As has been mentioned here on prior occasions, it is extremely rare to see any follow-up reporting by the BBC after Palestinian terrorists have been arrested and put on trial but just such a report did appear on the BBC News website’s Middle East page on June 22nd under the headline “Palestinians jailed for life for killing Israeli couple“.
However, despite this being a story about the sentencing of convicted terrorists belonging to the Hamas terrorist organisation who murdered two Israelis in a pre-planned terror attack, the words terror, terrorist or terrorism do not appear even once in this report.
“An Israeli military court has sentenced four Palestinians to life in prison for the murder of an Israeli couple in the occupied West Bank, the military says.
Eitam and Naama Henkin were killed in front of their four young children in a drive-by shooting on 1 October.
The military said the assailants, members of the Islamist movement Hamas, opened fire at the Henkins’ car after an attempt to abduct them failed.”
What does appear in this article is the above link to the BBC’s original report on the attack. There we learn that over nine months since its publication, BBC Online has still not got round to correcting its inaccurate presentation of Eitam Henkin’s name.
Sadly, there is of course nothing surprising about the BBC’s censoring of the word terror from this article: the same pattern was seen in its earlier reporting on the same story (see ‘related articles’ below).
However, just a few days earlier the BBC was capable of reporting that “jihadist terror struck Paris in November“.
Similarly, BBC audiences were recently informed of “counter-terror raids” in Belgium which resulted in three men being charged.
“The charges they face include attempting to commit murder through terrorism and participating in a terrorist group.”
The BBC was also able to tell audiences in its own words that these raids were:
“…the biggest coordinated operation since the terror attacks here in Brussels three months ago.”
And that:
“Thirty-two people were murdered in the terror attacks in March…”
Once again we see that while the BBC rightly uses the word terror when it reports on that topic in Europe, the same word is censored from its reporting from Israel, even an article about terrorists already convicted in court.
Related Articles:
BBC’s Connolly refrains from using the word terror in report on terror attack
BBC News describes Henkin family attackers as “alleged militants”
