The BBC’s credulous reporting of Hezbollah has become almost comical - The Jewish Chronicle

I know there’s nothing amusing about the BBC’s determination to portray Israel as some sort of Fourth Reich. But sometimes its reporting is so grotesquely, obviously and clearly off kilter that it becomes almost comical.

Take its coverage of the IDF’s recent revelation of how Hezbollah is hiding at least half a billion of dollars in cash and gold in a “money bunker” under the Al-Sahel Hospital in Dahiyeh, Hezbollah’s Beirut stronghold. According to the IDF, Iran sends “suitcases of cash and gold in planes to the Iranian embassy in Beirut”, the money coming from oil sold in Syria – hardly a surprise, given that Hezbollah is Iranian-funded.

Now if you were one of the hospital’s bosses, you would doubtless be slightly discombobulated by the world knowing that your hospital was perched above Hezbollah’s piggy bank. Not put out by the fact of Hezbollah using the hospital for cover, of course – your hospital is, after all, bang in the middle of prime Hezbollah real estate - but by everyone now knowing about the once-secret bunker. And you’d doubtless be worried that bad things might follow.

So you would try to come up with a cunning plan to show – innocent face – that the story is all wrong. You’re just a normal hospital doing normal hospitaly things. How could anyone doubt that? A Hezbollah bunker? How very dare you!

So yesterday the hospital implemented that very cunning plan, inviting the media to visit the hospital and take a gander to see that all that’s going on is medical care.

At this stage I might point out that the hospital director, Fadi Alameh, is also – what a coincidence! - a Lebanese MP for the Shia Amal party, which is a Hezbollah ally. And he was adamant – adamant, don’t you know – that the hospital had nothing to do with Hezbollah and there is no underground bunker. Its underground floors are just wards and operating theatres. How could anyone doubt his word?

The cunning plan would only work, of course, if the credulous media – the same media that takes everything that Hamas and Hezbollah say as gospel - could be persuaded only to look in the parts of the hospital that were, yes, a hospital. And not to look at the bit which was, er, a money pit.

But getting the credulous media to be credulous is about as difficult as getting me to eat more matzah balls than I should. And so yesterday we were treated to various journalists broadcasting reports of them wandering around the hospital pointing out that they could see no evidence of any money bunker, just a hospital being a hospital. Lebanese TV reporters were seen looking under sheets and beds and in opened drawers for money. Others were filmed looking inside morgue drawers, which had been left open for journalists to view.

And the BBC’s Orla Guerin – of course it was Orla – reported to the camera that, “Hospital staff are adamant that there is no hidden bunker”, as she looked around a room with medical waste, and boxes of equipment and surgical scrubs.

Just one problem. Orla and co were in the wrong place. Of course all they saw was the hospital being a hospital, because they were in the bit that is A HOSPITAL.

The IDF had published specific and focused access points to the bunker, with clear directions. At no point were the journalists taken there – and at no point did the journalists (or to give them their full description, credulous journalists) go to these access points. And guess what they would have found had they gone there? Armed Hezbollah guards blocking access. Doh.

You can – and probably should – be enraged by this truly shocking failure of basic journalism. You can be angry at yet another example of the BBC taking the word of a terrorist organisation above the verifiable statements of one of our closest democratic allies. Or, as I have chosen, you can consider it as merely the latest example of all this, and decide that it’s best to see the full comic potential of a group of seasoned hacks being led round a hospital atop a terrorist money pit without noticing they weren’t in the right place.

All it needs to be this year’s Christmas panto is someone to shout ‘Behind you!’.

Topics:

Hezbollah

IDF