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How Can You Trust the Cowardly BBC?
Apr 18, 2009 The BBC Trust's report on Jeremy Bowen's dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest. But I am mincing my words.
Will Obama Say the ‘G’ Word?
Apr 6, 2009 If the issue doesn't trip Obama up on his visit to Turkey, he is going to have to walk into a far worse minefield on April 24 when he has to honor a campaign promise to call the 1915 massacre of 1.5 million Armenian Christians by Ottoman Turkey a "genocide."
If Only the World Had Listened
Mar 29, 2009 Tom Hurndall was one of a bunch of "human shields" who turned up in Baghdad just before the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, the kind of folk we professional reporters make fun of. Tree huggers, that kind of thing. Now I wish I had met him because Hurndall's journals show a remarkable man of remarkable principle.
Human Rights Defenders Have It Tough in the Mideast
Mar 22, 2009 Dr Salim el-Hoss is 80 now but remains a staunch defender of human rights and democracy, an opponent of the death penalty and an outspoken supporter of Palestinians. When I recommended to him a long article on American torture, he read it right through to the end and then put the paper down with a slap on his knee. "Terrible, terrible," he muttered.
Consider the Source
Mar 1, 2009 Now a lot of folk will go along with the line that the Holy Father is so stupid -- so utterly out of touch with Planet Earth -- that he has no idea how disastrously his actions are received. Hmmm. Well, I wonder.
Rules of War Weren’t Made for Only One People
Feb 15, 2009 The organized persecution of a group is despicable whether the victims are the Jews of World War II or today's Gazans.
War Reporters Used to Prefer Morality Over Impartiality
Feb 8, 2009 I wonder -- in an age when the BBC can refuse help to the suffering because of its "impartiality" -- whether we still report war with the same power and passion as the men and women of an earlier generation.
When Did We Stop Caring About Civilian Deaths During Wartime?
Feb 1, 2009 I wonder if we are "normalizing" war. It's not just that Israel has yet again gotten away with the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza.
Time for a War Crimes Tribunal?
Jan 20, 2009 It's a wrap, a doddle, an Israeli cease-fire just in time for Barack Obama to have a squeaky-clean inauguration with all the world looking at the streets of Washington rather than the rubble of Gaza.
Leave World War II Out of Gaza
Jan 17, 2009 I have long raged against any comparisons with the Second World War -- whether of the Arafat-is-Hitler variety once deployed by Menachem Begin or of the anti-war- demonstrators-are- 1930s-appeasers, most recently used by George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara.