Switching on BBC News 24 just before going to bed last night, I had the disagreeable experience of being subjected to the poisonous ignorance and prejudice of Lauren Booth who was reviewing this morning's papers. Looking at the pictures of the handshake between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, she complained that while the stories said that Abbas had promised an end to Palestinian violence, there was no equivalent mention of any end to 'Israeli violence' -- only Sharon's promise of an end to 'military activity'.

This of course revealed her gross failure to grasp the fundamental moral difference between Palestinian and Israeli 'violence' -- that Palestinian violence is aggressive terror with the aim of murdering the innocent, while Israeli violence is the military defence of the country's citizens against such murderous terrorism.

Booth then went on to make clear that she indeed reverses the roles of terrorist and victim by saying that any cessation of violence by Hamas would depend on an end to 'Israeli incursions'.. and if a Palestinian child is killed next week then Hamas will respond.' But of course, as anyone whose mind has not been warped by propaganda knows, Israeli incursions are solely carried out in response to terrorism by Hamas and other Palestinian death squads, in order to prevent further atrocities from taking place. And of course, Hamas is pledged to the destruction of Israel altogether, a fact predictably absent from the discussion.

The air-head News 24 presenter did not, of course, challenge any of this rubbish from Booth, but merely smirked and nodded along in agreement. No doubt the programme's editors, and the BBC panjandrums who supervise those editors, couldn't see anything wrong in it either. It would doubtless be considered a perfectly legitimate opinion to be aired. They would not dream of airing certain other 'opinions' in the same way -- those of the BNP, for example -- without the most rigorous and aggressive challenge. But this kind of thing goes unchallenged because, basically, the BBC collectively and corporately is simply incapable of recognising the lies and libels about Israel for what they are. Thus poisonous untruths become cemented ever more securely as unchallengeable fact, and the BBC continues to do its historic bit in giving (unwitting) succour to the cause of evil in the world.