Posted on 07/11/2005 7:07:51 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Many commented on the fact that, on the day of the London bombings, the BBC referred over and over again to these acts as terrorism and to the perpetrators as terrorists. This was in striking contrast to its refusal to use the term terrorist when reporting terrorism in Israel. When a bus full of innocent people was blown up in Bloomsbury, it seemed, the perpetrator was a terrorist but when a bus full of innocent people was blown up in Jerusalem the perpetrator was a ‘militant’ or even ‘fighter’.
Now, however, it seems that the BBC has had second thoughts and no longer considers what happened last Thursday to be unarguably an example of terrorism. Its news reports are either putting the dreaded ‘t’ word into inverted commas — making it someone else’s contested definition — or removing it completely. Thus the terrorists have been upgraded to militants here:
‘At least 49 people died in the London blasts, blamed on al-Qaeda militants.’
Harry’s Place produces evidence that in two separate reports the word terrorist was originally used but was then removed from later versions altogether. Meanwhile the Beeb’s World Affairs Editor John Simpson calls the perpetrators something quite different again:
‘Now that the bombs have exploded, and thousands of newspaper pages and entire days of air time have been devoted to the horror of it all, and to the poor, decent people who are dead and missing, and to the misguided criminals responsible, perhaps we can stand back from it all and catch our breath.’
So people who set out to murder as many innocent people as possible in the furtherance of the fanatical cause of religious domination were merely ‘misguided’, and their actions simply ‘criminal’! Clearly, in Simpson’s mind they would hardly even qualify for an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Which makes the BBC’s Producer Guidelines all the more notable, since they sternly inform staff:
‘We must report acts of terror quickly, accurately, fully and responsibly. Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgements. The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.’
But ‘misguided criminals’ is a quite staggering value judgment. In the warped moral universe of the BBC, it seems, a value judgment is not a value judgment when it downplays acts of depravity, only when it calls such an act by its proper name. For the refusal to use the word terrorism is not a display of editorial objectivity — quite the contrary. It is a conscious acceptance of the morally degraded nostrum that terrorism is a subjective term, because ‘one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter’. But this is not so. Terrorism is the deliberate killing or infliction of harm upon innocent people, in order to inflict terror upon wider populations to achieve through violence political ends which cannot be achieved by lawful means. The BBC’s refusal to use this word in any circumstances means only one thing — that it has decided that terrorism does not exist but is merely a matter of subjective opinion. This is a highly ideological position which denies the very existence of a particular activity — and in doing so not only downplays the nature and significance of an act of terror, but correspondingly implicitly inflates and distorts the nature of any act of self-defence against it which becomes in such a vacuum an act of aggression.
No wonder the BBC is institutionally hostile to the war against terror. It’s a war against a phenomenon which apparently does not exist.
You wonder what it is about the media that attracts the lowest, most politically extreme elements of society.
I have a theory. These are the people who who are so extreme they can't get elected, so they go into the media, which is the next best thing from their perspective. On the other hand, that doesn't explain why they are extreme on the left.
What aqbout "jihad vermin", "the baboonic plague", or "Islamosimians"?
The BBC is PBS on steroids. I don't understand why the British taxpayers put up with it. For that matter, I don't understand why our Republican Congress continues to pour money into PBS.
Pitiful and disgusting.
You don't understand terrorists -- you kill them!
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