Part of the Mechanism of Genocide in Palestine: The Complicity of ‘Mainstream’ Media

MEDIA, 14 Oct 2024

Media Lens - TRANSCEND Media Service

Gaza destroyed by IDF – Aerial shot Oct 2024.  Media Lens

9 Oct 2024 – Propaganda often works in subtle ways. Consider a BBC News headline on its website on 3 October:

‘Israeli air strike kills 18 people in occupied West Bank’

This was noteworthy in that, for once, the BBC had made it clear that Israel was responsible for killing people, rather than using a contorted form of wording that obscured culpability as it so often does: ‘18 people die in latest violence in the West Bank’.

However, by the next day, the BBC headline read:

‘Israeli strike kills Hamas commander in occupied West Bank’

Greg Philo, head of the Glasgow Media Group, who died earlier this year, noted as long ago as 2011 that senior BBC News staff speak of ‘waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis’. Did such a phone call lead to the change to a more Israel-friendly headline?

Consider, too, a recent interview by BBC international editor Jeremy Bowen with Khalil al-Hayya, the deputy leader of Hamas. It was broadcast on the flagship BBC News at Ten on 3 October. BBC newsreader Clive Myrie prefaced the interview with this remarkable caution:

‘Many will find his comments abhorrent.’

It is unimaginable that BBC News would ever introduce an interview or a speech by a Western leader or Western ally with a similar remark.

Recall that Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, justified Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza in a speech to a fawning US Congress in July:

‘It’s a clash between barbarism and civilization. It’s a clash between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.’

When the BBC reported Netanyahu’s words, it did not provide an editorial warning that many would find such words abhorrent. That Israel could slaughter, by the time of Netanyahu’s speech, almost 40,000 Palestinians – likely several times more – and yet describe itself as ‘those who sanctify life’ is certainly abhorrent.

Similarly, when has the BBC felt the need to editorialise whenever Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or Keir Starmer declares that, ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’, effectively giving a pass to the genocidal actions of an apartheid state?

Indeed, since 7 October last year, BBC news presenters have relentlessly inserted the phrase, ‘Israel argues that it has a right to defend itself’, whenever Palestinian or pro-ceasefire spokespeople are interviewed. A BBC journalist who requested anonymity told Al Jazeera that the phrase had been:

‘drilled into us, into all our coverage. It was really an integral part of our editorial stance. To a guest talking about Israeli air strikes killing Palestinians in Gaza, that would be the response from our presenters.’

This is the bogus version of ‘impartiality’ practised by the BBC: a supposed balance between the large-scale violence meted out by Israel, the massively-armed occupier, supported in multiple ways by the United States, and the violence inflicted by Palestinians, the occupied, traumatised, dispossessed and far less powerful population.

When Myrie asked Bowen how the interview with the deputy leader of Hamas came about, he replied:

‘You know, at the BBC, we believe very strongly in impartial reporting which means, ideally, you have to sit down with people. Try and find what it is they believe in; what it is they say. And, if necessary, interrogate and challenge those statements which is what I was seeking to do in that interview in Doha.’

But how often does the BBC really ‘interrogate and challenge’ statements made by Netanyahu, his ministers, Israeli spokespeople or their Western allies? A solid body of evidence shows, in fact, that BBC journalists have been repeating and amplifying Israeli disinformation and propaganda bullet points; and not merely since 7 October 2023, as shown over many years by the Glasgow Media Group, for example.

Craig Mokhiber, who resigned last October as the director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, in protest at the UN’s weak response to Israel’s ‘textbook genocide’ in Gaza, wrote that:

‘western media companies have made themselves a part of the mechanism of genocide in Palestine.’

He pointed to:

‘the role of complicit Western media corporations [in] knowingly disseminating Israeli disinformation and propaganda, justifying war crimes and crimes against humanity, dehumanizing Palestinians, and blacking out information on the genocide in the West. From the perspective of international human rights law, such actions could and should be subject to sanctions.’

He included the BBC in his criticism:

‘CNN, Fox, BBC, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal know what they are doing. This is not to say that these Western outlets are in every sense the modern equivalents [of] Der Sturmer and [Rwanda’s] Milles Collines (they are not). But, like these historic examples, they have recklessly crossed the boundaries of ethical journalism and, in some cases, may find themselves legally exposed as well.’

Needless to say, these news organisations, the BBC included, have never critically appraised their own role in promoting Israel’s propaganda.

Bowen’s Tortuous Balancing Act

On the first anniversary of the 7 October attack on Israel, the BBC published a major piece by Bowen on its website titled, ‘Year of killing and broken assumptions has taken Middle East to edge of deeper, wider war’.

The vast majority of the killing has, of course, been perpetrated by Israel – including an estimated 17,000 children. Another 26,000 children have been made orphans.

Bowen noted that around 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, were killed on 7 October. He neglected to mention that there is strong evidence, including reports by Israeli news media, that Israeli forces themselves killed many civilians by implementing the deadly, so-called ‘Hannibal Directive’.

It was first implemented during Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon in 1986. The directive, which was kept secret and never published, allowed Israeli forces to use any force necessary to prevent Israeli soldiers from being captured and taken into enemy territory, even if such action would lead to those captives’ deaths. After being revised several times, the directive was dropped in 2016.

However, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, it was once again implemented on 7 October last year, and extended to the killing of Israeli civilians if that was deemed necessary to prevent them being abducted by Hamas. In an article for the World Socialist Web Site, Jean Shaoul observed:

‘As yet, the number of civilians and soldiers killed by Israeli fire is unknown, in part at least because there have been no autopsies identifying the cause of death, such as the type of weaponry used.’

Nor does Bowen refer to the discredited false stories that were manufactured by Israel about beheaded babies, civilians burned alive and the systematic use of sexual violence on 7 October – stories that were shared credulously around the world by major news media, including the BBC.

Bowen said of the deputy leader of Hamas:

‘He denied his men had targeted civilians – despite overwhelming evidence.’

By striking contrast, Bowen did not refer to the overwhelming evidence that Israel has targeted Palestinian civilians and vital infrastructure, including hospitals.

US journalist Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, told Al Jazeera that there was a deliberate attempt by the Israelis to portray hospitals as ‘terror bases’ for Hamas:

‘The Israelis were pumping the public with information that was meant to convince people that hospitals are not really hospitals.’

Netanyahu claimed:

‘Hamas was using patients in that hospital [Al-Shifa] as human shields.’

As Scahill noted:

‘This was a narrative that we saw unfolding almost from the beginning.’

He added:

‘The New York Times and other news organisations began to then create their own renditions of what they, I guess, imagined, Hamas had underneath Al-Shifa hospital, promoting the narrative that something very nefarious is taking place. That was the moment. And you can trace it, that the floodgates were opened for the Israelis, that they perceived that they now had a green light to wage war against Palestinian hospitals and medical facilities in Gaza.’

There is also no mention in Bowen’s piece of the shocking testimony of surgeons that they have treated Palestinian children with headshot sniper wounds; or, worse, that children have been killed by Israeli snipers who targeted them deliberately.

Jewish American doctor Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon and vice president of the International College of Surgeons, who volunteered in Gaza from the end of April until mid-May, told CBS News:

‘I have two children that I have photographs of that were shot so perfectly in the chest, I couldn’t put my stethoscope over their heart more accurately, and directly on the side of the head, in the same child. No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the “world’s best sniper.” And they’re dead-center shots.’

He continued:

‘All of the disasters I’ve seen, combined – 40 mission trips, 30 years, Ground Zero, earthquakes, all of that combined – doesn’t equal the level of carnage that I saw against civilians in just my first week in Gaza.’

Dr Perlmutter noted that the civilian casualties he saw were ‘almost exclusively children’:

‘I’ve never seen that before. I’ve seen more incinerated children than I’ve ever seen in my entire life, combined. I’ve seen more shredded children in just the first week … missing body parts, being crushed by buildings, the greatest majority, or bomb explosions, the next greatest majority.’

Another grievous omission in Bowen’s article is the eyewitness evidence that Israeli troops carried out executions of Palestinians, including doctors and healthcare workers. If these had been crimes committed by Russian troops in Ukraine, it would have been headline news, night after night.

BBC’s spurious and misleading notion of ‘impartiality’ yields ‘both-sidesisms’ in Bowen’s account:

‘Both sides deny accusations they have broken the laws of war. Hamas claims it ordered its men not to kill Israeli civilians. Israel says it warns Palestinian civilians to get out of harm’s way but Hamas uses them as human shields.’

Bowen is silent about Israelis using Palestinians as human shields in Gaza, including children.

What about the US role in funding Israel, arming it to the hilt, providing intelligence and defending the apartheid state robustly through its usual ‘diplomacy’ at the UN? This was given a token passing mention in Bowen’s article. But he omitted that the US has just approved a massive $8.7 billion military ‘aid’ package to Israel.

Bowen’s ‘balanced’ piece contains nothing about the intentions of Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians for a ‘Greater Israel’ which would require the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Jordan to the sea, other than one fleeting comment:

‘Ghosts of the past tormented Palestinians as well. Raja Shehadeh, the celebrated Palestinian writer and human rights campaigner believes that Israel wanted to make another Nakba – another catastrophe.’

Crucially, there is no explanation from Bowen that Netanyahu and his Israeli ministers are simply not interested in a peaceful, negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestine. They would rather that Palestine is eradicated from the map of the Middle East.

Moreover, as long as the genocide continues, as long as there is war, now expanded to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, then Netanyahu can likely cling on to power. This has the added benefit of shielding him from the corruption charges that may well land him in prison, once he leaves office.

As Jonathan Cook observed recently:

‘Netanyahu cannot afford to ease up on his war-mongering, because any moves towards a ceasefire would put his coalition in danger of collapse, potentially oust him from power, and accelerate his corruption trial and the likelihood of his being jailed.’

This is a rational perspective that Bowen, along with the rest of BBC News, has no interest in pursuing.

Terrified Of The Word ‘Genocide’

Another major omission in Bowen’s piece is any analysis, or even mention, of the role played by major news media in its reporting of Gaza. Greg Philo and co-author Mike Berry analysed the first four weeks of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza following the 7 October Hamas attack. They sought to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves (not in direct or reported statements) to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths:

‘We found that “murder”, “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).’

They added:

‘But the issue goes beyond these differences. The Palestinian perspective is effectively absent from the coverage, in how they understand the reasons for the conflict and the nature of the occupation under which they are living.’

A new investigation by Al Jazeera’s Listening Post team reveals testimony from inside Western media organisations reporting on Gaza. An anonymous BBC journalist, Sara (not her real name), told Al Jazeera that:

‘People [at the BBC] were terrified of using the word “genocide” in coverage. They still are. You will very rarely see it in any BBC coverage. And if an interviewee says the word “genocide”, the presenter will almost always panic.’

Imagine if an Official Enemy of the West – say, Iran or Russia – was inflicting comparable carnage, the BBC would be terrified of challenging the use of the word, ‘genocide’.

Sara observed that:

‘Gaza has massively exposed the hypocrisies at the heart of the BBC.’

She continued:

‘Many of our own presenters when faced with an interviewee who was Palestinian or who had lost family in Gaza, there was just such a lack of compassion.’

An infamous video clip, mentioned in a previous media alert, was then shown of BBC Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark interviewing Husam Zomlot, the head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK. He had lost several members of his family during the early days of Israel’s bombing campaign. Zomlot told Wark of his emotional pain, and he listed his relatives who had been killed, describing them as ‘sitting ducks for the Israeli war machine’.

Wark replied with appalling lack of empathy:

‘I am sorry for your own personal loss. I mean, can I just be clear though, you cannot condone the killing of civilians in Israel, can you? Nor the killing of families?’

Sara noted:

‘As a result, a number of producers were really reticent about putting a vulnerable Palestinian guest in front of a BBC presenter.’

The BBC journalist observed that double standards could be seen in the selection of interviewees, and how they were treated. After 7 October, the BBC set up an internal group chat in which producers could vet potential interviewees based on their online footprint.

Sara told Al Jazeera that defenders of Palestinian rights were discriminated against during this vetting process:

‘It was overwhelmingly guests on the Palestinian side of things who were being looked into. Palestinians being flagged up for using the word “Zionist”, which isn’t something to flag necessarily. Even the occasional NGO was thrown in, for example Human Rights Watch.’

She continued:

‘These are organisations that we’ve really relied on in terms of covering Ukraine and various other conflicts. And now and again they would check an Israeli guest. But there was no balance in what was going on. Israeli spokespeople who we did have on were given a lot of free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback. Whereas any Palestinian guest was asked to condemn Hamas, almost as though condemning Hamas was the sort of price to pay before they could be humanised in our coverage.’

Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon who worked in Gaza hospitals and who is the current Rector of the University of Glasgow, told Al Jazeera:

‘One of probably the most distressing aspects about that period when I was working at Shifa Hospital is that we were getting hundreds and hundreds of wounded. The bombing around Shifa was continuous. And so, you’d get phone calls and all the Western journalists wanted to ask about was, “when you walk around, do you see any tunnels?”’

Israel had relentlessly claimed that ‘Hamas tunnels’ under hospitals and other civilian buildings were part of an underground ‘command and control’ network used to launch attacks on Israel. This became a dominant theme diverting attention from Israel’s war crimes, including on the BBC. Abu Sitta added:

‘And if you say that I’ve never seen any of these tunnels, then you are dismissed immediately.’

Al Jazeera noted that internal BBC dissent (see our alerts here and here) had led to some BBC journalists writing letters to senior BBC management, including director-general Tim Davie, warning that BBC coverage risked ‘aiding and abetting genocide’. This action was reportedly ‘considered inflammatory by recipients’, according to an article published by Hollywood-based ‘Deadline’, billed as ‘the definitive choice for industry insiders’.

When shared on internal BBC distribution lists, Jewish employees were said to have taken ‘extreme offense’ to the language used:

‘“It was extraordinarily egregious,” says a non-Jewish insider who read the letter. Another recalls senior management being “quite shaken” by the accusations: “They were properly outraged that [people thought it was] acceptable to make these kinds of incendiary and unpleasant remarks about colleagues and send them around the BBC.’

The carefully considered content of the BBC dissident letters, comprising solid evidence and rational analysis, and the conclusion that BBC News coverage ‘aligned with Israel’s propaganda strategy’, was missing from the ‘Deadline’ piece.

Sara summed up her experience inside the BBC:

‘Multiple journalists in emails, in meetings, have raised concerns about a lot of the things I’ve said in this interview – the disparity in the language used, the inconsistency in approach compared to other story areas like Russia and Ukraine, the lack of humanisation when it comes to Palestinians, the lack of context about this conflict before the 7th of October. And it hasn’t really made a difference because there’s just a sort of unwillingness among the executive to accept evidence [our emphasis]. For me personally, it meant I could no longer see my future at the BBC.’

An Organ Of The British State

Why does the BBC behave this way? Earlier this year, the Jacobin website published a piece by an anonymous BBC journalist who wrote:

‘The BBC is, in many respects, an organ of the British state. As such, its journalism is enduringly informed by an intra-institutional connection to ideas of Western hegemony. This is a paradigm maintained through being deeply encoded in the corporation’s organizational structure.’

The BBC journalist added:

‘For staff to acquire editorial power, they must repeatedly demonstrate their adherence to a mode of journalism that is cautious and doesn’t damage political relationships while — crucially — upholding the veneer of impartiality. These are prerequisites for advancement at the BBC. Only those who have consistently proven they will uphold the supremacy of these principles will be elevated to positions of control.’

This, of course, was put more succinctly to a young Andrew Marr when he failed to run rings around Noam Chomsky in a classic interview on BBC2 in 1996:

Marr: ‘How can you know that I’m self-censoring?’

Chomsky: ‘I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.’

Let us conclude with the words of surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta:

‘In the future, when we have a museum for this genocide, we will have a special place where we put the pictures of the journalists who allowed it to happen. There will be a wing for the CNN and the BBC and the [New York] Times journalists who were the enablers of the genocide. The Palestinian people will remember them.’

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Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. In 2007, Media Lens was awarded the Gandhi Foundation International Peace Prize. We have written three co-authored books: Guardians of Power-The Myth of the Liberal Media (Pluto Press, 2006), Newspeak-In the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 2009), and Propaganda Blitz (Pluto Press, 2018). Contacts: David Edwards: editor@medialens.org – David Cromwell: editor@medialens.org

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