Few progressives will be unaware of the contribution feminists have made to public life. They have not just added to the wellbeing and socio-economic progress of other women, but in finding their voices, been vital in numerous campaign movements including anti-child-poverty, anti-war, anti-imperialism/racism, anti-lynching and in equality movements.
By contrast, amidst the horrors discovered in the relief of the Belson concentration camp, was also the surprise of seeing the allies march out of the camp, numerous women guards, along with the Commandant. Retrospectively less so surprising, considering Hitler’s presentation of an Iron Cross to female test pilot Hanna Reitsch had been a significant propaganda moment for the Nazi regime. Nazi celebrity Reitsch would go on to solve the gyroscopic problems of the V1 evolving to the V2 missiles, known as Hitler’s Revenge Weapons. This led to the onslaught of the Doodlebug Summer possibly the worst period of WWII for Southern England. As demonstrated by propagandists, Unity Mitford, Leni Riefenstahl, plus Mildred Gillars and Rita Zucca who broadcast under the name Axis Sally, some women were prominent in advancing the Nazi agenda.
Western ruling-classes using women as a sort of ideological beard did not suddenly originate with the Nazis. Steve McQueen’s film drama 12 Years a Slave (2013) depicts the problems the slave protagonist has in ‘talking back’ about his predicament because it was deemed as offensive to the white ‘Lady of the house’. Britain’s rural working-class historically, often had a similar ‘offending the mistress’ dynamic applied to them, when complaining of their economic conditions under the landed gentry that dominated their lives. Similarly, Julian Assange and the Femocracy (Arena Jun 2019) noted that at the forefront of those persecuting the journalist/publisher was a ruling-class of fake-feminists, who similarly had no problem cutting single mother benefits, girls continuing educational funding and even bombing other women, while turning a blind eye to establishment sexist oppression. More than twenty years of the New Imperialism, and censored genocide has seen this phenomenon intensify.
British Media and its Methods
In the summer of 2025, the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage contained a performance by the act Bob Vylan which included a chant ‘Kill the IDF.’ The BBC which had already been condemned by the Centre for Media Monitoring for statistically putting 33 times more value on an Israeli life than Palestinian (Page 9), amplified the subsequent manufactured outage, repeating PM Keir Starmer’s, who with up to 40% of his previous Cabinet appointees have accepted financial donations from Israel lobbyist (Sir) Trevor Chinn. The BBC attempted to address this supposed ‘offence’ and other Palestine coverage related issues on Katie Razzall’s The Media Show podcast, which often has a screened version on its Global News Channel. Significantly, Bob Vylan is an act fronted by Black performers but the issue of how dangerous Apartheid Israel is for minorities like them, was completely absented from the show. This is quite a contrivance because Arts/History channel BBC4 had previously screened (2016), the independent documentary, Forever Pure which followed the experience of two Chechen footballers who had been signed by the Russian billionaire owner of Beitar Jerusalem FC. However, due to their Muslim faith, they were denigrated as ‘dirty Arabs’ – they’re not middle-easterners – and driven from the country by a campaign of intimidation and occasional violence. Ignorance cannot excuse Katie Razzall who’s, ‘Culture & Media Editor at BBC’.
Israel’s documented Apartheid oppressions extend to Black Jews, so even if Jewish, the Bob Vylan Black musical act would be equally under threat there. But apart from an appearance from the former Ofcom regulator, Razzall’s show was whites only, with no Black or Muslim contributors. In contrast, BBC journalist Tim Franks was given platform privilege, as a white Briton covering the Middle-East, who happened to be Jewish, to talk about his unsubstantiated subjective ‘feelings’. Razzall’s stacking of the corporate media deck is fairly standard, and obviously helps facilitate the escalating genocide. Social media was reposting that the IDF had killed yet more children before Boby Vylan had completed their set.
BBC frontwomen are having to defend the corporation’s collapsing reputation across the board. BBC Scotland’s Connie McLaughlin hosted a discussion invoking the corporation’s supposed impartiality, again stacked with its own veterans as speakers. Backing up McLaughlin was former BBC political editor Brian Taylor and ex-BBC Radio 4 presenter Roger Bolton. According to The National, the lone permitted dissenter was Economist and Independence supporter Richard Murphy, who concluded “We’ve gone on for 40-plus minutes and all I’ve heard so far is pro-BBC propaganda from the BBC.” And went on “No, let me finish Connie please…you interrupt me Connie and you are not interrupting your BBC colleagues.” So current affair shows are stacked from outset, started from false positions, and those attempting to add new material are interrupted. This tactic quite deliberately breaks up innovative establishment challenging narratives – that a genuine accumulator of news material would welcome – into instead, isolated islands of material, that are conveniently, less coherent for audience assimilation.
Corporate News: Racists Obscuring Genocide and its Historical Continuities (Mar 2025) featured the BBC’s Kirsty Wark’s ‘browbeating’ mistreatment of genocide bereaved Palestinian representative Dr Husam Zomlot. And here again interviewed by BBC News Channel Presenter Martine Croxall he gets barely into an opening phrase before she interrupts him from answering her own question. This practice is clearly a mixture of deliberate training and the Producer shouting into Presenters earpiece’s, to ‘stop the narrative at all costs’.
The National similarly noted “A STUDENT receiving their A-Level results was cut off by a BBC presenter live on air after saying the broadcaster was “complicit” in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.”
By having these practices fronted by softly spoken middle-class women, dissidents protesting these misrepresentations, can be mischaracterised as bullies – possibly sexist – and the women manifestations of massive corporate media power, the victims. Nor are these ‘stacking the deck’, ‘false premise’ type tactics exclusive to the BBC.
Sky News – originally founded by Rupert Murdoch and now in other hands – is the BBC’s private sector, ideological twin. Its mirroring existence makes a mockery of the BBC’s claims of a separate public sector sensibility. Sky threw its weight behind false claims, that Black MP Diane Abbott in using traditionalist 50+ year old definition of ‘racism’ that anchored it in the post-slavery, post-colonial experience, was ‘redefining’ the term – thereby excluding feminist Black leftist Abbott from its elitist Femocracy. Obviously, powerful neoliberals, who orchestrated the violent new imperialism in the middle-east upon a racist notion of Muslim collective guilt, and those arguing religion excuses Israeli colonialism, would benefit if the definition of racism could be so altered, and generalised, as to be made irrelevant. Hundreds of UK academics with expertise in this area were capable of supporting Abbott’s definition. The late Professor Benjamin Zephaniah and others have spent decades of tv appearances, reaffirming the traditionalist definition. Sky instead – with the support of its onside women presenters – gave generous air time to the attacks on Abbott by Israel supporting Jake Wallis Simons, editor of arguably Britain’s most libelous newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle (JC). Ironically the year before and confirmed by the Press Gazette, the JC had even fallen foul of the UK’s largely tame Press Regulator – IPSO. The JC had falsely claimed that Iranians had wanted to ‘wipe Jews off face of Earth’. Iran has the largest Jewish population in the region outside of Israel, but for the purposes of doing pro-Israel propaganda, dark-skinned Middle-Eastern Jews were characterised as not ‘real Jews’ by Wallis Simons and his editorial team. These light/dark post-slavery/colonialism hierarchies. rather make Abbott’s racism definition point for her, but ‘stacking the deck’, ‘false premise’ is the UK media norm.
In this example, a Sky presenter – in contrast to the Dr Zumlot-type experience – gives Wallis Simons misrepresentations a sympathetic introduction, and little interruption.
Israel’s Celebrity Women’s lobby
In 2014 Israel’s summer long bombing of Gaza killed 2252 Palestinians – 551 of whom were children. Almost immediately a pro-Israel moral panic was started in the UK, the function of which was clearly to attempt to invert the status of Israel and its supporters from, aggressors to victims. Women celebrities, were mobilised seemingly co-ordinated and on-script to facilitate this. Principle among these were Rachel Riley – assistant on a daytime quiz show – and acting veterans Tracy-Ann Oberman and Maureen Lipman. Riley has made a number of public statements alleging an anti-Semitism crisis, which the news industry does not seem to care, are not born out by comparison to the Black & Muslim British experience. She has also, occasionally with Oberman been fronting pro-Israel, anti-Semitism moral panic Lawfare in the UK, with mixed results. Her lawyers have won a case, against Blogger Mike Sivier, and withdrawn from prosecution against barrister Jane Heybroek relating to comments about a Corbyn-era Labour activist, and had a Court of Appeal Judgement revoke a similar themed case against Laura Murray. The intention of Lawfare does not appear to be simply obtaining a legal win, but to generate such huge legal costs against its target, so as to act as a deterrent to other critics of Israel. Riley might have some infamy in Australia after falsely linking the Sydney Mall attacks to ‘globalised Infitada’.
Actor/lobbyist Tracy-Ann Oberman’s targets, are often people of colour, the function of these attacks, again appear to be to corrupt and co-opt the existing definition of racism. The fact that she is afforded credibility is indicative of the degraded nature UK news media. In a combative twitter exchange with the leftwing journalist of Bengali origin Ashna Sarkar, blonde Oberman repeatedly tweeted ‘I am as white a you’. Oberman could also be required to answer questions about her ability to tell one Black person from another, given that in one of her scattergun anti-Semitism accusations, she infamously confused music/acting celebrities Ice Cube and Ice-T.
Her major scalp was UK Grime star, Wiley. Wiley had issued a number of combative arguably inflammatory, and poorly worded tweets that included reference to Jews. In broad generic terms they address his own experience of music industry exploitation from an institutional tradition of cultural appropriation going back beyond Tin Pan Alley to slavery. He instinctively noted that Zionists the KKK and affiliates are ethnocratic white groups. Wiley critically referenced the colonisation of Palestine, then crudely regurgitated a Black mythological version of humanity’s African origins in relation to it. Unfortunately, he does not have the educational background to talk about different religions and the evolution of capitalism, or the difference between Zionists and Jews – understandably on the latter as publicly Zionists pretend, they are the universal norm for Jewish identity. Initial news coverage positioned direct quotes as accusations, “’Israel is not yours’: Wiley accused of anti-Semitism over ‘Jewish people are the law’ tweets”, which readers can judge upon for themselves – though posted comments are initially sceptical about anti-Semitism claims. Then in co-ordination with a social media pile-on led by Oberman, most subsequent coverage did not publish his quotes for reader’s independent opinions, instead referred, in unsubstantiated prejudgement, to his ‘anti-Semitic posts’. Wiley who has had no formal education. having spent his deprived teenage years in low-level drug crime, was stripped of his MBE for services to music. Oberman who has studied at Leeds and Manchester Universities, Central School of Speech and Drama, and Moscow Art Theatre School and is backed by the PR lobby of a nuclear-powered state, received an MBE along with Rachel Riley for ‘fighting anti-Semitism’.
Following the 2014 bombing of Gaza Maureen Lipman claimed to UK news organisations that she was thinking of leaving for New York or Israel because of anti-Semitism. This co-ordinated with the Jewish Chronicle’s claims that Scottish Jews were leaving because of anti-Semitism. Sometime later, Victoria Darbyshire would allow Jewish Lawyer Mark Lewis and wife – while blaming Jeremy Corbyn – to uncritically replicate Lipman’s emigration performance on her BBC show. Lipman despite her claimed ethnic sensitivities, was either ignorant, or uncaring, about New York’s Police’s recent stranglehold killing of African-American Eric Garner. In any case, she continued in the UK. Mark Lewis has spent subsequent years in UK courts engaged in Lawfare sometimes fronting for Riley and Oberman. During the middle of the ongoing Gaza genocide, Maureen Lipman similarly gave PR statements to the news industry claiming ‘nowhere is safe to be Jewish’, yet hundreds of banner holding, self-identifying Jews, often mature women of Lipman’s age, were on anti-Gaza-genocide protests, safe from anti-Semitism but perhaps not the police. At a moment when Home Secretary former Blairite Minister Yvette Cooper has banned non-violent organisation Palestine Action, this dynamic is a metaphor for the UK in our time. As the Femocracy, flourishes, actual feminists and women human rights activists are effaced from discourse and even imprisoned. Instead, Lipman gets media prominence, while caring little for the Genocide, perhaps even other ethnic groups? The non-violent anti-racists of Palestine Action are banned by a Home Secretary who, has blood on her hands of middle-eastern victims of wars, sold on the racist premise of collective ‘radical Islam’ guilt.
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