Alright, I'll admit the naivity implicit in my question, as I'll admit to a weakness for wanting to believe that people who share as much of my culture as do the journalists who fill the BBC, are somehow 'with me' and not against me.
Just whose side do they think they're on?
But still, reading this article on the BBC website, with its introduction as follows, I couldn't help silently screaming the line which I used to start this post:
'I knew he was a collaborator, and he knew, I knew he was a collaborator, but the 50-year-old sheikh still danced around the issue.'
Yes. And the 'collaborator' in question was an Arab man who had helped the Israelis.
So, if the BBC journo, Butcher, knows the man as 'a collaborator', presumably he also knows who he thinks the enemy are. Implicitly, he reinforces the intifada, he objectifies Israel as a combatant in a war, and he endorses the demonisation which, as Melanie Phillips notes, gives rise to viciousness which even then the BBC chooses to romanticise.
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