or its watered-down 2017 addendum). A moderate leader does not call for “the blood of the children, women and elderly” to be sacrificed for the Palestinian cause. I have no space left to mention all his other absences of “moderation” – but you see the point.
So, over just 5 days, a senior Sky News correspondent refused to give the benefit of the doubt to Israel’s painfully precise and defensive actions, while a senior BBC correspondent afforded that very same doubt to Hezbollah, whose actions are neither defensive nor precise. Together with the sanitised depiction of Ismail Haniyeh, the case for raising complaints becomes overwhelming. Please take the time to do so (viewerR@sky.uk, and www.bbc.co.uk/contact/complaints), to show that enough of us were paying attention.
