Usual coordinated campaign to defend Israeli apartheid and murder drives Anjana Gadgil off social media
BBC News presenter Anjana Gadgil has deleted her Twitter account, apparently in response to the predictable coordinated campaign against her by pro-apartheid trolls after she behaved as a journalist and challenged an Israeli spokesman about the Israeli military’s killing of children during its attack on the Jenin refugee camp.
Gadgil had responded to the spokesman’s claim that the attack had only killed ‘terrorists’ even if some of them were minors by asking ‘The Israeli military is happy to kill children’? And she pressed the point that the UN considers them children even if Israel does not:
Betenzos was perfectly correct to say that Israeli forces are perfectly prepared to shoot children – reports abound of Palestinian children killed, not by random bullets, but by targeted sniper fire, though often later claimed by the IDF to be ‘accidental’:
Even the Israeli media has reported on the phenomenon, with no excuse that there was any threat to Israeli lives:
Such targeted killings of civilians are not limited to children, of course. A few years ago the world was rightly horrified when video emerged of IDF troops cheering as a sniper shot an unarmed and motionless Palestinian man. Civilians are frequently killed by snipers and journalists have been targeted, including the shameful murder of Al Jazeera’s Shireen Abu Akleh last year.
But daring to use straight words in an interview about the murder of children is an unforgivable crime in the eyes of apologists for Israeli apartheid and violence – and the plethora of accounts set up to defend it and attack critics were quick to accuse Gadgil of antisemitism, hate speech and even ‘blood libel’, the mediaeval anti-Jewish smear that accused Jews of using children’s blood in rituals and cooking.
The BBC also received the predictable complaints from the usual right-wing pro-Israel groups – and, shamefully, caved into them and apologised for Gadgil doing actual journalism on its programme.
The deletion of Ms Gadgil’s Twitter was noted by activist Lisa Betenzos:
Ms Gadgil’s standing with the BBC is currently unknown, but it would be entirely unsurprising for the broadcaster to sack or sideline her rather than offend the defenders of Israeli apartheid.
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