More on Mohammad al-Dura

The story of the possible faking of a film which purported to show the death of a Palestinian boy at the hands of the Israeli army has been doing the rounds of the blogosphere for a while now. I picked up on it here. It is alleged that French television were complicit in the deception, which lead to hundreds of deaths in Israel and to international condemnation of the Israeli state.

Now the story has been picked up by the MSM in America, with a story appearing in, of all places, the New York Times business section. It has already been a big story in France and Germany. It will be no surprise to most people in this corner of blogosphere that the BBC have made not a single mention of the story. Not one hint of the doubts raised have appeared on the BBC website. And this from an organisation which has a fully fledged commission to ensure evenhandedness in its handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The BBC's bias is obvious. They will continue with their preferred tactic of ignoring stories which don't fit their preferred agenda, or spinning them to their advantage if they cannot ignore them. But it will become an increasingly difficult strategy to maintain with the news now finding its way into the mainstream media in the English speaking world. With internet editions of the American papers now viewable in Europe, stories like this are not going to go away, and the BBC will find it difficult to suppress the story as an unsubstantiated rumour when newspapers as big as the NYT and Le Figaro have reported it.