CAMERA Analyst Speaks at BBC March

On Sunday, November 15, 2015 college students from the Boston area gathered in Cambridge to protest the slanted and biased coverage of the BBC. After a brief rally, just over 100 protesters marched to the British Consulate in Cambridge to protest the BBC’s deceptive reporting.

The text of Van Zile’s talk is available below.

On Friday night, jihadists killed 129 people in Paris. Most of slaughter took place in the Bataclan, a concert hall known for hosting pro-Israel events. Because of its affiliation with the Jewish people and their homeland, it has been the target of hostility and threats for years.

In 2008, a group of young men wearing Palestinian keffiyehs over their faces came to the concert hall and complained about an event being held in support of Israel’s border police.

Apparently, the idea that the concert hall would be used to support people who stand between Israeli citizens and jihadists who want to kill them was simply intolerably to these folks. If the Bataclan continued to host these events, one of the masked thugs said, “the people will not take it any more and you will pay the consequences of your actions. The next time we will not come to talk.”

You can see this confrontation on Youtube. I don’t’ get it. You put a mask over your head and then you post the video on Youtube. Such is the logic of jihadism.

Jihadists planned an attack against the concert hall in 2011 but the French police thwarted this attack. One of the conspirators told officials after his capture, “We had a planned an attack against the Bataclan because the owners were Jewish.”

He was a member of a group that called itself “The Army of Islam.”

Finally, three days ago, jihadists from Syria made good on these threats, killing scores of people attending a rock concert.

Sadly, we live in a world where one thing we can really bank on is Jihadist threats. Jihadists keep their word. They promise violence, they give us violence. If the people who specifically make the threats cannot make good on their promise, one of their friends and allies will.

If Al Qaeda can’t do it, ISIS will.

And to make matters worse, jihadist threats are oftentimes more reliable than the promises and assurances from the captains of media who promise us they will promptly and accurately inform us about world events.

All too often they do not make good on their promises.

The BBC is one of the worst offenders.

For example during Israel’s war with Hamas in 2012, the BBC blamed, with little evidence to the contrary, Israel for the tragic death of Omar Misharawi. You remember the photo. He was the little boy who was wrapped in a shroud and held by his weeping father at the hospital in Gaza. It was a terrible scene. It was a huge tragedy.
His father worked for the BBC.

In a piece written by correspondent Jon Donnison, the network pushed a narrative in which Israel invariably was at fault for the boy’s tragic death.

Donnison’s piece acknowledged that some “bloggers” stated that the damage to Misharawi’s house was inconsistent with the destruction caused by Israeli rockets, but to preserve his narrative of Israeli guilt, Donnison wrote “the BBC visited other bombsites this week with very similar fire damage, where Israel acknowledged carrying out what it called “surgical strikes.”

The BBC’s correspondent did everything he could to push the narrative of Israeli wrongdoing and the network let him.

Then the United Nations issued a report stating that Omar Misharawi’s death was likely the result of a Hamas missile that fell short.

The bloggers, in their pajamas, got it right. The BBC got it wrong. The BBC put a small update at the bottom of Donnison’s article telling viewers about the UN report, but the damage has been done. Because of the failure of BCC’s journalistic skepticism, millions of viewers have been given the false impression that the Israelis killed the baby son of a BBC employee.

The image of the father weeping, holding his dead child has become an icon of outrage, a prop to be displayed by Israel-haters everywhere to demonize the Jewish state and Jews who regard Israel as their homeland.

Misinformation irresponsibly broadcast by the BBC has become an ideological stone to be picked up and thrown by Israel-haters at their convenience.

This was not the only time the BBC has behaved in such a manner. In its coverage of the deaths of 13 Palestinians, 11 of them children, near Shifa Hospital in Gaza in July 2014, it presented Hamas’s version of events – that the deaths were caused by Israeli rockets– as a reasonable explanation for these deaths even though the IDF had video of Hamas fired-rockets falling into the area at the time of the explosion.

In a number of reports the BBC portrayed Israeli and Hamas’s explanations for what happened as having equal credibility.

“The BBC would have audiences believe that it cannot possibly tell them which is more reliable, my colleague Hadar Sela reports: the evidence provided by a sophisticated system of radars and trackers which are part of a technologically advanced early warning system, or the unverified word of ‘health officials’ belonging to a terrorist organization which, if it did not fire the specific missiles itself, is collaborating with the terrorist organization that did.”

Under its charter, the BBC is charged with pursuing a number of goals, one of them is to “sustain citizenship and civil society.” The BBC’s website states: “You can trust the BBC to provide high-quality news, current affairs and factual programming that keeps you informed and supports debate about important issues and political developments in an engaging way.”

When it comes to the Jewish homeland, the BBC does not keep this promise.

Apparently, the BBC has concluded that just as long as its stories are engaging and interesting, it is OK to allow its correspondents in Gaza to serve as a propaganda arm for Hamas, an antisemitic totalitarian organization that oppresses its own people and seeks to exercise a veto over Jewish national life in the modern state of Israel. And to pursue this agenda it demonizes Jews everywhere.

As documented by CAMERA’s affiliate, UK Media Watch, BBC helps broadcast Hamas’s hotile narrative. And you here today know all too well the consequences of this lethal narrative.

You live in the United States, but you live and study under the shadow of this narrative.

Last week, students at Hunter College blamed the school’s so-called Zionist administration for high tuitions. Students chanted “Zionists out of CUNY!” and “There is only one solution, Intifada revolution.”

A speaker at the rally yelled to the crowd “Our administration is infected with Zionism and this is the sin that we’re fighting against.”

One protester said, Israelis don’t belong in Palestine and should go back to L.A.

These folks don’t Jews in Israel and they don’t them on campus. These folks direct more of their rage at Israel than they do at ISIS. They stage fake Israeli checkpoints but not protest the beheadings. They build fake security barriers to condemn Israel and they hand out mock eviction notices, but where are the mock executions of Christians by ISIS? Where are the mock slave auctions of Yezidi slave victims?

These people are not enemies of ISIS.

And that is the problem.

If you are not an enemy of ISIS, you are no friend of human rights.

You are no friend of freedom.

You are no friend of Israel.

You are no friend of America and you are no friend of the West.

But the sad fact is that college administrators have allowed anti-Israel activists to menace and abuse their fellow students who support Israel on a regular basis for well over a decade.

Jews have been threatened, assaulted and harassed on college campuses in the U.S. because their homeland has been demonized as a monstrous nation by its enemies. And sadly enough, news outlets such as the BBC have all too often cooperated with the demonization.

But the last thing the people who came here today will do is adopt the pose of fragile snowflakes who will cave into this bullying. You are no self-pitying snowflakes.

You are enemies of ISIS.

You’re men and women who came to stand up to the lethal narrative directed at Israel and the Jewish people.
Whether you are a Jew or not, you came here to send a message to the British government. The message is you are onto BBC’s ugly tendency to slant its coverage in favor of those who seek Israel’s destruction and against those who call it their homeland.

It’s time for the people who run the BBC to quit with the demonization and start with the honest journalism.

You got a lot of nerve showing up here today so soon after a spectacular jihadist attack. If I were your parents, would have told you to sleep in today, just in case.

But you showed up.

By showing up you declared yourself enemies of ISIS publicly.

You declared yourself to be friends of human rights, an ally of France in her time of trial, proud Zionists and proud Americans.

So may God bless you and keep you.

You are a blessing to your families, to your campuses, to you fellow students and your fellow Americans.
May God make his face to shine upon you and sharpen your minds and strengthen your hearts for the challenges that will surely present themselves in the days and years ahead.

Forward!

March!