The Yiddish word, chutzpah, is sometimes defined as the boy who kills his parents and then pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan. John Pilger has now offered us a new definition; his piece on this page yesterday was 850 words of chutzpah. He defends his film, Palestine is Still the Issue, by talking of his duty to the "basic truth"; yet rarely has there been broadcast a more distorted piece of anti-Israel propaganda. Such a contorted view, however, has now become the received wisdom on the left. When, in June, Cherie Blair remarked that "as long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress", she revealed just how deep-seated has become the willingness to excuse the murder of Israelis. That same week, Radio 4's The Moral Maze invited on a Hamas supporter to justify such murders.
One would have thought that most civilised people could agree on a basic morality: mass murder can never be justified. Apparently not; if the victims are Israeli, there is no shortage of people prepared to offer excuses, couched in the form of analysis, which amount to an implicit - and sometimes explicit - justification for murder. They make the ritual denunciations of the slaughter of innocent victims; but their every other word, and their entire slant, makes clear their belief that, as Israelis, the victims brought it on their own heads.
Still more insidious is the hidden bias of the BBC. Most of it is subtle, and all the more dangerous for that. Take the use of the word terrorist. Both the US state department and the UK government, along with the rest of the EU, classify Hamas and Islamic Jihad as "terrorist organisations". Even Palestinians have used the term "terror" to describe attacks on Israeli civilians: on the BBC World Service on December 4 2001, Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Authority security service, referred to the attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa as "terror attacks"; on Newsnight the same day, Nabil Abourdeneh, an adviser to Yasser Arafat, referred to Palestinian militants as "terrorist groups". But not the BBC's correspondents themselves. When they refer to Hamas and Islamic Jihad they call them not "terrorists" but "militants", "hard liners" and "radicals". Bombings of Israeli civilians are referred to as "attacks" or "suicide bombings". When suicide bombers killed 26 Israeli civilians in attacks on Jerusalem and Haifa, the word "terror" was used by the BBC only when describing Israel's response in attempting to root out the source of the murder inflicted on its citizens. It's not just the BBC: in Friday's Guardian, the murderer of Yoni Jesner, an 18-year-old Glaswegian Jew, was described not as a terrorist but as an "activist".
Newsnight's coverage of the UN report into Jenin was typical. The BBC had faithfully reported the Palestinian claims of a massacre as fact, so how would they deal with an inquiry which confirmed that there was no massacre? Easy: change the attack. The opening film by David Sells signed off with this impartial thought, which summed up the tone of his report: "What happened in Jenin was no massacre; but it was appalling in its own right."
According to the Glasgow Media Group, however, broadcasters "assume the Israeli perspective", citing in evidence the BBC's failure to explain the term "occupied territories". Leave aside the fact that the Glasgow Media Group, which purports to be apolitical and thus objective, is primarily comprised of leftwing ideologues who have been pushing their views since they were involved in Tony Benn's campaign for the Labour party deputy leadership two decades ago. Their claims are simply bunkum. The very phrases used by the BBC, "occupied Palestinian land" or "occupied Palestinian territories" prove the opposite point, suggesting that Palestinian territory was aggressively conquered by Israel. In 1948 the West Bank was conquered by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt. They were only taken by Israel during the 1967 war, which attempted to destroy her.
One should not be surprised by the BBC's bias, which simply reflects the left-liberal mindset of most of its staff. The left likes nothing more than pinning victim status wherever it can. Thus where first the Black Panthers and then the IRA were freedom fighters, so now it is the Palestinian terrorist groups which are fighting against oppression. Even better, Israel is backed by the US; two villains for the price of one. So blinkered are they in their worldview that they cannot see that it is not hopelessness - many bombers are wealthy and educated - which pushes terrorists into mass murder, but hatred. As the historian Robert Wistrich shows in Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger, the Arab press is suffused with anti-semitism on a par with early Christian blood-libels. But we hear none of this. Instead, we are fed a diet only of rampaging, barbaric Israelis.
All light does not shine on one side of the conflict, all darkness on the other. The truth is only ever simple for simple minds.
· Stephen Pollard is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels based thinktank
stephenipollard@hotmail.com
