BBC editor tells staff to be soft on Israel
By Nureddin Sabir
Editor, Redress Information & Analysis
Editor, Redress Information & Analysis
The Electronic Intifada today published a shocking reportexposing the extent to which Israeli propagandists have penetrated the BBC, Britain’s state broadcaster.
According to the report, Raffi Berg, the editor of the BBC News website’s Middle East section, has been sending his staff emails advising them to write more favourably about Israel.
Berg was promoted to his current position earlier in August, having already worked as a journalist on the Middle East desk. He replaces Tarik Kafala, who has moved over to head the BBC’s Arabic Service.
The emails
The Electronic Intifada reports that in one email, sent during Israel’s eight-day assault on Gaza in November 2012, which killed nearly 200 Palestinians, Berg
According to Electronic Intifada, the emails were originally posted onto the Zionist website Biased BBC on 21 November 2012 by a user going by the name “soothsayer”. They were reposted on another pro-Israeli website, Is the BBC biased?, on 13 April this year.
Absolving Israel of blame
The Electronic Intifada relates that in an email exchange in the last week of August with a British-Palestinian activist, Berg admitted that the emails were his.
The activist drew Berg’s attention to the fact that neutral sources agree that Israel’s assassination of Hamas commander Ahmad Jabari was the trigger for the assault which followed, and asked why Berg was requesting BBC journalists to de-emphasize this fact.
Berg replied:
However, as the Electronic Intifada points out, in the days preceding the execution of Jabari, Israel killed seven Palestinians in Gaza, including five teenage boys, in just 48 hours. But rather than report impartially on the scale and regularity of lethal Israeli aggression in Gaza, “BBC journalists stuck doggedly to the line, pushed by Berg, that Israel’s eight-day pounding of the besieged Strip was about Israel defending itself.
Urgent need for investigation
Berg is not the only Israel pimp working at the BBC. Others include the notorious Zionist James Purnell, who in February this year was put in charge of BBC policy and strategy, and the head of BBC News, James Harding.
According to Electronic Intifada, in 2011 Harding spoke at a media event organized by the Jewish Chronicle, telling his audience:
Seven years ago the BBC’s governing body commissioned an independent reportwhich concluded that BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “does not consistently constitute a full and fair account of the conflict but rather, in important respects, presents an incomplete and in that sense misleading picture”. The reasons for this have long been the subject of serious academic studies, the best known of which is Greg Philo’s and Mike Berry’s More Bad News from Israel.
Without a doubt, the presence of Raffi Berg, James Purnell, James Harding and other Zionists in key positions at the BBC will ensure that the corporation’s lopsidedness in favour of Israel will not only continue but will get worst.
However, while Berg is relatively junior compared to Purnell and Harding, the audacity and blatantness with which he is trying to shape the BBC News website’s coverage of the Palestine-Israel conflict is a cause for grave concern and should be urgently investigated by an independent authority.
While Palestinians talk, Israel creates facts on the ground
The Palestinian Authority, the Associated Press tells us, is making special efforts to reach out to Israel “in an attempt to jump-start recently renewed peace efforts”.
It’s a pity, then, that the feeling is not mutual.
According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
What will it take, we wonder, for the Palestinians to “show some steel, walk away from these bogus talks and put the blame squarely where it belongs – on Israeli and US dishonesty”?
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