Britain’s state-funded broadcaster BBC has launched an investigation into six reporters and a freelance contributor working for its Arabic service over allegedly exhibiting anti-Israel bias and cheering attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

The probe is related to the social media activities of the journalists, namely liking and reposting pro-Palestinian content and criticism of Israel. The online conduct of BBC employees is covered by BBC’s ‘impartiality’ rules.

According to British media reports, the offensive posts, all of which have been taken down, included descriptions of Hamas as “freedom fighters” and the group’s surprise attack on Israel as a “morning of hope” for Palestine.

While the staff reporters have not been formally suspended as of yet, only put off-air, the corporation has already parted ways with the freelance contributor, who had only been working with the outlet since early October.

“We are urgently investigating this matter. We take allegations of breaches of our editorial and social media guidelines with the utmost seriousness, and if and when we find breaches, we will act, including taking disciplinary action,” a BBC spokesperson said on Sunday.

The probe comes as the broadcaster faces domestic backlash over its refusal to call Hamas a “terrorist”group – despite London designating them as such – and describing them as “militants” instead. While the BBC argued it has been doing so for the sake of maintaining “impartiality,” multiple fellow British media outlets have attacked the broadcaster over this approach.

Seven former culture secretaries, led by Sajid Javid, penned a letter to the corporation’s director-general, Tim Davie, arguing the approach actually damages the BBC’s impartiality.

“The BBC’s commitment is to impartiality, not indifference. This distinction is now in danger of being blurred. Worryingly, the imprecise language of ‘fighters’ and ‘militants’ also serves to conflate terrorists with the Palestinian people, who suffer more than anyone from Hamas’ actions,” they argued, asking the corporation to “urgently reassess” its approach.

The BBC has also faced online backlash over using very specific language to describe victims of the ongoing escalation between Israel and Hamas, referring to Israeli victims as “killed,” and Palestinian – as those who “died” in massive retaliatory air strikes. Another major British broadcaster, SkyNews, has been caught using the same wording to describe the matter amid the escalation.

https://www.rt.com/news/585097-bbc-israel-hamas-reporters/

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At the United Nations Security Council, the United States, France and the United Kingdom vetoed a Russian draft resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Japan also voted against.

The Russian text called for an “immediate, lasting and fully respected humanitarian ceasefire” and “unhindered” humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip.

U.S. Permanent Representative Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the Russian draft resolution was presented without any consultation and did not mention Hamas. She accused Russia of giving cover to a terrorist group.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article219861.html

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Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

The plan by Israel and America to conquer the residents in the open-air prison called the Gaza strip is to either invade it, which would produce the immediate deaths of the Israeli and American hostages that Hamas captured and brought there; or else Israel and America will extend their blockade of food, water, medicine, and electricity to Gaza, long enough to conquer or kill everyone in that prison.

Their first expectation was that the residents in Gaza’s northern part, which Israel had ordered to evacuate southward, would leave only Hamas fighters in that northern part, so that Israel would simply destroy the entire northern part, and then march southward into the area that would be holding the evacuees, who — without Hamas to fight for them — would either commit suicide or else surrender to Israel.

Those were the Israeli-American policy-options in order to win this war: siege &/or invasion.

However, as things have turned out, many in the northern part followed Hamas’s order to refuse to evacuate. Consequently, the hostages that are being held there will be doomed unless Israel will stop its attack and siege against Gaza.

But the situation for America and Israel is actually even worse than that — much worse.

On October 16th, Jordan Times headlined “Gov’t asserts citizens’ right to express solidarity with Gazans”, and Jordan’s King Abdullah went even farther than that by responding to the millions of Jordanians who were marching in the streets to support the Gazans against Israel: he endorsed their demonstrations. Then, the next day, was even worse news for both Israel and America: that newspaper headlined “King: ‘No refugees in Jordan, no refugees in Egypt; that is a red line’”. He was refusing the requests from both the Israeli and the American regimes for both Jordan and Egypt to take in Gazans so that Israel could take their land. Israel doesn’t want the Gazans; Israel wants only their land. It’s like with the Crimeans and the Donbassers after America’s coup in February 2014 in Ukraine, which installed there a rabidly anti-Russian regime in Ukraine: those very Russian regions of Ukraine rejected the U.S.-imposed Russia-hating regime, which still (to this day) hates the residents in those regions but wants ONLY their land. In that sense, Israel is like Ukraine.

Already on October 16th, the Daily News of Egypt headlined “Egypt opposes collective punishment of civilians in Gaza: Al-Sisi”, and made clear that Al-Sisi was “rejecting collective punishment policies such as siege, starvation, or displacement of civilians.” He was rejecting the policies of Israel and of America, because both siege and invasion would either be survived and the residents of Gaza would then win, or else America and Israel would instead win and would be hated almost universally throughout the Middle East, which then would turn to both China and Russia as being the new leading co-Powers of the world.

The longer that the neoconservative (i.e., U.S. imperial) power will dominate the world, the more blood will be spilt in order to continue it — and, now, lots more of it will be spilt in the Middle East.

The leaders of Egypt and Jordan are not willing to be reviled by their countrymen and perhaps become assassinated in ignominy, so as to continue the U.S. empire over them. They’ve now made clear they won’t.

Ultimately, U.S. President Donald Trump’s arranged deal between the Sauds’ regime and Israel’s regime will either terminate now or else the Saud family will become terminated as the rulers of that regime. The present war in the Middle East will end the decades-long alliance between the Saud family and the U.S. Government.

The statements on October 16th and 17th, by Al-Sisi and King Abdullah, leave no way that the U.S. and Israeli regimes can leave this new Middle Eastern war as being anything but pariah-nations. Even if all of the Gazans end up being slaughtered, the U.S. and Israel will be pariah-nations. If, instead, the U.S. and Israel will lose this war, then the U.S. and Israel will also be pariah-nations. Either way, The American Century, which started on 25 July 1945, will be ended, in ignominy, by this war.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

https://theduran.com/u-s-israel-trapped-now-by-jordan-egypt-backing-hamas/

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6mWeUPj84E

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Israel’s culture of deceit

By Chris Hedges

Israel, which always seeks to blame Palestinians for the atrocities it carries out, is the least trustworthy source about the bombing of the hospital in Gaza.

Israel was founded on lies. The lie that Palestinian land was largely unoccupied. The lie that 750,000 Palestinians fled their homes and villages during their ethnic cleansing by Zionist militias in 1948 because they were told to do so by Arab leaders. The lie that it was Arab armies that started the 1948 war that saw Israel seize 78 percent of historic Palestine. The lie that Israel faced annihilation in 1967, forcing it to invade and occupy the remaining 22 percent of Palestine, as well as land belonging to Egypt and Syria.

Israel is sustained by lies. The lie that Israel wants a just and equitable peace and will support a Palestinian state. The liethat Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that Israel is an “outpost of Western civilisation in a sea of barbarism.” The lie that Israel respects the rule of law and human rights.

Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians are always greeted with lies. I heard them. I recorded them. I published them in my stories for The New York Times when I was the paper’s Middle East Bureau Chief.

I covered war for two decades, including seven years in the Middle East. I learned quite a bit about the size and lethality of explosive devices. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that killed an estimated 500 civilians in the al-Ahli Arab Christian hospital in Gaza. Nothing. If Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) had these kinds of missiles, huge buildings in Israel would be rubble with hundreds of dead. They don’t.

The whistling sound, audible on the video moments before the explosion, appears to comes from the high velocity of a missile. This sound gives it away. No Palestinian rocket makes this noise. And then there is the speed of the missile. Palestinian rockets are slow and lumbering, clearly visible as they arch in the sky and then tumble in free fall towards their targets. They do not strike with precision or travel at close to supersonic speed. They are incapable of killing hundreds of people.

The Israeli military dropped “roof knocking” rockets with no warheads on the hospital in the days leading up to the Oct. 17 strike, the familiar warning given by Israel to evacuate buildings, according to al-Ahli hospital officials. Hospital officials also said they had received calls from Israel saying “we warned you to evacuate twice.” Israel has demanded that all hospitals in northern Gaza be evacuated.

Following the strike on the hospital, Hananya Naftali, a “digital aide” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, postedon X, formerly Twitter: “Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza.” The post was quickly deleted.

Since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Palestinian resistance fighters, which reportedly left some 1,300 Israelis dead, many of them civilians, and saw some 200 kidnapped as hostages and taken to Gaza, Israel has carried out 51 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza that have killed 15 healthcare workers and injured 27, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Out of 35 hospitals in Gaza, four are not functioning due to severe damage and targeting. Only eight of the 22 UNRWA primary healthcare centres are “partially functional,” the WHO says.

The brazenness of Israeli lies stunned those of us who reported from Gaza. It did not matter if we had seen the Israeli attack, including the shooting of unarmed Palestinians. It did not matter how many witnesses we interviewed. It did not matter what photographic and forensic evidence we obtained. Israel lied. Small lies. Big lies. Huge lies. These lies came reflexively and instantly from the Israeli military, Israeli politicians and Israeli media. They were amplified by Israel’s well-oiled propaganda machine and repeated with a cloying sincerity on international news outlets.

Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterise despotic regimes. It does not deform the truth, it inverts it. It paints a picture that is diametrically opposed to reality. Those of us who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our stories — required under the rules of American journalism — although we know they are untrue.

Israel has invented an Orwellian lexicon. Children killed by Israelis become children caught in crossfire. The bombing of residential districts, with dozens of dead and wounded, becomes a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. The destruction of Palestinian homes becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists.

The Big Lie — Große Lüge — feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit — racism among its supporters and terror among its victims. The Big Lies fosters the myth of a clash of civilisations, a war between democracy, decency and honour on one side and Islamic terrorism, barbarism and medievalism on the other.

George Orwell in his novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” called the Big Lie “doublethink”. Doublethink uses “logic against logic” and “repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it.” The Big Lie abolishes nuances, ambiguities and contradictions that can plague conscience. It is designed to create cognitive dissonance. It permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to take comfort — a comfort they are desperately seeking — in their own moral superiority even as they abrogate all morality. It feeds, what Edward Bernays called, the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence.” All effective propaganda, Bernays writes, targets and builds upon these irrational “psychological habits.”

Israeli supporters thirst for these lies. They do not want to know the truth. The truth would force them to examine their racism, self-delusion and complicity in oppression, murder and genocide.

Most importantly, the Big Lie sends an ominous message to the Palestinians. The Big Lie states that Israel will wage a campaign of mass terror and genocide and never take responsibility for its crimes. The Big Lie obliterates the truth. It obliterates the dignity of human thought and human action. It obliterates facts. It obliterates history. It obliterates comprehension. It obliterates hope. It reduces all communication to the language of violence. When oppressors speak to the oppressed exclusively through indiscriminate violence, the oppressed answer through indiscriminate violence.

The cartoonist Joe Sacco and I watched Israeli soldiers taunt and shoot small boys in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza. We interviewed the boys and their parents afterwards in the hospital. In a few cases we attended their funerals. We had their names. We had the dates and locations of the shootings.

Israel’s response was to say that we were not in Gaza. We had made it up.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, Defence Minister and Israeli Defence Force (IDF) spokesperson immediately blamed the killing of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022, on Palestinian gunmen. Israel disseminated footage of a Palestinian fighter they said shot and killed the journalist, who was wearing a flak jacket and helmet marked “PRESS.”

Benny Gantz, who was at the time Defence Minister, stated that “no [Israeli] gunfire was directed at the journalist,” and that the Israeli army had “seen footage of indiscriminate shooting by Palestinian terrorists”.

This lie was peddled until video footage examined by B’Tselem, The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, identified the location of the Palestinian gunman depicted in the video. The video, the human rights organisation found, was taken in a different location from where Shireen was killed.

When Israel is caught lying, as it was with the murder of Shireen, it promises an investigation. But these investigations are a sham. Impartial investigations into the hundreds of killings by soldiers and Jewish settlers of Palestinians are rarely carried out. Perpetrators are almost never brought to trial or held accountable. The pattern of Israeli obfuscation is predictable. So is the collusion of nearly all of the corporate media along with Republican and Democratic politicians. U.S. politicians decried the murder of Shireen and dutifully repeated the old mantra, calling for a “thorough investigation” by the army that carried out the crime.

A few months later, Israel admitted that there was a “high possibility” that an Israeli soldier killed the journalist by accident, but by then the eruption of street protests and rage over the killing of the journalist was over and her murder largely forgotten.

By the time the conclusive proof comes out about the bombing of the hospital, it too will be a distant memory.

There is dramatic footage captured in September 2000 at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip — where I saw a nineteen-year-old boy shot and killed by an Israeli sniper — by France 2 TV, of a father trying to shield his traumatised 12-year-old son, Muhammad al-Durrah, from Israeli gunfire that ultimately killed him.

The killing of the boy resulted in the typical propaganda campaign by Israel. Israeli officials spent years lying about the killing, first blaming the Palestinians for the shooting, later suggesting that the scene was faked, and finally insisting the boy was still alive.

When an Israeli soldier, in 2003, murdered the 23-year-old student and American activist Rachel Corrie, by crushing her to death with a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the illegal demolition of a Palestinian doctor’s home, the Israeli army saidit was an accident for which Corrie was responsible.

The Israeli military has killed “at least” 20 journalists since 2001, with no accountability, according to a 2023 report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. “Immediately after a journalist is killed by security forces, Israeli officials often push out a counter narrative to media reporting,” the CPJ concluded. This includes blaming the deaths on “indiscriminate fire” by Palestinians or attempts to discredit those killed as “terrorists.”

Israel blocks the work of independent human rights organisations into atrocities and war crimes it commits in Gaza and the West Bank. It refuses to cooperate with the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes in the Occupied Territories. It does not cooperate with the U.N. Human Rights Council and prohibits the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, from entering the country. Israel revoked the work permit for Omar Shakir, the Director of Human Rights Watch (Israel and Palestine), in 2018 and expelled him. In May 2018, Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy published a report calling on the European Union and European states to halt their direct and indirect financial support and funding to Palestinian and international human rights organisations that “have ties to terror and promote boycotts against Israel.”

After the bombing of the hospital, Israel first released a video that purported to show Palestinian Islamic Jihad rockets which struck the hospital. The Israelis hastily removed the video when journalists noticed that time stamps showed the images were taken 40 minutes after the strike on the hospital.

Israeli propagandists — aware that Palestinian rockets have little explosive power — then claimed that Hamas stored munitions under the hospital. This caused the massive explosion, they said. But if this was true, it would mean there would be a secondary explosion. There was none. And now Israel has released what they say is a recording of two Hamas militants discussing the missile strike on the hospital. The militants ask each other, in a self-incriminating conversation that is too ridiculous to believe, if Hamas or PIJ carried out the strike. Please. How was Israel completely in the dark about an incursion by thousands of armed Palestinian militants from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7 and able to capture this incriminating conversation by two supposed militants?

“Israel has a whole unit of ‘mistaravim’, Israeli Jewish undercover agents trained to pose as Palestinians and secretly operate among Palestinians,” the reporter Jonathan Cook writes. “Israel produced a highly popular TV series about such people in Gaza called Fauda. You have to be beyond credulous to think that Israel couldn’t, and wouldn’t, rig up a call like this to fool us, just as it regularly fools Palestinians in Gaza.”

Israel has also long targeted medical facilities, ambulances and medics, as Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein points out. It bombed a Palestinian children’s hospital during the 1982 war in Lebanon, killing 60 people. It also carried out missile strikes on clearly marked Lebanese ambulances during the 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon. It damaged or destroyed 29 ambulances and almost half of Gaza’s health facilities, including 15 hospitals, during the 2008-2009 assault on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. It routinely prohibited wounded Palestinians from being picked up by ambulances during this operation, often leaving them to die. During Operation Protective Edge, the 51-day assault on Gaza in 2014, Israel destroyed or damaged 17 hospitals and 56 primary healthcare centers and damaged or destroyed 45 ambulances.

You can see my interview, released today, with Professor Finkelstein about Gaza and Israel here.

Amnesty International, which investigated the Israeli attacks on three of these hospitals in 2014, dismissed the “evidence” for the attacks offered by Israel as false. “The image tweeted by the Israeli military does not match satellite images of the al-Wafa hospital and appears to depict a different location,” the report read.

Expose Israeli lies and you are attacked by Israel and its supporters as an anti-Semite and apologist for terrorists. You are banished from mainstream media. You are denied forums to speak about the issue and, as has happened to me, disinvited from university events.

It is an old game, one I have played as a reporter many, many times. I bear the scars of the lies spewed out by Israel and its lobby. Meanwhile, Israel continues its butchery, endorsed and even lauded by Western political leaders, including Joe Biden, who accompany the torrent of lies from Israel like a Wagnerian chorus.

First published in The Chris Hedges Report October 19, 2023

https://johnmenadue.com/israels-culture-of-deceit/

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiRPpf-ot4I

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