The April 15th edition of BBC Radio 5’s “5 Live Breakfast” programme – hosted by Rick Edwards and Rachel Burden – included an item (from 2:07:47 here) in which the BBC’s security correspondent Frank Gardner answered listeners’ questions concerning the Iranian Islamic regime’s attacks on Israel over 24 hours earlier.
Burden read out the first question: [emphasis in italics in the original, emphasis in bold added]
Burden: “Why, when Israel is dealing with the situation in Gaza, did they attack Iranian interests in Syria, which then caused Iran to feel that they had to retaliate?”
Like most of the BBC’s coverage of the strike in Damascus and subsequent events, Gardner’s answer included an unqualified reference to “the Iranian consulate”:
Gardner: “…the reason being that – and I’m not in any way justifying what Israel did here – but their reasoning would be that the target they attacked in Syria was the Iranian consulate from which members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps – senior generals: two brigadier generals and others – were directing the arms supplies from Iran coming into Syria and Lebanon which were then used to attack Israel. Part of what Iran calls its axis of resistance. So it all comes back to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. So this a wider axis of resistance but which is lobbing missiles and rockets into Israel.”
Contrary to Gardner’s claim, that ‘axis of resistance’ – which includes the Syrian government, Hizballah, the Houthis, the Islamic resistance in Iraq and the Palestinian terrorist organisations Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad – is not motivated by “Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories” but, like the Iranian Islamic Republic itself, by opposition to Israel’s very existence.
By misrepresenting that shared ideology, Gardner steers listeners to the erroneous view that it is Israel’s actions – rather than its existence – which lie behind the attacks against it.
Later in the item (from 2:15:25) Burden asks Gardner about the “situation in the region at the moment”.
Referring to a “ladder of escalation” that he had also presented in a written article the previous day and once again describing the April 1st strike in Damascus as having taken place at the “Iranian consulate”, Gardner notes that the region was “already a tense region because of October the 7th” and goes on to describe the unprecedented events of that day merely as “the Hamas raid on Israel”. Gardner then refers to “the subsequent conflict in Gaza that’s killed over 33 thousand Palestinians – mostly civilians”.
Neither Gardner nor anyone else has been able to verify the casualty figures supplied by Hamas and yet he failed to inform listeners of the source of the figure he cited (which even Hamas admits is based on incomplete data), of the fact that it has not been independently confirmed or that his claim that most of the people killed were civilians is taken from information provided by the terrorist organisation that initiated the current war.
In other words, members of the audience who presented questions to this programme did not receive answers based on accurate and impartial information, but rather on narratives promoted by Hamas and Iran.
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No surprises here – just another ignorant infidel creep.