INTRODUCTION: THIS IS THE BBC

‘People around the world’ included me; and my father. In those days there was such a thing as ‘BBC English’: establishment Oxbridge accents of the upper-class variety, English heritage pronunciations, which is still recognised standard for broadcasting in English in some corners of the world. My father would urge us to speak BBC English, even though he never could. Neither could I. Having grown up in Hackney, I spoke a mixture of Pakistani and cockney with a deliberate dose of gibberish reminiscent of Rab C Nesbitt. My days had a fixed routine. Reading, researching, or writing till 18.55 and then rushing down from the attic, where I did most of my work, to watch the Channel 4 News. Then dinner, followed by BBC Ten O’clock News. The day ended with Newsnight. Then, as now, I considered Channel 4 News to be the best programme on terrestrial television, although the departure of Jon Snow has brought its critical level down a couple of notches. Newsnight has now degenerated to a superannuated chinwag. BBC News: well that’s what we are here to discuss.

The BBC, my father used to say, always uses the correct word for every occasion. Solemn words for solemn occasions. Objective words for controversial issues. Given that words are the medium though which the news is conveyed, reporting truth required the use of truthful words. However, as I soon learned, words – and the news which are attached to them – can be easily weaponised.

Consider sabzi. The other half of the biryani that I occasionally delivered to Mrs Robertson.

I have eaten it all my life. It was a staple of my mother’s cooking as it was of my late wife’s cuisine. In Urdu, Farsi, and Hindi, languages of a couple of billion people, sabzi is vegetables. So a book called Sabzi would be nothing more than a tome on vegetarian cooking; and a restaurant called ‘Sabzi’ would be catering mostly to vegetarians. But what if the owner of a chain of delis, a member of the general set ‘people’, called Kate Attlee, claimed that sabzi was her trademark, and the family cookbook, Sabzi, by Yasmin Khan, was infringing her trademark? She had two supporters on her side: British law, which allows common words to be trademarked; and the Duchy of Cornwall, the private estate of Prince William, which stood up to defend Attlee, whose husband is the great nephew of the even greater former Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. Of course, the struggle over sabzi went online where both sides threw accusations and abuse at each other. Attlee was accused of weaponising cultural identity; Khan of stealing her brand. Bloomsbury, the publishers of Sabzi, who also happen to be one of my publishers, rejected any notion that any trademark was infringed. Stalemate. However, I am glad to report, the matter was resolved amicably. Attlee withdrew her claim on sabzi, and even wished Khan the very best for her Sabzi.

What about ‘people’? Both Attlee and Khan are people. In common parlance, people are human beings, and include females as well as males. So, what should we make of ‘pregnant people’? When the words appeared on the autocue, the BBC newsreader, Martine Croxall, was taken aback. She was telling people to be careful during a heat wave. She raised an eyebrow, grimaced, and offered an alternative: women. Pregnant women! That upset the powerful people at the BBC. So she was disciplined. Allegedly, she had violated another word that the Corporation utters ad infinitum: impartiality.

‘Impartiality’, we are told, ‘is fundamental to the BBC’s purpose and is enshrined in the BBC’s charter’. The BBC generously offers a definition: ‘It means not favouring one side over another and reflecting all relevant sides of the debate. It means not taking sides, reflecting all relevant strands of public debate and challenging them with consistent rigour’.

Forgive me if I raise more than an eyebrow here!

The Gaza genocide is the defining event of the twenty-first century; just as the Holocaust was for the twentieth century. The Holocaust could not happen without the technology and administrative capability of modernity, as the noted sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has pointed out. The Gaza genocide is a product of our postnormal times, where truth has evaporated and lives are played out on social media. It was live streamed on digital network platforms and media outlets like Al-Jazeera and Al Araby for all the world to witness. So it is an ideal place to see just how ‘impartial’ the BBC is.

Let’s begin with words. For the BBC, Israeli casualties are ‘massacres’ and Palestinian casualties, if they are actually reported, are just ordinary ‘deaths’. Israel targets ‘critical sites’, while it is handing out collective punishment and grossly violating human rights for all to witness on their mobile phones. Israelis captured by Hamas are ‘hostages’ but Palestinian detainees, including children held without charge and mercilessly tortured, are ‘prisoners’.

When Israel escalates its killings in Gaza, the BBC tells you they are ‘pre- emptive strikes’, attacks are ‘targets’, when a threat is made it is simply a ‘warning’, and it is all carried out in the name of ‘Israel’s right to self- defence’ – repeated ad nauseam. It does not occur to the great minds at the BBC – albeit I am not sure if there are any – that it is the occupied who need defending, not the occupiers who are mercilessly butchering them.

Moreover, Israeli deaths are more significant than those of the Palestinians, because the BBC clearly sees them as lesser ‘people’. Indeed, people don’t die in Gaza, they die in ‘Hamas controlled Gaza’! While interviewing a volunteer medical doctor with Medical Aid for Palestinians, who had just returned from Gaza, about the harrowing conditions in hospital, the cartoonish Croxall asked her about Dr Alaa, a paediatric emergency doctor at Nasser Hospital. While Alaa was treating patients at the hospital, her home was bombed killing nine of her children, their bodies charred and dismembered beyond recognition. Croxall describes this horror simply as ‘children who died’, as though they died mysteriously and were not brutally murdered by the IDF. In one video that shows Israeli soldiers throwing Palestinians they had murdered from the roof of a building, Croxall suggested that maybe they jumped. In other words, the dead, murdered by the Israelis, got up, went inside the building, climbed a few floors to the roof, and then threw themselves to the ground. Bravo BBC journalism!

The statistics of death and destruction coming from Gaza are cited with a warning that they are provided by the ‘Hamas run health ministry’ to cast doubt on their accuracy, despite the fact that they have proved to be consistently more accurate than the constant stream of lies – widely recognised as such – peddled by Israel. But how about balancing that, since the BBC is very concerned about ‘balance’ and ‘impartiality’, with ‘according to the neo-fascist regime in Tel Aviv’? That, of course, would require admission that the Israeli ‘regime’ – a word that only applies in western journalism to non-western governments because only they can be authoritarian and nasty – has gone totally fascist. But words uttered by Israeli politicians that are clearly of fascistic nature never appear on the BBC. Say from the likes of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Security Minister, who openly admires mass murderer Baruch Goldstein and is a follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who the previous Israeli government (I am being generous) suggested was further right of Attila the Hun. Or, Bezalel Smotrich, former Minister of Finance, who denies the very existence of Palestine and its people, and says ‘international law does not apply to Jews’. The BBC even neglected to mention the Biblical Amalek reference uttered so clearly by Benjamin Netanyahu! The Amalek were people the Jews were – allegedly, is this the right word to use here? – instructed by God to wipe from the face of the earth. Netanyahu’s genocidal statement was targeted at Israeli soldiers from extremist communities who read the Bible as literal truth. It was permission to commit genocide.

Genocide is a word the BBC hates most. Its newsreaders have systematically shut down the mention of the word by interviewees hundreds of times. Sometime even taking them off the air at the very mention of the word. In an interview with a Palestinian journalist, Croxall – the very same; she is quite shameless – asked: ‘you just used the word genocide?...Are you really using that word?’ In another interview, she says I have to say that ‘Israel denies that (ie genocide), they say they were in pursuit of terrorists’. Whenever the dreaded word is mentioned, the newsreaders suggest it is not widely accepted.

Yes: it is not accepted by the US administration, and the UK, France, and Germany, the chief allies of Israel. But it is universally accepted by rest of the ‘people around the world’. And since, ‘BBC World’ is broadcasting to the world, it should, at the very least acknowledge what the rest of the world is openly, permanently, constantly, loudly, describing as genocide in Gaza. That includes the UN and its agencies. And it includes International Association of Genocide Scholars, Physicians for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation for Human Rights, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, and B’Tselem, Israel’s own human rights organisation. On the other side, the humanitarian organisations that are openly and deafeningly saying that Israel is not committing genocide: none, zilch, zero, nada! Oh Heck! Even the Israelis are saying they are committing genocide. Read Haaretz. OK, that’s too left wing. Listen to the Minister of Social Equality, who said: ‘I am personally proud of the holocaust of Gaza, and that eighty years from now, they will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did’. Or the debates in the Knesset where the genocide is discussed openly. One proposal is to kill everyone in Gaza by ‘destroying all food, water and power sources’, and then shooting them. They are willing to be kind to those who carry white flags; they will only suffer ethnic cleansing. (However, the last time Israeli soldiers came across people carrying white flags, it was a group of hostages escaping from Hamas. Guess what? They were – what’s the right word – murdered – anyway). Or watch the volley of videos where Israeli pop singers, rabbis, children, and citizens are gleefully singing, dancing, announcing, that ‘every child in Gaza is an enemy, we should target their offspring’, ‘may their village burn’, or enumerating the genocidal rights of the ‘chosen race’. You don’t even have to go that far: turn to Channel 4 News, where Israeli spokesman, the repulsive British subject David Mencer, will no doubt be interviewed yet again by Matt Frei. In one interview, Frei asked Mercer if he feels ‘shame’ Israel is accused of genocide. Mercer replied: ‘I will tell you how I feel. I feel pride’.

If you have been following the BBC, you may come to the conclusion that the horrors visited on Gaza are somehow descending from the sky and no one is really responsible for them. ‘The lonely death of Gaza man from Downs Syndrome’ suggests he died naturally and was not murdered by Israeli soldiers. Or, ‘West Bank violence: My child’s destiny is to get killed’ suggests that children in Gaza are destined to die by some misfortune – not be brutally murdered by a genocidal regime. ‘Gaza destruction risks lost generation of children says, UN official’, not really; Israel’s destruction of Gaza risks lost generation of children, says UN official’. By deliberately leaving out ‘Israel’, the BBC attempts to sanitise Israeli crimes.

The BBC verifies and fact-checks to confirm the truth of videos and fake news, including Russian claims in its war with Ukraine. Yet, it remained conspicuously silent in checking Israeli claims. Elsewhere, an investigation found that the Israeli army used fake 3D animations taken from video games, online assets, content creators, and a Scottish museum to claim Hamas was hiding under Gaza’s hospitals. But the BBC backed Israeli claims without subjecting it the standard scrutiny of its Verify department.

Apart from impartiality, there is another word in the BBC lexicon that is frequently mentioned: context. Indeed, it even has an hour-long show on its news channel called ‘Context’, where mostly the American and British worldview is promoted. The BBC guidelines emphasise that context is crucial for the different aspect of a complex story to be truly appreciated. ‘When considering whether content may cause harm or offence, the context in which the material will be published or broadcast should be taken into account’, it declares.

To begin with, the context demands that the Jewish community is represented in all its complex diversity. As far as the BBC is concerned, the only Jews in the world are Netanyahu supporting Zionists. There are, of course, Zionists, with Israel in their veins, who do not support the current regime and are appalled by its actions. There are liberal, left-wing Zionists who do not believe in the notion of a ‘Jewish state’. (Just as there are countless Muslims who reject the idea of an ‘Islamic state’). And then there are Jews who are not Zionists. And the world is full of them. Did the BBC report on the massive anti-Zionist, anti-Israeli demonstrations by Jews in New York. No! Did the BBC cover that ultra-orthodox Jews, who refuse to join the IDF, have been systematically reviled, beaten up, and denigrated. Nope. Has the BBC ever had anyone on its programmes from Jewish Voice, or Voice of Rabbis (who describe themselves as ‘Jews United Against Zionism’), or any leader of the Sephardic Jewish community? Or anyone from the Bukharian Jewish community, the oldest diaspora in the world! Never!

Would it not be the right, let us say the ‘impartial’, thing to do, to provide the broader context of what Israel has been doing for the past seventy years. By all means describe Hamas as terrorists, if that is your position, but do point out that the founders of Israel were the ones who first introduced terrorism in the region. I am referring to the Stern gang and others of similar ilk, who started their terror campaign by murdering British soldiers. Since the BBC has repeatedly focused on the Hamas massacre on 7 October 2023, how about giving some context to Zionist and Israeli massacres? We can start with a string of massacres in Haifa, Jerusalem, Balad al-Sheikh in 1937–1938 and move on to the number of massacres committed in 1947–1948, and then to the Khan Yunus massacre of 1956, the Jerusalem massacre of 1967, the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982, the Al-Aqasa massacre of 1990, the Jenin refugee camp massacre of 2022, to one massacre after another in Gaza: 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, 2018–2019, 2021, arriving at the genocide that the BBC can’t see.

Oh, that’s too far in and too much of history. So how about providing context for the massacre that BBC does recognise: the one on 7/10. It just so happened, somewhat like Kipling stories, that the highly respected journalist, Peter Oborne, author of Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza, came face to face with a certain Richard Burgess, a rather dim bloke said to be BBC’s executive news editor. They were at a parliamentary meeting held at the launch of BBC on Gaza-Israel: One Story, Double Standard, a report by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM). Originally established by the Muslim Council of Britain, CfMM is now independent; and have published reports that are painstakingly and extensively researched, including an earlier report: Media Bias: Gaza 2023–24. It also just so happened that the brilliant British journalist, Jonathan Cook, columnist for The National, Abu Dhabi, and Middle East Eye, was there to record the encounter between Oborne and Burgess.

Oborne, writes Cook, ‘makes a series of important points that illustrate why the BBC’s slanted, Israel-friendly news agenda amounts to genocide denial, and means executives like Burgess are directly complicit in Israeli war crimes’. The BBC never mentioned the Hannibal directive, invoked on 7 October and widely reported in the Israeli press, that permitted the IDF to kill soldiers and citizens to prevent them from being taken hostage by Hamas. In other words, the IDF murdered its own people by Apache helicopter while blaming Hamas for the killing. The BBC, Oborne went to say, ‘never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine, the basis of its “mowing the lawn” approach to Gaza over the past two decades, in which the Israeli military has intermittently destroyed large swaths of the tiny enclave. The official aim has been to push the population, in the words of Israeli generals, back to the “Stone Age”. The assumption is that, forced into survival mode, Palestinians will not have the energy or will to resist their brutal and illegal subjugation by Israel and that it will be easier for Israel to ethnically cleanse them from their homeland’. The BBC’s refusal to acknowledge these doctrines ‘leaves audiences gravely misinformed about Israel’s historical abuses of Gaza, and deprived of context to interpret the campaign of destruction by Israel over the past 20 months’. Moreover, the BBC has disregarded ‘Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza. A greater number have been killed by Israel in its war on the tiny enclave than the total number of journalists killed in all other major conflicts of the past 160 years combined’.

Cook describes a revealing exchange between Declassified journalist Hamza Yusuf and Burgess. Yusuf asks Burgess why the BBC is not covering the story of British spy planes operating over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus. Burgess replies: ‘I don’t think we should overplay the UK’s contribution to what’s happening in Israel’. Cook concludes:

So the British state broadcaster has decided that its duty is not to investigate the nature of British state assistance to Israel in Gaza, even though most experts agree what Israel is doing there amounts to genocide. Burgess thinks scrutiny of British state complicity would be ‘overplaying’ British collusion, even though the BBC has not actually investigated the extent or nature of that collusion to have reached a conclusion. This is the very antithesis of what journalism is there to do: monitor the centres of power, not exonerate such power-centres before they have even been scrutinised.

So, to paraphrase the well-known adage of journalism (attributed to Jeremy Paxman but originally uttered by Times journalist Louis Heren), why are the lying bastards at the BBC lying to us? Because that’s what the BBC has always done when it comes to Palestine. As the late, great John Pilger, who knew a thing or two about journalism, noted, ‘the BBC is, and has long been, the most refined propaganda service in the world’. But the refinement has now faded; BBC propaganda is now crude, lies are astonishingly obvious, the cognitive bias so bent and so visible that it can be legitimately used to put the Corporation in a strait jacket.

There are reports and there are reports. The BBC has turned a blind eye to all the reports coming from the various off shoots of the UN. A number of reports by Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, the Italian lawyer, Francesca Albanese, have been given the cold shoulder. The absence of one particular report, ‘Gaza Genocide: a collective crime’, which alleged that both UK and its Prime Minister were complicit in genocide surely deserved a headline. But the BBC did not think it newsworthy. The report states:

The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel. Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the Palestinians, this live-streamed atrocity has been facilitated through Third States’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection and, in some cases, active participation. It has exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest. The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met and justice is upheld.

The BBC paid no attention to the meticulously documented reports of CfMM. A ‘Panorama’ documentary, commissioned by the BBC itself, that looked at the work of doctors under Israeli bombardment, and examined their detention and killing, was shelved because the BBC feared it would undermine its confirmed bias for Israeli propaganda. It was later shown on Channel 4 which saw no breach of any particular guidelines, even though its mandate is not too far from that of the BBC. It pulled another documentary on Gaza from its iPlayer; and ignored its own ‘Report of the Editorial Review into “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone”’ by Peter Johnston, Director of Editorial Complaints and Reviews. The documentary features fourteen-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri chronicling daily life in Gaza. The BBC acted after it was informed that Abdullah’s father, Ayman Al-Yazouri, holds the position of deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s Hamas-run government. This was seen as breach of impartiality. But Johnston’s detailed thirty-page report emphatically stated: ‘I do not consider that anything in the Narrator’s scripted contribution to the Programme breached the BBC’s standards on due impartiality. I have also not seen or heard any evidence to support a suggestion that the Narrator’s father or family influenced the content of the Programme in any way’. The BBC also ignored an Open Letter in support of the documentary from 450 film and television professionals, actors, journalists, and broadcasters, who know something about making documentaries, including the celebrated directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. The letter defended the Gaza documentary as ‘an essential piece of journalism, offering an all-too-rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinian children living in unimaginable circumstances’, pointed out that Ayman Al-Yazouri was little more than a civil servant tasked with food production, and ‘assumptions about Palestinians in administrative positions are rooted in “racist tropes.”’. That too was ignored. Also ignored was the June 2025 letter of 400 ‘talents’, to use a BBC term, which included Jewish actor Miriam Margolyes and the comedian Alexei Sayle, historian William Dalrymple, and 111 BBC journalists. The letter claimed that ‘BBC is not reporting “without fear or favour” when it comes to Israel”. The BBC journalists express concern ‘over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine’. The BBC journalists declare:

We, the undersigned BBC staff, freelancers and industry figures are extremely concerned that the BBC’s reporting on Israel and Palestine continues to fall short of the standards our audiences expect. We call on the BBC to do better for our audiences and recommit to our values of impartiality, honesty and reporting without fear or favour...For many of us, our efforts have been frustrated by opaque decisions made at senior levels of the BBC without discussion or explanation. Our failures impact audiences...As an organisation we have not offered any significant analysis of the UK government’s involvement in the war on Palestinians. We have failed to report on weapons sales or their legal implications...In some instances staff have been accused of having an agenda because they have posted news articles critical of the Israeli government on their social media.

A report – rather, a ‘memo’ or maybe even a ‘letter’ – did receive serious attention from the BBC. It was written by a corporate lobbyist called Michael Prescott said to be an ‘independent advisor’ to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Board for three years until June 2025. He acquired this appointment largely due to the courtesy of his friend Robbie Gibb, a ‘proper Thatcherite conservative’, spin doctor for Theresa May, and former owner of Jewish Chronicle, who was appointed to the BBC Board of Trustees by the veracious Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Under his ownership the JC (which I used to read avidly during the 1980s and 1990s and learned a great deal), became so rabidly pro-Israel, that five of its leading columnists, including Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian and my former colleague, David Aaronovitch, denounced the coverage and left. Freedland declared, ‘too often, the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic’.

The report laid four charges against the BBC. It suggested that the BBC had an anti-Trump bias. Evidence: a Panorama programme ‘spliced’ together two segments of his famous 6 January 2021 speech and thus made it look like he encouraged the violence that followed. It attacked the BBCs Arabic Service arguing that it had selectively covered stories critical of Israel. The report also claimed that the BBC had misrepresented the number of Palestinian women and children killed by the IDF and inaccurately portrayed the likelihood of children facing starvation under Israel’s aid blockade. Furthermore, the BBC was biased in favour of transgender issues, and produced oversimplified and distorted narratives about British colonialism, slavery, and their legacy.

It was leaked to the unhinged mega-right wing Daily Telegraph – which is dominated by JC folks, which now reads like the house rag of the IDF. It pursued the story relentlessly – until the enforced resignation of the Director General, Tim Davie, and head of news, Deborah Turness, in November 2025. There is nothing in this story that says it is anything but partial. The June letter from the BBC journalists had already highlighted political interference by Gibb. It expressed disquiet at the ‘inconsistent manner in which guidance is applied draws into focus the role of Gibb, on the BBC Board and BBC’s editorial standards committee’; and expressed concern ‘that an individual with close ties to the Jewish Chronicle ... has a say in the BBC’s editorial decisions in any capacity, including the decision not to broadcast ‘Gaza: Medics Under Fire’. This was clearly a ‘conflict of interest’, which ‘highlights a double standard for BBC content makers who have themselves experienced censorship in the name of “impartiality”’.

What about the Prescott memo itself? Compared to the 185-page detailed data-filled CfMM report, the report is pathetic. In his analysis for the Observer, David Aaronovitch dismisses it as half-baked, biased, selective, and unworthy of attention: it ‘flunks the impartiality test’. Aaronovitch wonders ‘how the preoccupations and prejudices of “independent advisors” came to play such a major role in guiding editorial discussion’.

The answer is simple: the BBC bends to power, and always favours the establishment. It has always done so. Even the saintly Lord Reith, the first Director General of the BBC credited with establishing the principles of public broadcasting and the ‘Reithian principle’ of ‘political neutrality’, was not all that impartial. According to Mark Damazer, former controller of BBC Radio 4, he ‘hemmed and hawed before finally allowing Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, who was bitterly opposed to Britian’s involvement in the war, to address the nation. The Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, was livid and claimed that the BBC had – what else – acted against “the national interest”’. ‘The truth’, Damazer asserts, ‘was, very, very, often not told’.

The truth was defiantly not told during the Iraq war. And it has been the case ever since I started watching BBC news on a daily basis – way back in the 1980s. I not only saw but experienced, as I was personally involved, how the BBC manipulated and demonised Muslims during the Rushdie affair – who got on Newsnight and who did not. I witnessed how the BBC was systematically economical with the truth during the Iraq invasion. In 2004, Tim Llewellyn began his chapter for Bad News From Israel, with the words:

Watching a peculiarly crass, inaccurate and condescending programme about the endangered historical sites of ‘Israel’ – that is to say, the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories – on BBC2 in early June 2003, I determined to try to work out, as a former BBC Middle East correspondent, why the Corporation has in the past two and a half years been failing to report fairly the most central and lasting reason for the troubles of the region: the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom.

Since the beginning of the Aqsa Uprising, or Second Intifada, in September 2000 there have been countless examples throughout the BBC’s news broadcasts, discussion programmes, features, documentaries and even online of this muddying of the clear waters of the Israel-Palestine crisis.

Way back in 2004, Bad News from Israel showed that British television news coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lacked historical context, and unfairly favoured the Israeli perspective. Reporters relied heavily on and often cited Israeli official sources while presenting Palestinian positions as ‘claims’ rather than ‘statements’. The book cites many examples where false claims by Isreal are presented as fact. The end result: reinforcement of the power dynamic. In other words, British television news prostrated in front of the powerful Israeli lobby and its supporters in the establishment. We can safely say that nothing much has changed. Except, as More Bad News from Israel revealed bias had increased by 2007. By now, in 2025, it has become blatant and all encompassing.

Just how barefaced the BBC has become is well expressed by Karishma Patel, a former BBC journalist and newsreader, who resigned because of her disgust at the Corporation’s coverage of Gaza. She saw ‘a shocking level of editorial inconsistency’ with journalists ‘actively choosing not to follow evidence’ of Israeli war crimes ‘out of fear’ of powerful executives and presenters. ‘It’s important’, she writes, the public understands how far editorial policy can be silently shaped by even the possibility of anger from certain groups, foreign governments, our own government, mega- corporations – any powerful actor’

Perhaps no one illustrates the degeneration of BBC journalism more than Jeremy Bowen, former BBC Middle East editor who is now dubbed ‘International Editor’. Sometime in May 2025, I caught him interviewing Philippe Lazzarini, head of United Nations refugee agency UNRWA. He introduced the highly respected Lazzarini as someone ‘Israel says he is a liar, and that his organisation has been infiltrated by Hamas’. Then, he goes on to justify why Lazzarini is being interviewed. ‘But I felt it was important to talk to him for a number of reasons. First off, the British government deals with him, and funds his organisation. Which is the largest dealing with Palestinian refugees. They know a lot of what is going on, so therefore I think it is important to speak to people like him’. These are not just offensive and uncouth words coming out of the mouth of a BBC journalist, but totally unforgivable. Would Bowen, who looks increasingly constipated during his links to camera, introduce Netanyahu, as ‘Prime Minister wanted by International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity’, or ‘the leader of the fascist regime in Israel’? Being interviewed because he knows a lot about using starvation as a method of warfare, mass murder, and other inhuman acts? Bowen refuses to call ethnic cleansing by its name, never fails to describe Hamas as terrorists, and was quite happy to perpetuate the myth that numerous hospitals in Gaza are Hamas ‘command and control centres’ – thus, indirectly justifying the bombing of medical facilities by Israeli forces. Yet, had Bowen bothered to go out of his luxurious hotel in Jerusalem and looked at Israeli society he would have seen the evidence of ethnic cleansing with his own eyes, settlers beating up and stealing from Palestinian homes, dozens of prominent Israeli rabbis giving the IDF religious approval to bomb Al Shifa Hospital, citizens uttering inhuman xenophobic chants. Israeli people have been fairly open about their position on Palestine and Gaza. Bowen only had to stop a few people in the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem and they would have told him that ethnic cleansing is justified and that Palestinians are not truly ‘people’. As one Tel-Aviv school principal described what they tell their pupils: ‘Arabs are inferior to us. That’s why we kick Palestinians and slap them. We train dogs so they will bite them strongly and tightly. That’s why we shoot them. They’re nothing’. He would have bumped into a posse of young men shouting, ‘We will tear their mothers apart. We will fuck them in the arse’. Had he bothered to talk to Israeli soldiers they would have openly admitted, on the record, that they raped Palestinian persons (men, women, little children), they used them as human shields, and shot and killed unarmed civilians whenever and wherever they wished. He could have cornered an Israeli prison guard who would openly confess they torture, starve, amputate, and routinely kill Palestinian prisoners; and admit that their prisons are death camps, ‘grave yards’, as they call them. Heck, if he had just switched the television on in his hotel room, he could have witnessed ethnic cleansing and genocidal talk twenty-four hours a day! He could have watched the drama of the Israelis cheering soldiers who gang-raped and filmed the horror unfold before his eyes. The video of the rape was leaked by the Military Advocate General, Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi. In court, the soldiers claimed they gang-raped Palestinians prisoners ‘out of duty to protect Israel’; and talking about the trauma they suffered! He could have switched on to Al-Jazeera where live coverage of genocide and ethnic cleansing was broadcast – day after day. Including a report on a South Africa-bound plane carrying an Israeli-Estonian national, the man behind the dubious front company ‘Al-Majd Europe’, involved in deportation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Back in snow clad Britain, he should see the ITV documentary, ‘Breaking Ranks’, in which over a dozen soldiers relate how they were ordered to fire on unarmed Palestinians, use teenagers as human shields, and level districts which presented no threat, and ignore international law. But Bowen, like many other BBC journalists, has been blind to the truth, has whitewashed Israeli lies and privileged genocidal narrative, insulted and suppressed Palestinian voices, and largely ignored the suffering of the Palestinians.

I focus on the BBC because it is the oldest public service broadcaster. If the BBC has sunk to such low depths, what can one say about other western media institutions?

A good indication of where we stand with western media in general is provide by the notorious Hamas ‘rape’ and ‘beheaded babies’ story that was spread worldwide. It first emerged on the Israeli news channel i24NEWS. Journalist Nicole Zedek claimed that ‘40 babies/children were beheaded at the kibbutz Kfar Aza’. On 10 October 2023, Britain’s Daily Mail carried the headline on its website: ‘Hamas cut the throats of babies’. The front page the following day declared: ‘This was a Holocaust pure and simple’. On the same day, the front page of The Times, London, announced: ‘Hamas “cut the throat of babies” in massacre’. The following day, President Joe Biden, on a Fox News alert, stated that he had seen evidence of beheadings. When questioned by Al-Jazeera reporters, a White House spokesperson said that ‘comments were based on news reports and claims by Israeli officials’.

But the story that really spread the ‘beheaded babies’ and rape allegations worldwide appeared on 28 December 2023 in The New York Times. Under the heading, ‘How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7’, described as an ‘investigation’, it carried the by-lines: Jeffrey Gittleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella. The debunking of the story began within a few weeks when Declassified UK pointed out reports of Hamas attack atrocities were not corroborated with evidence: ‘Beheaded babies’ – how UK media reported Israel’s fake news as fact’. DCUK showed that exact words of the original channel i24NEWS were repeated by Biden, IDF spokespersons, and Benjamin Nathanyahu on CNN. But neither French journalists or even Israeli journalists on the ground had seen any evidence of beheaded babies or rape.

A more detailed debunking on 28 February 2028 by Intercept,‘Between the Hammer and theAnvil:The Story Behind the NewYorkTimes October 7 Exposé’, completely debunked the story. While Gittleman had some journalistic credentials, Schwartz, it turned out, had no reporting experience, and was recruited just three weeks before the piece was published. She is a filmmaker who worked for Israeli Airforce intelligence. She liked anti-Palestine social media posts, and described Palestinians in inhuman terms. On one post, she declared:‘those in front of us are human animals who do not hesitate to violate minimal rules’. Sella turned out to be a nephew of her partner.The report relied on the Israeli community emergency response alliance ZAKA, not renowned for accurate testimony, serving as witness. In short, it was ‘atrocity propaganda’. Even after further investigation by the superb Israeli paper, Haaretz, accused Zaka personnel of negligence and spreading misinformation in their testimonies about 7 October, the NYT stood by the story: ‘We remain confident in the accuracy of our reporting and stand by the team’s investigation’.

So, a group of fifty American professors of journalism penned an open letter to NYT demanding that a group of experts investigate the 28

December report.The NYT podcast,‘The Daily’, based on the report had to be cancelled due to the newspapers own reporters raising objection. The beheaded babies fantasy was further discredited by Le Monde – ‘40 beheaded babies: Deconstructing the rumour at the heart of the information battle between Israel and Hamas’. Le Monde’s correspondent in Jerusalem, Samuel Forey’, actually went to the Kfar Aza on 10 October, just three days after the Hamas attack. Le Monde found no credible evidence for claims that ‘dozens of babies beheaded’ at kibbutz Kfar Aza and pointed out that the youngest recorded victim there was fourteen years old.Yet, the allegations of mass rape and beheaded babies continue.

What does the maladaptive daydreaming about beheaded babies tell us? It tells us that the major western media institutions bend to the will of power. Mainstream media journalists, like CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash manufacture consent to justify, not just the destruction of Gaza, but the paranoia of those in power. Note how easily the likes of ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Jour nal, and The New York Times bent the knee to Tr ump. There is not muc h to say about the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph, or Die Welt or Bild. Let us not dwell on Fox News or GB News or the foaming-in the-mouth with semi-fascist gibberish of the Spectator either. For the so-called legacy media, it is the propaganda, viewpoint and experience of Israel that matters. Nothing else. Vide the systematic demonisation of Zohran Mamdani, the dazzling Mayor of NewYork, by the mainstream US media, analysed by Khuda Bushq in his review of Equality Labs report, Tracing the Online Hate Against Zohran Mamdani.When Mamdani metTrump, the BBC reported the meeting but omitted – or did the BBC ‘splice’ – the quote where he said: ‘I have spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide and I’ve spoken about our government funding it’.Which most news hounds will consider to be a crucial bit of the story.

However, all this is hardly news. It has always been just so.

But the mainstream media in the non-western world is just as mediocre and becoming increasingly irrelevant. As Muhammad Saad reports, the dominant news channels in Pakistan perpetually feed a frenzy of political rivalry and cannot even be bothered to report the floods that have devastated large swathes of the country. In India, the veteran journalist Shiv Visvanathan laments, the mainstream media has sold its soul to the ruling BJP party. Much of Indian television is crowded with multiple talking heads shouting across each other.The same can be said about the main channels and newspapers throughout the South.

This does not mean that good journalism is dead. In England, there is the Guardian (which I started reading during my student days and still read every day), New Statesman, and Prospect magazine. Across the border in Scotland, there are the Herald and the truly magnificent The National. There are journalists like Turkey’s Hrant Dink, whose life and work are so inspiringly described by Boyd Tonkin, who worked for ‘warm and friendly dialogue among equals’. There are journalists devoted to truth, such as Leopold Weiss (later to be known as Muhammad Asad), who travelled to Palestine in 1922 and reported for Frankfurter Zeitung.Weiss, writes Josef Linnhoff,‘gives us a firsthand account of life in Palestine in the years after the Balfour Declaration, at a time of heightened tension, twenty-five years before the creation of the State of Israel’ and ‘presents the Palestinians as the authentic, rightful inhabitants of the land’. Journalists of this calibre have always been around and always will be.

But increasingly they are not found in the legacy media; and if there, they will soon be departing to more independent abodes. Or be asked to leave as asking probing questions is simply not the done thing by legacy media. The Italian journalist, Gabriele Nunziati, politely asked on 13 October, the European Commission’s chief spokesperson a simple but relevant question:‘You’ve been repeating several times that Russia should pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine. Do you believe that Israel should pay for the reconstruction of Gaza since they have destroyed almost all its civilian infrastructure?’.Two weeks later, on 27 October, he was sacked by his agency, Nova. Their spokesperson acknowledged that the question was ‘technically correct’. But you don’t ask such questions of Israel. It was being attacked for asking probing questions that led the brilliant Mishal Husain to leave the BBC (Bowen should become her pupil and learn how to respectfully ask relevant and penetrating questions). Ditto Sangita Myska et al. Mehdi Hasan suffered the same fate at MSNBC.

Solid journalism is increasingly found in alternative media like Declassified UK, Intercept, Novara Media, Media Lens, or platforms such as Substack. Saoussen Ben Cheikh describes how alternative media in the Middle East has so bravely kept good journalism alive. ‘Journalism has futures’, Scott Jordan tells us. Although we ought to add the adjective ‘critical’ to the term ‘alternative’. Not all alternatives are genuine alternatives dedicated to exposing the truth. But the futures of journalism, as Visvanathan argues, is tied up to the futures of democracy. It is those who are fighting for democracy against the rising tide of authoritarianism the world over who are really dedicated to journalistic truth in this post- truth age.

So, like a spurned lover, I return to the BBC, an institution I have occasionally worked for and contributed to. There is a general perception in Britain, rather England, that without the BBC we – the people of the UK and the world – will somehow be severely diminished. Without the BBC, says Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian who now edits Prospect, we will end up with ‘an unholy alliance of Murdoch (or whoever comes after Rupert), Lord Rothermere and whoever ends up owning theTelegraphto mediate most of our national information and conversations?’. The Guardian old hand, Polly Toynbee, asks us to stand up and defend the BBC. Labour MP, Peter Prinsely, thinks ‘defending the BBC is, ultimately, an act of defending democracy itself’. Pat Young of British Broadcasting Challenge suggests that the BBC needs saving from ‘unprecedented dangers’ posed by Al-generated deepfakes, hostile state propaganda, and algorithms that amplify divisions. ‘The foundations of informed democratic debate are under attack across the globe’, he writes, from ‘tech platforms, through which most media and news content are distributed, discovered, consumed, and shared, are owned or controlled by six American billionaires who pursue self-interested agendas’.

Nice sentiments. Shame about the object that needs to be rescued. You cannot defend the indefensible. We are talking about an organisation that has now inverted John Birt’s notion of ‘bias against understanding’ to become a beacon of bias towards misunderstanding. Birt, a former DG of the BBC and my boss during my days at LWT, argued that television news is normally presented in sensationalised and superficial form. Everything was geared towards ‘presenting the news’, rather than analysing and explaining. The BBC’s alleged impartiality, to use the words of Burgess, does not ‘overplay’ the crimes of UK Ltd. Or ‘what’s happening in Israel’. Indeed, its underplaying is so transparent that young people all over the world spot it immediately. As Zain Sardar writes ‘the BBC’s lack of impartiality’ has created a lopsided ‘moral universe’. ‘The disposability of Palestinian lives — invoking Stalin’s chilling remark that one death is a tragedy while a milliondeathsare a mere statistic — and the marginalisation of their suffering underscores the grotesque lack of impartiality and balance’. This is why so many independent well- established journalists, including Peter Oborne, Jonathan Cook, Mehdi Hasan, Owen Jones, Chris Hedges, and many others have accused the BBC and its journalists of being complicit in perpetuating genocide.

John Kampfner, former editor of New Statesman, where once I used to be a columnist, says that the BBC is in ‘a permanent nervous breakdown’. I suspect that long-standing tailspin is due to the simple fact that as an institution the BBC is a very weird place. I mean, where on earth can you have a prolific pedophile like Jimmy Saville committing abuse for decades in front of everyone and no one notices? The BBC’s own Panorama of 26 October 2012 reported that a paedophile ring could have been operating at the BBC for twenty or even forty years! The BBC does seem to be a magnet for paedophiles and perverts. There were allegations, in Strange Places, Questionable People by John Simpson, then the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, about a certain ‘Uncle Dick’ who sexually assaulted children. Uncle Dick even had a side kick; and they both carried on in the 1940s and 1950s and no one noticed nor did anything about it. Around the death of Saville in 2011, over 150 allegation of sexual abuse were made involving some eighty staff or contributors. And since then, we have had the high profile cases of Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall, DJ Tim Westwood, DJ Chris Denning, right down to the highly esteemed newsreader Huw Edwards. Then we have had MasterChef presenter Gregg Wallace and various chaps on Strictly Come Dancing. If that wasn’t enough, there has been scandal after scandal since the BBC’s early days, starting in 1950 with involvement in the notorious coup d’etat in Iran; the coverage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; the falsification of the coverage of the miners’ strike; the Richard Bacon cocaine affair; the refusal to broadcast the Gaza DEC appeal in January 2009; rigged phone competitions; BNP spokespersons on Question Time; allegations of sexism and sexism; the gender pay gap; obscene levels of pay for the executives; and the silencing of Gary Lineker. Not forgetting the Martin Bashir interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, for Panorama, secured, according to a new book, Dianarama, through lies, forged documents, and extraordinary deception. One can just go on and on.

I am afraid the ‘permanent nervous breakdown’ has taken its toll on an ageing Aunt. One loved her in her younger days, when she was fully compos mentis, and one was a bit naïve and believed in objective journalism. Those were the days, my friend, when my father listened to the BBC as if it was broadcasting truth as though it was revelation. And I believed in my father as I believed in the BBC. And others like me with non-English heritage were believers too, including Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, judging from one of her recent columns. But now Aunty is getting old, she is partially blind, a bit hard of hearing, and showing clear signs of amnesia, which is an indication that dementia has set in. She needs palliative care; after that, we should allow her to, what’s the word, ‘pass away’ quietly onto never never land.

From Kuala Lumpur to Istanbul, Karachi to Cape Town, Almaty to Sarajevo – places where I have tuned into the BBC – the BBC looks parochial, amateur, and crude. Its propaganda stands out a mile. When its presenters insist on telling their guest, and hence the audience, that Israel denies committing genocide, the IDF denies this or that, they only generate derisory laughter. In the eyes of the world, it has zero journalistic integrity. People, pregnant or otherwise, do not love the BBC. And the world would not even notice if it disappeared.

Poor Mrs Robertson. She would be turning in her grave.