“The BBC seems to regard Palestinian lives as less valuable than Israeli lives”.
Brian Eno was right.
‘FOUR HOSTAGES SEIZED AT NOVA FESTIVAL FREED IN GAZA RAID, declared the publicly-funded BBC.
Then if you squint a little you can read underneath, “Hamas claims more than 200 Palestinians were killed in the densely populated area where the raid took place”.
Of course, the BBC amended the article, but not before X/Twitter user @greg_herriett captured a screenshot and his post went viral.
The BBC: Palestinian lives are subtext
The BBC effortlessly relegated Israel’s wholesale slaughter of nearly three hundred Palestinians – as usual, mostly women and children, and which also left a further seven hundred civilians wounded — to a tiny bit of subtext, despite the horrifying images of disemboweled children being live-streamed to our phones.
Palestinian children are continuing to bear the brunt of western complicity and a complete failure of international law and accountability mechanisms put in place to prevent exactly what is happening in Gaza right now.
The children of Gaza should be at school learning, not buried under a mountain of rubble that used to be called home.
Israel has quite literally just committed an illegal act of unspeakable brutality, but true-to-form, the shamefully complicit establishment media is found to be investing greater effort in humanising Israeli victims when compared with Palestinians, who are routinely dehumanised and not even considered worthy of the label, “collateral damage”.
The BBC’s news coverage of Palestine rarely offers context or history to current events. There is no acknowledgement that Israel made Palestinians refugees in their own land.
Covering for genocide
Be in no doubt, dressing up as an aid worker and driving into a refugee camp in a vehicle designated for aid workers is a violation of international law. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998) defines war crimes, including the use of humanitarian assistance as a pretext for military attacks.
So rather than obediently congratulating Israel for rescuing the soldiers-turned-civilians perhaps the British Broadcasting Corporation should focus on the criminality and the horrifying death toll of the Nuseirat refugee camp massacre.
Israel — whose ‘history’ reads like a criminal record — has committed some of the most heinous, wicked acts of unconscionable depravity and criminality in our lifetimes in the space of just eight bloody, genocidal months.
Stick that on your website, ‘Auntie’.
The former director of Labour Friends of Israel, David Mencer, is regularly put out in front of the cameras to minimise the genocidal lunacy of the colonialist superpower.
Any idea who funds LFI? Me neither, so on that basis they should be a proscribed terrorist organisation.
Why on earth does the mainstream media, including the BBC, treat this Eylon Levy with an extra chin character as some sort of a credible witness to the war crimes of the nuclear-armed rogue state of Israel?
It would seem the only notable difference between Mencer’s previous post at LFI and his bullshitter-in-chief position with the Israel government is the addition of the word “official” to his job title.
Not subtle, and not even tolerated by its own staff
The BBC’s pro-Israel bias has always been as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face, and while the hard-right frequently describe the BBC as a woke, lefty, Hezbollah mouthpiece, headed by ‘Jermy Crumbin, and the ghost of Chairman Mao, you only need to look at the Beeb’s top brass to see why the flag-fondling fuckwits on the political right-wing are less intelligent than the hope-hoarding heroes on the political left-wing.
I’m glad it’s not just me that is of the opinion the BBC fails to accurately report the Israeli genocide of Gaza.
Eight of the BBC’s own journalists were so horrified by the state broadcaster’s appalling coverage they felt the need to send a 2,300-word letter to Al Jazeera, accusing the BBC of failing to portray the story of the Israel-Palestine conflict accurately and omitting key historical context in its coverage.
Unsurprisingly, you didn’t hear about this on BBC News.
Earlier this year, a study looked at thousands of online articles and posts from the BBC between October 7, the date of the Hamas attacks on Israel, and December 2.
Researchers found a “systematic disparity in how Palestinian and Israeli deaths are treated” by the BBC, with words such as murder, massacre, and slaughter almost exclusively being linked to Israeli deaths.
BBC is failing on every count
I’ve got a headline for you BBC:
THREE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY PALESTINIANS SEIZED FROM THE STREETS OF GAZA REMAIN HELD HOSTAGE IN ISRAELI TORTURE CAMPS WITHOUT CHARGE OR TRIAL
In the occupied Palestinian territories, one in every five Palestinians has been arrested and charged at some point. This rate is twice as high for Palestinian men as it is for women – two in every five men have been arrested and charged.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted the Israeli detainees have returned home to their families — unlike the three Israeli captives that were shot dead by an unhinged IOF soldier, despite them holding a white flag — but what about the thousands of Palestinians being held under administrative detention? Surely they deserve to see their families too?
Neither the administrative detainees, who include women and children, nor their lawyers are allowed to see the “secret evidence” that Israeli forces say form the basis for their arrests.
Does this sound reasonable to you? Locked up in prison for an indefinite period of time, and you don’t even know what you’ve done wrong? It is a penal system that is quite obviously ripe for abuse and maltreatment.
Administrative detention is an anathema in any democratic society that follows the rule of law, and while Israel will argue it is a democratic society, it hasn’t got a leg to stand on when it comes to abiding by the rule of law.
Israel’s genocide continues
I thought it was important to write about the ongoing genocide. The general election here in Blighty is dominating the headlines and Gaza is barely afforded a few words on the page opposite the horoscopes. Don’t ever stop talking about Palestine, and don’t ever stop talking about the enablers and perpetrators of this harrowing genocide.
Israel has committed some of the most heinous, wicked acts of unconscionable depravity and criminality in our lifetimes. History will not be kind to these evil bastards.
The incoming Labour government will happily grasp the loyal subject of the Knesset baton from the Conservative Party, they already have, and let’s not pretend otherwise.
The values of the Labour Party are the directives of the Likud Party. Whilst Israel occupies Palestine, the cancerous ideology of Zionism occupies the corridors of power across the Western world.
Something has to change.
Featured image via Rachael Swindon
