The Zionist onslaught on Gaza has been unequivocally backed by the British media establishment. Despite their best efforts, the British media, from the tabloids to the supposedly liberal Guardian and Independent and the ‘impartial’ BBC, have utterly failed to manufacture public consent for Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people, with their blatant lies exposed by the daily evidence of the Zionist state’s war crimes. Ria Aibhilin reports.
Every major newspaper in Britain covered the events of 7 October as front page news. For weeks we were told 1,400 Israelis had been killed that day. Within 24 hours Zionist forces had murdered almost 250 Palestinians in indiscriminate attacks. ‘Israel says “hundreds of terrorists dead”’ The Guardian online headline told us (8 October). For the British media, Israelis are victims with names and stories, worthy of our attention and sympathy; Palestinians are just terrorists used to dying. Shameless racism is employed to dehumanise the Palestinian people.
The Guardian, with its historically ‘left’ readership, has played a particular role: ‘propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those with a fine education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia – and with careers on the BBC, The Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post’ (John Pilger, cited in Propaganda Blitz, p159). The Guardian has lined up the usual suspects to try to justify Israel’s massacre of the Palestinian people in Gaza:
- As Zionist forces bombed the entrapped population in Gaza and starved its two million inhabitants of fuel, food and water, columnist George Monboit tried to kid us that this is an ‘Israel-Hamas conflict’ (18 October). Israeli ministers have openly declared it is ‘rolling out the Gaza Nakba’ and boasted ‘Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end’.
- For Owen Jones, Israel’s military onslaught was ‘the aftermath of Hamas’ unjustifiable atrocity’ (24 October). From his acceptance of the Zionist framing, you would believe history began on 7 October. There is no mention of the illegal land, sea and air blockade imposed on Gaza since 2006, or of the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and lands, the ongoing occupation of Palestine by the settler-colonial state of Israel or of the years of unending terror and violence inflicted on Palestinian people at the hands of Israeli forces. There is no mention of the 2,070 Palestinians, many of them children, held in administrative detention in the Israeli state before a single Israeli prisoner was taken on 7 October.
- When the story that Palestinian militants were beheading Israeli babies was revealed to be a lie, with even the IDF admitting it could not corroborate the claim made up on air by Nicole Zedeck of the i24News private Israeli channel, The Guardian did not want you to lose sympathy for the Zionist murder squads. Its Rory Carroll has often laid the groundwork for public support for foreign intervention in Latin America through spreading misinformation and lies. This time he spared his attention for an article detailing ‘killings and mutilations during Hamas’s rampage in southern Israel’. Only if you make it right to the very end of the article do you learn that in Israel’s ‘retaliatory bombing[s]’ over 2,000 Palestinian children had been murdered before the publication of the article on 23 October, ‘according to the Hamas-run health ministry’. Though figures provided by the Israeli state are quoted without qualification, suspicion and doubt is cast on the Hamas figures of Palestinian deaths.
As well as these The Guardian has:
- Erased the existence of Palestinians in the occupied 48 by racistly referring to them as ‘Arabs in Israel’ (20 October);
- Weaponised anti-Semitism by firing its cartoonist of 40 years, Steve Bell (Bell’s sackable offence was a cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu inspired by an old cartoon of former US President Lyndon Johnson); promoting the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism; running articles about pro-Palestine marches not being a ‘comfortable environment for Jews’ (18 November).
Similarly, the BBC was forced to retract its misleading comments that marches in solidarity with Palestine are characterised by ‘people voic[ing] their backing for Hamas’. The BBC and The Guardian quote statistics from the Zionist state without qualification. It doesn’t matter to them that the figure of 1,400 Israeli deaths branded across every major news source was later announced by the IDF to be a lie. It doesn’t matter that of the revised-down figure of 1,200 deaths over 350 of them were military personnel. It doesn’t matter that an Israeli police investigation later found that some of the Israeli civilian casualties at the Supernova festival on 7 October were killed by the IDF attack helicopters.
On 16 November the BBC revealed the depths to which it is willing to go to defend the genocidal acts carried out by the Israeli state. While the Israeli state forces attacked the Al-Shifa hospital with bombs and snipers, imposed a siege on the hospital and cut it off from fuel, food, water and medical equipment; while Palestinians were being forced to have amputations and women to have C-sections without anaesthesia; while the life support machines keeping newborn babies alive were cut off and the Zionist forces targeted medical professionals and opened fire on patients, the BBC Question Time panel took the question: ‘Is the Israeli targeting of a hospital justified?’ The panellists overwhelmingly agreed it was. The targeting of hospitals is an international war crime. The BBC aired this unashamed promotion of mass slaughter to a portion of its eight million regular viewers.
Mainstream British media – the tabloids, The Guardian, the BBC – are the unofficial spokespersons of various sections of the British ruling class. They are united in defending its imperialist interests. From Ireland to Iraq, they have brazenly laid the groundwork for and justified the brutal consequences of the needs of British imperialism. We must not be fooled as they do so today to protect British foreign interests in the Middle East and around the globe.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 297 December 2023/January 2024
