How the news is spun (and the BBC fails to learn any lessons)

A young British female journalist Natasha Smith was brutally raped in Cairo last week. You should read her gruesome account here. There have been many such attacks on Western women in Cairo since the 'Arab spring' all of which were either ignored or under-reported in the Western media. Even when the victim was high profile reporter Lara Logan of CBS News her own organisation CBS tried to cover up the story completely.

Hence, it is no great surprise that, as startling and newsworthy as the story is (especially considering it involves a young attractive British journalist), the British media has been almost completely silent on it. A search of both BBC News and Sky News draws a blank.  However, there is a CNN video on the web (presumably the Americans are only prepared to report cases like this when it is not an American victim).  But compare the CNN report with what Smith actually says herself. The CNN report plays up the role of 'heroic bystanders' and completely plays down the scale of the attack and ignores completely the crucial cultural angle such as the refusal of Egyptian doctors to treat her and the demands of others to know whether or not she was a Virgin.

This story is not just about the extent to which Western media will cover up violent Islamic attitudes and crimes. It also provides a very good example of the extent to which people like Smith are useful idiots to the cause of Islam. Just read the beginning of her account and wonder how she could be so naive given the stream of previous attacks against Western women like her in that very place. And read her comments which show the disconnect between her positive perception of Islam and Egypt and the reality that she herself went through (Sultan Knish has a typically incisive view on her attitude). I also found it rather interesting to note that the book that she was shown reading at the end of the CNN report. is by Jon Snow, the anti-Israel, pro-Jihadist bigot from Channel 4. 

Put simply the story does not fit the mainstream (especially BBC and Sky News) narrative about the wonderful 'liberal' Egyptian revolution and the inherently peaceful nature of Islam. That is why this story will receive minimal coverage.  In many respects there is a close analogy here with the BBC's refusal to cover the Fogel family massacre by Palestinian terrorists in Israel last year. Interestingly the BBC has just issued an apology to MP Louise Mensch about their failure to report on the story. But what they have not done is right the wrong. Nobody outside the Jewish blogasphere will ever hear about the BBC apology. And the BBC will continue to refuse to inform the public about the massacre.  The BBC will not learn from their mistakes and they clearly do not want to. For how else to explain the complete failure of the BBC - at the very time they were issuing their 'apology' to Louise Mensch - to report on the terrorist attack against Israel from Egypt on 19 June (resulting in the death of an Israeli civilian) and the subsequent 180 rockets fired from both Egypt and Gaza that followed Israel's targetted killing of two of the terrorist attackers.  While the BBC and other British media outlets continue to refuse to report on those stories the British public remains ignorant of the the real news, and as a result is guided to cast the blame on Israel for any unrest in the Middle East.