"It never happened..."about the fate of a Palestinian cameraman shot by the Israelis

http://www.newstatesman.com/print/200707260028

"It never happened..."

<http://www.newstatesman.com/print/200707260028##> John Pilger

Published 26 July 2007

Concealed during the Alan Johnston kidnap crisis was the fate of a
Palestinian cameraman shot by the Israelis. The BBC, desperate to deny
charges of "bias", refused to follow the story.

One of the leaders of demonstrations in Gaza calling for the release of the
BBC reporter Alan Johnston was a Palestinian news cameraman, Imad Ghanem. On
5 July, he was shot by Israeli soldiers as he filmed them invading Gaza. A
Reuters video shows bullets hitting his body as he lay on the ground. An
ambulance trying to reach him was also attacked. The Israelis described him
as a "legitimate target". The International Federation of Journalists called
the shooting "a vicious and brutal example of deliberate targeting of a
journalist". At the age of 21, he has had both legs amputated.

Dr David Halpin, a British trauma surgeon who works with Palestinian
children, emailed the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen. "The BBC
should report the alleged details about the shooting," he wrote. "It should
honour Alan [Johnston] as a journalist by reporting the facts, uncomfortable
as they might be to Israel."

He received no reply.

The atrocity was reported in two sentences on the BBC online. Along with 11
Palestinian civilians killed by the Israelis on the same day, Alan
Johnston's now legless champion slipped into what George Orwell in Nineteen
Eighty-Four called the memory hole. (It was Winston Smith's job at the
Ministry of Truth to make disappear all facts embarrassing to Big Brother.)
While Alan Johnston was being held, I was asked by the BBC World Service if
I would say a few words of support for him. I readily agreed, and suggested
I also mention the thousands of Palestinians abducted and held hostage. The
answer was a polite no; and all the other hostages remained in the memory
hole. Or, as Harold Pinter wrote of such unmentionables: "It never happened.
Nothing ever happened . . . It didn't matter. It was of no interest." ......

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