Today it was reported that four of the UK’s most senior lawyers had complained to Ofcom, the British media regulator, had breached its code of impartiality by refusing to use the word ‘terrorist’ in reports that mentioned Hamas or its fighters, preferring terms like ‘militant’. The four lawyers, joined by Lord Polak of the Conservative Friends of Israel, noted that Hamas is proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK and as such, the description ‘terrorist’ is a legal fact and “not a matter of debate or discussion”. They also noted that the BBC had referred to the Manchester Arena bombing as a “terror attack”, and therefore is showing further partiality by “discriminating in this case only”. A number of Tory politicians as well as Keir Starmer also criticised the BBC for the policy; Grant Shapps called it “verging on disgraceful” while Starmer demanded that they explain why they were not using the word terrorism. On the BBC’s website, its veteran correspondent John Simpson explains that the term is loaded, and is commonly used for outfits that people disapprove of morally, and it is not the BBC’s job to tell people “who are the good guys and who are the bad guys”.
The complaint looks like a typical Israel lobby bias complaint, making an accusation of bias the substance of which actually shows that the organisation complained about are just not biased in their favour. There are whole organisations set up here and in the US to ‘monitor’ newspapers, broadcasters and educational institutions for what they see as anti-Israel bias. Quite often they rely on official stories and official definitions and present them as fact, and this case is no different: they rely on the fact that Hamas is classified as a terrorist organisation in British law, and thereby demand that the BBC report this as fact. However, a legal ‘fact’ is not the same as a fact; it is a doctrine which has the force of law, but the law often uses words to mean other than they mean in everyday language. A good example of this is the term “statutory rape”, a term used in American though not British law which uses descriptive phrases like “sexual activity with a minor”; the legal term is based on the notion that an underage person cannot give meaningful consent, the same reason the act is also illegal here, but in everyday parlance ‘rape’ implies sex that is forced and where consent is absent, not merely invalid.
Some of what Hamas does is undoubtedly terrorism, including the use of suicide bombers who passed among civilians to attack public places in Israel, and the Manchester Arena bombing was a similar type of attack. The invasion of southern Israel by Hamas was a military invasion, and the attacks on the music festival and the kibbutzim would normally be called war crimes rather than incidents of terrorism. (The stories of rape and the decaptiation of babies are unsubstantiated, and the latter in particular is typical of wartime atrocity propaganda.) Recent legal definitions of a terrorist organisation characterise everything such an organisation does as in furtherance of terrorism, and elides the distinction between their political and military wings, as in the case of Hizbullah in Lebanon. (I have no brief for Hizbullah; in recent years it has assisted the Assad regime with attacks on civilian populations in rebel-held areas of Syria, but it enjoys popular support in Lebanon, is one of two major political parties there, and has in the past assisted in defending Lebanon from Israeli attack.)
In addition, the same people who demand compliance with official definitions of terrorism when applied to Arab or Muslim organisations that fight Israel will readily defend clear-cut acts of terrorism by the Israeli state, or the groups that fought for it in the 1940s, pointing to who the victims of the bombings and kidnappings were (and it’s true that one of them was Adolf Eichmann, but one of them was also Mordechai Vanunu) and that warnings were given before, say, the King David Hotel bombing. They always insist there is no moral equivalence between them and their enemies; they are always the best kind of terrorist, Hamas are the bad terrorists. The BBC are not part of the legal profession; they are also a public service broadcaster rather than a state broadcaster, and are not under obligation to adhere to British state policies or official doctrines and report them as fact. The BBC do actually have a history of false balance, often setting up hostile pairs of interviewees to have a row on air and interrupting stories about topics like child abuse to read out statements from the institutions so accused. Hamas are terrorists; I have no difficulty saying that, but it’s certainly an act of bias to call only them terrorists when Israel uses terror tactics freely.
Possibly Related Posts:
#Terrorists #militants #Indigo #Blogs
