By Daphne Anson
Courtesy of the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams, a video report on those uniquely hereditary refugees, the Palestinian Arabs Palestinians, now into the fourth generation of refugee status.
Of course, their fellow-Arabs could have absorbed the “first generation” that left Eretz Israel in 1948-49, but preferred to use these unfortunate people as pawns in their rejectionist struggle against the Zionist Entity.
Paul Adams skims over such essentials, in a report that is essentially context-free.
More polished than Bowen and Donnison, and I dare say more intelligent, he nevertheless descends into propaganda, in contravention of the Corporation’s Charter.
Lack of context is rather a hallmark of Mr Adams’s reportage on Israel and the Palestinian Arabs Palestinians, as Hadar Sela of BBCWatch so ably pointed out here and here
So please bear in mind the following, as I noted in a comment on the first of those BBC Watch posts cited above (emphasis added):
‘Paul’s father was Michael Adams, foundation director of CAABU. Below is an extract from what I wrote about him in one of my blog posts re the BBC-pro-Arab nexus, in which I identified Keith Kyle as the first openly anti-Israel BBC journalist:
Shortly after Israel’s stunning victory [1967], the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) was set up in London in order to coordinate Arab and pro-Arab opinion in the UK…. Funded by Arab governments, CAABU could afford a secretariat, and its director was Michael Adams, who had worked for the BBC early in his career but had later joined the Guardian. It was owing to his articles in that paper that a columnist in the Jewish Chronicle (30 June 1967) observed: “It is with a sinking feeling and eventually turning stomach that one examines the Guardian each morning.” (That writer would certainly vomit daily if he read the Guardian nowadays!)
One of CAABU’s first actions had been to send Adams, while he was still employed by the Guardian, on a funded trip to the Middle East, from whence he sent a series of articles biased against Israel. The Guardian had printed them without explaining that they had been subsidised by Arab money. There was also a despatch from Cairo which talked of the “forcible expulsion across the burning desert of Palestinian Arabs to Gaza”. In fact, those deportees were members of the Palestine Liberation Army and a threat to Israel’s security, as the Guardian grudgingly acknowledged the next day. Adams also used the offensive term “final solution” to describe Israeli policy.
It was shortly after this that Adams became CAABU’s director…
The BBC’s Keith Kyle was not slow to identify openly with CAABU. He was a keynote speaker at one of its first major rallies….
[In 1969] on the BBC’s Panorama, Michael Adams spewed out vitriol about “nation-wide and even world-wide Jewish pressure” – in other words, a certain lobby.
In one of his platform appearances Adams – foreshadowing the avoidance by Al Beeb and the Guardian of the T-word – rhetorically enquired why the British press referred to “Arab terrorists”: ‘I can’t remember calling members of the resistance in Nazi-occupied France “terrorists”‘, he continued. (In 1999 his son, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent Paul Adams, used the prescribed Al Beeb term “Islamic militants” of suicide bombers. It was Paul Adams, when diplomatic correspondent, who in 2007 appeared to admit to BBC bias when he described Alan Johnston’s job as “to bring us day after day reports of the Palestinian predicament in the Gaza Strip”.)’
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