Role of the Media

Israel intends to launch an unprecendented global propaganda blitz within days in a bid to reverse what it sees as its rapidly diminishing image following 10-months of conflict with the Palestinians.

Last week The Independent’s Robert Fisk accused the BBC of buckling to Israeli pressure to drop the use of ‘assassination’ when referring to Israel’s policy of knocking off alleged ‘terrorists’. Not true, blustered John Simpson, auntie’s world affairs editor in The Sunday Telegraph. The corporation, he insisted, had simply reaffirmed its house rules that only prominent political figures could be assassinated -though he didn’t offer an alternative term for the killing of ordinary folk. He bitterly resented Fisk’s allegation that the Beeb had been got at.

News about reforms in the Palestinian Authority (PA) come from Yasser Arafat’s headquarters, the only remaining section of the bombed out Mukata’a, the sixty-year old British built military compound in Ramallah, which has become an easy target for any Israeli offensive and a symbol for a nation under siege.