Turning self-defence into a war crime -- again.
Despite its predictability, the BBC's twisted treatment of Israel is deeply shocking.
Even by the standards of the BBC’s venomous bias against Israel, today’s exchange between BBC Radio Today programme anchor Anna Foster and Israeli spokesman Alex Gandler was jaw-dropping.
Gandler tried to present an accurate timeline and context to show that Israel had attacked both Lebanon and Iran in response to their attacks on Israel. He didn’t get very far. Constantly interrupting him, with a voice made tremulous with indignation at Israel’s apparent perfidy, Foster insisted that the Lebanon ceasefire wasn’t really a ceasefire at all because Israel had continued to attack Hezbollah. Indeed, she charged, in attacking Beirut “it looks like Israel doesn’t want a ceasefire”. To Foster, it seems, demonic Israel just wants to kill people for its own opaque but nefarious purposes.
She ignored the fact that Hezbollah had broken that ceasefire with a volley of missiles into Israel just three hours after it was agreed; that it has been killing IDF soldiers in Lebanon almost every day since then; and that Israel’s strike on the Hezbollah stronghold in the Dahiyeh district of Beirut was in response to another volley of missiles at two towns in northern Israel.
Spluttering over Gandler’s attempt to explain that the Lebanese government had shown itself systemically incapable of reining Hezbollah in, and brushing aside his statement that Hezbollah is the biggest non-state actor in the Middle East using civilians as cover, Foster insisted that “Israel has occupied a huge swathe of south of Lebanon. How can that be described as proportionate?” The majority of Lebanese including women and children, she expostulated, were being killed by Israeli forces.
Ah yes, there we had it once again: the wickedly obtuse refusal by the BBC to acknowledge the difference between intentionally targeting civilians — a war crime — and civilians unintentionally killed in a just war of defence.
Hezbollah and Tehran have been targeting Israeli civilians in their missile attacks: a war crime. Israel by contrast targeted Hezbollah’s main command centre in Beirut and strategic military installations such as anti-aircraft defence batteries, Tehran’s main airport, and a drone factory: justified and proportionate self-defence. But to Foster, Israel is apparently the war criminal.
Not content with all that, she then accused Israel of cutting essential aid to Gaza, including food, by closing the crossings. Hang on — wasn’t this a discussion about the war in Lebanon and Iran? Don’t be silly — for the BBC there’s only one issue, the evil of Israel; and so why not throw in its alleged war crimes in Gaza for good measure as a job lot of libels? It’s surprising Foster didn’t take the opportunity also to throw in genocide, murdering Palestinian children to bake them into matzo crackers, and using satanic Jewish power to control America.
In vain did Gandler protest that, because of the missile attacks by Iran, everything in Israel had been cancelled today. And anyway, there was no absence of food in Gaza. “Really?” said Foster in contemptuous disbelief.
But yes, really. The charge that Israel has been starving the Gazans during the war was another libel. As the Israeli humanitarian agency COGAT later stated, operating the crossings under fire puts lives at risk, both on the Israeli side and on the Gazan side. The crossings therefore couldn’t be operated safely under such conditions and would be reopened gradually when it was safe to do so. To accuse Israel of malevolently halting food supplies in such circumstances was hard to credit.
After this travesty of a professional journalistic interview, on came the BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen — the quintessence of the BBC’s institutional anti-Israelism — to state blandly and without elaboration, “Much what he [Gandler] said is not borne out by the facts”.
This was the same Bowen who, in October 2023 a few hours after the first reports of an explosion at Gaza’s al Ahli hospital that Hamas blamed on Israel, reported: “The missile hit the hospital not long after dark. … The explosion destroyed al Ahli hospital. … The building was flattened”.
Even after it was established that a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket had fallen short and merely hit the hospital’s car park, killing a far smaller number of people, Bowen airily dismissed his falsehoods, saying, “I don’t regret one thing in my reporting because I think I was measured throughout. I didn’t race to judgment.”
A couple of hours earlier on this morning’s Today programme, a Beirut-based reporter was asked: “What caused Israel to attack Iran?” His answer was all about Netanyahu’s politicking over the Iran deal and pressure from the Israeli public, with only a passing and vague reference to Hezbollah’s continued attacks on Israel. No mention of the nearly daily killing of IDF soldiers in Lebanon, nor the missile attack on Israel’s north which breached Trump’s ceasefire terms and precipitated Israel’s attack on Beirut.
Other media have also been presenting Israel falsely as the aggressor rather than defending itself against Iran which has been using Hezbollah to attack Israel. It’s business as usual — the truly wicked media distortions which present Israel falsely as evil rather than the target of real, unadulterated evil, and which have done so much to fuel murderous hatred against Israel and the Jewish people.
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