BBC - Accomplice to terrorism

Dear Friend, 2005 May 29

I take the opportunity today to present you an unprecedented and once un-thinkable document. This is not one more of the usual and mostly ignored complaints of the public against BBC's politicized reporting or pro-terrorism bias. You are invited to read here the first findings of a semi-legal inquiry:

Do or do not the bias and other malpractices of the BBC News and political commentaries constitute complicity with terror?

We ask you to read our article pasted below with critical eyes and if you agree to some extent with the content, to distribute it as widely as possible. Our purpose is that the BBC's suspected malpractices be fully and thoroughly investigated and, if justified, proper corrective actions be made.

In January this year after a terror attack in Tel-Aviv killed five young Israelis and wounded 49 waiting to enter a disco bar, the BBC dedicated its report; "Family in Mourning" and paid its condolences to the family of ... no, not of one of the victims but of the Palestinian killer. Following this further heavily unfair treatment of Israel by the BBC with regard to impartiality and justice, a friend asked: "Is there any point in the usual barrage of complaints?" This question indicated the degree of hopelessness felt in Israel about BBC News and its political commentaries. Even the most factual and fully documented complaints against their bias and other irregularities, like those by the prestigious BBCWatch led by a London solicitor, had never been formally accepted by the BBC and had never achieved more than minimal and temporary improvements at best.

This led us to proceed on this occasion with this long overdue inquiry. By mid-April we had completed the first stage of the study on the question, whether the above and many similar BBC malpractices favouring the perpetrators of terror and the killers of civilians are not actually cases of complicity with those crimes?

My article: "BBC - an Accomplice?" attached (and the Executive Summary of the full study) describes the procedure and the conclusions of a semi-legal inquiry based on British law, into the suspicion of BBC's complicity with terrorism. Every statement and example in the article is fully backed by facts, data and reliable sources, on the spot or in the full study.

Before distributing and publishing our findings, I wrote to the new Chairman of the BBC Board of Governors, Mr Michael Grade CBE, included our Executive Summary, and offered co-operation in continuing the inquiry together. I promised that we, Take-A-Pen, step back from any publication until the inquiry is completed.

Two days ago, on the 27th May I received the reply of Chairman Michael Grade, and a copy of his recent lecture: "The Future of Impartiality". These convinced me about Mr Grade's sincere personal wish to reach impartiality in the BBC. However, there was no response in his letter neither to the suspicion of complicity nor to Take-A-Pen's offer to co-operate, and therefore our self-imposed silence is over and we are commencing this important campaign here and now.

The mission of this campaign is to correct the current unbalanced ways of the world media's trendsetter, the BBC. Let the BBC be the positively impartial British (not: "Biased", not: "Bent") Broadcasting Corporation, again.

We, hopefully with your active help, dear Reader, will pursue the objective that this inquiry into the BBC News and political commentaries malpractices be brought to conclusions and to implementation.

What are our chances in front of the giant BBC? We do believe that after the Hutton report, which found the BBC News and its political commentaries guilty of prejudiced and politicized reporting on the Iraq war and led to the immediate resignation of the BBC's Chairman and Vice Chair, we do have an opportunity, maybe co-operating with the BBC's new management; to find the truth about BBC reporting on Israel, to bring the BBC News to justice and to ensure that the corrective actions required are implemented.

Let's achieve this together. Please distribute this letter and the attached article as widely as you can. You can use, quote and distribute this article and report, with appropriate acknowledgment to Take-A-Pen and the writer, in any way you wish.

The report is enclosed below, and may also be found on our website at

http://www.take-a-pen.org/english/Articles/Art30052005.htm

Yours,

Endre Mozes

Chairman, Take-A-Pen for Israel, Multilingual

chairman@take-a-pen.org