Muslim Pakistani security forces killed 38 Muslim Islamist militants in two separate operations near the Pakistan/Afghanistan border over the weekend.
The announcement elicited a collective yawn from the international media, but with not a word by the BBC.
Muslim suicide bombers in Baghdad killed 32 Muslim Iraqis outside three embassies, including the Iranian mission. Iran is run by a Shia Islamist regime which is at odds with most of the world’s Sunni Muslim nations. All the indications are that the embassy bombings were a response to the slaughter two days earlier of 24 Sunni Muslims in a village just south of Baghdad.
Australia’s ABC published a Reuters-sourced report on the killings. The London-based BBC still has not carried the story.
A few days previously, however, the BBC like the rest of the international media ran a major article on how Israel allegedly killed a 15 year old Palestinian Arab boy in the Gaza Strip, Muhammad al-Faramawi, quoting at length graphic and detailed reports by the Palestinian media and various Palestinian government officials explaining how the boy had been left to bleed to death.
Problem: after a few days in Egyptian (read it again – Egyptian) custody for illegal infiltration into that country, the boy was returned safe and sound and totally unharmed to his mother in the Gaza Strip.
The BBC now cursorily acknowledges that the boy has returned home, but has not apologized for its scurrilous claims of Israeli involvement in his “death”.
Multiply that by equally bigoted reports in the rest of the European media, and what emerges is a determined, well-funded campaign to slander, libel, delegitimise and dehumanise the Jewish state. Any story, however tenuous and unsubstantiated, that can be used to bludgeon Israel is fit for print. But stories about Muslim and/or Islamist atrocities seldom make it into the public domain. Not for nothing is the BBC often referred to as the VOICE – the Voice of Islamism in Christian Europe.
Journalist Julie Burchill, writing in the Jerusalem Post, puts it very neatly in her article “Britain’s Arab Apologists”.
Europe is witnessing the sort of selective media silence and selective media raucousness that historically has always preceded political catastrophe.
These are worrying signals indeed.