Why the Middle East balance does not add up

The BBC has received many complaints about this week's Death in the Med Panorama programme, which ought to have been billed as jointly produced by the Israel Defence Force.

In response, Panorama flannelled about the "complexity of the subject," noting: "Israel has been accused of breaking international law by seizing a Turkish ship. Israel says they were terrorists. Turkey insists they were innocent victims."

The implication is that these positions have equal validity. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

And this stab at an equidistant pseudo-neutrality was compounded by Panorama's eulogy of its correspondent Jane Corbin as "respected for her dedicated, impartial and balanced work from both sides of the conflict."

Would a BBC journalist have been praised for being "impartial" in the historic conflict between those defending apartheid in South Africa and those struggling to end it?

That is part of the problem. The BBC, taking its lead from Whitehall, refuses to base its position on international law and United Nations security council resolutions.

Rather than accept the obvious truth that Israel is an expansionist racist state that is illegally colonising its neighbours' land with a view to annexation and site its news coverage within those political parameters, the BBC affects a "balanced" view between dispossessed and dispossesser.

It would be bad enough if our national broadcaster succeeded in achieving such an amoral refusal to take a stand.

But, in reality, far from impartiality, BBC coverage, in common with all major international news agencies, including - amazing as it may seem - Al-Jazeera's English-language service, is tainted by a bias to Israel.

This may surprise those conditioned into believing that the BBC is somehow anti-Israel by the tidal wave of protest unleashed by well-organised zionist lobbies in Britain and the US whenever the slightest criticism of Israel is aired.

Sharif Nashashibi's study of Middle East coverage, published by Arab Media Watch on June 10 2009, noted that, during a four-month period, every BBC article on the issue included Israeli sources, while 35 per cent had nothing from Palestinians.

Of the 65 per cent quoting a Palestinian source, these articles devoted 82 per cent more coverage to Israelis.

For Al-Jazeera, every article had Israeli input, while 11 per cent lacked a Palestinian view. Of the 89 per cent that quoted Palestinian sources, 69 per cent gave more space to an Israeli counterpoint.

As far back as 2005, Greg Philo and Mike Berry of the Glasgow University Media Group identified instances of bias that are largely unchanged today.

They found that Israelis were reported more than twice as much as Palestinians and that US politicians supportive of Israel appeared as commentators twice as often as even their British counterparts.

TV news programmes also ignored the origins of the conflict, leaving many viewers unaware of Palestinians having been driven from their homes in 1948, of the military occupation of Palestinian land after the 1967 war or of Israeli appropriation of water resources.

Even occasional references to "occupied territories" were misunderstood as the Palestinians occupying disputed land.

Lack of historical background and explanation created the impression that problems, especially of violence, start with Palestinian actions and the Israeli military machine is forced to "retaliate" or "respond" to Palestinian provocation.

Israelis are killed as a result of "brutal murder," "atrocity" or "savage cold-blooded killing," while Palestinians have a tendency to simply "die."

"Terrorist" is an epithet reserved exclusively for Palestinians, while Israelis committing terrorist acts such as trying to bomb a Palestinian school or mowing down worshippers in a mosque are described as "extremists" or "vigilantes."

The power of the "get your retaliation in first" school of zionist propaganda was exemplified in media coverage of the BBC 2004 "secret report" on Middle East coverage by senior editorial adviser Malcolm Balen, which was kept under wraps.

Commentators confidently asserted that it detailed anti-Israel bias in BBC output, while, in fact, Balen acknowledged its "failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation."

And he recommended that "the BBC should make purposive, and not merely reactive, efforts to explain the complexities of the conflict in the round, including the marked disparity between the positions of the two sides, and to overcome the high level of incomprehension among the audience."

In that context, the Panorama team might ask itself why its Death in the Med programme failed to mention that Israel's siege of Gaza, which its special forces' attack on the Mavi Marmara was intended to enforce, has been declared illegal by the UN.

Why did Corbin refer to "thousands of rockets" fired from Gaza into Israel, without specifying when, while ignoring the 1,400 Palestinians wiped out in a three-week onslaught at the beginning of 2009?

Why no mention of the Israeli troops' theft of aid campaigners' cameras, laptops and recording equipment, which could have provided a different picture than the doctored images provided to the BBC by the IDF?

The BBC has not only flouted its own recommended standards but has colluded with Israel to justify the ongoing illegal blockade of Gaza.