Biased BBC takes The Israel Test: Mishal Husain wonders if attempted murder is any crime at all?
GIL Hoffman, Chief Political Correspondent and Analyst with the Jerusalem Post, has been on the BBC talking with Mishal Husain about the latest fighting in Gaza. As ever, these wars of self-defence and self-assertion ride high on the news cycle. The West sees itself in the conflict.
Brendan O’Neill paraphrases George Gilder in The Israel Test:
Western thinkers, politicians and activists define themselves through their attitude towards Israel. They project on to Israel either their desperate desire to save Western Enlightenment values from being trashed (with some seeing Israel as the No.1 defender of those values), or their aching guilt over the values of Western colonialism (with others seeing Israel as the No.1 embodiment of those archaic values), and then cheer or denounce Israel and its local wars accordingly.
The idea you can only act when people have been killed is odd. If you keep shooting, and the target keeps ducking, what does the law say?
This would all at least be consistent if the BBC punctuated its coverage of Iraq and Afghansitan with the tallies of death on each side. When a British serviceman or woman dies, the BBC can adjust the tally and then the journalist can look approvingly or disapprovingly at the camera. When they numbers of ruined lives on all sides match up, the war can be declared a draw right?
According to the BBC, 6,850,000 Germans died in World War 2 – see table below (the figure inlcudes Holocaust victims.) . The number of British killed: 388,000.
So. Was the British response disproportionate? Was the Russian response (20,600,000 dead) not enough?
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Posted: 22nd, November 2012 | In: Reviews Comments (14) | TrackBack | Permalink
