found this on another thread and thought worth posting here. I dont think even the most strident msmers here would expect this to happen here.
"good comments from by Anshel Pfeffer on Beeb reporting on Israel & the GWOT, currently the subject of a BBC director's report:"
The basic outlook of foreign reporters covering Israel - whether as a result of the political views they held before coming here or their personal prejudiced take on what they've seen - is on the whole sympathetic towards the Palestinians and critical of Israeli policies. That's a fact of life and we're never going to have a Zionist foreign press corps.
But I don't think that's the BBC's main problem. The BBC, like many other British news organizations, is suffering from a denial complex of the fact that the West, including Israel and Britain, is in the midst of a bitter war against radical Islam, and that this not just a small group of religious crackpots with no connection to the peace-loving Muslim society.
I realized this when I was in Britain during the bombings on the London Underground 10 months ago. Listening to the first BBC radio reports on the attack, the moment it was clear there had been several blasts in different places there was no question that this was an act of terror.
But what was crystal clear to me was not at all certain to the newsreaders. They proceeded from just "explosions" to "what could be a terrorist attack" and then "what seems to be a terrorist attack."
Only three hours after the blast, when Tony Blair announced it had been the work of terrorists, would the BBC admit "now it's officially confirmed."
One didn't need more than sub-average intelligence to realize that what looked like a terror bombing and sounded like a terror bombing could not be just three simultaneous power surges. As the day wore on, the faceless men in the studio repeated again and again in disbelief, "but there was no warning," in an anachronistic throwback to the good old days of the IRA. How hard was it to understand that the Republican terror offensive, with all its inherent cruelty, was a gentleman's war next to what is happening around the world and now in Britain?
And that was nothing next to the sheer astonishment at the possibility that a suicide bomber might have been the perpetrator of the bus bombing. "For the first time in Britain" was the recurring mantra.
What did they think? That London was somehow immune to the ultimate weapon used already on New York, Washington, Islamabad, Nairobi, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv? What had the BBC been reporting from around the world for the last decade? Are the British special somehow, or did they think that the Islamists somehow owed them a favor? The denial mindset of the BBC and other news organizations in the West is a result of decades-long political and cultural influences, and if the wave of terror attacks over the last five years hasn't changed that, it's hard to believe that anything can.
jpost.com. |
