A BBC Journalist's Fabulist Portrayal of an Israeli City

And Israel's raid of the Mavi Marmara.


Michael Weiss
The Weekly Standard
15 September '10

BBC Arabic’s Jerusalem correspondent Ahmad Budeiri claims that were it not for “hostile environment training,” he might have been beaten and kidnapped by “an angry mob” of Israelis in Ashdod in response to his reporting on the Free Gaza flotilla raid.

In an online dispatch for the BBC World Service, Budeiri describes a scene in the Israeli port city as something out of Somalia or Waziristan. Only by his own quick-witted recourse to the BBC’s safety-first self-preservation seminar, Budeiri insists, did he and his crew narrowly escape being assaulted or taken hostage by a violent gang of Ashdod residents. He writes:

I remembered what I was trained for in a kidnap situation and used the exact process during the mob incident. The cameraman and I had a password that, if used, he will start packing and I would be on the phone for more than ten minutes. By doing this the mob lost interest in me and gave us a gap to leave the location without being spotted. Other Arab crews were beaten when they all left as one big group and were slow departing because of their equipment.

Budeiri says that the Ashdod police merely looked on with indifference and “never reacted to nor stepped in to prevent the threats” – an odd disclosure in that these “threats” were evidently backed up by real actions and yet our correspondent doesn’t explain what the police response to those might have been. Also, assuming others saw and reported on the Ashdod “chaos,” why is this first-person testimony the BBC’s first and only statement on the matter?

Even as a primer on institutional methods of journalistic precaution in the field, Budeiri’s piece does little to avoid a descent into macabre self-parody:

(Read full article)

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