BBC International editor Jeremy Bowen has spent most of his long and prestigious career reporting on the Middle East. He’s a man of extensive experience, and as such his analysis is given substantial prominence and airtime in coverage of significant developments in the region. Unfortunately for BBC audiences, and more significantly, licence fee payers, Bowen’s prominent analysis on the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the US and Iran was problematic at best.
The core issue with Bowen’s reporting is his apparent refusal to view Hezbollah as an active participant in the conflict, much less as an Iranian occupation of Lebanon, dragging Lebanese civilians into endless wars in pursuit of their ultimate goal, the destruction of Israel.
According to Bowen, Israel sees Lebanon as a dystopian playground, a place to engage in wanton destruction with little to no cause or logic. In his written piece on the BBC website:
“The memorandum of understanding – or MOU – calls for an end to the war in Lebanon. Israel says that cannot happen. It wants a free hand in Lebanon”
And on the BBC News at 6 of June 18th:
“there are hardliners on all sides who want to sabotage this, hardliners in Tehran, Washington and Israel. Israel wants to continue its war in Lebanon. Iran is against that happening. So there are lots of things that could go wrong in this process.”
And on the Radio 4 Today programme of the same day:
“The Israelis, I think it’s not too strong a word to say, are horrified by this deal, because it also includes a line saying that the conflict in Lebanon’s got to stop. They want to have a free hand in Lebanon.”
The stark omission from these comments is of course Hezbollah. Israel does not want a “free hand” in Lebanon simply to inflict damage on innocent people. Hezbollah is a heavily armed proxy army, acting on behalf of the Iranian regime and in pursuit solely of the ultimate expression of antizionism; the destruction of the state of Israel. The current war in Lebanon, as the BBC reported in March, was a war of choice which Hezbollah inflicted on the Lebanese people on behalf of the Islamic Regime in Iran, by targeting Israeli civilians. To leave out the reason why Israel is so committed to the war with Hezbollah is to deliberately shape the narrative to give an appearance of arbitrary Israeli cruelty that is simply not borne out by the facts.
The BBC itself has reported Hezbollah’s deep embedment in civilian infrastructure in Lebanon, with Middle East Correspondent Hugo Bachega making clear on BBC Podcast The Global Story that:
“When you go to those places, they don’t wear uniforms, they don’t wear any kind of badges, and it’s impossible for you to say, “Well, look, this is a fighter, this is a member, this is an operative,” because they are, you know, embedded in those neighbourhoods and in those areas, and they also rely on what you may call reservists, let’s say. So it is your neighbour, it is the guy who owns, I don’t know, the pharmacy in your town or, you know, the vendor in your town. But you know, this is the thing, I mean you can’t really see their presence on the ground. Obviously you feel the presence, because again, let’s say if you show up in a village as a journalist, almost instantly, you’re going to have half a dozen men coming to you asking questions, but if you go to a place, you’re not going to see men wearing uniforms or identifying themselves as members of the group.”
To a veteran reporter such as Jeremy Bowen this is a known fact, and he even identified this in his TV report from southern Lebanon aired on BBC News 24 on July 18th:
“The Lebanese army return, they have a big role ahead if the country is to be stabilised, though away from the cameras, Hezbollah operatives are still here too. And the Israeli army is not far away, awaiting orders”
And yet just seconds later his report features a Lebanese man claiming there is no Hezbollah presence:
“Where is Hezbollah? Said Mohamed, a shopkeeper. He’s calling all this destruction, aggression and state terror. He wants Europe to boycott Israel. This isn’t war, Mohammed said. It’s a crime against people. Systematic destruction”
As we have identified at CAMERA before, the choice of which voices to elevate is not a passive endeavour, it is a crucial part of journalism. Either Bowen’s own reporting was wrong, and there were no Hezbollah operatives present, or this particular vox pop was the uncritical airing of Hezbollah propaganda, strategically placed to portray a narrative of Israel engaged in ruthless violence against innocent people, at massive cost both economically and in the lives of its own soldiers, in defiance of all logic. A tactic that Hezbollah has been openly employing for well over 20 years.
Jeremy Bowen says that:
“Lebanon’s curse is that bigger countries fight their wars here.”
He does not however identify that the key feature of Lebanon’s curse is Hezbollah. Nor does he identify that it could be convincingly argued that the Islamic regime’s insistence on making the ceasefire in Iran contingent on Israel ceasing to defend itself against Hezbollah serves as a solidification of it’s ownership not only of the terrorist organisation itself but also of vast swathes of Lebanese territory and the lives of millions of Lebanese civilians.
Perhaps Lebanon is not only cursed with an apparent occupation from Tehran, but also by the institutional infantilisation of terrorists in the collective BBC psyche, making it impossible for even such a seasoned expert as Bowen to see the true cause of Lebanese suffering.
