The Hamas Broadcasting Corporation (ctd)

Spectator (U.K.) ^ | January 6, 2008 | Melanie Phillips

[Schnucki]

Last night’s BBC TV News at Ten featured a highly partisan report about Gaza by Jeremy Bowen. Making no mention of the direct hit yesterday by a Hamas rocket on a kindergarten in Ashdod (which was empty for fear of precisely such an occurrence) Bowen concentrated heavily on the growing civilian casualty toll among Palestinians, making no acknowledgement of any Hamas operatives among these figures. The piece de resistance of this item was a report from Gaza’s Shifa hospital by a Gazan BBC producer, Rushdi abu Alouf. He claimed that ‘hundreds of kids, women and children’ had been brought to the hospital for medical treatment. Undoubtedly there are many casualties -- tragically, including children -- and the hospital is obviously under pressure. This though may help explain some of that pressure:

Hamas has set up an independent hospital in the Gaza Strip to treat its operatives wounded in fighting with the IDF - and, according to Israeli estimates, it is pilfering a significant portion of the medicine allowed into the Strip.

But the BBC did not tell its viewers the important fact that every single journalist and media utterance coming out of Gaza is controlled by Hamas. In other words, you can’t believe a thing that anyone there tells you.

More notable still was the interview this producer conducted with a Norwegian doctor treating the wounded at Shifa, Dr Mads Gilbert. Gilbert painted an appalling picture. There were many amputations and head injuries; more and more patients were arriving; there were so many they were dying waiting for surgery. Asked how he was coping, he replied: ‘I’m not coping; the Palestinians are coping and they do all they can’.

Gilbert was presented as just an ordinary doctor. But Gilbert appears not to be just an ordinary

[jimt]

Excellent post.