If you think the BBC is already hopelessly biased against Israel, you ain’t seen nothing yet. In its unreported response, published last Monday, to the recent independent inquiry into BBC bias in its Middle East coverage, it announced that it was appointing a ‘West Bank correspondent’. This is apparently in response to the inquiry’s conclusion that

in some respects the account given of the conflict was incomplete and recommended measures to ensure that as full and fair account as possible was provided and the conflict’s complexities properly reflected.

This was the inquiry which found that there was ‘no deliberate or systematic bias’ in the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East but that the coverage was nevertheless unfavourable towards the Palestinians — a view whose demonstrable absurdity is explained by the fact that, rather than apply some intellectual rigour to an analysis of the coverage, the panel relied heavily upon the subjective opinions of others about whether or not the BBC was biased, including some highly tendentious ‘research’ into the BBC’s coverage carried out by people amongst whom a bias against Israel was transparent.

The BBC has also swallowed the extraordinarily skewed view of the Middle East impasse offered by the inquiry, which decided that there was an ‘asymmetry’ in the conflict and that the two sides were not equal — by which it meant that Israel was strong and the Palestinians were weak. But of course the Palestinians happen to be backed by states such as Syria and Iran which are arming them; and Israel’s six million inhabitants remain hopelessly outnumbered by an Arab world of hundreds of millions. Sure, there’s asymmetry all right —it’s just the other way round.

None of this is acknowledged. So now a news organisation which already views the Middle East impasse through a distorting lens of poisonous prejudice against Israel; which routinely decontextualises Israeli defensive military actions by failing to report the scale and ferocity of the Palestinian attacks that provoke it (witness the largely unreported barrage of rockets being fired daily from Gaza at Sderot); which jumps to the worst possible conclusions about Israel’s behaviour while uncritically regurgitating the lies and propaganda of the Palestinians (see the Gaza beach scandal below), is now to have another correspondent (it already has one in Gaza, a fact apparently overlooked by the dozy inquiry panel) based in a closed society where lies are routinely told in a language western journalists don’t understand, and where reporters face threats ranging from a withdrawal of information to violence against themselves if they try to tell the truth.

At the same time, the BBC has rejected the inquiry’s one decent proposal, namely that it should call terrorism by its proper name. The BBC says it doesn’t actually ban the ‘t’ word; but nor does it say when and if it should be used more frequently, for fear of

introducing the very value judgements

that it says its guidelines seeks to avoid. And it adds:

we do caution against its use without attribution.

In other words, the BBC will only broadcast the ‘t’ word in the mouth of someone it is reporting who uses it. It will never use it itself. Thus in Iraq it constantly uses the word ‘insurgent’ — which is actually misleading, since ‘insurgents’ are home-grown and the violence in Iraq is being perpetrated in large measure by foreign jihadis.

Since it virtually never uses the ‘t’ word, the BBC is close to implying that terrorism doesn’t exist at all. It thus cannot distinguish attacks upon innocents for political ends from attempts by such victims to defend themselves against attack. That is a particularly rotten value judgment. Meanwhile, it cannot see the value judgments it is constantly making in its loaded coverage against Israel. Trouble is, the real value judgment the BBC is avoiding is the truth.