Over the years, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and its employees have repeatedly crossed journalistic red lines by exhibiting anti-Israel bias. Now, a senior BBC producer working in Israel has been exposed as sharing blatantly false pro-Palestinian propaganda, the London-based Jewish Chronicle has reported.
Rosie Garthwaite, who is currently working on a new documentary critical of “Israeli actions” in eastern Jerusalem for BBC Arabia, admitted to disseminating “inaccurate” pro-Palestinian propaganda on Twitter.
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Garthwaite told the JC that she had “un-retweeted” an infamous misleading set of maps from her social media account. The series of maps is used to “prove” that the Palestinians have over time made huge “compromises” with respect to territorial concessions.
Different versions of the maps have long been a staple of Palestinian online propaganda, and were given a new lease of life earlier this year when Jared Kushner presented US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace plan. The specific graphic shared by Garthwaite is most notable for being held aloft on a placard by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during an Arab League emergency following the release of the White House proposal.
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Close examination of the maps reveals their duplicity. The first map encompasses all of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, stretching from north of Haifa and down south to Eilat. The area was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and is here labeled ‘Historic Palestine.’ In the context of the other maps, it is disingenuously serves to suggest that ‘Historic Palestine’ was at some point a Palestinian Arab state.
The next map represents a proposed division of the land into two separate states, one Jewish and one Arab. It was rejected by Arabs nations, who instead launched a war on the Jewish population in what was then British-ruled Mandatory Palestine.
Subsequent maps omit Israeli withdrawals from the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, as well as Israel’s transfer of control of large swaths of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority in the mid-1990s.
The final graphic, labeled ‘Trump’s Projected Plan,’ makes Palestinian-controlled lands seem smaller than they actually are.
Related Reading: The Infamous, Misleading Palestinian Maps, Debunked
Following Garthwaite’s admission, the JC delved into her Twitter feed and found a litany of dishonest and antagonistic claims, such as the false assertion that Gaza’s “one” border is controlled by Israel. (The Palestinian coastal enclave also shares a land border with Egypt.)
It turns out that the 40 year-old journalist and author “shared several other false or controversial claims about Israel on social media,” wrote the JC’s Lee Harpin. This included an online post slamming alleged “British duplicity” regarding the Balfour Declaration.
Garthwaite’s Twitter account also contained a retweet of an article glorifying violent teen activist Ahed Tamimi as an “icon for Palestinian resistance.”
It remains to be seen how the BBC will respond to the revelation that one if its senior employees responsible for the production of a politically sensitive program has shared anti-Israel content on social media.
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While a BBC spokesman told the JC that Garthwaite had deleted the post of the series of maps when “she realized it was inaccurate,” it is difficult to believe that an individual with years of experience and charged with the responsibility of overseeing a major project could be quite so ignorant as to not realize the blatantly obvious misrepresentations and inaccuracies in the set of maps.
Then again, this is the BBC, an organization that has spent a fortune burying a damning report commissioned in response to allegations that the publicly-funded British media corporation maintains an anti-Israel bias.
Featured image: Wikimedia Commons
