LEBANON VS. THE BBC

by Sarah Meyer
23rd July 2006
INDEX RESEARCH

For more photographic evidence of Israeli war crimes in Lebanon, click here.

On 22 July, I joined two friends for the peaceful London demonstration for "END ISRAEL'S BARBARISM NOW," organised by Stop the War.

The BBC said: "Police estimated that 7,000 people took part in the London rally but organisers said more than 20,000 people had attended the march from Whitehall to Hyde Park." Both estimates are wrong.

The UK police consistently underestimate crowd size if a demonstration is against UK government policy. The BBC's quote of the organisers is wrong. Stop the War said 30,000 were present. Some said more.

The demonstration story is, in any case, buried underneath the headlined story: Rally offers support to Israelis. “A rally is being held to show solidarity with people in areas of northern Israel caught up in the crisis in the Middle East.”

The BBC thus makes its support of UK (US / Israeli) Government policy, in which the bombing of Lebanon is accepted, abundantly clear. This is a disgrace. UK citizens should not have to pay exorbitant license fees to a biased organization. This bias has been evident since the beginning of the Iraq war. Everyone concerned should refuse to pay this fee.

Mainstream Media ‘transparency’ is not evident in the disparate numbers of people killed, either. In the Gaza offensive following the missing Israeli soldier, which began on 5 July, at least 106 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have now been killed. And on 22 July, the AP wire said: At Least 372 Dead in Lebanon, 34 in Israel. Meanwhile, the US sends more bombs to Israel. These bombs appear to wreak the same human horrors as the phosphorus bombs used in Fallujah, Iraq. But As Safir Newspaper has asked: Do you know what kind of weapons causes this damage?

Protocol I, Article 85, Section 3 of the Geneva Convention: "An indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population or civilian objects and resulting in excessive loss of life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions."

The time has come for a war crimes tribunal on the US government and its ‘War on Terror’. Lebanon is yet another step in America’s ‘March Against Freedom and Democracy’ for the benefit of US corporate control of resources and vast profits from the arms trade and its subcontractors.


The url to Lebanon vs. The BBC Is: http://indexresearch.blogspot.com/2006/07/lebanon-vs-bbc.html

Sarah Meyer is a researcher living in Sussex, UK.
Email: sarahmeyer@fastnet.co.uk

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.