Saturday, February 16, 2008

..both regarded as great national leaders...

As reported here:

In a clip posted on the BBC website, BBC correspondent Humphrey Hawkesley's "report on what he called "an amazing day for Lebanon," when a memorial rally for Hariri was followed by Mughniyeh's funeral, concluded: "The army is on full alert as Lebanon remembers two war victims with different visions but both regarded as great national leaders."

...Contacted by the Post, the BBC issued a statement Friday acknowledging that "the scripting of this phrase was imprecise" and apologizing to anyone who was offended by the item.

In his letter to the British state broadcaster, Mell wrote: "For you to refer to former prime minister Rafik Hariri and Imad Mughniyeh as 'great national leaders' in the same sentence is beyond belief.
One was an elected leader who spent years and millions of his own money rebuilding his country. The other was probably the world's second most notorious terrorist, who was responsible for, in addition to running a major criminal enterprise, destroying the US Embassy, the French and US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983; the hijacking of TWA 847; the bombing of the Israeli cultural center in Buenos Aires, [and] the kidnapping and murder of many Westerners in Lebanon, including Terry Anderson, Terry Waite, John McCarthy."

The BBC "In an uncommon act of journalistic contrition, the BBC has apologized for equating former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri and Hizbullah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh as "great national leaders."

The apology itself as represented here can hardly be the described as an "act of contrition", as it reads: "the scripting of this phrase was imprecise" and apologizing to anyone who was offended by the item."

My first thought upon reading this report was that the news organization responsible for the original expression of subsuming Hariri and Mughniyeh in the same cadre of great leadership and the non-apology that follows, once again showed its true colours and where its real sympathies are. The BBC seems to have forgotten that it is a Western democratic media outlet, supposed to adhere to the values and judgments of a democratic ethos (clarity, objectivity, validity of historical facts, verifiable truth).

But hardly surprising.

Remember Barbara Plett's tears over Arafat's final departure from the West Bank?

Yet when the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry... without warning.

Looks like the BBC cannot hire correspondents who are actually resistant to the romantic lure of the Palestinian terrorist. Orientalists galore.

Biased BBC provides its own feisty critique:

Mughniyeh was a senior terrorist within Hezbollah, and his death has seen him eulogised him as a "jihadist" and as a "martyr" by those who hate Jews and Americans. This monster was involved in a series of bombings that took the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of people. And yet, the BBC headline describes him as a "top Hizbollah leader." The BBC studiously avoids describing him as a terrorist because as we know that would be judgemental and that would never do.

2 Comments:

At 12:21 PM EST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Do you ascribe this to actual sympathies, or BBC trying to be inclusive of its multi-cultural society? Or are they one and the same? Is this the fetization of balance?

 
At 12:33 PM EST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

That's a very good question. No. The BBC attitude far outstrips the impulse of fetishization of balance that has taken a stranglehold over so-called "liberal" media. It is actually a great affection they have for Palestinian terrorists who are never called "terrorists" but "militants" or some such thing.

This video says it better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOWptKsPHYQ

 

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