March 04, 2008

Holocaust revisionism at the BBC?

Back to Israel's "shoah" controversy because Eine Kleine Nichtmusik has a very useful post on how the BBC bent over backwards to cover for Israel over the issue:
Israel's Deputy Defence Minister threatened Gaza with a Shoah (the word generally used in Hebrew exclusively to refer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews). Or more exactly with a "bigger Shoah", implying perhaps that the inhabitants of Gaza are already suffering genocide. (Whoops.) In any case, his meaning was perfectly clear: we don't like the government you elected (in free, fair and wholly democratic elections) so we will slaughter you all. Look, we've started.

Now of course he may have said more than he meant, but when one compares the slim coverage given to his remark when compared with that given to, for example, Iran's President Ahmadinejad's call for Israel to be "wiped off the map", it's almost as though there was some kind of systematic pro-Israeli bias in the Western media. But that can't be true, because we're always being told how anti-Semitic they all are.

Now of course if there was really a systematic bias towards Israel at, say the BBC, they might have bowed to pressure to modify their reporting of the story. Their site might have changed its story to airbrush the word "holocaust" from the headline and bury it deep within the small print. But the BBC would never do that, would they?

Actually, it's even better than that: the BBC made nine revisions to the story during the day. The first corrected a typo; thereafter they progressively made more and more references to Hamas attacks on Israel, before "holocaust" was diluted to "risking disaster" and finally "invasion". Presumably the Israeli embassy just kept on ringing back until they took down the dictation correctly.
I can't think of any other explanation, can you?

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