Material and rhetorical support for the genocide of the Palestinian people is everywhere. It's time to ask why
Nearly a year into the world’s first live-streamed genocide - which began in Gaza, and is rapidly expanding into the occupied West Bank - the establishment western media still avoid using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s rampage of destruction.
The worse the genocide gets, the longer Israel’s starvation-blockade of the enclave continues, the harder it gets to obscure the horrors - and the less coverage Gaza receives.
The worst offender has been the BBC, given that it is Britain’s only publicly funded broadcaster. Ultimately, it is supposed to be accountable to the British public, who are required by law to pay its licence fee.
This is why it has been beyond ludicrous to witness the billionaire-owned media froth at the mouth in recent days about “BBC bias” - not against Palestinians, but against Israel. Yes, you heard that right.
We are talking about the same “anti-Israel” BBC that just ran yet another headline - this time after an Israeli sniper shot an American citizen in the head - that managed somehow, once again, to fail to mention who killed her. Any casual reader risked inferring from the headline “American activist shot dead in occupied West Bank” that the culprit was a Palestinian gunman.
After all, Palestinians, not Israel, are represented by Hamas, a group “designated as a terrorist organisation” by the British government, as the BBC helpfully keeps reminding us.
And it is the supposedly “anti-Israel” BBC that last week sought to stymie efforts by 15 aid agencies known as the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to run a major fundraiser through the nation’s broadcasters.
No one is under any illusions about why the BBC is so unwilling to get involved. The DEC has chosen Gaza as the beneficiary of its latest aid drive.
The committee faced the very same problem with the BBC back in 2009, when the corporation refused to take part in a Gaza fundraiser on the extraordinary pretext that doing so would compromise its rules on “impartiality”.
Presumably, in the BBC’s eyes, saving the lives of Palestinian children reveals a prejudice that saving Ukrainian children’s lives does not.
In its 2009 attack, Israel killed “only” 1,300 or so Palestinians in Gaza, not the many tens of thousands - or possibly hundreds of thousands, no one truly knows - it has this time around.
Famously, the late, independent-minded Labour politician Tony Benn broke ranks and defied the BBC’s DEC ban by reading out details of how to donate money live on air, over the protests of the show’s presenter. As he pointed out then, and it is even truer today: “People will die because of the BBC’s decision.”
According to sources within both the committee and the BBC, the corporation’s executives are terrified - as they were previously - of the "backlash" from Israel and its powerful lobbyists in the UK if it promotes the Gaza appeal.
A spokesperson for the BBC told Middle East Eye that the fundraiser did not meet all the established criteria for a national appeal, despite the DEC's expert opinion that it does, but noted the possibility of broadcasting an appeal was "under review". (more...)
How the war on Gaza exposed Israeli and western fascism
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