How the BBC and Sky News side with HAMAS

Prior to the kidnapping of three Israeli seminarians a poll showed support for HAMAS at an all time low of 15%.  It acquiesced to a one-sided reconciliation agreement, signed in Cairo, with its also corrupt Palestinian Authority rival.  HAMAS received no ceremonial or actual positions in the new Authority ‘coalition’; it received no financial benefit. With this new agreement Gaza’s 40,000 HAMAS employees did not receive a single penny in contribution towards their salary bill.  It signed a piece of paper which we can assume they hoped would facilitate HAMAS infiltration into their rival’s power base. The aim was surely to eventually seize political control of the Palestinian Authority. 

In its past Gaza received cash, supplies and weaponry from Egypt, Turkey, Qatar (its principal fundraiser) and Iran (its main military supplier).   HAMAS was founded as an offshoot of the Egyptian racist, fascist political organization known as The Muslim Brotherhood.  But Egypt was fundamentally destabilized by the Muslim Brotherhood.  So when el-Sisi seized control he outlawed it.  He then blocked all funds to HAMAS (which had contributed to Egypt’s problems by its activities in the Sinai), shutting down the thousand or so tunnels that made Gaza’s military and political elite enormously wealthy amidst Gaza’s poverty. 

Qatar, without the tunnels was unable to transfer its funds to HAMAS while Iran has found it increasingly difficult to successfully smuggle weapons into Gaza.  The closure of tunnels made the task almost impossible.  During Operation Protective Edge Turkey exported ball bearings to Gaza amongst a civilian transport passing through Israel. Israel refused it because there was only one use in time of conflict for ball bearings and that was in fragmentation weapons that would kill large numbers of people.

It is against this background that HAMAS refused the offer by Israel not to escalate the cold war into a military conflagration.  It realized that it had nothing to lose and everything perhaps to gain by eliciting international support.  Support it needed for the lifting of the siege against it and the opening of a sea-port and airport under its control. It violated or refused seven separate ceasefires offered or accepted unconditionally by Israel.  HAMAS was desperate and desperate regimes are dangerous to themselves and their people.

It is estimated that Israel destroyed two thirds of Gaza’s military infrastructure and a similar percentage of its missiles.

And now a controversial statement:

The main barrier to the overthrow of HAMAS is the support shown by the press against Israel, a support that barely exists at this time in most of the Arab world but is growing throughout the Western World.

On the evening of August the 9^th I listened to the British Broadcasting Commission. The BBC is funded by obligatory public taxation and is the largest News organization in the world. I also listened to Britain’s Sky News.  Both had extensive reports on the ongoing conflict between HAMAS and Israel.  Referring to what one of them labelled “the so called Humanitarian ceasefire” their video extracts emphasized the injured children on the Palestinian side. If I had not known better I would have been sold to the Palestinian cause.  In both cases the reports were crafted to eke out maximum sympathy for Gaza and the Palestinian people while reviling their Israeli ‘tormentors’. The BBC made clear by its report that it sided with Gaza (HAMAS).  The BBC ended its Gaza tale stating that after all the years of siege, HAMAS would not return to the “quiet” of the past without a lifting of that siege.

It is a perfectly reasonable statement in the aftermath of the devastation and loss of life.  One can never complain about the professionalism of either news outlet. The pathos was exquisite.  But both the BBC and Sky at that time behaved as activists for genocide. They erased the Islamist ideology, the aggressive military stance of HAMAS and the ethnic cleansing of Southern Israel.

They ignored the genocidal anti-Jewish rhetoric that suffuses Palestinian society and that Palestinian Arab children receive from kindergarten through to adulthood. 

As none of this is mentioned in any British news reporting HAMAS is rehabilitated rather than being damned.  Sky News led with a long interview with a paralyzed seven year old girl.  Her interview was eloquent and heart breaking. The interview was inaccurate and the reporter refused to take any questions from Israel afterwards even though his journalistic integrity is clearly in doubt.  Israel is damned by its deliberate exclusion from the narrative and Sky News won kudos for an excellent piece of tragic theater.

And then we have Channel 4 News which has its own special reputation for unbridled pro-Arab news reporting.  On the evening of August 11^th Channel 4 News broadcast a clip on the desperate situation in Iraq.  They managed to completely subvert the message by overlaying a voice recording about four teenagers in Gaza, downplaying the significance of the Iraqi crisis while focusing on Israeli actions. I would not have thought it was possible.

So it is realistic to say that at least in the UK the press has abandoned all impartiality.  Its eagerness to draw us into one sided video presentations on Palestinian victim-hood against an evil Israeli juggernaut is professionally skillful even as it overlooks Palestinian complicity.

It is ironic that the real genocide happening in Israel’s neighborhood cannot be prevented without troops on the ground and air strikes that will inevitably kill many innocent civilians in Iraq.   But in the UK reports on the Yezidi genocide are sanitized, laundered so that what we see are geometrically ordered pictures of men in non-descript uniforms waving black flags while smiling sweetly for the cameras.  These same smiling heroes of Islamic supremacy in Iraq and beyond have crucified Christians, buried women and babies alive and while not independently verified, beheaded babies, filling a park with their spiked macabre trophies. IS (the fighters of “the Islamic State”) have lined up hundreds of civilians in ditches and murdered them just like the Nazis did in WW2. It is irrelevant whether IS’s victims are Assyrian Christians (Chaldean), Jewish, Kurdish, Yezidi, Turkmen, African, Mandaean, or even the wrong kind of Muslim. This black flag waving army of evil are storm troopers for the Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, al Shabab, Boko Haram, Hezbollah and HAMAS.  Their provenance is a dishonorable line stretching back all the way down to 6^th Century Arabia and they are as always an ever present tool of Muslim conquest.  But in the Western World we say very little in case we offend them!

None of what the Islamic State, Boko Haram et al is capable of committing compares though, according to Britain’s news networks, with acts of Israeli self-defense and juxtaposing this, Palestine’s slick cinematic pathos, fabricated film footage and scenes of devastation in Gaza.   There is a distressing visual impact to bombardment but Israel is at war and only a collaborationist thinks that turning the other cheek will make HAMAS or the Palestinians happy.  They want our heads.

So a reminder then.  HAMAS is an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. HAMAS believes in a Hudna or temporary cease-fire to last ten years.  During this time Israel will withdraw to the pre-1967 disengagement borders.  Israel will permit all people classified as refugees by the UN to return to Israel. HAMAS affirms the right to establish an Islamic state in the area that is Israel, Gaza, Judea and Samaria (renamed in 1950 after its conquest by Jordan as “the West Bank”).  HAMAS remains committed to Israel’s destruction.

If HAMAS was weak and failing prior to Operation Protective Edge it is news networks such as the BBC, Sky News and Britain’s Channel 4 News that are now propping them up. As such they are responsible for killing Palestinian children.  It is they who give succor to an organization that willingly sacrifices its own women and children for the dream of annihilating the Jews, one of the many existential enemies it would wish to destroy.

If HAMAS provides the rocket fire that has violated seven cease-fires (in the current campaign) then Britain’s Left wing fascist press is guilty of War Crimes, by giving oxygen to this murderous organization.

If HAMAS provides the theater, Sky News, the BBC and Britain’s Channel 4 News provide the global audience.