On the afternoon of April 24th the BBC News website published a report by Raffi Berg on a terror attack which had taken place earlier near the Machane Yehuda market in Jerusalem.
Originally titled “Jerusalem: Five injured in car ramming attack near market”, the report’s headline was amended some half an hour later to read “Jerusalem: Five injured in Palestinian car ramming attack”.
While the account of the attack presented to BBC audiences is reasonable, the second half of the report, which purports to provide background to the story, displays some notable omissions.
Relating to the fact that the attack took place as Memorial Day was about to begin, Berg tells readers that:
“Israel was on heightened alert ahead of Memorial Day, which commemorates soldiers and civilians who have been killed in conflict and attacks since 1860.
The sombre occasion leads into Independence Day on Tuesday night and Wednesday. The day is celebrated with patriotic events, with this year marking Israel’s 75th anniversary.
Palestinians, however, consider Israel’s formation in 1948 as a catastrophe which led to the displacement of up to 750,000 of their people in the Arab-Israeli war that followed.”
Notably Berg makes no mention of the fact that around half of the Palestinians who fled did so before Israel declared independence in May 1948, in many cases on the advice of their leaders. His account omits the violent response of local Arabs and the Arab Liberation Army to the 1947 UN Partition Plan proposal as well as the fact that the armies of five neighbouring Arab states invaded Israel the day after independence was declared.
In other words, Berg’s portrayal of the “catastrophe” of displacement distorts history by portraying Palestinians as completely passive and entirely erasing the actions of their leaders and their Arab allies from the picture presented to BBC audiences.
Berg goes on to promote false equivalence between the random, mostly civilian victims of terror attacks and a member of Fatah’s Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorist organisation who was killed during a counter-terrorism operation earlier the same day:
“Monday’s attack comes amid a surge in Israeli-Palestinian violence this year.
In the early hours of Monday, a 20-year-old Palestinian was shot and killed during an Israeli army arrest raid in a refugee camp near the city of Jericho, in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian health ministry said.”
Berg closes his report with what has become the BBC’s unhelpful yet standard portrayal of Palestinian casualties resulting from the current wave of terrorism:
“Since the start of this year, more than 90 Palestinians – militants and civilians – have been killed by Israeli forces. Eighteen Israelis, a Ukrainian and an Italian – all civilians, except for an Israeli paramilitary police officer – have been also killed in attacks by (or suspected to have been carried out by) Palestinians and, in one case, an Israeli Arab.”
The BBC continues to avoid clarifying to its audiences that the majority of the Palestinians killed since the beginning of the year were members of terrorist organisations – “militants” in BBC speak – and/or males engaged in violence at the time, thereby compromising their ability to understand the broader story.
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Once again Berg shows his true antisemitic bias against Jews, Israel and its civilian population.. Every attack is made by a terrorist or multiple terrorists, predominantly against civilians. The highly trained terrorists are too cowardly to attack Israeli soldiers as they know they are no match for them. #defundthebbc