DURING a supervision session early in my PhD studies at Portsmouth (UK), my doctoral guide, Dr Bronwen Price, advised me to listen to BBC Radio 4.
She did so mainly because of the educational nature of its programmes. Since then, for nearly two decades, I have been listening to BBC Radio 4 and found its various episodes quite useful.
As a student of literature, I am especially fond of its programmes on literature, culture and the arts.
However, when it comes to reporting events involving the Palestinian issue and the suffering of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis, the BBC's bias against the Palestinians is often a deviation from its usual journalistic standards.
This has manifested in the way the British news agency has been covering the recent Israeli air strikes and civilian deaths in Gaza that began on May 10, 2021.
On May 13, I was shocked to read on the BBC website a news headline titled "Israel-Gaza: Rockets hit Israel after militants killed."
In every big flare-up of hostility between Israel and the Palestinians, the disproportionately powerful Jewish state kills Palestinian men, women and children indiscriminately.
To describe all of them as 'militants' is nothing short of media cruelty and a distorted coverage of an entire people. I stopped listening to the BBC for a few days.
Then on May 17, I brought myself to listen to BBC Radio 4's Today programme. I was disconcerted to hear the news presenters repeatedly uttering the phrase "conflict between Israel and Palestinian militants."
Again a blatant caricature of an entire human community as well as a ploy to normalise Israel's continued occupation of Palestinian lands and dispossession of and siege against the Palestinian people.
This reminds me of a discussion I attended in Kuala Lumpur years ago where the main speaker was the British journalist Lauren Booth, half-sister of Tony Blair's wife Cherie Blair.
Someone in the audience asked her a question about BBC coverage, especially in the case of Israel and Palestine. In reply, she said: "Oh, the BBC is a joke." All in the audience laughed.
Booth talked about the importance of alternative communication channels and the diminishing dominance of the pro-establishment media. Through social networking sites and other communication affordances, most people are nowadays well-informed about what is happening in the land of Palestine.
Hence, the BBC's and some other news agencies' attempts at distortion appear laughable. It is also an affront to those honest journalists who work for them but cannot report what they personally see, know and experience.
Despite my personal use of the BBC for educational purposes, the news corporation is definitely a joke if one considers some of its coverage of the Palestinian issue. Conscientious people around the world feel bewildered when the rhetoric of self-defense is employed to justify Israel's acts of aggression on the Palestinians.
Yes, it is true that the desperate Palestinians fire rockets into Israel, and the disruption and death they cause to Israeli society are regrettable.
However, it is worth understanding the context of the rockets fired from Palestine. In the chapter titled "Gaza Under Assault" in his book Because We Say So (2015), the noted American academic Noam Chomsky quotes an "old man in Gaza" who held a placard that read:
"You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my father, kill my mother, bombard my country, starve us all, humiliate us all, but I am to blame: I shot a rocket back."
This statement tells us a lot about the context of the Palestinian rockets fired into Israel.
By the way, media antics to cover up Israel's severe human rights abuses amounting to war crimes are comparable to one GOP lawmaker's depiction of the armed insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 as a "normal tourist visit."
Lies, propaganda and media distortions bite. They bite the Palestinians too.
The writer is with the Department of English Language and Literature at International Islamic University Malaysia
