Friday 26 August 2011

Playing Palestinian statehood football -- doesn't the BBC know the offside rule?

Letter to Aunty Beebs:

Your BBC World Service story on the Palestinian football team was a piece of propaganda.

One interviewee:  Palestinian murders at the Munich Olympics were just the way they had to do it then, to gain attention.

Another interviewee: There was hope of a Palestinian state back in 2000 when it was an "enticement" from Israel [Note not a good faith offer in the negotiations, but an "enticement" with it's connotation of suspicion], but that "didn't quite happen" because of the intifada. Like the intifada just happened, an act of God, or whatever. In fact what happened was that the Israelis offered everything (well, 97+%) of what the a Palestinians wanted. In response: not acceptance of the offer, or even a counter-offer, but Yasser Arafat's Al-Aqsa intifada, murderous and without warning.

What the Palestinians - or at least their leadership - want is not two states living side by side in peace. They want one State, achieved by the destruction and ethnic cleansing (aka murder) of Jews on that land.  That is what they say; and their actions are consistent with that aim.

If your interviewers and their interlocutors would at least admit that - that "peace" on Palestinian terms means the destruction of Israel - then at least their views, horrid as they are, would have the virtue of honesty. As they are, they are merely duplicitous, and horridly so.

Peter F
Hong Kong