Another obstacle to peace the BBC will not report

As we recently noted, the BBC has refrained from informing its audiences about the terrorist-run summer camps in the Gaza Strip in which tens of thousands of children are indoctrinated with hatred towards their neighbours and encouraged to believe that Israel will cease to exist. 

Like many of the Western voices which – with comic regularity – inform us that time is running out for a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the BBC endeavours to keep public focus on the issue of Israeli building plans rather than facing up to the fact that supporters of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups have absolutely no interest in an outcome in which two countries exist peacefully side by side. In addition to ignoring that sizeable proportion of public opinion on the Palestinian street, the BBC also ignores the glorification of terror by Israel’s so-called ‘moderate peace partners’ in the Palestinian Authority. 

A few weeks ago we published here the English-language translation of the list of Palestinian prisoners currently held in Israeli prisons since the pre-Oslo Accords period. Not only are those people sometimes erroneously described by the Western media as being “political” prisoners, but their release is one of several demands presented by the Palestinian Authority as pre-conditions to peace negotiations. 

Over at Palestinian Media Watch is a recent report documenting the glorification of the terrorist acts of two of those prisoners on PA controlled television.  

“Faraj Saleh Abdallah Al-Rimahi, who is serving a life sentence for beating an 84 year-old Israeli to death with a hoe in 1992, was coined a “giant hero” by the PA TV host. The host continued:
“Our hero, Faraj Al-Rimahi, is still writing the finest epics of endurance, heroism and self-sacrifice…”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r-ma34A3TzA]

“The PA TV host referred to Ibrahim Faiz Abu Ali, who is serving a life sentence for murdering a 24 year-old Israeli taxi driver in 1992, as “the hero prisoner.” The editors of the program also chose to include words of praise by the terrorist’s mother:
“By Allah, he is good, good. Ibrahim is honorable and a man. He’s never harmed his Muslim brother, never harmed a neighbor, never harmed any person…”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AwYtTg7EhvQ]

The PMW report also includes details of a “solidarity visit” to the families of other prisoners – as reported in the PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida – by officials not infrequently quoted by the BBC in articles on the subject of Palestinian prisoners.

“Hebron district, in cooperation with the Prisoners’ Club, the Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs and the Committee of Families of Prisoners, organized a solidarity visit to the families of veteran prisoners in the Hebron district… they are: Ziyad Mahmoud Ghanimat and Mustafa Ghanimat (both serving a life sentence)… Najeh Muqbil (serving 38 years in prison)… Muhammad Al-Tus (serving a life sentence)… Governor of the Hebron district [Kamel Hamid] awarded the ‘shield of resolve’ to the families of the veteran prisoners.”

The BBC’s consistent censorship of the institutional glorification of terrorists and their acts by the Palestinian Authority – and the resulting lack of preparation of its population for a peaceful end to the conflict – is yet another aspect of its failure to inform audiences of the real obstacles to a two-state solution which compromises its adherence to standards of accuracy and impartiality and prevents it from fulfilling its defined public purpose of building “a global understanding of international issues”. 

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