Mick Hartley

The BBC’s Lucy Williamson has a history with this kind of reporting. Back in December 2023, as I noted at the time, she reported on the violence and abuse that Palestinians supposedly suffer at the hands of the wicked Israelis in their jails. A poor lad, eighteen-year-old Mohammed Nazzal, was interviewed and photographed surrounded by his loving family, with his hands bandaged up after the bones were broken by a vicious beating from the Israeli prison guards. Unfortunately for this story the Israeli Prison Service had a video of Nazzal being released from jail with hands unbandaged, looking fine. Never mind, Lucy is persuaded. How could this lovely family, in their humble but welcoming home “down a winding alley in the village of Qabatiya near Jenin, in the north of the occupied West Bank”, possibly be lying to her?

These BBC reporters have no idea of the hatred, instilled from birth, that these people have for Israel and Jews, and the culture of taqqiya, the doctrine that allows dissimulation and secrecy to protect one’s religious beliefs. In contemporary usage this appears, unsurprisingly, to have mutated into the idea that Muslims have a religious duty to deceive non-Muslims if it “furthers the cause” of Islam. And it works – not least because the BBC, along with virtually all western media, are determined to downplay or ignore entirely the all-important Islamic element in the conflict.