Jan 26 2009 George Galloway
THE BBC's admirable reporter Alan Johnston was rescued from his cruel incarceration in Gaza by the Palestinian government led by Hamas.
At the time, the BBC thanked the people of Gaza, and Hamas Prime Minister Ismael Haniya in particular, for breaking the criminal gang of extortionists who had seized their man - at the risk of their own lives to save his.
Now in the winter of their hardships, as 61,000 families shiver in the ruins of their bombed-out houses, in rags and hungry, the same BBC has stabbed them in the back. The achievement of the corporation's management, in uniting the Government, the opposition, the churches, the press, right and left, the anti-war movement, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, on one side and they and the Israel lobby on the other is almost unparalelled in modern public relations.
After a 22-day attack which has left thousands of children dead or orphaned and left the Strip looking like a moonscape, the publicly funded, bloated, arrogant, insensitive bosses who've presided over the Beeb through scandals from Blue Peter to Jonathan Ross have now launched their own airwave strike on the refugees.
And their smokescreen of "impartiality" will prove as deadly to these refugees as any cloud of white phosphorous gas. The BBC, once the proud emblem of Britishness, is now branded around the world, and dangerously the Muslim world, as an arm of Israeli propaganda....
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