Friday, November 09, 2012

The BBC As Palestinian Propaganda Instrument

If you review this audio/slide show story,  (Audio by Yolande Knell.Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 9 November 2012)

 Olive harvesting in the West Bank

The annual Palestinian olive harvest is an important cultural and economic event. Nearly half the agricultural land in the Palestinian territories is planted with eight million olive trees - and there are about 80,000 farmers, most of whom operate on a small-scale basis.  But many have difficulty accessing their olive groves, because they are located close to Jewish settlements or the barrier that Israel is building in and around the West Bank. Israeli soldiers are deployed in some areas during the harvests to try to prevent clashes with settlers...

You wouldn't know there is another side and that there are other facts and claims.

That: Jewish olive groves are destroyed and damaged.
That: not all the damage is the work of, as per suspicion, Jews.
That: not all the olive groves are owned by the people who claim to own them.
That: olive groves existed in the land, planted by Jews, over 2000 years ago and that some groves are occupied territory by Arabs.

Did you hear:
 
"Try to attack the families"?  

or perhaps Arabs are not acting in accordance with the new regulations that permits the IDF to provide security while also assuring there will be no Arab terror?  That olive groves have been used for cover for ambushes of shooting at Jews on the roads, or the trees used as cover for infiltration?

"Expanding into his village"?  

but no Jewish community actually move into an Arab village.

This would seem to be the narrator, Ms. Vivien Sansour, note: narration, no reporting:



Some of her biography:

Vivien Sansour is a life style writer and photographer. She is capturing the stories of the farmers of the Palestine Fair Trade Association for the wider world. Vivien was Communications Manager/Life and Culture Specialist at The Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) prior to joining Canaan. Vivien is an activist and organizer...Vivien was co-founder and producer/writer for the Los Angeles based non- profit ImaginAction where she organized and led the wildly successful Olive Tree Circus to tour Palestine in 2008. The Olive Tree Circus used humor, play, music and art to help Palestinian farmers access their olive fields during the olive harvest. Vivien is a native of Beit Jala, Palestine where she grew up under Israeli military occupation. She has both a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Theatre Arts, and an M.A. in International Studies with a focus in Anthropology from East Carolina University. She is interested in Agriculture as a form of resistance.

Well, at least that "growing up under Israeli military occupation" didn't affect her ability to get an education and it didn't stultify her artistic talent..

The BBC just rolled over and thought of...Palestine.


This is not reportage or a journalistic effort.  It is propaganda, uncriticised, imbalanced, unchecked. 

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