"Israel's War Against Terrorism"
Placard show four month old Palestinian girl Iman Hijo
who was murdered by Israeli soldiers in her home
in Khan Yunis refugee camp last May (2001)

Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the IHRC (Islamic Human Rights Commission) addressed the media hysteria about "suicide-bombers" :

" ... and for those who are pointing their finger at the Palestinians and crying suicide bombers and terrorist ... they should realise that this whole scenario has been created by the United States and the West because if they supplied the Palestinians the same weapons which they have donated freely to the Israelis then those who have to sacrifice their life would have been able to use F-16s and F-15s and US made helicopter gunships and air conditioned tanks. The issue here is that you cannot equate the violence which is being used by oppressors and occupiers to the violence that is necessary to be used by those that are defending their homes, their children and their lives..."

This placard with a single image and select words
captures the whole conflict.

"...First victory today - 10 Downing Street has just announced the freezing of all arms sales to Israel..."

"And I want to say to the British Government on behalf of a clear majority of the British people that the sight of Britain belly dancing for Bush in Texas is turning our nations stomach! Our country is not the tail of anyone's dog."

"I want to say even more clearly something very important to the Arab world. Last Wednesday was one of the days of shame in Arab history... not because the fighters of Jenin and Nabulas fell, but because they fell because they ran out of ammunition... And they ran out of ammunition because the Arab regimes have doubled and tripled the security along their borders so that no guns and no bullets can reach the intifada to defend the camps, to defend the people...

And we say to the belly dancing Arab regimes your day is coming. Either the Arab regimes will have to change or the Arab masses will have to change the Arab regimes...

Victory to Palestine! Victory to the Intifada!"

 

BBC staff are told not to call Israeli killings 'assassination'

By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent
The Independent, 04 August 2001

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=86965

In a major surrender to Israeli diplomatic pressure, BBC officials in London have banned their staff in Britain and the Middle East from referring to Israel's policy of murdering its guerrilla opponents as "Assassination". BBC reporters have been told that in future they are to use Israel's own euphemism for the murders, calling them "targeted killings".

BBC journalists were astonished that the assignments editor, Malcolm Downing, should have sent out the memorandum to staff, stating that the word "assassinations" "should only be used for high-profile political assassinations". There were, Mr Downing said, "lots of other words for death".

Up to 60 Palestinian activists and numerous civilians, including two children killed last week have been gunned down by Israeli death squads or missile-firing Israeli helicopter pilots. The White House has gently chided Israel about these attacks, but already this week the BBC has been using the phrase "targeted attacks" for the policy of murder. The Palestinian killing of Israelis, however, is regularly referred to accurately as "murder" or "assassination".

Mr Downing's memorandum suggests that the murder of a leading Israeli the late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, killed by an Israeli extremist is worthy of the word "assassination" while the killing of Palestinians is not.

The memo apparently says that "assassination" can only be used "sparingly"and with "attribution". The ban resulted from a discussion between Mr Downing and Vin Ray, deputy head of newsgathering at BBC World TV. Israeli diplomats have been lunching with BBC officials and complaining that the corporation's coverage was anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian.

The Israeli murder campaign is, in fact, far from "targeted". In the first such killings, two middle-aged Palestinian women were killed. After the initial reporting of the incident, the BBC dropped all reference to the female victims.

The Language of Bias

A summary of an article in the Independent by Robert Frisk, "When journalists forget that murder is murder" [18 August 2001]

What on earth has happened to our reporting of the Middle East? George Orwell would have loved a Reuter's dispatch from the West Bank city of Hebron last Wednesday. "Undercover Israeli soldiers," the world's most famous news agency reported, "shot dead a member of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction yesterday in what Palestinians called an assassination." The key phrase, of course, was "what Palestinians called an assassination". Any sane reader would conclude immediately that Imad Abu Sneiheh, who was shot in the head, chest, stomach and legs by 10 bullets fired by Israeli "agents" had been murdered, let alone assassinated. But no. Reuters, like all the big agencies and television companies reporting the tragedy of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, no longer calls murder by its real name.

Back in the days of apartheid, no one minced their words when South African death squads gunned down militant opponents. They talked about murder and assassination. They still do when Latin American killers murder their political opponents. I've yet to find a newspaper which shrinks from reporting the "murder" – or at the least "assassination" – of IRA or UDA gangsters in Belfast. But not when the Israelis do the murdering. For when Israelis kill, they do not murder or assassinate, according to Reuters or CNN or the most recent convert to this flabby journalism, the BBC. Israelis perpetrate something which is only "called" an "assassination" by Palestinians. When Israelis are involved, our moral compass our ability to report the truth dries up.

Editors around the world are requesting their journalists to be ever softer, ever more mealy mouthed in their reporting of any incident which might upset Israel. Which is why, of course, Israelis are so often reported as being killed by Palestinians while Palestinians, some as young as 10, are killed in "clashes" – "clashes" coming across as a form of natural disaster like an earthquake or a flood, a tragedy without a culprit.

Mohamed el-Dura, a child of 12 was murdered by Israeli soldiers
in front of the camera, but still reported as "killed in crossfire"

One sure way of spotting Israel's responsibility for a killing is the word "crossfire". Mohamed el-Dura, the little Palestinian boy shot dead by Israeli troops in Gaza last year, became an iconic symbol of the Palestinian "intifada". Journalists investigating the boy's death, including The Independent's Jerusalem, correspondent were in no doubt that the bullets which hit him were Israeli. Yet after a bogus Israeli military inquiry denounced in the Knesset by an Israeli member of parliament, all the major Western picture agencies placed captions on the photo for future subscribers. Yes, you've guessed it, the captions said he was killed in "crossfire".

Wars have always produced their verbal trickeries, their antiseptic phrases and hygienic metaphors, from "collateral damage" to "degrading the enemy". The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has produced a unique crop. The Israeli siege of a city has become a "closure", the legal border between Israel and the occupied territories has become the "seam line", collaborators for the Israelis are "co-operators", Israeli-occupied land has become "disputed", Jewish settlements built illegally on Arab land have become "neighourhoods" – nice, folksy places which are invariably attacked by Palestinian "militants".

Within the past week, CNN, the news agencies and the BBC have all been chipping away at the truth once more. When the Jewish settlement at Gilo was attacked by Palestinian gunmen at Beit Jalla, it once more became a "Jewish neighbourhood" on "disputed" land even though the land, far from being in "dispute", legally belongs to the Palestinian people of Beit Jalla ("Gilo" being the Hebrew for "Jalla"). But viewers and readers were not told of this.

When the next state-sponsored assassination of a Palestinian Hamas member took place, a television journalist – BBC this time – was reduced to telling us that his killing was "regarded by the Israelis as a targeted killing but which the Palestinians regard as an assassination". You could see the problem. Deeply troubled by the Israeli version, the BBC man had to "balance" it with the Palestinian version, like a sports reporter unwilling to blame either side for a foul.

So just watch out for the following key words about the Middle East in television reporting over the next few days: "targeted killings", "neighbourhood", "disputed", "terrorist", "clash" and "crossfire". Then ask yourself why they are being used.