BBC capitulates to Israel lobby pressure
JVL Introduction
Under pressure from UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) the BBC has withdrawn a whole series of Bitesize educational videos from its website.
It says it will review their content and edit them if need be – or “retire them” altogether.
Given the BBC’S startled rabbit-in-the-headlights stance at present, it is unlikely to do anything that draws attention to itself. Such as respecting the work of its own journalists, standing up for the truth etc – that kind of thing.
In an atmosphere where there is consistent campaigning by pro-Israel lobby groups to deny the realities of Israel’s history (the nakba and its consequences, for example) and its current ethno-nationalism, we hope the BBC finds, somewhere, a residue of backbone.
This article was originally published by Middle East Monitor on Wed 2 Jun 2021. Read the original here.
BBC sparks outrage after removing content following pressure from pro-Israel lobby
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Why is there not a UK Lawyers for Palestine? Then on the basis of parity the truth about Israel can come out and debate with facts take place.
Check out Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights
This is Orwell’s 1984 in action from a virulent proto-fascist outfit like Im-Tirzu in Israel that acts to ban the real history of the Nakba in schools, and universities where academics teaching the true history are also under attack. LFI are no less than an infiltration of a foreign state’s repres
cf to Israeli Malmad Ministry of Defence’s wiping of historical archive on Israel’s foundational ethnic cleansing 1947-49 as reported by Haaretz July 2019. Asked why, Malmab Head, Yehil Horev stated that ‘the objective is to undermine the credibility of studies about the history of the refugee problem’. I’ve just been reading Jeff Halper’s ‘Decolonising Israel, Liberating Palestine’ and he explains it in terms of ‘settler project normalisation’ (the old die and the young forget’). Palestinian resistance and global movements around BDS have ensured this is never likely to happen. I find it hard to believe professional historians would allow this sort of nuanced censorship to go unchallenged. Yet the people who should be reporting it, the BBC, are the ones succumbing to it and worse, becoming one of the censors.
There is nothing new either about the power of the Israeli lobby or the corporate media’s capitulation to it. The real question is how we, on the other side, build up a similarly powerful and effective lobby to push the Palestinian cause. After all, we have truth on our side and as Tom Paine said, “such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing.”