Thursday 21 January 2010

Just Journalism Exposes BBC's Twisting Of Defence Into Attack

In the BBC's recent documentary on Jerusalem (last paragraph in this post), there was an incident described that left me confused. The documentary portrayed an Israeli's seemingly extremely aggressive shooting of Palestinians in Jerusalem, including a child, which left a father apparently unable to walk without crutches and his son traumatised. (Watch it here at 22 minutes, but it'll probably become unavailable soon.)

I recalled reading about an incident where an Israeli was arrested for shooting two Palestinians, but was then released when CCTV footage revealed he had been threatened by the Palestinians and had acted in self defence.

Indeed, the BBC documentary actually showed this footage, but the story they described sounded so different that for a second I actually thought these might have been two seperate incidents. It reminds me of that game where you have to click on the word in red, but the word red is written in blue and the word blue is written in red and it's all very disorienting!

A Haaretz article I found confirmed that they were the same incident, but didn't give many more details than the BBC's version.

Just Journalism though, have exposed the inaccuracies and lack of context in the BBC's version of events, and link to a YNet article that gives the Israeli's story in more detail - including the fact that even when he first fired a warning shot in the air, the Palestinians did not back off.

Just a minor detail on the Israeli side of the story that the BBC forgot to mention.

No comments:

Post a Comment