The BBC's bias on war reporting

The BBC headlines are all Israeli "child murder's" . Since most people only read or scan the headline the BBC's anti-Israel job is done.

If you follow through to the article below more biased headlines you discover that:

1) Islamic Jihad terrorists were successfully killed in counter battery fire due to their murderous attempts to fire rockets to kill anyone is Israel they can.
2) The Israeli's don't deny the event, but point out this happens when you have to return fire against terrorist activity.

What most worrying is the BBC spin on this event, that is quite frankly bigoted.

* Clip is from the UK version of the BBC news main page at about the time of this post.

The dangers of revolution and Obama

Nial Ferguson suggests Egypt has been a failure of inexperience and policy. Given how often the US has damaged its allies and let its enemies of the hock under the Obama Whitehouse I think we have to consider that damaging the Western World may be Obama foreign policy.

H/T To anon who pointed to this in a previous post's comments.

Being used

I'm away on a short break Just back from a short break, so haven't been able to say much about events in the Eastern Mediterranean. But I've listened to the radio before I left and seen updates here and there, and quite honestly I've been horrified.

But not in the same way the BBC, or much of the media has been.

My horror has been at how easy we are to use these days. This convoy to Gaza was always a direct provocation, and born of a very simple strategy to isolate Israel by destroying any remaining support for the country in Europe and the implicit support in parts of the Arab and Turkish world.

Imagine it has been a Royal Navy boarding party being clubbed and attacked by a vessel it was boarding - how would we really have hoped they would react ? ( Well after the HMS Cornwall humiliation perhaps we know. ) Remember and Israeli service person who is delivered into the hands of Hamas can give up on their life - so getting taken prisoner is just not an option.

Should the Israeli forces have intercepted the convoy in international waters ? I don't know what international law says here, so won't comment beyond saying some element of surprise could be expected to reduce the tension in any boarding, but surprise was clearly not achieved.

Was it a well planned operation - we its seems hardly likely as the outcome was a PR disaster.

But it seems Most likely that it wasn't one carried out with the intent of causing harm, which can be seen by the way the trouble was clearly started by the blockade runners who were the first to deploy deadly levels of violence. Its corroborated by the fact that this sequence of events would so obviously play badly for Israel that they would never have planned it.

The real horror for Israel should be how few friends they have left, so that even when they are stitched up like this - the near beating to death of Israeli soldiers is played as a crime of aggression ( no questions asked - at least not loudly enough to be heard) by the world media.

Here is their real problem - with the settlements on the west bank and treatment of Palestinians in Jerusalem they have used up the good will in the world towards them so that they no longer get a fair hearing in the court of European and maybe even American opinion.

The people who were on that convoy were being used by some very nasty forces for evil in our world. But what should worry Israel is how well its worked, and what should worry the rest of us is how easy its been to use us.

"Human rights abuses" in war

Predictably the UNHRC is reporting a few incidents of Israeli human rights abuses during its military action in Gaza.

My guess is that even if they aren't true, others probably are. I base this on reading Max Hastings accounts of the end of the second world war with Germany and Japan, which especially focus on individual experiences. Nothing that happened in Gaza comes close to the terror and whole scale murder that occurred in both those conflicts. And Max Hastings is careful to point out that the excesses were not just on the Axis side, though the stories of the Battle for Manila or the starvation of the Netherlands and of course the Holocaust make it clear where the bulk of the vast blame lied.

The truth appears to be that under the stresses of battle people do unexpected things and their primal nature come to the fore. In an event when you expected survival can be measured in minutes or seconds, the pressures of civilisation can fall away or prove stubbornly hard to move. ( On the western front many allied soldiers never aimed their weapons as they had an aversion to killing, leaving advances to be achieved by overwhelming artillery).

Reading these accounts also makes me realise that I can't know for sure how I would behave until confronted with the threat itself. The mass and systematic rapes of the Red Army look horrific, but then so where their conditions of service, life expectancy and the blood price the Russians paid to reach Berlin ( a price the armies of the democracies where clearly not willing or able to pay ). The behaviour of German, and especially SS units appears to have been just evil. But who can be so sure they would not have joined in if they had been born in Russia or in Germany in those days ?

I have also met Israelis and Palestinians. Some, many, are civilised and good people. But some have a visceral hatred of each other. Put those people in uniform, arm them, and put them in fear of their lives and very nasty things are going to happen. There are few armies in the world from the British, through to US via Canadian and French and even Dutch who can reflect with 100% satisfaction about the behaviour of all their soldiers over the last 60 years.

Little mention seems to appear in the media of the use of UN facilities by Hamas, its own use of human shields, its regular attempt to kill random civilians and its execution of Fatah supporters in hospitals as they lied in bed.

So I conclude that UNHRC is mostly engaged in ambulance chasing with a specific agenda to pursue.

War is ugly. High explosives do horrfic things to human bodies, and cornered frightened soldiers and militiamen cannot be relied upon to be always saints.

We all know this when we think about it. If UNHRC wasn't reporting human rights abuses, it would be a safe bet they took place, as they do in almost every conflict int he world. ( The Lady from SriLanka who headlines the report might like to return home to see how her own military is behaving with its own civilians. )

But what is really happening is that this is political theatre to attempt to weaken Israel.

If the world cared about those who live in Gaza it would send in military forces to police the area, save the people and guarantee peace. But that's not the real agenda of those who make so much fuss. They too are using the suffering of civilians to advance their own agenda - and is that not a war crime itself ?

PS It is of course right that crimes carried out in war are reported and if possible punished. My point is that we cannot act surprised that they happen given the nature of such conflicts, and we should question those who are so keen to allow the policy of using the people of Gaza as a mass human shield to advance their own agendas, which is surely also a war crime.

What the BBC won't tell you about the School deaths in Gaza

Melanie Phillips makes some very strong accusations in here coffee house blog here.

In short she says that Hamas fired from within the school compound and that it was the triggering of Hamas explosives that caused the causalities in the school.

Also the UN knew about the use of their facilities for firing weapons. ( I heard a fairly unconvincing dance of words last night by a UN official who kept saying on Newsnight that he had no evidence that something like this had happened - which is not the same as saying it didn't - and Jeremy Paxman let him get away with this deliberate ambiguity ).

Now I don't expect the BBC to buy this version of events, but I do expect some scepticism about the UN/Hamas line and also that the claims of each side are stated equally.

Another view on Gaza

From the receiving end of Hamas's campaign to murder :



And a slightly longer video fro Sderot.



This is a view that gets too little airtime, though I do note the BBC has at least mentioned these subjects and that some interviewers ( notably R5L ) challenge Hamas spokespeople and supporters on the morality of this. ( The answer is always the same to go on about calling random murder resistance and to cite other issues ).

Personally I'm not sure I would have taken the approach the Israelis have just now - but its to be remembered that they have tried a large range of other options first. Every concession is seen as weakness rather than a desire for an accommodation. Hamas has tried to kill Israeli citizens randomly and used its own as a human shield combined with its sick death cult of martyrdom.

Lebanon war second half starting now - soon to widden to war with Iran and Syria

Its hard not to come to that conclusion.

Iran has been systematically trying to encircle Israel making alliance with the Sunni Hamas in Gaza and the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Now all that Muslim unity stuff is being shown to be just the lies you would expect. Hezbollah is making its bid to subjugate Lebanon to the will of Iran and the Shia sect of Islam - you just know that has to suck.

Of course Israel won't be able to stand for this - as Iran's leadership fully understand.

So its time for the second half of the Lebanon war that the international community was so keen to stop before Israel destroyed Hezbollah.

At the same time our politicians know that Iran is probably butchering British service personnel with their bombs in Afghanistan, Iraq and Katyusha rockets in Basra - both techniques hallmarks of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. But I guess Gordon Brown has his own career to worry about and doesn't have much time for dealing with our enemies as long as they don't kill our young men and women too quickly for the voters to notice.

The Americans are running out of patience - as Hillary Clinton's warnings a few weeks ago show. The Iranians are run by a group who are looking forward to the apocalypse.

Unless they change track they will soon get their wish. But what is truly evil is that this game is just being played by a few middle aged leaders in Iran who are condemning a bright, well educated and highly civilised population to a dreadful fate.

Update Robert Fox takes a similar view over at the First Post. His comments on Hezbollah being able to take on the UN should give the French something to think about.

Israel is now warning Iran is behind all this. So were back to the streets of Sarajevo again - waiting for the spark.