Here’s the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Appeal for Gaza. So far Channel 4, Channel 5 and ITV have aired it last night. The BBC and Sky are still refusing to show it.
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The BBC has decided not to air a TV fund-raising appeal for Gaza, saying it wanted to avoid compromising public confidence in its impartiality. Indefensible, immoral, indifferent to human suffering? Yes. Impartial? No.
The medialense website has more information.
THE BBC REFUSES TO BROADCAST GAZA CHARITY APPEAL
Numerous members of the public have written to us expressing their bewilderment at the violence of Israel’s 22-day attack on Gaza killing upwards of 1,300 people and wounding 4,200. To many witnessing the onslaught on their TV screens (especially Al Jazeera) this appeared to be an act of state sadism.
Israeli forces repeatedly bombed schools (including UN schools), medical centres, hospitals, ambulances, UN buildings, power plants, sewage plants, roads, bridges and civilian homes.
On January 15, Helpdoctors.org reported that Al Quds hospital had been “again the target of bombing”. Some 50 patients, 30 in wheelchairs, fled as the burning hospital was “totally destroyed”. (http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2F www.helpdoctors.org%2F&langpair=fr%7Cen&h l=fr&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools)
The hospital’s medical director said, “My heart is crying,” as he described how intensive care patients and premature babies in incubators were wheeled onto the street in the middle of the night. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7833919.stm)
On January 19, UN official John Ging said half a million people in Gaza had been without water since the conflict began – huge numbers were without power. Four thousand homes have been ruined and tens of thousands of people are homeless. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7836869.stm)
It is now known that the Israeli army (the IDF) used white phosphorus incendiary weapons – designed to burst over a wide area and burn to the bone – against civilian targets, including hospitals and UN buildings. The use of these weapons against civilians is a war crime.
Surgeons in Gaza have reported numerous, unusual cases where bomb victims had lost both legs rather than one, raising suspicions that the Israeli military used Dense Inert Metal Explosive (Dime) bombs – experimental weapons that generate micro-shrapnel that burns and destroys everything within a four-metre radius. Dr. Erik Fosse, a Norwegian surgeon, commented:
“We suspect they used Dime weapons because we saw cases of huge amputations or flesh torn off the lower parts of the body. The pressure wave [from a Dime device] moves from the ground upwards and that’s why the majority of patients have huge injuries to the lower part of the body and abdomen… The problem is that most of the patients I saw were children. If they [the Israelis] are trying to be accurate, it seems obvious these weapons were aimed at children.” (Patrick O’Connor, ‘Reports reveal devastation wreaked by Israeli military in Gaza,’ World Socialist Web Site, January 20, 2008; http://www.wsws.org/articles/ 2009/jan2009/gaza-j20.shtml)
The IDF also used hideous “flachette bombs” – high-tech nail bombs that shower victims with small metal darts that penetrate flesh and bone.
The BBC – Impartial or Immoral?
Despite this carnage, despite the fact that 89% of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents have received no humanitarian aid since Israel began its assault (http://www.maannews.net/en/ index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=35162), the Guardian notes that the BBC has refused to broadcast a national humanitarian appeal for Gaza, “leaving aid agencies with a potential shortfall of millions of pounds in donations.” (Jenny Percival, ‘Broadcasters refuse to air Gaza charity appeal,’ The Guardian, January 23, 2008;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2009/jan/22/gaza-charity-appeal)
The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella organisation for 13 aid charities, launched its Gaza appeal yesterday saying the devastation was “so huge that British aid agencies were compelled to act”. (Ibid.)
By refusing to give free airtime to the appeal, the BBC made a rare decision to breach an agreement dating back to 1963. Other broadcasters then also rejected it. The DEC’s chief executive, Brendan Gormley, said:
“We are used to our appeal getting into every household and offering a safe and necessary way for people to respond. This time we will have to work a lot harder because we won’t have the free airtime or the powerful impact of appearing on every TV and radio station.” (Ibid.)
A BBC website article defending the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal, asserted:
“The BBC decision was made because of question marks about the delivery of aid in a volatile situation and also to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of an ongoing news story.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/ 1/hi/uk/7846150.stm)
Gormley rejected the BBC’s claim that there were question marks about the delivery of aid, saying 100 lorries a day were entering Gaza. He also challenged the alleged problem with “impartiality”:
“We are totally apolitical and are driven by the principles of the Geneva conventions in terms of impartiality and neutrality. This appeal is a response to those humanitarian principles. The BBC seems to be confusing impartiality with equal airtime.” (Percival, op. cit)
ITV said: “The DEC asked all broadcasters if they could support the appeal. We (the broadcasters) assessed the DEC’s requirements carefully against the agreed criteria and we were unable to reach the consensus necessary for an appeal.” (Ibid.)
Sky said: “We were considering this request internally when the DEC contacted us to let us know that the BBC had decided not to broadcast the appeal at this time. As, by convention, if all broadcasters do not carry the appeal then none do, the decision was effectively made for us.” (Ibid.)
This immoral and callous decision by the BBC in response to the suffering of the people of Gaza should not go unchallenged. Please complain using the phone number and email addresses below:
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The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Phone the BBC from the UK on: 03700 100 222
Helen Boaden, Director of BBC news
Email: helenboaden.complaints@bbc.co.uk
Peter Horrocks, Head of BBC TV News
Email: peter.horrocks@bbc.co.uk
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Email: richard.sambrook@bbc.co.uk
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Email: editor@medialens.org
On Thursday 15th January during a Commons debate, Sir Gerald Kaufman, the Labour MP for Gorton MP, spoke up for Gaza. He urged an arms embargo and compared Israeli troops in Gaza to the Nazis who forced his family to flee Poland. Given the weasel words of Our Dear Leader, it’s quite refreshing to actually hear a politician calling for action.
I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our kitchen, there was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund, into which we put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine.
I first went to Israel in 1961 and I have been there since more times than I can count. I had family in Israel and have friends in Israel. One of them fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 and was wounded in two of them. The tie clip that I am wearing is made from a campaign decoration awarded to him, which he presented to me.
I have known most of the Prime Ministers of Israel, starting with the founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Golda Meir was my friend, as was Yigal Allon, Deputy Prime Minister, who, as a general, won the Negev for Israel in the 1948 war of independence.
My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust. My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.
My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count.
On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army, Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians—the total is now 1,000. She replied instantly that
“500 of them were militants.”
That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.
The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi Livni’s father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including four Jews.
Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to them, to negotiate with the Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It is too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him. Because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death, Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable error, from which dreadful consequences have followed.
The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned for peace on many platforms, said:
“You make peace by talking to your enemies.”
However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2.5 million more on the west bank. They are treated like dirt by the Israelis, with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly denizens of the illegal Jewish settlements harassing them as well. The time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel.
It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government that their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis’ real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools.
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