THE HAMAS POGROM AND THE NADIR OF JOURNALISM:
I’ve seen some mad media corrections in my time, but the one from the BBC this week was on an entirely new level. It wasn’t a correction as such, it was an ‘update’. ‘This post replaces an earlier story which has been updated’, said a tweet from BBC News. It concerned the story of Yocheved Lifschitz, the 85-year-old Israeli woman who was seized by Hamas during its genocidal pogrom in southern Israel on 7 October. Mrs Lifschitz was released on Monday evening. ‘Released Israeli hostage shakes her captor’s hand’, gushed the BBC, encouraging us to think this elderly lady must have got on pretty well with her Hamas keepers. Then came the new post, the updated one, the correction, the truth. ‘I went through hell, says 85-year-old hostage released by Hamas’, it said.
That is some turnaround. From a handshake to ‘hell’, in two tweets. From fawning over a kidnap victim and her kidnapper briefly shaking hands to admitting that the kidnap victim actually had a horrific time. It seems the BBC, belatedly, caught up on some of the things Mrs Lifschitz said after she was released. It was ‘hell’, she said from her wheelchair in a hospital in Tel Aviv. ‘They stormed into our homes. They beat people’, she said, seeming ‘overwhelmed’. She herself was thrown on to a motorbike by the terrorists: ‘My head was on one side and the rest of my body was on the other side.’ Her watch and jewellery were stolen. And she was battered with sticks. With Herculean grace she said: ‘They didn’t break my ribs but it was painful and I had difficulty breathing.’
Why would any journalist worth his or her salt focus on a touching of hands rather than the near breaking of ribs? On the briefly humane ending of a racist and unjust false imprisonment rather than on the inhumanity of the imprisonment itself? You could say ‘Shame on the BBC’ virtually every week. (This week, for example, it was revealed that the Beeb’s channel for kids, CBBC, asked an academic who’s just published a book on the ‘psychosis of whiteness’ to explain ‘white privilege’ to its young viewers.) But the BBC’s switch on the Lifschitz story is an entirely different order of shame. Here we have an elderly Jew who was violently kidnapped by an anti-Semitic movement, and what does our public broadcaster initially say? That there was a nice moment between her and her tormentors. It focused not on the vile humiliation of Mrs Lifschitz, but on the fleeting instant in which she reached out to one of the anti-Semitic monsters who conspired in her violation and persecution.
The Grauniad looks at the BBC and says, hold my lager:
