Missing boys?

BBC

They came in their thousands, on a muggy evening at the end of August, to ask a simple question: "What's become of our missing boys?" - the three Israeli soldiers, whose abductions triggered the parallel crises in Gaza and Lebanon.

First inexactitude: prior to the kidnap of Gilad Shalit by Palestinian militants, thousands of Palestinians - presumed to be militants - have been kidnapped in Gaza and the West Bank by the Israeli miltary. The last ones prior to the kidnap of an israeli were two palestinian brothers, Osama Muantar and his brother Mustafa.

A few blocks away, another "missing boy", a lone figure, tormented and filled with his own private despair, prepared to make his dramatic protest.

In this case a civilian, not a soldier. Yet for the BBC, he is the palestinian equivalent to the Israeli "missing boys". These two cases are not comparable. And yet I am forced to compare them: on the one hand, three combattants are kidnapped during a war (Israel continues to oppress the Palestinians while professing to make peace; Israel and Lebanon have never made peace and were still technically at war when Hezbollah captured the Israeli combattants-indeed Israel had kidnapped scores of Hezbollah combattants prior to the Hezbollah 'provocation'); on the other hand a Palestinian civilian used by the Israeli occupier as a snitch and abandoned to the mercy of the Palestinian resistance to be treated as a traitor or used against Israel. Finally, though tecnically on British soil to request asylum he is removed by Israeli anti-terrorist police. Would the British embassy in Karthoum or Harare have acted in this way? This complicity makes me sick. And the BBC needs to review its impartiality too.