Poster from the British Distaster Emergency Coalition (DEC).
It would appear that there is a conflict brewing over Gaza, in Britain, concerning efforts to publish the most basic of humanitarian calls for help: charity appeals for the Palestinians just decimated by Israel’s duck shoot in Gaza. There is no need to speak about the already dead. It is the living Gazans who survived the onslaught whose lives are in question, and many British charities such as the Red Cross and Oxfam are in need of immediate support and funding.
The BBC, however, refused to publish these charity appeals because, as the BBC contends, its impartiality would be jeopardized. Unless most of us are in a state of ignorance about what just happened in Gaza, 1300 dead including nearly 400 children, the 4,500 wounded and maimed, some of whom will still die, and the vast destruction, this charity appeal is apparently viewed by the BBC as one-sided or perhaps a prejudiced venture.
The two thousand protesters in London who marched to the BBC headquarters didn’t think so.
MediaLens filed this report:
The BBC – Impartial or Immoral?
Despite (the) carnage, despite the fact that 89% of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents have received no humanitarian aid since Israel began its assault, the Guardian notes that the BBC has refused to broadcast a national humanitarian appeal for Gaza, “leaving aid agencies with a potential shortfall of millions of pounds in donations.” (Jenny Percival, ‘Broadcasters refuse to air Gaza charity appeal,’ The Guardian, January 23, 2008;
The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella organisation for 13 aid charities, launched its Gaza appeal yesterday saying the devastation was “so huge that British aid agencies were compelled to act”.By refusing to give free airtime to the appeal, the BBC made a rare decision to breach an agreement dating back to 1963. Other broadcasters then also rejected it. The DEC’s chief executive, Brendan Gormley, said:
“We are used to our appeal getting into every household and offering a safe and necessary way for people to respond. This time we will have to work a lot harder because we won’t have the free airtime or the powerful impact of appearing on every TV and radio station.”
A BBC website article defending the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal, asserted:
“The BBC decision was made because of question marks about the delivery of aid in a volatile situation and also to avoid any risk of compromising public confidence in the BBC’s impartiality in the context of an ongoing news story.”
Gormley rejected the BBC’s claim that there were question marks about the delivery of aid, saying 100 lorries a day were entering Gaza. He also challenged the alleged problem with “impartiality”:
“We are totally apolitical and are driven by the principles of the Geneva conventions in terms of impartiality and neutrality. This appeal is a response to those humanitarian principles. The BBC seems to be confusing impartiality with equal airtime.”
ITV said: “The DEC asked all broadcasters if they could support the appeal. We (the broadcasters) assessed the DEC’s requirements carefully against the agreed criteria and we were unable to reach the consensus necessary for an appeal.”
Sky said: “We were considering this request internally when the DEC contacted us to let us know that the BBC had decided not to broadcast the appeal at this time. As, by convention, if all broadcasters do not carry the appeal then none do, the decision was effectively made for us.” (Ibid.)
This immoral and callous decision by the BBC in response to the suffering of the people of Gaza should not go unchallenged.
ABC posted this story on Sun Jan 25, 2009 with this headline:
BBC under fire over refusal to show Gaza charity appeal.
….Its decision has provoked fierce criticism from Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Government and Muslim groups, while thousands of demonstrators gathered Saturday to protest against the move.
“I think the British public can distinguish between support for humanitarian aid and perceived partiality in a conflict,” he told BBC radio Saturday. “I really struggle to see, in the face of the immense human suffering in Gaza at the moment, that this is in any way a credible argument.”
Then this report today,
MPs Back Motion For Gaza Appeal
More than 50 MPs are backing a parliamentary motion urging the BBC to air an aid appeal for thousands of people without food and medicine in Gaza.
(snip)
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is the latest figure to add his voice to the string of politicians, including senior government ministers, urging the corporation to change its mind.
He said he fully backed the Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu – who said: “This is not a row about impartiality but rather about humanity.
The people responded,
Protests at BBC’s Gaza charity appeal snub mounting
In London yesterday, hundreds of people gathered for a rally outside British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) offices, later swelling to thousands in a march through central London to protest the BBC’s wrong-headed refusal to broadcast a charity appeal to raise emergency funds for people in Gaza.
The crowd was addressed by speakers including Tony Benn, a former Labour cabinet minister, MP George Galloway, Salma Yaqoob, Jeremy Corbyn and Dave Crouch (Media Workers against War).
The Stop The War Coalition, which organised the march, estimates that the ban on broadcasting the appeal could cost up to $14 million in donations.
The BBC, like the US Public Broadcasting System (PBS), is a publicly owned network. So where is PBS in this appeal. Don’t ask. The British appear to have taken the lead in human rights activism from us.
Updates may follow.
UPDATE:
Gaza protestors invade BBC Scotland offices over refusal to broadcast aid appeal
Jan 26 2009
PROTESTERS invaded BBC Scotland’s HQ last night to condemn bosses for refusing to show an emergency appeal for Gaza.About 25 Stop the War Coalition campaigners marched into the lobby at Pacific Quay in Glasgow and refused to leave.The crowd swelled to about 60 within a couple of hours. About 15 police arrived to keep order but there were no arrests.
The BBC claim airing the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal for Gaza would threaten their impartiality. ITV, Channel 4 and Five have all agreed to screen it.The protesters demanded that the BBC executive responsible for the decision be sacked.
A Rothschild is on the board.
Marcus Ambrose Paul Agius (born 22 July 1946) is a British financier and businessman, currently the Chairman of Barclays. He has also been appointed the senior non-executive director on the BBC’s new executive board.
He was educated at St George’s College, Weybridge, and gained an MA at Trinity Hall, Cambridge in Mechanical Sciences and Economics. In addition, he has an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Agius has been a non-executive Director of Barclays since 1 September 2006, and succeeded Matthew Barrett as Chairman from 1 January 2007. He was previously chairman of the London branch of investment bank Lazard and non-executive chairman of BAA Limited.
Born into a Jewish family, Agius is married to Katherine (born 1949), daughter of Edmund de Rothschild of the Rothschild pirate family of England, with two children, and has a close involvement with the Rothschild family estate, Exbury Gardens in Hampshire.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Agius
Six hundred thousand pounds donated before the Appeal broadcasts hit the air waves
BBC is a publicly owned-government funded network.
The ground has shifted
As Uri Avnery observes people like the Rothschilds, Barak, Netanyahu, Olmert, Livni are all on The Wrong Side of History:
This man, Avnery, is 85 years old, and he is still giving us the insider’s view of the reality in Israel and its neighbors in the Palestinian territories. There are others certainly, like Gideon Levy at Haaretz, but his wisdom is unsurpassed.
Why won’t the Israelis listen to him?
Entrenched money interests? War has been big big business:
Study: Conflict has cost Middle East $12 trillion
Zionism has always been a business.
Oh yes – “Arab American” George Mitchell who denies his Middle Eastern heritage.
why do you cite shit like that? an anonymous account in an elevator is taken as fact? you can do better than that. At least point out the dubious sourcing.
Pardon me, but how do you know it is shit?
And sorry, but I have known the source personally for years, and do not find him at all dubious, but quite honest.
By the way, Maronites are not Arabs, and they will be the first ones to tell you that – usually rather adamantly. Most are somewhat to extremely hostile toward Arabs, some of them refuse to speak Arabic, they rarely give their children Arabic names, and the really silly ones insist that they are Phoenicians.
The Maronites, particularly the fascist Phalangists, were allies of Israel and acted as Israeli agents during the various invasions and occupations, and committed a variety of atrocities on behalf of and under the direction of Israel, most notably the Sabra and Shatila massacres. You see, Israeli leaders decided very early on that it would be to their advantage to have Lebanon be a Christian-dominated country, and the Maronites were only too happy to volunteer. The Lebanese Orthodox and “regular” Catholics, who DO generally consider themselves Arabs, were less enthusiastic, and generally sided against the Palangists in the civil war.
I don’t criticize Maronites for insisting they are not Arabs – lots of peoples living in Arab countries are not Arabs, and ethnic and religious diversity only enriches and strengthens society. I have many relatives-by-marriage who are Maronite, some of whom I love dearly and respect and great deal, some of whom I enjoy a lot, and some of whom I can do without. However, to pretend that a Maronite Lebanese-American is an Arab, and that choosing a Maronite as a Middle East envoy somehow balances out the overwhelming American bias against Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular, and in favour of Israel is either ill-informed or downright deceptive.
Uri Avneri, whom I do respect a lot, is mistaken in suggesting that George Mitchell is an Arab-American, or even remotely self-identifies that way. It will be a pleasant surprise if he does not go along with the traditional American blindly pro-Israel position.
What do they consider themselves then, Assyrians, converted Jews…?
They consider themselves Maronites.
I thought that was a religion, not an ethnicity.
They are considered an ethno-linguistic group. Their language, Syriac, is a dialect of Aramaic, a Semitic language. The language died out for the most part in the 1700’s, but is used in their liturgy, and there are a few places where it is still spoken.
I can’t help thinking that Mitchell will again propose the Road Map, because his 2001 report on the Middle East became the basis of it under Bush. Of course, Israel refused to stop the settlement building and never complied with it, and in 2007 when Bush went further regarding two states, he was just completely ignored. Apparently his call for contiguity and sovereignity were too much for the Israelis to handle.
The terrorists would take over, don’t you know.
To be fair, can you see any US media organization including PBS doing this either?
Absolutely not. The NYT might be willing to run an ad, perhaps the LA Times, but that’s it.
If I have to watch Jerry Lewis every year, I’ll watch a Gaza appeal.
But the BBC is lying. Last night I read a entire list of former fund raising efforts that they televised.
Sadly, a message from the Red Cross and Oxfam about hungry and injured children anywhere else in the world could get aired. Only when the children live in Gaza does the ad get rejected as too political.
Well, the BBC can then balance the Gaza appeal with one to help alleviate suffering in Israel.
Yeah, I have heard there is a shortage of Lattes in Tel Aviv cafes – terrible!
Absolutely shameful conduct!