Monday, June 09, 2008

June 6 ‘Media Critique’: “BBC Reporter: Genuine Eyewitness or Palestinian Propagandist?”

Yet again, HonestReporting goes for the hard news, this time a story from the BBCs From Our Own Correspondent’.

HR are deeply concerned that the facts of this story were reported differently in different media outlets.

Maqbool appears to be describing the death of Palestinian terrorist Omar Abdel-Halim CAMERA, however, investigated media coverage of this incident and discovered countless contradictions between the accounts of so-called Palestinian "eyewitnesses", Palestinian NGOs and media outlets, which could not even agree on the correct name of the terrorist.

But, true to form, HR then refer to an IDF press release on the incident. I think we’re meant to see this as an injection of objectivity and fact.

Let’s just get some perspective here. This is the same IDF that routinely lies and covers-up its actions in relation to the killing of Palestinians. Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, had proof of IDF mendacity mailed to it in 2001 after it had requested an investigation into the IDF shooting of 3 children (1 was killed).

B'Tselem obtained internal documents from the office of the Military Advocate General which reveal how the military cleared the soldiers who caused the death of an eleven year-old Palestinian boy, covered up the incident, refrained from opening an investigation by the Military Police, and issued a false statement regarding the circumstances of the death.

The documents that the IDF mistakenly sent B’Tselem include a discussion of the various false explanations (after discovering the IDF soldiers had indeed deliberately shot the children with a tank-mounted machine gun) they could offer B’Tselem and which were most plausible.

Lawrence of Cyberia also offered a taste of the IDFs mendacity in its ‘investigations’.

So, this is the organization whose statement HR offer for objective comparison to media reports.

Propagandists? Indeed.