Stone the journalist doing his job

Stop the presses! A British journalist states the bleeding obvious:

The BBC Trust yesterday called into question the corporation’s reporting of the most sensitive news story of modern times, publishing findings that the BBC Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, had breached guidelines on accuracy and impartiality. The ruling will be seized upon by campaigners who claim that BBC News is prejudiced against Israel in its coverage of the Middle East.

The reason for the findings?

Bowen was censured for a piece which he wrote for the BBC website last June under the headline “Six days that changed the Middle East”, attempting to give context to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by analysing the events of the 1967 Six Day War. The Middle East editor referred to “Zionism’s innate instinct to push out the frontier”. He wrote that Israel showed a “defiance of everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own” and that its generals felt that they were dealing with “unfinished business”, left over from the 1948 War of Independence…

The second finding related to a broadcast Bowen delivered on From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio 4 in January last year, in which he referred to a contemporary Israeli settlement, Har Homa. Bowen said the US government considered the settlement illegal.

The committee found the assertion was inadequately sourced: “The Middle East Editor had stated his professional view without qualification or explanation, and that the lack of precision in his language had rendered the statement inaccurate.” It ruled the report had partially breached accuracy guidelines.

Palestine is burning and the Zionist lobby is upset about a few “biased” reports by a seasoned BBC reporter.

The Jewish establishment fiddles while the world burns around them.

UPDATE: Robert Fisk deals appropriately with the BBC Trust:

The BBC Trust’s report on Jeremy Bowen’s dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest.

But I am mincing my words.

The trust – how I love that word which so dishonours everything about the BBC – has collapsed, in the most shameful way, against the usual Israeli lobbyists who have claimed – against all the facts – that Bowen was wrong to tell the truth.

Let’s go step by step through this pitiful business. Zionism does indeed instinctively “push out” the frontier. The new Israeli wall – longer and taller than the Berlin Wall although the BBC management cowards still insist its reporters call it a “security barrier” (the translation of the East German phrase for the Berlin Wall) – has gobbled up another 10 per cent of the 22 per cent of “Palestine” that Arafat/Mahmoud Abbas were supposed to negotiate. Bowen’s own brilliant book on the 1967 war, Six Days, makes this land-grab perfectly clear.

Anyone who has read the history of Zionism will be aware that its aim was to dispossess the Arabs and take over Palestine. Why else are Zionists continuing to steal Arab land for Jews, and Jews only, against all international law? Who for a moment can contradict that this defies everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own?

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