Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

It was only a few days back that The Times reported the following:

Israel’s Government has thrown its weight behind efforts by supporters to counter what it believes to be negative bias and a tide of pro-Arab propaganda. The Foreign Ministry has ordered trainee diplomats to track websites and chatrooms so that networks of US and European groups with hundreds of thousands of Jewish activists can place supportive messages.

In the past week nearly 5,000 members of the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS)have downloaded special “megaphone” software that alerts them to anti-Israeli chatrooms or internet polls to enable them to post contrary viewpoints. A student team in Jerusalem combs the web in a host of different languages to flag the sites so that those who have signed up can influence an opinion survey or the course of a debate.

Out of curiosity, I installed megaphone as well, and since then I have received some of the most useful insights into the Zionist propaganda machine. However, I wasn’t quite prepared for the latest alert. Israel’s implacable propaganda establishment, which rarely finds a source extreme enough to match its views, has just issued an endorsement for the BBC. The Zionist “ministry of truth” wants its legion of credulous dittoheads to write to the UN demanding that it condemn Hizbullah, and to use BBC’s overview of the organization for its case. Given BBC’s outrageously skewed coverage of the Israel’s current invasion of Lebanon, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise, since in its interview with Shimon Peres, BBC’s Gavin Esler showed more enthusiasm for the war, than even his interviewee. More tellingly, no civilian casualties were mentioned by the revoltingly obsequious hack.

Also worth noting is the fact that ever since the beginning of this conflict BBC’s editors have consistently shown that for them, only Israelis are frontpage material. All of Lebanon’s suffering is relegated to side pages.

BBC has also consistently ignored or downplayed anti-War voices but as Sarah Meyer reports, a pro-Israel rally received a very different treatment:

The BBC said: “Police estimated that 7,000 people took part in the London rally but organisers said more than 20,000 people had attended the march from Whitehall to Hyde Park.” Both estimates are wrong.

The UK police consistently underestimate crowd size if a demonstration is against UK government policy. The BBC’s quote of the organisers is wrong. Stop the War said 30,000 were present. Some said more.

The demonstration story is, in any case, buried underneath the headlined story: Rally offers support to Israelis. “A rally is being held to show solidarity with people in areas of northern Israel caught up in the crisis in the Middle East.”