The Asserson Report, the BBC, and the real problem with global media

Picking up on comments I often hear about Israel’s behavior in Gaza, there’s a misunderstanding even some pro-Israel people seem to have when they talk about Hamas as ‘terrorists hiding in homes, refugee camps, schools and hospitals’.

This means people imagine Hamas a bit like the Basque Separatists or the IRA, small groups of gunman, who when attacked go and hole up in these places. It mistakenly leads quite a few well-intentioned people to think, ‘why does Israel need to go blow up these places with air raids and risk killing civilians? Why not just surround the building and negotiate with them quietly to come out?’

We know here in Israel, Hamas is an altogether different animal. Hamas is 50,000 heavily armed men with advanced heavy weapons supplied by Iran. It has intentionally purpose-built the entirety of its infrastructure – its tunnels, its armories, its weapons manufacturing factories, its rocket launch sites, its command and control centers, its data rooms and more – into the civilian infrastructure.

What it means is that, if Israel at any time and in any way wants to seriously defend itself from Hamas, it cannot avoid the civilian infrastructure.

What it can do – and does better than any army in history according to many respected US and British experts (see John Spencer, Andrew Fox, etc) – is to mitigate the civilian casualties when it has to attack Hamas: the evacuation efforts, the advance notice, the millions of leaflets/SMS/calls, etc.

US national security spokesman John Kirby has many times publicly recognized Israel does much more than the US in this regard.

Only yesterday, UK General Sir John McColl, former deputy supreme commander of NATO, stated in The Times (UK), Israel’s rules of military engagement for protecting civilians are at least as robust as the UK’s.

This information about what Hamas is and how it is set up is nothing new. It has been exhaustively documented for years, and not only by Israel, although Israel dutifully releases relevant evidence regularly on its website and in its press conferences.

Former British Army officer, Andrew Fox’s recent Spectator article about Hamas was treated like a revelation, but it was old news for those who have been following Israel-Hamas rounds of conflict in Gaza since the late 2000s over the last 15+ years.

The problem with the BBC and other global media is not that they report on the civilian tragedy in Gaza, nor even that they dedicate more coverage to Palestinian victims than to Israeli victims, nor even that they obviously sympathize with the Palestinian cause.

The truth is, what has happened in Gaza is a huge tragedy. I sympathize with innocent Palestinians caught up in this, and I do not accept that they should have to suffer or die.

The problem with the BBC and other global media is with the way they explain this tragedy, the way they explain (or insinuate) why this destruction has happened.

You could say, in a very minimalist way, that the BBC and global media could be seen to be impartial if they would discuss equally the two competing narratives – ‘blame Israel’, ‘blame Hamas’.

But they have failed consistently to meet even this minimalist level – we almost never hear (perhaps we have never heard) on the BBC or its peers any basic exposition of the ‘blame Hamas’ narrative, as Andrew Fox articulately summarized it in the Spectator.

That is the scandal.