If we could spend five minutes in Gaza without the constant, babbling distractions of these so-called journalists, the truth would be clear. It’s a genocide. It was always a genocide.
Lies of omission are a stock in trade when corporate media, which may speak truthfully to us on matters – not all of them trivial – which do not impact on core ruling class interests, find themselves obliged to cover matters that do. One such is the ongoing genocide committed by Israel which, for reasons given here and here, 1 has the unconditional if at times mildly critical backing of Western elites.
Particularly shocking was the BBC’s failure in this extended report to mention even once the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a fugitive for months from the International Criminal Court, which wants him on trial for crimes against humanity. Why? For using starvation as a weapon of war against the civilian population …
… Verify’s reporter asserted that in early March Israel “blocked humanitarian aid demanding that Hamas extend a ceasefire and release the remaining hostages”. He then jumped to 18 March, stating: “Israel resumes military operations.” Viewers were left … with the impression that Hamas had rejected a continuation of the ceasefire and had refused to release the last of the hostages.
Obfuscation is another handy tool in the propagandist arsenal. Big Tobacco used it when, fully aware it could no longer credibly deny the addictive toxicity of its products, it hired maverick scientists not to confront head on an overwhelming medical and statistical consensus but to muddy the waters. As does Big Oil. Who benefits when our reluctance, as habitual smokers or societies hooked on fossil fuels, to change our ways is given sly absolution by the notion that “even the experts can’t agree”?
The establishment media’s aim is to so confuse audiences that they will throw up their hands and say: “To hell with Israel and the Palestinians! They are as bad as each other. Leave it to the politicians and diplomats to sort out.”
In any other circumstance, it would strike you as obvious that starving children en masse is morally abhorrent, and that anyone who does it, or excuses it, is a monster. The role of the BBC is to persuade you that what should be obvious to you is, in fact, more complicated than you can appreciate. 2
In that last sentence, obfuscation morphs seamlessly into gaslighting: 3
If we could spend five minutes in Gaza without the constant, babbling distractions of these so-called journalists, the truth would be clear. It’s a genocide. It was always a genocide.
Over to Jonathan Cook, writing today apropos last night’s Gaza coverage by BBC’s News at Ten; coverage which lied by omission, obfuscated and gaslit in roughly equal measure.
Starvation in Gaza is so bad even the BBC is covering it – and reporting it all wrong
The BBC’s role is not to keep viewers informed. It’s to persuade them a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics they cannot hope to understand
You can tell how bad levels of starvation now are in Gaza – as the population there begins the third month of a complete aid blockade by Israel – because last night the BBC finally dedicated a serious chunk of its main news programme, the News at Ten, to the issue.
But while upsetting footage of a skin-and-bones, five-month-old baby was shown, most of the segment was, of course, dedicated to confusing audiences – by two-sidesing Israel’s genocidal programme of starving 2 million-plus Palestinian civilians.
Particularly shocking was the BBC’s failure in this extended report to mention even once the fact that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a fugitive for months from the International Criminal Court, which wants him on trial for crimes against humanity. Why? For using starvation as a weapon of war against the civilian population.
I have yet to see the BBC, or any other major British media outlet, append the status “wanted war crimes suspect” when mentioning Netanyahu in stories. That is all the more unconscionable on this occasion, in a story directly related to the very issue – starving a civilian population – he is charged over.
Was mention of the arrest warrant against him avoided because it might signal a little too clearly that the highest legal authorities in the world attribute starvation in Gaza directly to Israel and its government, and do not see it – as the British establishment media apparently do – as some continuing, unfortunate “humanitarian” consequence of “war”.
Predictably misleading too was BBC Verify’s input. It provided a timeline of Israel’s intensified blockade that managed to pin the blame not on Israel, even though it is the one blocking all aid, but implicitly on Hamas.
Verify’s reporter asserted that in early March Israel “blocked humanitarian aid demanding that Hamas extend a ceasefire and release the remaining hostages”. He then jumped to 18 March, stating: “Israel resumes military operations.”
Viewers were left – presumably intentionally – with the impression that Hamas had rejected a continuation of the ceasefire and had refused to release the last of the hostages.
None of that is true. In fact, Israel never honoured the ceasefire, continuing to attack Gaza and kill civilians throughout. But worse, Israel’s supposed “extension” was actually its unilateral violation of the ceasefire by insisting on radical changes to the terms that had already been agreed, and which included Hamas releasing the hostages.
Israel broke the ceasefire precisely so it had the pretext it needed to return to starving Gaza’s civilians – and the hostages whose safety it proclaims to care about – as part of its efforts to make them so desperate they are prepared to risk their lives by forcing open the short border with neighbouring Sinai sealed by Egypt.
Yesterday, an Israeli government minister once again made clear what the game plan has been from the very start. “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said. Gaza’s population, he added, would be forced to “leave in great numbers to third countries” – in other words, Israel intends to carry out what the rest of us would call the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as it has been doing continuously for eight decades.
What is the point of the BBC having a Verify service – supposedly there to fact-check and ensure viewers get only the unvarnished truth – when its team are themselves peddling gross distortions of the truth?
The BBC and its Verify service are not keeping viewers informed. They are propagandising them into believing a clear crime against humanity by Israel is, in fact, highly complicated geopolitics that audiences cannot hope to understand.
The establishment media’s aim is to so confuse audiences that they will throw up their hands and say: “To hell with Israel and the Palestinians! They are as bad as each other. Leave it to the politicians and diplomats to sort out.”
In any other circumstance, it would strike you as obvious that starving children en masse is morally abhorrent, and that anyone who does it, or excuses it, is a monster. The role of the BBC is to persuade you that what should be obvious to you is, in fact, more complicated than you can appreciate.
There may be skin-and-bones babies, but there are also hostages. There may be tens of thousands of children being slaughtered, but there is also a risk of antisemitism. Israeli officials may be calling for the eradication of the Palestinian people, but the Jewish state they run needs to be preserved at all costs.
If we could spend five minutes in Gaza without the constant, babbling distractions of these so-called journalists, the truth would be clear. It’s a genocide. It was always a genocide.
* * *
- In neither of these two linked posts do I offer the Israel Lobby as the core reason for the West’s “unconditional if at times mildly critical backing” of Israel. That’s a misconception held not only by antisemitic voices but by well informed and otherwise useful sources including John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter and a Jewish Jeffrey Sachs. Though certainly powerful, “the Lobby” ultimately derives that power from the alignment of Israel and its expansionist agenda with more than a century of Western control of the Middle East. As Brian Berletic put it in a podcast last October:
People tell me Israel controls the US. When I ask how, they tell me AIPAC. But the arms industry spends far more. So do the Banks, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture. A cartel of industries fund think tanks producing papers which become policies and bills that the media sell to the American people. That’s how it works and the Israel lobbyists are a tiny fraction of that. if Israel truly controlled the US, all its forces would be in the Middle East. But they’re also in Ukraine and South Asia because the US is waging proxy war in all three.
- Jonathan Cook targets BBC propagandists but in a recent piece – “Gaza is complicated!” No it isn’t. Grow up! – Caitlin Johnstone aims at those whose complacency, cowardice and/or intellectual dishonesty makes them willing dupes:
… westerners act like an empire-backed military force dropping bombs on a giant concentration camp and systematically using rape as a weapon of torture and deliberately starving civilians is just way too compwicated for a dumb widdle baby wike me, goo goo ga ga. People act like they’re being humble about their own intellect and understanding, but really they’re just lying and psychologically compartmentalizing away from self-evident reality. It’s not humility, it’s just another kind of dishonesty.
- Says this AI generated response:
The term “gaslighting” originates from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, “Gas Light,” which was later adapted into a 1944 film. The play’s storyline, where a husband manipulates his wife into doubting her sanity by subtly altering their home environment and denying it, became synonymous with the act of psychological manipulation.