BBC’s Connolly refrains from using the word terror in report on terror attack

In addition to the written article on the BBC News website in which the October 1st terror attack which resulted in the deaths of Eitam and Na’ama Henkin was reported, the incident was also the subject of an item (available from 02:43:03 here) by Kevin Connolly on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme on the morning of October 2nd.Pigua Henkin family Today 2 10

As can be seen in the transcript below, both Connolly and programme host James Naughtie managed to avoid all use of the word terror in that three-minute report on a terror attack.

JN: “The Israeli army is searching for the killers of a Jewish couple who were shot dead in their car in front of their four children. Hundreds of soldiers are now being deployed close to Nablus in the occupied West Bank. Our Middle East correspondent Kevin Connolly is on the line from Jerusalem. Just tell us what happened in this incident, Kevin.”

KC: “Well this married couple – Eitam and Na’ama Henkin – they were driving on a dark country road between two Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories – the nearest big city being Nablus – when they were fired on from a passing car. Now the parents were both killed – they were pronounced dead at the scene – but remarkably their four children aged between nine years and four months old – they were all in the back seat of the car – they were all unhurt.

It’s a hugely traumatising incident of course – immediately the area was flooded with emergency services and with soldiers. There is an intensive search going on; part of the role of the soldiers too is to try to keep a lid on rising tensions which of course you always see in the aftermath of this kind of shooting and of course today it is Friday prayers here in Jerusalem so there’s also a huge police operation around the Old City because any killing like this does immediately produce a predictable rise in sectarian tensions.”

JN: “And of course it is a tense moment – well it’s always a tense moment – but we’ve had this week Prime Minister Netanyahu saying that he would restart negotiations with the Palestinians immediately without preconditions but that the Palestinians weren’t interested and we’ve had President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority at a flag-raising ceremony at the UN saying he’d more or less given up on the Israelis. I mean episodes like this coming in the middle of it all just make it more and more unlikely there’ll be any progress.”

Listeners then heard Connolly equate the deaths of Palestinians – the majority of whom were killed whilst carrying out terror attacks or whilst engaged in violent rioting – with those of Israelis murdered in deliberate terror attacks.

KC: “I think that’s right. I mean I sometimes think, Jim, that the politics of it all feels as though it’s going on as a kind of abstract – almost in the background to the sectarian realities on the ground. I mean we were just going back through our own news archive here. It’s far from scientific but we would say that more than twenty Palestinians have died in political violence on the West Bank this year, at least a half a dozen Israelis. Often there’s a level of tension that bubbles away somewhere below the level, frankly, that you need to make global headlines.”

As readers will recall, the BBC has failed to report half of the Israeli fatalities resulting from terror attacks since the beginning of the year and as of the end of August, its coverage of fatal and non-fatal terror attacks stood at 0.81%.

Connolly ends with uncritical amplification of the narrative promoted by the Palestinian Authority in its quotidian incitement, encouraging BBC audiences towards the view that Jews celebrating their holidays “ratchets up the tension” rather than terrorism and violence fuelled by the incitement the BBC perennially fails to report.

“This week it’s the Jewish religious festival of Sukkot; that’s one of the times of year when Jews traditionally make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. That means, of course, that they move towards the Western Wall in the old city; that means they’re close to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. Many in the Arab world see that as a kind of attack on their religious identity. That ratchets up the tension too and of course the basic truth of this place is that the kindling you need to start these kind of fires of sectarian violence is lying around somewhere to hand all the time and it takes only a little spark, like last night’s killings, to ignite it.”

Notably, Connolly erased from his report both the celebrations on the Palestinian street which took place after the murders of Eitam and Na’ama Henkin and the statements praising the terror attack which were put out by leading officials from Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.Pigua Henkin family art 2 10

Those topics were also absent from the BBC News website article titled “Israel hunts West Bank for couple’s killers” which appeared on the site’s Middle East page on the afternoon of October 2nd. As was the case in the prior report which this article replaced, no mention was made of the fact that the attack was claimed by a group linked to the Fatah party’s armed wing. Instead, this article also promoted the amorphous notion of “tensions” – with no clarification concerning their roots.

“It [the terror attack] comes amid a period of tension between Israel and the Palestinians, which has seen clashes in Jerusalem. […]

There has been a recent flare-up in tensions between Israel and the Palestinians, with violent confrontations between security forces and Palestinian youths in a compound holy to both Jews and Muslims in East Jerusalem.”

Coming as they do after weeks of unsatisfactory reporting on the topic of the violent rioting seen on Temple Mount, these reports are further examples of the results of an editorial policy which causes the BBC to fall short of its remit of enhancing “awareness and understanding of international issues”.

A good place to start in order to begin meeting that remit would of course be the employment of accurate language. Of the six cases of fatal attacks on Israelis targeted purely because of their ethnicity which have taken place during the last nine months, three have been completely ignored by the BBC and three reported without any mention of the word terror. That editorial policy is clearly not fit for purpose. 

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