The BBC‘s racist, institutional bias in favour of Israel has been clear throughout the state’s settler-colonial genocide in Gaza. In particular, its propaganda strategy involves the omission of key context. And a new article about falling support for Israel in the US is a perfect example. Because the BBC couldn’t bring itself to mention Israel’s war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or apartheid – not even once. And the only mention of genocide was to note that former president Joe Biden rejected the label “Genocide Joe”.
The BBC is an utter embarrassment
Like good propagandists, the BBC has long participated in the whitewashing of Israeli crimes like attacking hospitals and health workers. It has also failed consistently to give a prominent place to key context like the fact that Israel’s prime minister is an internationally wanted war criminal, or that numerous genocide experts have long accused the settler-colonial power of committing genocide in Gaza, the occupied Palestinian territory whose highly concentrated population it had previously isolated with a brutal blockade that turned the strip into “the world’s largest open-air prison”. And the tightening of apartheid structures has met with tumbleweed.
It’s not exactly like there aren’t enough Israeli war crimes to mention. There’s the murder of children around a refugee camp clinic, “the largest child massacre“, or the flattening of the “only specialised cancer hospital”. There’s the use of human shields “at least six times a day” or the pushing of civilians into “a concentration camp” and “letting starvation and desperation do the rest”. And there’s the murder of hundreds of media workers, more than in any other conflict in living memory.
But there’s not even a mention in the BBC article of reports or rulings from international legal institutions or human rights organisations.
They can do journalism. They just prefer to do PR for war criminals.
The BBC certainly can provide background and research when it wants to. For example, the article outlines fairly well the factors that established Israel as the next step in Western colonialism. It mentions the New York Zionist campaign in the subways to “collect money to try to get England to open the doors” to Palestine when Britain was in control of the territory. It quotes a woman saying:
My brother would go on the subway trains, all the doors open on the train and he’d shout ‘open, open, open the doors to Palestine’
The article also quotes historian Rashid Khalidi, whose family British colonialists expelled from Palestine in the 1930s. He said:
On the one side, you had the Zionist movement led by people whom are European and American by origin… The Arabs had nothing similar… [The Arabs] weren’t familiar with the societies, the cultures, the political leaderships of the countries that decided the fate of Palestine. How could you speak to American public opinion if you had no idea what America is like?
The piece makes it clear that experts were warning the US government of the risk of intensifying conflict in the Middle East if Washington backed the creation of Israel. It later explains how the war of 1967 showed the US “the importance and the significance of Israel as a major military and political power in the Middle East”, further strengthening the US-Israeli love-in. And it even mentions how Trump’s proposals for Gaza “upended international norms, flying in the face of international law”.
Just no talk of ‘genocide’. No ‘apartheid’. No ‘war crimes’. And no ‘ethnic cleansing’.
In short, the BBC is perfectly capable of giving context when it wants to. It cannot plead ignorant or incompetent. It simply chooses to avoid mentioning the international condemnation of genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and apartheid. That is a conscious choice, and an utterly despicable one.
Featured image via the Canary
