A BBC report from December 21st, entitled “Palestinian refugees return to Syrian camp” relates to some of the people who left the Yarmouk camp (actually a suburb of Damascus) for Lebanon as a result of the fighting there between pro-Assad Palestinians from Ahmed Jibril’s PFLP-GC (together with other factions such as the DFLP and PFLP) and the Free Syrian Army-aligned Palestinians of the Liwa al Asifa (Storm Brigade).
In an otherwise reasonable report in which BBC Arabic’s correspondent in Lebanon Carine Torbey did not shy away from mentioning the subjects of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon being denied basic rights and the presence of armed militias in the refugee camps, there is nevertheless one completely gratuitous sentence allowed to stand.
At 00:40 in the report Torbey’s interviewee says: [emphasis added]
“We left with nothing. It was like 1948 when Palestinians were forced to flee their homes. We walked for more than an hour. There were no cars. We knew that if we stayed, no-one would survive. And we were right: look at the camp now.”
Did the editor of the footage really think that context-free sentence contributed to the audience’s understanding of a story about people caught up in fighting between opposing Palestinian factions in Syria’s civil war?
