On October 11th the BBC News website’s UK Politics page included an article titled “MPs to vote on recognising Palestine as a state“. Both the caption to the photograph illustrating the article and its opening sentence inform readers that the vote is “historic”.
“MPs will take part in an historic vote calling for the recognition of Palestine as a state”
“MPs are to take part in an historic vote in Parliament that will call on the government to recognise Palestine as a state.
Labour backbencher Grahame Morris will present the motion on Monday as MPs return to the Commons.
The motion has the full backing of the Labour shadow cabinet, the BBC has been told.”
Curiously, the vote quickly moves from “historic” to “symbolic”.
“The vote is symbolic and would not change government policy but could have international implications.”
Later on in the report, under the subheading “Swedish move”, readers are reassuringly told:
“The vote comes amid moves elsewhere in Europe to recognise Palestine officially.
Sweden’s new centre-left government announced last week that it intends to officially recognise Palestine as a state, becoming the first long-term European Union member state to do so.
It will join more than 100 other countries that have already recognised Palestinian statehood.
A spokesman for the French foreign ministry said this week that recognition would be a positive step at some point in the future.”
A previous BBC article from October 3rd on the topic of the announcement by the new Swedish prime minister is promoted at the bottom of this report and in the sidebar of ‘related stories’. As was also the case in that superficial report (which failed to make any mention of the past anti-Israel activities of some members of the new Swedish cabinet or of that country’s history of financing anti-Israel NGOs), this one concerning the UK vote makes no attempt to inform BBC audiences of the implications and significance of such a move.
No mention is made of the fact that one party to the current Palestinian Unity Government is a terrorist organization designated by the EU with a private militia which is additionally proscribed by the UK. Readers are not informed of the fact that despite a pledge to abide by all existing agreements with Israel, that unity government has failed to do so since its inauguration on June 2nd and yet has remained unaccountable for that failure in the international arena.
The BBC’s report does inform readers that:
“Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander, writing on the LabourList blog, said: “This conflict will only be resolved ultimately by both sides engaging in a negotiated peace process towards that two state solution.””
It does not, however, bother to clarify that Hamas is not a member of the body with which Israel conducts negotiations – the PLO – or that it rejects the concept of a two-state solution and that its raison d’etre is the destruction of the Jewish state.
British MPs may well elect to take the step of recognizing a state with an internationally designated terror organization which seeks to destroy its neighbour (a UK ally) party to its current government. They may decide that it is acceptable to recognize a state in which the official security forces are outmatched by a much stronger terrorist militia backed by countries (Iran and Qatar) which fund terror throughout the Middle East and which, as we saw only this last summer, is capable of dragging that government into conflict as and when its own (or its backers’) interests dictate. British MPs should, however, be frank about their motives and ought not to be allowed to pretend that they are doing so in the interests of ‘peace’.
The people those MPs represent (most of whom are of course also BBC licence fee payers) are clearly in need of – and entitled to – the full range of information concerning the background to this issue if they are to be able to make their views on the subject known to their elected representatives before Monday’s vote.
As we have seen in both the previous BBC article about the Swedish move and in this one, the BBC has failed to provide its funders with that information.
