BBC is sorry it filmed attack

The Ramallah lynching in 2000.

Israeli soldiers and a few of their internal organs were thrown out the window to the cheering crowd below.

The media and enduring narrative -Caroline Glick

Last Wednesday's terror attack in Jerusalem was unique. Due to the fact that Husam Taysir Dwayat bulldozed his victims outside of Jerusalem Capitol Studios where many of the foreign television networks have their offices, his was one of only two attacks to have been caught live on camera.

The only other attack which was filmed was the lynching of IDF reservists Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Novesche at a Palestinian police station in Ramallah on October 12, 2000 [pictured above]. That attack, which showed the mob basking in the blood of the two men, was filmed by an Italian camerawoman. The attack last Wednesday was filmed by the BBC whose correspondent Tim Franks witnessed the carnage from the outset through his office window.

Their film documentation is not the only things those two attacks share. The lynch[ings] in Ramallah and the attack last Wednesday are also the only attacks that elicited abject apologies by otherwise arrogant media giants. In the aftermath of the lynch[ings], Riccardo Cristiano, Italy's state-owned RAI network's correspondent in Israel, wrote a groveling apology to the Palestinian Authority in which he went to painstaking lengths to explain that it was not his network, but his competitor that published the footage.

On Friday, the BBC published an apology for broadcasting the footage of Wednesday's carnage. What did the BBC have to apologize for?

In this case, as in the case of the lynching eight years ago, the reason the BBC apologized is not because the film's images were too gruesome, but because it strayed from the accepted narratives of the Palestinian war against Israel.

The film showed an unarmed, furloughed IDF commando climb onto Dwayat's bulldozer just after Dwayat murdered Batsheva Ungerman by crushing her car. It showed the soldier grabbing a gun belonging to a security guard who was unsuccessfully trying to restrain Dwayat and shooting Dwayat three times in the head. The film did not show Dwayat or any of his victims dying. What it showed was the terror of the wounded, Dwayat's murderousness and the soldier's heroism.

[W]hat all of this illustrates is that the media will only give us the information they wish us to have. And that information's relationship to the truth is arbitrary at best.
[Jerusalem Post]