Fran Unsworth, head of newsgathering at the BBC, takes issue with Bret Stephens. She calls his piece on Alan Johnston for the Wall Street Journal “scurrilous.” I disagree. I think snide is a better word. And it’s shorter.

First, let me put the piece in context. Stephens is an anglophobe and his attack on the BBC has to be seen in the context of this anglophobia. He’s critical of the British government position in the Middle East, and although it’s perfectly reasonable for Britons to criticise their government (Britain is a democracy!) when non-nationals do it, it’s often highly correlated with anglophobia. Mr Stephens’ anglophobia is particularly distressing, since he benefited from British hospitality and education at the London School of Economics.

Still, anglophobia aside, let’s look at his piece:

Dozens of hostages were released in Gaza over the weekend, in the wake of a truce called between the warring factions of Hamas and Fatah. The BBC’s Alan Johnston, now in his 11th week of captivity, was not among them.

I last saw Mr. Johnston in January 2005, the day before Mahmoud Abbas was elected to succeed Yasser Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Johnston was by then the only Western correspondent living and working full time in Gaza, although the Strip was still considered a safe destination for day-tripping foreign journalists.

He kindly lent me his office to interview Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, and asked whether I was still editing the Jerusalem Post. He seemed genuinely oblivious to the notion that my by-then former association with an Israeli newspaper was not the sort of information I wanted broadcast to a roomful of Palestinian stringers.

So Johnston is kind but naïve. Snide 1. Incidentally, Stephens had run the loss-making English language paper as a neo-con megaphone for Conrad Black. The strategy had taken the readership from 36,000 when he joined to 25,000, when he left. Why did Stephens take the job? “One of the reasons I left the Wall Street Journal for the Post was because I felt the Western media was getting the story wrong. I do not think Israel is the aggressor here. Insofar as getting the story right helps Israel, I guess you could say I’m trying to help Israel.”

January 2005 was also the last time one could feel remotely optimistic about an independent Palestinian future. Mr. Abbas had campaigned for office promising “clean legal institutions so we can be considered a civilized society.” He won by an overwhelming margin in an election Hamas refused to contest. There had been a sharp decline in Israeli-Palestinian violence, thanks mainly to Israeli counterterrorism measures and the security fence. A Benetton outlet had opened in Ramallah, signaling better times ahead.

Stephens likes Benetton. He mentioned it in a previous op-ed piece, where he had argued what “pundits and reporters have striven to deny: that there is a military solution to the conflict.”

In Gaza things were different, however, and Mr. Johnston was prescient in reporting on the potential for internecine strife: “This internal conflict between police and the militants cannot happen,” one of his stories quotes a Palestinian police chief as saying. “It is forbidden. We are a single nation.” Yet in 2005 more Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians than by Israelis. It got worse in 2006, following Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and Hamas’s victory in parliamentary elections. “The occupation was not as bad as the lawlessness and corruption that we are facing now,” Palestinian editor Hafiz Barghouti admitted to Mr. Johnston in a widely cited remark.

So Johnston’s reporting for the BBC was fair and accurate.

When Mr. Johnston was kidnapped by persons unknown on March 12 – apparently dragged at gunpoint from his car while on his way home – he became at least the 23rd Western journalist to have been held hostage in Gaza. In most cases the kidnappings rarely lasted more than a day. Yet in August FOXNews’s Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaf Wiig were held for two weeks, physically abused and forced to convert to Islam. Plainly matters were getting progressively worse for foreigners.

A regular Fox News contributor, Stephens makes no mention of the alleged deal done to secure Centanni and Wiig’s freedom, and its effect on the security of journalists in the area.

So why did the BBC keep Mr. Johnston in place?

One answer is journalistic fidelity. Mr. Johnston had been the BBC’s man in Kabul during the Taliban era; he was used to hard places. His dispatches about the travails of ordinary Gazans brimmed with humane sympathy. And any news organization would prefer to have its own reporter on the scene than to rely on stringers.

Journalistic fidelity – that sounds like a good reason to keep him in place.

Yet the BBC also seemed to operate in the Palestinian Authority with a sense of political impunity. Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti described Mr. Johnston as someone who “has done a lot for our cause” – not the sort of endorsement one imagines the BBC welcoming from an equivalent figure on the Israeli side.

Despite Johnston’s reporting revealing the fissures within Gaza, the BBC’s presence was accepted by the Palestinian Authority. Unless Stephens is suggesting that Barghouti’s endorsement implies that Johnston was a Palestinian propagandist or partisan? Snide 2.

Other BBC correspondents were notorious for making their politics known to their viewers: Barbara Plett confessed to breaking into tears when Arafat was airlifted to a Parisian hospital in October 2004;

Plett’s confession came not in a news report, but in a programme that allowed correspondents to air their personal experiences (you can read a transcript here). Plett’s tears were, she says, prompted by the pathos of ordinary Palestinians choosing to ignore their leader’s journey to die in a Paris hospital. Her piece did not leave unmentioned Arafat’s “obvious failings – his use of corruption, his ambivalence towards violence, his autocratic way of ruling.” But it still rightly produced an apology from the BBC’s Director of News, after a listener complained. The piece had not observed “due impartiality.”

Orla Guerin treated Israel’s capture of a living, wired teenage suicide bomber that March as nothing more than a PR stunt – “a picture that Israel wants the world to see.”

The Israeli government accused Guerin of anti-semitism for that report. They also levelled criticisms at Sky News and the Times. They didn’t criticise Guerin for this piece, on Palestinians executing “collaborators.”

Though doubtlessly sincere, these views also conferred institutional advantages for the BBC in terms of access and protection, one reason why the broadcaster might have felt relatively comfortable posting Mr. Johnston in a place no other news agency dared to go.

So, it wasn’t journalistic fidelity, but institutional advantages in terms of access and protection that prompted the BBC to keep Mr Johnston in Gaza? Snide 3.

By contrast, reporters who displeased Palestinian authorities could be made to pay a price. In one notorious case in October 2000, Italian reporter Riccardo Cristiano of RAI published a letter in a Palestinian newspaper insisting he had not been the one who had broadcast images of two Israeli soldiers being lynched in Ramallah. “We respect the journalistic regulations of the Palestinian Authority,” he wrote, blaming rival Mediaset for the transgression. I had a similar experience when I quoted a Palestinian journalist describing as “riff-raff” those of his neighbors celebrating the attacks of Sept. 11. Within a day, the journalist was chided and threatened by Palestinian officials for having spoken to me. They were keeping close tabs.

Is this a contrast? Snide 4.

Still, whatever the benefits of staying on the right side of the Palestinian powers-that-be, they have begun to wane.

What were the benefits? An ability to report on the blood-letting between Fatah and Hamas? Snide 5.

For years, the BBC had invariably covered Palestinian affairs within the context of Israel’s occupation – the core truth from which all manifestations of conflict supposedly derived.

Developments within Gaza following Israel’s withdrawal showed the hollowness of that analysis.

Like this piece on Gaza? Snide 6. Evidence?

Domestic Palestinian politics, it turned out, were shot through with their own discontents, contradictions and divisions, not just between Hamas and Fatah but between scores of clans, gangs, factions and personalities. Opposition to Israel helped in some ways to mute this reality, but it could not suppress it.

Exactly as reported by Alan Johnston, before his kidnapping.

This is the situation – not a new one, but one the foreign media had for years mostly ignored – in which the drama of Mr. Johnston’s captivity is playing out.

What about the ransoming of other foreign journalists? That’s also part of the context.

Initial reports suggested he had been kidnapped by the so-called Popular Resistance Committee; later an al Qaeda affiliate called the Army of Islam claimed to have killed him. More recently, evidence has come to light suggesting he’s alive and being held by a criminal gang based in the southern town of Rafah. The British government is reportedly in talks with a radical Islamist cleric in their custody, Abu Qatada, whose release the Army of Islam has demanded for Mr. Johnston’s freedom. What the British will do, and what effect that might have, remains to be seen.

For now, one can only pray for Mr. Johnston’s safe release. Later, the BBC might ask itself whether its own failures of prudence and judgment put its reporter’s life in jeopardy.

Snide 7. Johnston was in Gaza as a volunteer. His biggest mistake seems to have been to allow someone to use his office who would seize the connection as an opportunity to sling mud at him whilst in captivity.

The BBC’s Paul Adams has said of his colleague that it was “his job to bring us day after day reports of the Palestinian predicament.”

For that act of solidarity one hopes a terrible price will not be paid.

Snide 8. Reporting from Gaza is not simply an attempt to document what happens there. It is an act of solidarity, a taking of sides.

So the piece has more snide than a Dr Seuss story. Now I don’t really know if Bret Stephens is anglophobic and I don’t much care.

I do know that understanding the world’s troubles need more reporting like Johnston’s and fewer columns like his.