Followup: BBC and Gaza Charity Appeal

In BBC and Gaza Charity Appeal, I published an email I sent to MP Baroness Falkner about the BBC refusal to air the Gaza charity appeal.

I received the following response, which is useful in elucidating a very clever Zionist linguistic trick meant to manipulate news coverage and to maximize harm to Palestinians.

RE: BBC Refuses To Broadcast Gaza Charity Appeal

From: FALKNER, Baroness

Dear Joachim

It is more complex than it appears. The BBC got a lot of stick after a government scientist died/committed suicide/was murdered after leaking some information about a weapons of mass destruction story to a BBC journalist in the run-up to the Iraq war. A huge row ensued between the Blair government and the BBC. The upshot was that the BBC governance structure was changed, with new codes on impartiality drawn up including a legal requirement to observe it. Politicians who were first to decapitate the Board at the time, cannot now say that because this cause is right, the BBC should risk legal action and reputation damage. Either we have an independent broadcaster or we don't. When we have written into statute its duty to be impartial re ongoing news, then we cannot change it the first time a decision we don't like is taken. It may be that when the dust has settled, then a review is taken of this clause in the Charter and it is changed. Now, in heat of argument is not the right time.

Incidentally, on Muslim outrage, I know from my own experience both in Pakistan and the Middle East, that we depend on impartial news as much as anyone. If the BBC was truly irrelevant, then there would not be such an outcry. As for Muslim Brits, they may be interested to know that they are better represented on the BBC's payroll than any other minority group. Also, minorities of all descriptions often have to live with unpopular decisions just by definition as they do not happen to be the majority, in majoritarian systems. My own view is that they should write to their MPs and the BBC seeking a charter review of this legal requirement or some change to governance whereby another body can overrule certain contentious decisions, and carry the can for it.

The whole affair is unfortunate, but on this one, I support them, although I wish we did not have to start from here.

Kishwer

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[I was initially concerned that I might be in violation of some sort of Parliamentary confidentiality rule if I put the response on my blog -- I do business in the UK, but there is no genuine problem because the disclaimer only refers to my confidentiality.]

Gideon Rachman takes a position similar to that of Baroness Falkner in FT.com | Gideon Rachman's Blog | The BBC, Gaza and impartiality. The full BBC impartiality rules are found via a link in BBC impartiality in the twenty first century – BBC Trust press release.

Baroness Falkner points out that the new impartiality requirement is an apparent response to the death of David Kelly that is supposed to have been a consequence of Andrew Gilligan's infamous BBC Radio 4 Today programme story on the sexing up of the September 2002 dossier.

I have some serious reservations with positing impartiality rather than truth or factuality as the primary goal of news reporting, and in retrospect the Gilligan story does not look so much like irresponsible journalism as like the first installment of a much larger more important story that powerful people in the British and possibly the US government managed to spike.

In any case the real issue of BBC impartiality relates not to the David Kelly story but to the coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict. See BBC Governors - Israeli-Palestinian Impartiality Review.

I would have been more impressed by the argument of the BBC’s director general, Mark Thompson, to justify the refusal to air a Gaza humanitarian aid appeal on the basis of impartiality requirements if there were not apparently legitimate suspicions about Mark Thompson's pro-Zionist partiality. (See BBC’s Mark Thompson Exposed for Refusing Gaza Aid Appeal ....)

I cannot help but suspect that Thompson (and the quite probably mostly Jewish BBC attorneys) would have come to a different conclusion if those desperately needing humanitarian aid had been Jewish.

Rachman's blog entry betrays the real Zionist intentions in Thompson's shyster lawyering of BBC governance rules.

But I think the BBC are right. Broadcasting a charity appeal for Gaza at this particular moment would compromise the corporation’s impartiality. This is not a disaster caused by a tsuanami or an earthquake. It is not an Act of God. It is the product of a highly controversial war - and for the BBC to broadcast appeals for humanitarian relief for Palestinian victims would inevitably be seen as a political act.

Note how Rachman like Jewish Zionists in general uses controversiality as the quality that defines partiality even though the two concepts are completely unrelated.^* For example, during WW2 BBC coverage was generally partial to the Allies and on the whole uncontroversial.

In other words, a lack of controversy may be an indicator of partiality.

Suppose the Israel government wanted to maximize human suffering in Gaza and to minimize Gazan access to humanitarian aid by making it difficult to broadcast appeals via media organs like the BBC.

The Israeli government need only make the war as controversial as possible via crimes against humanity and violations of the commonly accepted international rules of war.

Then within the twisted mental framework used by Zionists and their lackeys, helping to alleviate Palestinian suffering becomes a political act.

In other words Thompson's and Rachman's ridiculous interpretation of the BBC governance rules is tantamount to claiming that the BBC is partisan if it does not help the Israeli government in its strategic goal of making life either miserable or impossible for Gazans by preventing an humanitarian appeal from reaching the BBC audience.

Could there possibly be a more ass-backward interpretation of the impartiality requirements?

The raw numbers on Muslim representation at the BBC tell little about BBC partiality toward Jewish or Zionist causes. It is time to try a Muslim Brit as BBC director general and to start reducing the disproportionate Jewish influence at the BBC. (See Corrupt Jewish Social Networking Rules!) As anyone, who has studied the Jewish role in the consolidation of the Soviet Union knows, percentages only count when weighted in terms of authority and rank, and the effect of Jewish wives on non-Jewish husbands can be considerable both today with regard to the BBC and in the past with regard to the Soviet Communist Party.

Note

^* Zionists used a similar tactic of equating controversy with unfairness or with political inappropriateness in their efforts to stymie the Somerville Divestment Project.
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