More PLO propaganda and polemic on BBC WS radio – part one

Newshour's Razia Iqbal blames the PA's financial woes on 'the occupation'.

As we saw in an earlier post the PLO’s Saeb Erekat was provided with a sympathetic BBC Radio 4 platform three days after the Palestinian Authority envoy in London gave a briefing to BBC journalists.

Erekat also appeared in an item over eight minutes long billed “Newshour speaks to one of the most senior and long serving Palestinian officials” (from 30:05 here) aired on the same day – June 20th – on the BBC World Service radio programme ‘Newshour’ presented by Razia Iqbal.

[emphasis in italics in the original, emphasis in bold added]

Iqbal: “The most intractable of conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians has been on the Trump administration’s agenda since Mr Trump went into the White House. His son-in-law Jared Kushner has been tasked to come up with what Mr Trump has dubbed ‘the deal of the century’. As part of that peace plan the US is hosting an economic summit in Bahrain next month – next week in fact. Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia will be present but the Palestinians say they were not consulted and are boycotting the summit. I’ve been speaking to Saeb Erekat who is currently the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and is the chief Palestinian negotiator. I began by asking him why Palestinian officials are boycotting the summit.”

The accuracy of Iqbal’s claim (which frequently crops up in BBC content) concerning the origin of the phrase ‘the deal of the century’ is questionable. Erekat began by recycling a theme he had used in his ‘Today’ programme interview aired earlier in the day.

Erekat: “Today, June 20th, Trump has been [in] office for 28 months. Did you hear the term occupation by any of them? Did you hear the term two states by any of them? Did you hear the term settlements are illegal by any of them? Did you hear Palestinians have the right to determination by any of them? They feel they can dictate a solution on me. In the last speech Jared Kushner gave he said if Palestinians accept what we offer then they are good, they can govern their people. If they don’t accept what we offer, they’re corrupt and they’re not fit to govern.”

Razia Iqbal did not bother to intervene to inform listeners that what Erekat was referring to was an interview rather than a “speech” and that Kushner did not say the things attributed to him by Erekat. Neither did she ask her interviewee how – if as he just alleged, the Trump administration had not used the term two states in 28 months – he managed to agree with them on a two-state solution as he next claimed.

Erekat: “I engaged with them – the Trump administration – in 37 meetings in 2017. We gave every possible chance. We signed agreement. We have an agreed terms of reference – international law, Security Council resolutions – and we agreed on two-state solution. Now what the American administration is doing is destroying these terms of reference, destroying international law, destroying the two-state solution. And they’re telling me – once they finish their negotiations with Netanyahu and the Israeli settlement council which they adopted their plan – ‘come here, boy, we know what’s best for you and if you don’t accept this you’re going to be related to Bin Laden, you’re corrupt and you’re not good to govern Palestinians’.”

That unsupported claim concerning “the Israeli settlement council” went unquestioned by Iqbal just as it did in the Radio 4 interview.

Iqbal: “OK, let’s look at the issue…the allegation of corruption. When you talked about how the Americans are saying that we will look at the Palestinian situation in terms of their needs as opposed to what you want, which is your rights, isn’t it true to say that there is corruption absolutely at the heart of the Palestinian Authority; that there is mismanagement of funds?”

Erekat: “I think that it’s really unfair to say this. I’m not saying that we’re perfect. I’m not saying that we’re not doing mistakes. We’re as normal as you in Britain, as Americans, as anywhere else. But [laughs] take American aid: they have never given us a single dollar directly. They have an agency called United States International Development Agency; they spend their money through it. So do the British and the French and the Germans and the Japanese and anybody else. So do I deserve to have occupation because I am corrupt? Do I deserve to have occupation because I cannot govern myself as Kushner says?”

Failing to clarify that ‘occupation’ was the outcome of attacks launched by Arab states, Iqbal went on to blame the PA’s financial situation in part on “the occupation”.

Iqbal: “It’s not about those two things being correlated. It’s about answering questions of accountability. So if the Palestinian ministers are going to give themselves more than 60% pay rises when the economy of the Palestinian Authority is on its knees, clearly informed by the occupation but also informed by mismanagement.”

Erekat predictably skirted round that issue and went on to make the inaccurate claim that the Oslo Accords included the term ‘two-state solution’ with no correction from Iqbal.

Erekat: “This was a mistake and we do mistakes and this mistake is being corrected but the point is I am under Israeli occupation. I am not independent. I entered a contract with Israel, the PLO – the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the Israeli government – under the auspices of the Americans, the Europeans, the Arab, to achieve the two-state solution. Now we have an American administration that’s saying ‘no – it’s not gonna be two states. Jerusalem is not, can’t be Palestine capital. Palestinians don’t have their actual determination and they must accept this’. And these people…the conflict is political, is about territory, is about narratives. It’s not a religious conflict. Judaism to us as Christian and Muslim Palestinians was never a threat, is not a threat, will never be a threat.”

Failing to provide her worldwide listeners with any examples of the blatant antisemitism that comes regularly from Palestinian officials and the incitement to religious war put out by both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, Iqbal asked:

Iqbal: “And are you saying that the Americans are casting it as a religious conflict?”

Erekat: “Absolutely. When the ambassador – so-called ambassador – Friedman says that it’s God who recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and when Pompeo the Secretary of State would say that God sent Trump to save the Jews, they are turning this into a religious conflict and this should be a red line to anyone.”

The BBC itself reported at the time that Mr Pompeo “said it is “possible” that President Donald Trump was sent by God to save Israel from Iran” but Iqbal refrained from challenging Erekat’s claims.

The rest of this interview will be discussed in part two of this post.

Related Articles:

BBC journalists get a ‘briefing’ from a past interviewee

BBC Radio 4 provides a platform for the PLO’s ‘apartheid’ smear

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