BBC misreports John Kerry on talks failure

BBC misreports John Kerry on talks failure

  EDITOR

By Nureddin SabirEditor, Redress Information & Analysis

For once, US Secretary of State John Kerry was not mincing his words when he blamed Israel for the breakdown of talks with the Palestinians.

But you would not have known this if you were following the story from the BBC News website.

What Kerry actually said

Here is how Philip Weiss, founder and co-editor of the news website Mondoweisscharacterized Kerry’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 7 April:

John Kerry, Secretary of State, blamed the Israelis for the breakdown of peace talks during a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday. Israel failed to release prisoners on time according to a deal it had with Palestinians, then announced 700 settlement units – “poof!”– causing the latest breakdown in the talks…

And this is what Kerry actually said:

In my judgment both leaders have made courageous and important decisions up until now. For Prime Minister Netanyahu to release prisoners is a painful, difficult political step to take, enormously hard, and the people of Israel have been incredibly supportive and patient in giving him the space in order to do that. In exchange for the deal being kept of the release of prisoners and not going to the U.N. Unfortunately, the prisoners weren’t released on the Saturday they were supposed to be released. And so day went by, day two went by day three went by and then in the afternoon when they were about to maybe get there, 700 settlement units were announced in Jerusalem. And poof! That was sort of the moment.

Weiss called it possibly a historic moment.

As Juan Cole, Professor of History at Michigan University, stresses:

Kerry attributed the breakdown to two separate Israeli moves. One was to decline to release the remaining 25 or so Palestinian prisoners jailed before 1993, whose release had been agreed to in the Oslo Peace Accords (a pledge on which Israel reneged, as it did on the whole Oslo process), and which Israel had undertaken to free last August. The second was the announcement of 700 new squatter homes in Palestinian East Jerusalem by fanatical Israeli expansionist Housing Minister Uri Ariel.

Even the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said it was disappointed over Kerry’s remarks, which implicitly means they saw it as apportioning the blame for the talks’ collapse on Israel.

How the BBC reported Kerry to absolve Israel

However, the BBC News website chose to fudge the truth by making it seem that Kerry had blamed not Israel but both Israel and the Palestinians in equal measure.

According to the BBC, Kerry “blamed both sides for taking ‘unhelpful’ steps”.

But search Kerry’s full statement and you will not find the word “unhelpful” anywhere. The only person who mentioned the word “unhelpful” was State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, as reported by the Israeli news website Ynet.

So, either the person who wrote the BBC report is sloppy or incompetent, or there is something more sinister at work.

Although sloppiness and incompetence are no strangers to the BBC, there is reasonable ground to suspect that there is something more sinister.

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http://www.redressonline.com/2014/04/bbc-misreports-john-kerry-on-talks-failure/