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BBC Bowen’s Insidious ‘Analysis’ of Israel’s Media Battlefield
The BBC logo is seen at the entrance at Broadcasting House, the BBC headquarters in central London. Photo by Vuk Valcic / SOPA Images/Sipa USA.
The BBC’s international editor Jeremy Bowen barely conceals his disdain for Israel these days.
This is his latest “analysis“:
Let’s break this down.
Israel’s borders with Gaza are shut. Period.
Foreign journalists were previously able to enter the Gaza Strip through the Erez Crossing, which has been closed since October 7 for obvious reasons. There is no “business as usual” for passage between Israel and Gaza for anyone, including journalists.
The international media do, however, have the ability to attempt to enter Gaza through the Rafah Crossing on the Egyptian side.
But Bowen believes that Israel is preventing foreign media from entering because “there are things they don’t want us to see and that they want to master the media battlefield.”
It is arguably not to Israel’s benefit that foreign journalists are absent from Gaza. Because Palestinian stringers and agenda-driven Arab outlets such as Al Jazeera are currently the only ones supplying all of the coverage from inside the Strip.
HonestReporting has, on numerous occasions, documented how some Palestinian media workers in the employ of foreign media are, at best, clearly invested in promoting the Palestinian narrative, and at worst, expressing antisemitic views and support for Hitler.
Despite a steady flow of damaging footage from Gaza showing injured women and children while suspiciously never showing Hamas terrorists, Bowen still believes Israel is “controlling the media.”
Such conspiratorial thinking is dangerously close to a classic antisemitic trope.
But is Israel also controlling its domestic media in the cause of ensuring its people don’t see any Palestinian suffering?
Israel’s government may wish it had some semblance of control over the country’s newspapers and TV stations, but the reality is that Israeli media is fiercely independent.
The Israeli media also unsurprisingly caters to its domestic audience. And like any country at war, the nation, including its media, rallies behind the flag.
Jeremy Bowen might point out that UK and US media were highly critical of wars conducted by their own countries such as in Iraq. But Israel’s war against Hamas isn’t being conducted in a faraway land. It’s on the home-front, and it’s mostly Israeli civilians, not foreigners, who have been murdered, raped, and kidnapped on October 7 in their own homes and on Israeli soil.
Israel is a country still traumatized by those events, and for Bowen to expect Israeli media to be broadcasting the same sympathetic content on Gaza as his own BBC or other foreign media is both unrealistic and meant to portray Israelis as somehow immune to the suffering of ordinary Palestinians.
How dare Bowen make such a judgment. Israelis are still processing and trying to come to terms with October 7 and the resulting impact on the country.
Israeli TV news is now broadcasting footage of the funerals of Israeli soldiers, many of whom were reservists who left their families and day jobs to defend their country. Many may have lost their lives because the IDF has used ground troops rather than airstrikes precisely to avoid causing Palestinian civilian casualties.
But when the war ends, most Israeli media outlets will swiftly change tack, harshly criticizing the Israeli government as they did before October 7 and perhaps even more so. And that criticism will extend to how the war was conducted, including the military tactics and whether Palestinian (as well as Israeli) casualties could have been avoided. Israeli media outlets aren’t subservient to the Israeli government or considerations of patriotism.
The time for criticism and self-reflection will come in the Israeli media. But not right now, while Israeli soldiers are risking their lives, Hamas still holds hostages, and Israeli civilians are still under attack.
Jeremy Bowen is correct: there is a media battlefield. Israel has every right to fight on that battlefield especially when foreign journalists like himself weaponize their news reports to assault the Jewish state.
The author is the Editorial Director of HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
The post BBC Bowen’s Insidious ‘Analysis’ of Israel’s Media Battlefield first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Treasure Trove explores the curious case of a stamp from an imaginary land
This 1 V. postage revenue stamp from West Refaim was postmarked in Virikoso in South Giantsland 100 years ago. Problem is—none of these places ever existed. There is a second […]
The post Treasure Trove explores the curious case of a stamp from an imaginary land appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has informed the International Criminal Court that it will contest arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The office also said that US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had updated Netanyahu “on a series of measures he is promoting in the US Congress against the International Criminal Court and against countries that would cooperate with it.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move comes after the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
“Israel today submitted a notice to the International Criminal Court of its intention to appeal to the court, along with a demand to delay the execution of the arrest warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Court spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah told journalists that if requests for an appeal were submitted it would be up to the judges to decide
The court’s rules allow for the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that would pause or defer an investigation or a prosecution for a year, with the possibility of renewing that annually.
After a warrant is issued the country involved or a person named in an arrest warrant can also issue a challenge to the jurisdiction of the court or the admissibility of the case.
The post Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage
Shomrim officers at the scene of a hate crime in London in which Jewish girls were struck with glass bottles. Photo: Shomrim Stamford Hill/Screenshot
A group of young Jewish girls were the victims of an “abhorrent hate crime” when a man hurled glass bottles at them from a balcony as they were walking through the Stamford Hill section of London on Monday evening.
One of the girls was struck in the head and rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local law enforcement.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the Woodberry Down Estate in the city’s borough of Hackney following reports of an assault on Monday evening at 7:44 pm local time.
“A group of schoolgirls had been walking through the estate when a bottle was thrown from the upper floor of a building,” the spokesperson said. “A 16-year-old girl was struck on the head and was taken to hospital. Her injuries have since been assessed as non-life changing.”
Police noted they were unable to locate the suspect and an investigation is ongoing before adding, “The incident is being treated as a potential antisemitic hate crime.”
Following the incident, Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and serves as a neighborhood watch group, reported that the girls were en route to a rehearsal for an upcoming event. The community, the group added, was “shocked” by the attack on “innocent young Jewish girls,” calling it an “abhorrent hate crime.”
14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill.
Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4.
This… pic.twitter.com/MzHPHusgyX
— Shomrim (London North & East) (@Shomrim) November 26, 2024
Since then, another Jewish girl, age 14, has reported being pelted with a hard object which caused her to be “knocked unconscious, and left feeling dizzy and with a bump on her head,” according to Shomrim.
Monday’s crime was one among many which have targeted London Jews in recent years, an issue The Algemeiner has reported on extensively.
Last December, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”
Months prior, a perpetrator stalked and assaulted an Orthodox Jewish woman. He followed her, shouting “dirty Jew” before snatching her shopping bag and “spilling her shopping onto the pavement whilst laughing.” That incident followed a woman wielding a wooden stick approaching a Jewish woman near the Seven Sisters area and declaring “I am doing it because you are Jew,” while striking her over the head and pouring liquid on her. The next day, the same woman — described by an eyewitness as a “serial racist” — chased a mother and her baby with a wooden stick after spraying liquid on the baby. That same week, three people accosted a Jewish teenager and knocked his hat off his head while yelling “f—king Jew.”
According to an Algemeiner review of Metropolitan Police Service data, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred in London between October 2023 and October 2024, eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The problem is so serious that city officials created a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.
“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Jewish Chronicle in a statement about the policy decision earlier this year. “So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet, areas with two of the biggest Jewish communities in London] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”
Khan added that the route “connects communities, connects congregations” and would reassure Jewish Londoners they would be “safe when they travel between these two communities.”
However, it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything seen in the Western world since World War II. Just this week, according to a story by GB News, an unknown group scattered leaflets across the streets of London which threatened that “every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be slaughtered.”
Responding to this latest incident, the director of the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs UK Isaaz Zarfati told GB News that the comments should be taken “seriously.”
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of red lines being repeatedly crossed,” he said. “This is not just another wave that will pass if we remain passive. We must take those threats and statement seriously because they will one day turn into actions, and decisive steps are needed to combat this alarming phenomenon.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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