BBC Bias against Israel is a Fantasy
JVL Introduction
Jonathan Cook exposes the coalition that is working to intimidate the BBC into suppressing details of the suffering of the people of Gaza. Some like the Daily Mail are using this in their long-running campaign against the corporation. Others, like the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, have a clear desire to keep details of Israeli torture off our screens, preferring to maintain the fraying myth of “the most moral army”.
Their current weapon is a deeply flawed report on BBC bias produced from Israel. Novara media have produced a video exposing just a few of its many falsehoods.
Cook extends his analysis to describe how this denial of genocide and state criminality reinforces the growing fascist elements inside Israeli society and strengthens the more submerged tendencies in Britain and elsewhere in the Israel defending west.
MC
This article was originally published by Jonathan Cook's substack on Fri 13 Sep 2024. Read the original here.
How the war on Gaza exposed Israeli and western fascism
Material and rhetorical support for the genocide of the Palestinian people is everywhere. It’s time to ask why
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‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.’
Many people simply believe what they want to believe anyway, whatever the blatant evidence go the contrary.
If the ethnic identities of the dead of Gaza was inverted with that of their killers, the BBC and others would soon be calling it a genocide.
The official death toll for 9/11 was 3,000 plus many more injured. A few years previously Bill Clinton bombed a medicine factor in Sudan – the German ambassador there Werner Daum put the resulting death toll in the 10s of thousands. Yet next to no critical coverage.
The death toll in Gaza – 40,000 last time checked – is nearly 14 times that of 9/11.
It’s not just that Palestinian lives don’t equal Israeli ones according to the state affiliated BBC. Black and Indigenous lives killed by the west never matter as much as westerners. Look too at Iraq and Afghanistan etc.
On the BBC politicians with responsibilities for these offences can get away with 19th C ‘civilising the savage’ type narratives. Eg no matter how many times Afghan mums protested about western forces killing their children – Gordon Brown the man who in the UK who abolished the mandatory grant and free tuition – could appear on Newsnight claiming this was because he wanted to educate Afghans.
Zionist accusations of BBC bias against Israel is an old ploy. Zionists know perfectly well that the bias at the BBC is in fact to protect Israel. However, to ensure even greater allegiance to Israel by the BBC, Zionists regularly criticise it and pressurise it by making these accusations. They know it also gives the BBC an excuse to say to viewers “look, even Zionists criticise us, it shows we are even handed”.
The crux of the issue lies, as is often the case, in the framing of the question. If the occupation of Palestinian land is illegal – and it is – and if the Palestinians are a nation – and they are – and if the “great powers” have done nothing to force Israel to cease its illegal actions – and they haven’t – then the Palestinian people have a right to resist that occupation with violence. Simple.
The specifics of that resistance will be issues which divide Palestinians, but until the resistance is hailed as necessary and just all reporting will be biased in favour of Israel.
As ever, I am feeling angry and sad all at the same time about our complicity in genocide. Something strikes me anew – the deep roots of the human shadow exposed throughout history in degrees of depravity. Somehow we need to recognise that we too are capable of responding with existential fear of the other, the outsider, and of such depravity. Activism is one resistance path, but we also need others that address political structure, structures of countervailing power and above all, the psyche to strengthen what is good and acknowledge truthfully what is a fundamental destructive capability. Otherwise these cycles repeat in a death spiral. I don’t have easy answers.
This is an angry piece, and rightly so. The crimes against humanity in Gaza – and now, in the West bank – affect us all. History will find us all guilty of failure to defend innocent human beings against guns, bombs and tanks provided by the US, UK and other wealthy nations. Israel depends for its continued existence on handouts from the US, in spite of which it treats their feeble demands for restraint with utter contempt, because they know it will not affect the flow of heavy armaments to their ruthless military. Thank you for being a voice for truth, Jonathan. I wish it could be heard by those in power, and acted upon.
I wonder whether the BBC will DARE report what “Haaretz” just has, highlighting the obvious parallels between Putin’s behaviour and Netanyahu’s???
“Haaretz Exclusive | Israel Is Recruiting African Asylum Seekers for Life-threatening Gaza War Operations, Promising Permanent Legal Status
Israeli security officials are offering the incentive of permanent residency status to asylum seekers who agree to participate in sometimes life-threatening military operations in Gaza. Sources say that internal criticism of this exploitation has been silenced”
The story is even more ugly in the context of Israel’s widely reported discrimination against black Ethiopian Jews and black immigrants generally.