I guess not strictly news - but with all of the vitriol I have seen in discussions on the Israel situation, that have boiled down to arguments over wording, I feel that this take from the BBC is worthy of some discussion.
Mods, feel free to remove if this is not newsy enough.
Based
Commendable to resist such pressure and remain as objective as possible
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The BBC trying to stay neutral on such an emotionally loaded subject is very suspicious.
Why? The guidelines say they report on what actually happened in these events.
Cause the BBC hasn’t been neutral in the past when it comes the the Israel / Palestine conflict
Source? Was it actually a BBC reporter or someone they were interviewing?
I don’t buy this argument whatsoever. The BBC referred to the Manchester bombing as a terror attack.
Cowards, call a spade a spade.
It could be an interesting thing to go through various incidents and look, it might boil down to if the parties involved both hold territory?
Manchester was a terror attack.
Under international law the Palestinians have a right to resist the occupation. That their tactics are not always in accordance with international law is a point you can make only if you recognise that Israel violates these laws far more frequently, and far more brutally, causing far more deaths and an indescribable amount of misery for millions, every day.
The BBC will never describe Israel as a terrorist state and so they are quite correct not to label Palestinian resistance as terrorism.
Indiscriminately shooting people in a music festival is a terrorist act.
You’re being so open minded that your brain has fallen out.
I think one key difference is that Israel has compulsory service for everyone. Like if in the 1770s the Torrey soldiers on leave held a music festival and they all got gunned down, I’m fairly certain the history books would not change substantially. It’s abhorrent, but if you were in the same situation - occupation by some analogous group to wherever you live who have overwhelming military superiority - would you give up your Identity and assimilate, or try to make them hurt? I’m absolutely NOT saying Palestinians are the good guys, I’m just saying I understand where they’re coming from.
Terrorist isn’t really the right word to use. What’s going on over there is bilateral genocide. That’s the appropriate term to use.
It’s a very one-sided genocide. It’s just plain ridiculous to equate the two sides when it was Zionists who stormed the Arab mandate in 1947, Zionists (and later, Israel) who created hundreds of thousands of refugees with millions still stuck in miserable camps on the borders, Israel who has kept Palestinians under brutal occupation and blockade since 1967, and Israel who bombs densely populated cities with fighter jets while the brand new Hamas air force is using hang-gliders powered by fans.
It’s such a difficult thing to explain to people whose primary exposure to the conflict is through the Western media but these accounts, by two Palestinian and Israeli non-violent activists, are well worth a read. Unfortunately I can’t find the original transcripts so it’s a google books extract and is missing some of George’s testimony.
The same thing’s happening in Canada with the CBC; bunch of people calling them out for not saying “terrorist” implying it means they’re in favour of the attacks, when CBC simply has a policy of not saying that about anyone, because it’s not their job.
??? They call neo-nazis terrorists.
Because they unambiguously are. Nobody reasonable is debating that. We’re never going to look back and say “actually they were right”
This is why we need CBC and can’t let the Conservative Party of Canada destroy them.
Wow, this a really weird take from the BBC. I had no idea they would be fearful of inciting violence from uneducated abrahamic cult members by appropriately identifying Hamas as a terrorist org.
Learn how to read
I don’t think you need to call hamas what they are, a far right fundamentalist extremist terrorist organisation. Their actions speak for themselves.
What they mean as that they could also say Israel is a terrorist state. That’s what some people think. And some people, specially those who have friends or family who have been killed in Palestina, might say that Hamas are defending their people and are not terrorists.
But you and me, citizens without voice, can call them terrorists (that’s what they are) but doing so we are somehow chosing a band in a conflict.I’m not sure I’d call Israel a terrorist state, but absolutely an apartheid state.
If you live in Gaza, you really don’t have a lot to lose by attacking Israeli non-combatants, because you have no hope, and the Israeli gov’t keeps going farther and farther to the right. Gaza looks a lot like the Warsaw ghettos prior to rounding all the Jews up and murdering them. The uprisings in the Warsaw ghetto were punished with the same kind of wildly disproportionate force as we’re already seeing Israel use against Gaza.
Hamas and Palestinian militants were, and are, wrong to target and murder non-combatants. And, at the same time, Israel has been doing exactly the same fucking thing for 20-odd years now; from 2008 through 2020, more than 120,000 Palestinians–mostly non-combatants–were wounded or killed by the Israeli military. In that same time period, 6,000 Israelis were wounded or killed by Palestinian militants.
Israel can not claim to be a democracy, because they refuse to give Palestinians a voice in government at all.
As an aside, the parallels between how Israel has treated Palestinians, and how the US has treated Native Americans is uncomfortable.
As an aside, the parallels between how Israel has treated Palestinians, and how the US has treated Native Americans is uncomfortable.
Which is even more ironic when you realise that that’s exactly where a certain mustachioed German dictator got his ideas from.
IIRC, Hitler originally wanted to ship all the Jews out. Except that no one else wanted them either. Extermination became the “logical” conclusion.
While I get what you mean, I don’t think it should automatically mean (even a lot of people think it does) that you can either say Hamas is a terrorist group or Israel is a terrorist state.
In my own view both are terrorist, both commit atrocities and the result of that are innocent lives lost from both sides.
I despise centrism so saying that hurts a little bit on the inside, but this is one of the rare cases where fighting at all is meaningless and both sides that are fighting (and commiting atrocities) are in the fault.
So, basically: people performed atrocities. Are they evil? Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, the BBC has no idea whether it is evil to perform atrocities. Right.
They are saying they do not use language that makes judgement, because that is not what they do. They are a neutral reporter of what is happening in the world (ie the news).
Everyone laments that “news” has been overrun by opinion journalism that tries to influence left or right. This is what “just news” looks like.
No, they will report on the attrocities committed. Is it important for you for the BBC to tell you whether the attrocities are evil or not?
So basically, you can’t read above a 2nd grade level.
BBC is saying they report the facts and let people make their own judgements. I know this might be hard for your biased mind to understand, but the word ‘terrorist’ has been thrown around so much it’s practically meaningless. Heck, even when it should be applied (American terrorists shooting substations), it isn’t. It’s a political term at this point, nothing more.
You’re trying to advocate for news outlets to tell us how to think instead of showing us information, which is shitty journalism for idiots.
Show the information that this was a terrorist attack, because it was. That’s an indisputable fact. Indiscriminately killing, maiming, torturing and raping civilians to spread terror. That is terrorism.
No-one can possibly defend the murder of civilians, especially children and even babies - nor attacks on innocent, peace-loving people who are attending a music festival.
No-one, except for racists who work for the genocide of that population.
But this doesn’t mean that we should start saying that the organisation whose supporters have carried them out is a terrorist organisation, because that would mean we were abandoning our duty to stay objective.
That makes it sound as if the Hamas was a regular, military organization with legitimate goals, which eventually settles their dispute at the negotiating table. And I think that’s giving a false picture of that organization. But let’s hear what they have to say about themselves:
Quoted from article 7:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).
Quoted from article 13:
There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.
These people (Hamas, not Palestinians) see it as their religious duty to kill all Jews.
I think the BBC’s position makes sense in most conflicts, but not in this one. They probably just try to appease both sides, with an explanation that sounds reasonable, if you don’t look too much behind the curtains.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Government ministers, newspaper columnists, ordinary people - they’re all asking why the BBC doesn’t say the Hamas gunmen who carried out appalling atrocities in southern Israel are terrorists.
We regularly point out that the British and other governments have condemned Hamas as a terrorist organisation, but that’s their business.
As it happens, of course, many of the people who’ve attacked us for not using the word terrorist have seen our pictures, heard our audio or read our stories, and made up their minds on the basis of our reporting, so it’s not as though we’re hiding the truth in any way - far from it.
No-one can possibly defend the murder of civilians, especially children and even babies - nor attacks on innocent, peace-loving people who are attending a music festival.
There was huge pressure from the government of Margaret Thatcher on the BBC, and on individual reporters like me about this - especially after the Brighton bombing, where she just escaped death and so many other innocent people were killed and injured.
That’s why people in Britain and right round the world, in huge numbers, watch, read and listen to what we say, every single day.
The original article contains 595 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn - who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.
I miss when this was the standard for news. Now most (e: major) outlets don’t even try to pretend they have no bias and instead push a subjective point. Even when I agree with the point, I don’t like it when my “news” pushes it instead of just, you know, reporting.
Give me the info and let me form my own opinions.
It is biased and wrong, you can see by the obvious problem in their research, like Hamas is considered terrorists by the entire western world, therefore saying that you don’t call them that because you don’t want people to tell what to think is terrorism support.
I disagree; it’s a loaded, politicized word. Even if you say that the “entire western world” considers Hamas a terrorist organization, that’s a sweeping generalization which, even if it could be called 100% true, does not represent the whole world.
Tell me the facts without giving me those loaded words. I’m smart enough to draw my own conclusions.
I disagree with your disagreement, im objectively correct https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_groups
You’re not objectively correct, “designated as terrorist by current and former national governments, and inter-governmental organizations” - they’ve expressed an opinion. You’re taking that opinion and presenting it as objective fact.
Are you on crack or something? Do you understand how the world works?
Do you understand how the world works?
Yes I do. I just explained it to you. Is there some part of what I said that you’re struggling with?
John Simpson is a legend. His book, A Mad World, My Masters, is exceptional reading.
The guy has been reporting since before many of us were even born. If you can catch his show on the BBC it’s a great antidote to the sensationalized, biased reporting that passes for journalism these days.
