Melanie's baloney: 'BBC is fifth column...'

Melanie Phillips is at it again. One of the most jingoistic journalists in Fleet Street, Mel my belle currently writes for the fish'n chips wrapper The Daily Hate Mail, after a career with The Guardian. Personally I've always felt that those who flip-flop from one side to the other aren't to be trusted: if their political, moral and ethical convictions weren't that steadfast in the first place, why then should I trust the new direction of their spinning compass?

Let me cut to the chase: one of Melanie Phillips' latest piece of drivel is called simply The Hamas Broadcasting Corporation. Now, we're all looking for that catchy one-liner, that semantic game that produces a eye-catching title but this one really takes the biscuit.

So what's the brouhaha? Mel has it on good authority (well, from The Jerusalem Post, not well known for its objectivity or accuracy...) that the BBC has approached someone from Hamas with regards to the abducted BBC journalist Alan Johnston. Here's what Mel makes of it (emphasis is mine):

So now we know why the BBC sounds like the voice of Hamas. It is Hamas. A story in the Jerusalem Post all but throws away the following explosive revelation: [follows an excerpt from the J'Post piece]

Then there's the (according to Mel's overheated imagination) highly suspicious use of the terms 'employ' and 'employees'

Hmnn. Note the uses of the words ‘employ’ and ‘employees’. It may well be that this man is not on the staff of the BBC and is therefore technically not an employee. Indeed, it is most likely that he is a stringer, one of the many freelance journalists that the BBC uses for its reporting from Gaza. But that is a semantic weasel. It makes no difference to the central claim made by the Post’s story, that the supposedly dispassionate BBC is using to supply its supposedly dispassionate reporting from Gaza a Palestinian who is a member of Hamas, a terrorist organisation proscribed by Britain, the US and the EU and which is committed to the destruction of Israel, the murder of Jews everywhere and the Islamist takeover of the world.

So is it true? The BBC must now tell us, immediately, exactly who this Palestinian is and what work he does for it. Otherwise we must assume that the Post’s story is correct. If that is so, it underlines once again that the BBC has become a fifth column in our society that must with the utmost urgency be addressed.

...with the utmost urgency... fifth column... Well, I'm onto it Mel, I'm putting my quill to paper and will be demanding that the BBC clear up this matter... well, with the utmost urgency, of course!

Whilst the BBC cannot find such accusations very pleasant, I can't help but think that Mel's ramblings must have raised a few smiles in the corporation's corridors. Not so long ago an Israeli press spokes-something (Danny Seaman) compared BBC coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict to "the worst Nazi propaganda". And to the loony right, the BBC is a bunch of 'multiculturalists', 'elitists', 'environmentalists', 'Marxists' and worse beside that. As a media outlet, you know you're fairly centrist and pretty close to objectivity when you get sniped at from all sides...