Is Sky News pandering to British anti-semitism, or is just dumb, lazy journalism?

For much of today Sky News has been running the story of an female Israeli who posted picture of herself posing with Palestinian detainees. A story on Sky's website talks about photos and images without mentioning how many; it appears there were all of two, amongst an album containing a couple of dozen photos spanning the range of military life (At least they didn't stoop to the level of this French website which actually reproduced one of the pictures twice to pad out its treatment of the issue).

An accompanying video on the Sky website includes a bit of editorialising, or making things up, on the part of the reporter supplying the voiceover. She refers to the prisoner's 'confined' quarters, when the pictures make it impossible to judge the immediate surroundings (they actually look to have been taken outdoors), or how long the detainees were kept there. I say reporter when the mangled English sounds more like the work of a teenager on a summer work placement: "...on her lap, the plastic wrist tie used to restrain those over whom she is responsible..." (Just the one tie for all of them? Responsible over? But kudos for the correct use of the increasingly rare 'whom'). And in the inevitable comparison with Abu Ghraib, she refers to the U.S. soldiers jailed over that scandal as officers.

On the evening news version of the story, the correspondent even acknowledged that what occurred was not abuse and was not comparable to Abu Ghraib. So what could possibly explain a British news channel running this story as one of its leads all day, or the fact that it's the second most viewed item on the Sky website?

Hang on... Unless...

War in the Middle East... A win-win for Hillary

With some form of conflict between Israel and a variety of foes looking increasingly likely before the year is out, I predict victory for... Hillary Clinton, regardless of the outcome for the actual combatants.

If mosque boy fails to forcefully support Israel in a conflict, especially in the event that rocket attacks by Hezbollah or Hamas cause significant civilian casualties, Hilary could resign on this point of principle before the November elections, and thus avoid being tarred as disloyally kicking Obama while he's down by resigning to launch a challenge to him in the wake of the looming mid-term meltdown.

While this would be the most promising scenario from the point of view of a potential presidential bid, the other possibilities are hardly much worse. Robust US backing for Israel,while it wouldn't hurt Obama, would do nothing to save Democrats in the mid-terms; and it would give Hilary plenty of positive exposure as a tough supporter of Israel against common terrorist enemies. A third option, a bout of high-profile shuttle diplomacy leading to an end to fighting, would also enhance her credentials. In either of the latter two cases, thus bolstered, she could then leave the administration anyway next year if Obama's prospects for 2012 continue to deteriorate.

Hamas steps up aid thefts - where's the outrage?

Don't hold your breath waiting for celebrity-led protests in European capitals...

From the Jerusalem Post:

UNRWA informed the IDF on Friday that it is suspending its humanitarian aid deliveries to the Gaza Strip after Hamas stole supplies the United Nations organization had transferred to the Palestinian territory.

The seizure of the 200 tons of supplies took place Thursday night and in response, UNRWA officials informed the Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration that it was suspending its deliveries to the Gaza Strip until further notice. The supplies confiscated included flour and other basic commodities.

The transfer of 40 truckloads of humanitarian supplies - some 800 tons - planned for Sunday has already been canceled.

It was the second time this week that Hamas stole UN supplies transferred to the Gaza Strip for impoverished Palestinians.

The first incident took place Tuesday evening when armed Hamas police broke into a Gaza warehouse packed with UN humanitarian supplies and seized thousands of blankets and food packages.

In Gaza, the ownership of aid confers power, and Hamas desperately needs to hold on to power after starting a war which wrecked the Strip, and damaged it militarily.

At least the UN locally is starting to speak out. But what about the UN bosses in New York? What about the EU, and all those politicians who are so quick to protest about suffering Palestinians when the suffering is inflicted by Israelis? And where's the media outcry?

Then again, the MSM is fond of reminding us that Hamas is a legitimate government, and a 'humanitarian organisation' - maybe they're just frustated by the UN's inefficiency.

Palestinian rock thrower, channelling Wile E. Coyote, is killed by own rock

File under 'Cartoon Violence': From Israel National News, via Daniel Pipes:

A Palestinian Authority Arab who stoned cars in Samaria was killed by one of his own rocks, police have concluded. A Jewish man held in connection with the death has been released.

The Arab teenager hurled heavy stones at Israeli-owned vehicles along a Samaria highway last Tuesday evening. He managed to hit one car, which was driven by a resident of the nearby town of Emmanuel.

Fearing further attacks, the driver fired a single shot in the air to frighten away the stone-thrower. He then contacted local security officers to report both the attack and his own response.

A short time later, Israeli paramedics received a report of an Arab teen found unconscious and badly wounded next to a highway. The teen suffered a serious head injury that appeared to be a bullet wound. Medical personnel rushed to the scene but were unable to save the young Arab, who died a short time later.

Police originally believed that the resident of Emmanuel who reported firing in the air had in fact fired at his attacker, killing him. The man was arrested and questioned. However, an initial forensic report showed that the attacker had not been killed by a bullet, and the detainee was released.

A final forensic report, released over the weekend, showed that the attacker was killed when a stone he threw hit the car driven by the man from Emmanuel. The stone hit the car's tire and bounced back at high speed, hitting the attacker and leaving him with a fatal head injury.

Israel is right to keep the MSM out of Gaza

My latest piece for Pajamas Media. It's not like there's a news blackout - there's plenty of information coming out of Gaza, much of it in fact skewed against Israel, and the last thing Israel needs is Christiane Amanpour and the rest of the MSM all-stars providing one-sided, context-free, 'infotainment' that focuses almost exclusively on Palestinian suffering.

Make sure you read the rest of the coverage at Pajamas, particularly Victor Davis Hanson.

Media's favourite Gaza doctor is terror-loving fascist

Unbelievable. A Norwegian doctor who is all over the TV news channels pontificating about the suffering of Gazans is a terrorist sympathiser. A regular Che Guevara. And these are the sort of people the world is getting 'impartial' reports from. (Via LGF)

BBC plays 'Guess the Victims' over Jerusalem attack

I also have a piece up at Pajamas Media, on the - probably unintentional - symbolism of a Palestinian using a Caterpillar machine to murder Israelis. You can read it here.

The US media has long enjoyed playing the game of ‘Guess the Party’, wherein the affiliation of Republican politicians accused or convicted of wrongdoing is prominently featured in news reports, while that of misbehaving Democrats is buried in the depths of the story, if it’s mentioned at all.

The BBC appears to have developed a couple of variants on the game – Guess the Nationality of the Victim/Aggressor and Guess the Sex of the Victim – to be played when reporting on deaths in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This morning the Beeb headlined its report on yesterday’s murders of three Israelis by Palestinian Hussam Dwayat ‘Jerusalem attacker acted alone’. The report began:

A Palestinian who went on a bulldozing rampage in west Jerusalem on Wednesday apparently acted alone, Israeli police say, despite claims by militant groups.

Hussam Dwayat was at work on a building site when he drove his front-loader vehicle into the street and started mowing down cars and ramming buses.

He killed three people and wounded dozens more before security personnel climbed on the vehicle and killed him.

The fact that people died doesn’t make it into the headline or the first two paragraphs. And you have to get all the way to paragraph 12 – after the BBC presents a couple of theories for Dwayat’s actions, which, while not exactly excusing the attacks, suggest that the behaviour of Israelis may have driven him to his wits’ end – to find out that two of the dead were women, and beyond that to realise how close Dwayat came to murdering two babies as well.

The BBC also doesn’t mention that the male victim was 68, and soon to be a grandfather. In fact its reporters fail to get so much of what’s relevant into the crucial opening lines of the story that if this was a test-piece in an exam for entry to journalism school they would probably have flunked it – and this despite the fact that BBC reporter Tim Franks watched the whole thing unfold.

Update: The BBC updated the story while I was writing this post, and the details of the victims have been pushed even farther down the report.

Contrast the story with the BBC’s reporting of incidents in which Palestinians are killed by Israeli troops or airstrikes. A quick search of the BBC’s site reveals a steady stream of headlines such as 'Four children die in Gaza strike', 'Palestinian children die in blast', 'Family killed during raid in Gaza' and 'Outrage over killing of Gaza boys'.

If children aren’t mentioned in the headline, they’re invariably mentioned in the first line of the report, and the facts that they were Palestinians, or lived in Gaza, and were killed by Israelis, are also prominent.

Again, contrast that with a February BBC story headlined ‘Gaza rockets injure two Israelis’, in which you have to get to paragraph five to learn that one of the victims was aged eight.

In the case of yesterday’s story the BBC appears more concerned with reassuring readers that Dwayat was some kind of unhinged loner, and not a terrorist. In the process of doing so they’ve essentially relegated the killings to the status of an industrial accident.

Readers’ perceptions are often framed by a quick glance at the headline, or the first paragraph of a story. Casual readers of the BBC’s website must get the impression that the Israelis deliberately target children and other Palestinian civilians on an almost daily basis, while Israelis are occasionally the victim of some mishap or criminal act.

Clearly the BBC doesn’t want its readers to know that Palestinians kill women and children. After all this would undermine the image, so carefully cultivated by the BBC and other media outlets, of Palestinian terrorists as ‘militants’ engaged in a war against an occupying army – or ‘urban guerrillas’, in the words of BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston, the first kidnap victim to develop Stockholm syndrome before being seized.

The tactic is subtle, but very effective, and it stinks to high heaven. But as we’ve seen, if enough people complain, they’ve been known to withdraw lies and misleading reports. You can complain here.

HonestReporting.com has a rather more scientific analysis of bias in BBC headlines and reports.

Gazans driving Caterpillars; Rachel Corrie spinning in grave

For the past few years Palestinian sympathisers and Israel haters have been waging a campaign against US construction equipment maker Caterpillar, on the grounds that it builds the D9 earthmovers used by the Israeli Defence Forces.

Campaigners say the IDF uses the bulldozers to illegally demolish Palestinian homes. The IDF says it uses them to demolish buildings used by terrorists as firing positions, and to dismantle booby-traps and fill in weapons-smuggling tunnels.

A D9 famously ran over and killed the flag-burning US activist Rachel Corrie in Gaza in 2003, spawning an entire canon of sub-standard poetry and drama. The pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement claimed she was 'murdered' while trying to protect Palestinian homes, producing a series of contradictory and apparently faked photos to support their claims. (HT for that last link Israel Matzav.)

The IDF says its troops were clearing weapons-smuggling infrastructure, and that there was no way the driver of the D9 could have seen Corrie. Corrie's family and others have tried to sue Caterpillar but failed, and she has become a hero of the Palestinian 'resistance' movement, and its official PR arm.

Whatever the truth of that particular incident, it's fair to say that, in the eyes of the anti-Israel lobby, Caterpillar's name is Mudd – or maybe that should be Earth. In 2004 Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch said:

Caterpillar betrays its stated values when it sells bulldozers to Israel knowing that they are being used to illegally destroy Palestinian homes. Until Israel stops these practices, Caterpillar’s continued sales will make the company complicit in human rights abuses.

So it comes as something of a surprise to see Palestinians clearing up the damage caused by last week's Israeli strikes on Gaza with… a Caterpillar:

Apologies for the picture quality – it's a screen grab of a video, which is itself pretty ropey (or maybe it's my monitor…) on the BBC's website. But if you click to enlarge it you can clearly see 'CAT' on the engine cowling, and 'CATERPILLAR' along the top of the windscreen.

The BBC video is here (if that doesn't work the page is here – click the 'Watch' button below the photo). The Caterpillar appears briefly at 50 seconds, but there's no commentary. There's another version, with commentary, here (the page is here). It's edited differently, and the Caterpillar appears at 46 seconds. The branding is clearly visible in both clips.

It's what's known as a 'backhoe loader', rather than the notorious, almost larger-than-life D9, but a Caterpillar it most certainly is. This must be what they call the 'circle of earthmoving': Caterpillars knock the buildings down, Caterpillars come along and clear up the mess, and so it continues…

You've got to hand it to Caterpillar’s Mid-East sales rep. Talk about playing both sides – the guy has to be in line for 'salesman of the year' and a weekend in Vegas.

There are several websites, including Stop Caterpillar, devoted to attacking Caterpillar, and calling for boycotts of its products (I for one will certainly have pause for thought next time I'm out shopping for a 150,000lb earthmover). You can see some endearingly pathetic photos of a demo in England here.

The United Methodist Church in the US is running a disinvestment campaign against Caterpillar. The General Synod of the Church of England, under the leadership of the hapless Rowan Williams, voted to do the same in 2006, but was snubbed by its investments advisory group.

Among leftist opponents of Israel, Caterpillar has become a by-word for the perceived injustices visited on the Palestinian people. Maybe someone ought to tell the Palestinians.

Related: Business as usual at the BBC

Thanks to all who linked. In Berlin for a few days so not much time for blogging. I was at the Holocaust memorial shortly after hearing of the attack on the seminary in Jerusalem. Maybe I'll have some thoughts when I get back.

Frank Gaffney on gang rape in Annapolis

It is fitting that Condoleezza Rice chose the U.S. Naval Academy for the venue of tomorrow’s so-called Mideast peace conference. The reputation of that extraordinary institution in Annapolis has been sullied in recent years by a succession of rapes of young women. Despite official efforts to low-ball its significance, Ms. Rice’s conclave is shaping up to be a gang-rape of a nation on a scale not seen since Munich in 1938, when the British and French allowed Hitler and Mussolini to have their violent way with Czechoslovakia.

This time, the intended victim is Israel. As with the effort to appease the Nazis and Fascists nearly sixty years ago, however, the damage will not be confined to the rapee. The interests of the Free World in general and the United States in particular will suffer from what the Saudis and most of the other attendees have in mind for the Jewish State – namely, its dismemberment and ultimate destruction.

Read the whole thing.

Elsewhere, Jerusalem Post columnist Carline Glick talks to National Review's Kathryn Lopez:

It is hard to see any positive outcome from the Annapolis conference. Some have argued that the conference will make clear the distinction between states interested in peace and states uninterested in peace. But it is far from clear why this is the case. Indeed, one of the basic flaws inherent in the Annapolis conference, and indeed in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s recent frenetic pursuit of Palestinian statehood is the complete absence of moral distinctions between states committed to the ideals of peace, freedom, and fighting terror and those committed to jihad, tyranny, and hatred.

And here's Bernard Lewis in yesterday's WSJ on the fraud of 'the right of return':

The Poles and the Germans [refugees from Hitler's Europe], the Hindus and the Muslims [refugees created by the partition of India], the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, [during the 1947-48 fighting] all were resettled in their new homes and accorded the normal rights of citizenship. More remarkably, this was done without international aid. The one exception was the Palestinian Arabs in neighboring Arab countries.

The government of Jordan granted Palestinian Arabs a form of citizenship, but kept them in refugee camps. In the other Arab countries, they were and remained stateless aliens without rights or opportunities, maintained by U.N. funding. Paradoxically, if a Palestinian fled to Britain or America, he was eligible for naturalization after five years, and his locally-born children were citizens by birth. If he went to Syria, Lebanon or Iraq, he and his descendants remained stateless, now entering the fourth or fifth generation.

The reason for this has been stated by various Arab spokesmen. It is the need to preserve the Palestinians as a separate entity until the time when they will return and reclaim the whole of Palestine; that is to say, all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Israel. The demand for the "return" of the refugees, in other words, means the destruction of Israel. This is highly unlikely to be approved by any Israeli government.

Let's hope.

Facts are held hostage at the BBC

Alan Johnston, the BBC's Gaza correspondent who was held hostage for nearly four months by Islamic terrorists before being freed in July, is probably the first kidnap victim to develop Stockholm syndrome before being abducted. His solidly pro-Palestinian reporting made him an unlikely target for the militants, and as Melanie Phillips has written, his kidnapping was very likely staged as a prelude to Hamas’s takeover of Gaza a few weeks later.

That’s not to belittle Johnston’s ordeal. But the way the BBC has milked the episode to wallow in self-importance, and generally promote its global brand, leaves a nasty taste in the mouth – to say nothing of its kid-gloves approach to the terrorists of Hamas in the months since.

The Beeb is in full Johnston-mania mode this week, and aired an hour-long Panorama documentary on the kidnapping last night. It was typical of what passes for current affairs on BBC1 these days, mixing slick production values with superficial analysis, and stuck to the simplistic line that Johnston was kidnapped by rogue Islamists and/or criminals, before being rescued by that paragon of law and order, Hamas.

So we had Johnston being interviewed, with no end of nods and winks, by the smooth-but-serious Jeremy Vine in, for some reason, a very large empty warehouse; frantic point-of-view shots as we raced through the streets of Gaza; a raven appearing every now and then to symbolise menace. And most bizarrely, every time the prospect of Johnston’s death was raised, we got a sequence ripped off from Gladiator, showing a woman trailing her hand through a field of tall grass.

But for all its silliness, the programme at least steered clear of the broader politics of the Middle East, a temptation that Johnston was unable to resist in a radio program which also aired yesterday, and the text of which is on the BBC’s website. Slipping effortlessly back into the language he employed as Gaza correspondent, Johnston makes excuses for his kidnappers, implicitly pins the blame for his ordeal on Israel, and even manages to get in a swipe at the US.

Here’s Johnston’s inevitable romanticising of one of his captors:

Like many young men who I had met in Gaza, Khamees was the son of a family that had either fled or been driven from their home in what is now Israel.

He had been raised in the poverty of one of Gaza's intensely crowded cities, and been drawn to the militant groups that had fought the occupying Israeli army.

Khamees had matured into a battle-hardened urban guerrilla.

The BBC’s reporters have come up with no end of weasel words to describe Palestinian murderers over the years, but I thought ‘urban guerilla’ had gone out with flares and disco. And as Khamees apparently belonged to an fringe Islamic group, rather than Fatah or Hamas, I’m not sure which ‘battle’ Johnston thinks he was ‘hardened’ in – perhaps the Battle of Mahmoud’s Barber Shop, when Mahmoud was given a good beating for offering un-Islamic beard trims – or the Battle of Ali’s Video Store, when Khamees and his comrades succeeded, in the face of overwhelming odds, in shoving Mahmoud’s mother out of the way, knee-capping Mahmoud and torching his collection of decadent Western movies.

And you'd think that an authority on the Middle East such as Johnston would be well aware that most of the Arabs who were displaced at the time of the creation of Israel in 1948 either left of their own accord or were told to leave by the invading Arab armies (Alan Dershowitz has a chapter on the 'refugees' in his book The Case for Israel, and there's a good collection of mea culpas from Arab sources here). As for the 'occupation', Johnston might have mentioned that the Gazans were perfectly happy to be occupied by Egypt until the Arab nations' second failed attempt to destroy Israel; they're not against occupation per se – they just prefer to choose their occupiers.

For all Johnston knows, Khamees could have been born and raised in Gaza. He may not even be a Palestinian. Johnston is probably just throwing in a bit of colour here to give his captors a human face, along with an excuse for their brutality to boot: it’s all down to Israeli aggression, and Israeli-inflicted poverty.

And a little later, Johnston recounts how he was able to cheer himself up by putting his ordeal into context:

But the fact was that I had not been killed, and I was not being beaten around.

I was being fed reasonably, and I decided that my conditions could have been much, much worse.

Whatever else it was, my Gazan incarceration was not what Iraqi prisoners had been forced to endure at Abu Ghraib jail.

It was not the Russian Gulag, and it certainly was not the Nazi death camps.

Dreadful as Abu Ghraib was, to talk about what happened there in the same breath as the Gulags and Hitler’s concentration camps – and in fact to focus on the former while adding the latter horrors as an afterthought – is taking moral equivalence to extremes.

Johnston might argue that he was simply looking to provide context. If so, he could have chosen three far more appropriate examples: Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who are being held captive by Hezbollah, and Gilad Shalit, who remains a prisoner of Johnston’s ‘liberators’, Hamas. All three have been held for over a year, probably not far from where Johnston was confined, and you might think that their fates would have been on his mind in the months he’s had to reflect on his own ordeal.

But in the inverted moral universe of Alan Johnston and the BBC it’s the murderers and kidnappers of Gaza who are the good guys, and the Israelis and the Americans who are to blame for everything that’s wrong in the Middle East. Johnston and other reporters often fret over the lack of progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it might help matters if they stopped making excuses for terrorists and started reporting the truth.

Lessons in bigotry

Melanie Phillips on how 'citizenship' lessons in British schools are being used to spread anti-Israel propaganda:

We are now a country where the uninformed are instructed by the bigoted. From the Olympian heights of Britain’s once unsurpassed education system, which produced the fairest, gentlest and most rational society on earth, Britain’s children are now being equipped instead to inhabit Planet Virulence, where ignorance, irrationality and injustice rule.

The cost of Gaza's hostility

I read through this BBC report on an Israeli air strike taking out a terrorist rocket crew in Gaza expecting to find that the Israelis were aiming for some Palestinian children, but missed. In the absence of civilian casualties the Beeb has to look elsewhere to get a dig in:

Correspondents say last week's declaration by Israel of Gaza as ‘hostile territory’ sets the stage for cutting electricity to the impoverished coastal territory which has 1.4 million inhabitants.

If you read the story you'll see that the paragraph doesn't naturally fit into it, but has been shoehorned in purely to inject an anti-Israel note.

I meant to post on the ‘hostile territory’ development last week, but got sidetracked, so thanks to the Beeb for bringing it up again, which gives me the opportunity to quote from two NRO posts that put the lie to the media's ‘Gazans under siege’ theme.

Here’s Victor Davis Hanson at The Corner:

Why would [Hamas] not welcome such a state of clear-cut armed conflict against the hated Zionist entity, given that they are already constantly rocketing Jews? And second, why not simply make arrangements with Egypt to connect infrastructure, power, and trade, and seal on its own the border with Israel, while developing much closer ties with a brother Arab state? Or alternatively, with Gulf oil money Hamas might develop port facilities to ensure supplies of fuel and export/import trade, or even a power and water plant of their own on the coast.

And here's J. Peter Pham at The Tank:

While some like the United Nations official quoted in the [Jerusalem Post] article will argue that Israel is engaging in "collective punishment", the Jewish state is doing nothing more than what any other nation at war does with a declared enemy. Did the Allies in World War II feel themselves bound to make sure that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had an adequate supplies of petroleum? The object of a blockade, after all, is to degrade the enemy's ability to continue fighting effectively. As long as shipments of basic foodstuffs and medicine for use by non-combatants are allowed past a blockade—after due inspection, if necessary, to prevent the smuggling of contraband—a country at war, unlike a former spouse paying alimony, is hardly obliged to keep a declared enemy in the style to which he or she has become accustomed.

Pham also has a superb article, written with Michael I. Krauss, at The American Thinker, in which they explain that Israel’s actions are entirely in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, and which includes this observation, which I’m going to start posting as a comment on every BBC story on the subject:

Egypt, during its entire occupation of the territory from 1948-67, never developed Gaza's energy infrastructure, leaving the strip destitute and primitive. Israel's integration of Gaza into its supply grid has allowed Gazans to develop their industry and agriculture.

The Western Media has developed a bizarre tendency to completely disassociate the actions of the armed thugs that run Gaza with the fate of its citizens. But until Gazans decide to elect leaders who are committed to peace, and not war, they’re going to have to lie in the bed they’ve made for themselves.

BBC playing down Israel's strike on Syria

Why is the BBC playing with such a straight bat (note to US readers: the expression is cricket parlance, and is used to suggest that someone doesn’t want to take sides on an issue, or give away more information than is necessary), over Israel’s air strike on Syria?

Almost every other major news outlet has reported, some in considerable detail, that the Israeli raid targeted nuclear material that had been shipped from North Korea. While the BBC has quoted some of these accounts, its first-hand reporting continues to talk of the incident being ‘shrouded in mystery’.

Its story today, on Binyamin Netanyahu confirming that some kind of raid did in fact take place, is typical. After reporting Netanyahu’s remarks, (incidentally I think Netanyahu, who I generally have a lot of time for, is an idiot for publicly talking about the raid, and thereby dispelling the air of mystery that was working to Israel’s advantage), the story lapses into the vagueness of previous BBC accounts of the raid itself.

For example, no serious observer doubts that the Israelis got into and out of Syria with ease, or that the first the Syrians knew of the raid was when things started blowing up around them; yet the BBC persists in parroting the official Syrian response: ‘The Syrian authorities say that the aircraft were forced away, and that they fired their weaponry into a deserted area.’ As for the target of the raid, the report only notes that: ‘US officials have indicated that at least one target in northern Syria was hit.’

You would think the BBC could do a little better, given its considerable, taxpayer-funded resources, and its global network of correspondents (although it would hardly be surprising if senior military and intelligence figures in Israel were unwilling to talk to the BBC, given its barely concealed hostility to the state).

The BBC might argue nobly that it only reports the facts, and doesn’t engage in speculation. But of course it engages in speculation every day, when speculation suits it.

More likely the BBC is playing down the incident because it’s averse to reporting on completely justified and successful Israeli strikes against its enemies, and equally averse to talking about developments that might portray Syria in a negative light. As if it were needed, clear evidence of the BBC’s position with regard to Israel and Syria is provided by this paragraph towards the end of the report:

The Syrian government has insisted that peace talks can be resumed only on the basis of Israel returning the Golan Heights, which it seized in 1967.

As usual, there's no context, and no balance. The BBC might have mentioned that from 1948 to 1967 Syrian forces used the Golan Heights to shoot at and later shell Israeli kibbutzim, and that Syria allowed Yasir Arafat's Fatah terrorists to launch raids into Israel from the territory; and all this before Israel occupied an inch of Arab territory. If you didn’t know any better – and many people don’t – you might be forgiven for thinking that Israel seized the Golan Heights in an unprovoked act of aggression against a harmless, peace-loving neighbour.

Thus does the BBC rewrite the history of the Middle East, day in and day out. And if it won’t tell the truth about Israel’s past conflicts with the Arab world, it can hardly be relied upon to tell the truth about what’s going on in the region today.

Iran and Syria will have to put up or shut up

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner's remarks about preparing for war with Iran, combined with Israel's air strike against Syria, have really put the cat among the pigeons in Tehran and Damascus.

Via The Jerusalem Post:

Six hundred Iranian Shihab-3 missiles are pointed at targets throughout Israel, and will be launched if either Iran or Syria are attacked, an Iranian website affiliated with the regime reported on Monday.

"Iran will shoot at Israel 600 missiles if it is attacked," the Iranian news website, Assar Iran, reported. "600 missiles will only be the first reaction."

According to the report, dozens of locations throughout Iraq which are being used by the United States army have also been targeted.

The Shihab missile has a range of 1,300 km, and can reach anywhere in Israel.

Hang on a tick... Syria was attacked, last week, by Israel. Where's the firestorm of Iranian retribution? Or is Tehran saying "Okay, we're going to let you have that one, but if you try it again we're really going to get mad?"

Meanwhile, Iran's state-owned IRNA news agency has responded to Kouchner's remarks by accusing Paris of pandering to the United States.

"The new occupants of the Elysee want to copy the White House," the IRNA news agency said. It also accused French President Nicolas Sarkozy of taking on "an American skin", adding: "the French people will never forget the era when a non-European moved into the Elysee".

In a not-unconnected development, JPost reports that a top Israeli intelligence commander has told Israeli MPs that Israel's deterrence against Syria and Iran has been reestablished since last year's Lebanon War.

"[Israeli deterrence] is having an impact on the whole region, including on Iran and Syria," Major General Amos Yadlin said during his intelligence briefing to the legislature's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Sunday.

Not surprisingly, the General didn't refer to the recent strike on Syria, which Israel will neither confirm nor deny (the Israeli media, incidentally, is still barred from revealing details of the operation by the military censor, which is why they're in the odd position of quoting US and European media reports that quote Israeli sources), but the implication was clear.

You don't need a master's degree in international relations to see what's going on here. Both Damascus and Tehran are very, very rattled by recent developments, and don't seem to know how to respond. The Syrians are maintaining an embarrassed silence, while Iran is making rhetorical threats on the one hand, and mocking the French for getting too close to the US on the other.

There's a lesson here for those who think the two biggest troublemakers in the Middle East can be contained by diplomacy and sanctions. While Western countries have persisted with the softly-softly approach Iran and Syria have continued to meddle in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere, and have continued with their respective weapons programmes. Recent events demonstrate that only language they understand is force - and it doesn't necessarily have to lead to an uncontrollable escalation of hostilities.

Now that they've experienced real live military action, with the prospect of more to follow, they're caught between a rock and a hard place: do nothing, and lose influence and credibility; or respond, and face an overwhelming US, Israeli and perhaps even French, onslaught.

Tehran and Syria have been getting away with murder, quite literally, for too long. But in the latest round of hostilities they've yet to claim a single victim with their tanks, their aircraft or their long-rang missiles. They love all that asymmetric warfare stuff. The real thing? Not so much.

Related analysis here.

Update: Thanks to Ace of Spades and Pajamas for linking, and welcome all. While you're here do check out my latest post, on the Greenspan affair. You might like this post from yesterday, on how the inability of MoveOn and the Dems to resist a good insult caused them to shoot themselves in the foot.

Syria goes blah-blah over Israeli strike

A consensus seems to be emerging that the targets Israeli jets hit last week were arms supplies destined for Hezbollah, although as Scoop 86, blogging at In From The Cold, writes, there's also a lot of talk about clandestine nuclear cooperation between Syria and North Korea.

Whatever the target was, Syria is hopping mad, although of course they're pretending that no damage was done - how could there be, when there are no Hezbollah-bound weapons in Syria for Israel to hit?

Syria's UN ambassador Bashar Ja'afari got decidedly prickly when pressed on this matter: "This is blah, blah. This is nonsense, this is an unfounded statement. It is not up to the Israelis or anyone else to assess what we have in Syria."

"There was no target," he added. "They dropped their munitions. They were running away after they were confronted by our air defence."

Of course they were. Just like they ran away in 1948, 1967 and 1973. But I suppose you could be forgiven for being a little prickly if your bitterest enemy's air forces had just moonwalked through your air defences, destroyed an expensive cache of weapons destined for your terrorist buddies, and moonwalked out again.

RELATED: Jules Crittenden has a piece on the 'squeezing' of Syria and Iran at Pajamas Media. His conclusion:

Whether by happy coincidence or design, what we appear to be witnessing may be shaping operations for a long overdue curtailing of the what are now the primary destabilizing forces of the Middle East … now that Saddam’s out of the way. As the Iraq Study Group stated nearly a year ago, both Syria and Iran needed to be spoken to. The Israeli-Palestinian situation needed to be addressed.

Hamas graciously saw to the latter, isolating itself in a spasm of unbelieveably murderous bloodshed that has given Mideast peace an unexpected boost. Iran and its partner Syria, with their intransigent meddling and obtuseness on several fronts, have given the United States an open to talks of a different sort than the disingenuous negotiations in Baghdad. At this late date, even Democratic presidential candidates who want us out of Iraq immediately say they are open to the idea of attacks on Iran.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Israel playing war games?

Speculation is continuing over whether or not Israel carried out an airstrike inside Syria last week. The Jerusalem Post quotes a Kuwaiti newspaper report, which claims Israel targeted Iranian missile batteries, and that Syrian President Bashar Assad is under pressure to hit back. CNN says the strikes may have been aimed at weapons supplies destined for Hezbollah, and quotes Israeli sources as saying the attacks "left a big hole in the desert".

If it’s confirmed that Israel did carry out an airstrike, it’ll be criticised for launching an unprovoked attack. But Syria’s support for Hezbollah in last year’s war, and its continued arming of that and other terrorist groups, are acts of aggression, and Israel has every right to retaliate; and anyway, in the eyes of much of international opinion, Israel is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t.

It might be that Israel is playing a clever game here, by launching an attack knowing that Syria wouldn’t want to acknowledge that Israeli aircraft had penetrated its air defences and taken out important, and supposedly secret military installations. If Syria is too embarrassed to respond, or too fearful, Israel may well carry out further hit-and-run raids.

And if Assad does bow to pressure to hit back, Syria’s attacks are likely to be as conspicuous, indiscriminate and ineffective as some analysts are saying Israel’s was discrete, precise and successful. And Israel would then have the perfect justification for launching overt and large-scale attacks on Syria, striking its air force and air defences, and going after Hezbollah’s training camps and supply lines.

The nihilists of Gaza

Rockets fired from Gaza have hit an Israeli army camp. Many hurt. The latest is here. Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Mark Regev says it all:

"We pulled out of the Gaza Strip two years ago, we took down all of the settlements, we pulled out all our military personnel, we ended the military occupation and these extremists who are shooting rockets really have no positive agenda. It's just nihilism."

Awful at this is, thank God it wasn't a school or a shopping mall. Mind you, if it had been it would have given the BBC another chance to tell us why the Israelis deserve it.