The morning after the October 22nd terror attack in Jerusalem in which a three month-old baby was killed and eight other people injured, the BBC News website replaced its highly unsatisfactory report on the incident with another article titled “Israel’s Netanyahu accuses Abbas over Jerusalem car attack“.
Although the unnecessary inverted commas around the word attack seen in the previous article’s various headlines did not appear in this one, the description of a “car attack” of course still fails to adequately inform audiences that this was an act of terror and indeed the BBC refrains from categorizing the incident as such itself.
“A spokesman said the incident was being treated as a “terrorist attack”.”
For some reason the BBC found it necessary to ensure that before readers had reached the end of the first six paragraphs of the article, they had been informed no fewer than three times that the terrorist was shot by the Israeli security forces: once in the caption to the photograph illustrating the report and twice in its text.
As has often been documented here, the BBC consistently avoids reporting on the issue of Palestinian incitement from all factions and so this report may appear to make a welcome change to that previous policy. The topic of the article’s headline is presented thus:
“Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu has accused the Palestinian president of incitement, after an attack which killed a baby girl in Jerusalem.
Mr Netanyahu said Mahmoud Abbas had provided encouragement for incidents such as the killing of the three-month-old by a Palestinian driver.” […]
In a statement, Prime Minister Netanyahu accused the Palestinian unity government, backed by Mr Abbas’ Fatah party and Hamas, of fuelling such attacks.
“This is the way in which Abu Mazen’s [Mahmoud Abbas] partners in government operate, the same Abu Mazen who just days ago incited to harm Jews in Jerusalem,” he said.
Mr Netanyahu was alluding to comments by Mr Abbas in which he said Jewish “settlers” should be barred “by any means” from entering a disputed holy compound in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount and Muslims as Haram al-Sharif. He described Jews visiting the site as a “herds of cattle”.
Mr Abbas was speaking after a series of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police on the compound.”
However, as Khaled Abu Toameh has documented, Abbas’ incitement has extended beyond those comments as they are reported by the BBC.
“A few days before the terrorist attack in Jerusalem, Abbas strongly denounced Jews who visit the Temple Mount as a “herd of cattle.”
Abbas told Fatah activists from Jerusalem who visited him in his office that they must make an effort to stop Jewish “settlers,” “by all means,” from “desecrating our holy sites.”
Abbas added:
“We must prevent them from entering the Noble Sanctuary by all means. This is our Al-Aqsa. Al-Aqsa is a red line: Israel must be aware that the ongoing raids and attacks on Al-Aqsa will cause a volcanic explosion in the area that will reach Israel. Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the State of Palestine, and without it, there will be no state.”
Abbas and his Palestinian Authority have been exploiting the visits by Jews to the Temple Mount to incite Palestinians against Israel. They have been incorrectly denouncing these visits as “assaults” and “raids” on Islamic holy sites by Jewish “extremists”.”
The PA president has also recently used other issues to promote incitement:
“During the 50-day military confrontation between Israel and Hamas in July and August, PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his senior officials in the West Bank made it a daily practice to incite their people against Israel.
The anti-Israel campaign of incitement reached its peak with Abbas’s speech at the UN General Assembly last month, when he accused Israel of waging a “war of genocide” in the Gaza Strip. Abbas made no reference to Hamas’s crimes against both Israelis and Palestinians.”
“Forty-eight hours before the Jerusalem attack, Abbas intensified his rhetorical assault on Israel by announcing that any Palestinian who is involved in property transactions with “hostile countries” (Israel) would be punished by life imprisonment with hard labor.
Abbas’s announcement came in response to reports that Palestinians had sold homes to Jewish families in Silwan — the Jerusalem neighborhood where al-Shalodi lived. By threatening to punish Palestinians for selling property to Jews, Abbas was sending a message that this is an awful crime that should not pass without a Palestinian response.”
Rather than clarifying to BBC audiences the scale and intensity of the incitement promoted by the Palestinian Authority president it so frequently describes as “moderate“, the BBC elects to present the issue in terms of “accusations” by the Israeli prime minister. The fact that Abbas’ party Fatah published a ‘martyrdom poster’ praising the terrorist on its Facebook page and that Abbas’ advisor described him as “a heroic martyr” has not been reported to BBC audiences.
Whilst the BBC has one the one hand frequently promoted the erroneous notion that the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas was a result of the lack of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and on the other sympathetically amplified the PA’s assorted unilateral moves to achieve international recognition of statehood whilst avoiding negotiations, the corporation consistently fails to provide audiences with information on the very relevant issues of the incitement and glorification of terrorism propagated by Palestinian leaders of all factions. Unfortunately, this report does little to correct those omissions or to begin to provide BBC audiences with the information necessary to enable their understanding of the part played by those factors in encouraging terrorism and making any negotiated peace agreement increasingly unlikely.
