The Gaza genocide denial currently being practiced by the corporate news media requires direct confrontation. Much of the mainstream media practice ethnic double-standards with respect to the comparative value of human life and, in doing so, facilitate imperialist mass killing.

Institutional Power & Historic Cultural Representation.

Back in 2019 in Arena some of the historical DNA of the racist double standards of British Empire and continuities to current news media practices were explored in The Unspoken ‘Wog’ Slur. If anything, things are worse now. Despite its claims to the contrary, the BBC conforms to existing definitions of a State Affiliated Broadcaster providing a service to power. It has its Director General (DG) appointed by the government. Its staff have historically been politically vetted by state security services and it is financed by a household tax called the licence fee. Indicative of its authoritarian establishment status, in November 2024 public access and particularly protest outside BBC’s London HQ was banned by Westminster City Council, which is also responsible for the similarly controlled areas around the British Parliament. Public anger at the BBC’s one-sided reporting and refusal to permit the phrase ‘Gaza Genocide’ on its news/current-affairs broadcasts has required it to exclude the public from its proximity, representational practices, and basic processes of democratic accountability. In a recent  London anti-genocide march of some tens of thousands attempted to march past the BBC Seventy-seven activists and movement organisers were arrested – even MPs including Jeremy Corbyn faced interview under caution.

The BBC is merely at the forefront of the British media in subjecting inconvenient, ‘wrong sort of human beings’ to genocide denial. A giant ‘Yes It’s a Genocide’ protest banner displayed outside parliament was retitled in a Telegraph newspaper headline ‘Giant anti-Israel banner unfurled outside Parliament’. In British media ‘la,la land’ outing a privileged group for genocide is worse that actually committing it.

If nearly 47,000 of the various white ethnic West-Europeans, Russians, Americans, South Africans and Australians who have colonised Palestine since 1948 – some on their second or third white settler state – had been slaughtered in the manner of Gazan Palestinians (Reuters figures), the BBC and other news outlets would not be indignantly blocking the word ‘genocide’. By comparison the attack on lesser hundreds of settlers at Sukkot 7 October 2023 was likened to a ‘holocaust’ by pro-Israel voices and given media platform privilege.

The racist double standards of organisations like the BBC are evident in even the most recent of historical comparisons. The German ambassador to Sudan, Werner Daum reported victims of Bill Clinton’s 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical factory there, numbering “several tens of thousands”.  Corporate media outrage was hard to find. The 2001, 9/11 attacks on US sites of Military and Financial power were perpetrated by 15 Saudi Arabian Wahabist Muslims and four others. Three thousand westerners were killed and many more injured in the attacks. The attacks filled the 24-hour news industry who provided extreme emotive and condemnatory coverage, with little exploration of provocations of the prior historical injustices of the US global empire. The Gaza Genocide has at least 16 times the death toll of 9/11. Western news media recognition, condemnation and value placed on these dead victims, has been negligible. Again, as non-westerners who were victims of western ruling-classes, Palestinians – as in the historic supposed sub-human ‘Wogs’ of the British Empire are treated as a lesser humanity, whose victimhood is downplayed and denied a voice. Entire Muslim diasporas were subjected to the collective guilt smear of ‘Radical Islam’ for 9/11 minority Muslim attacks, yet for a far higher kill rate, western proxy Israel. does not even equivalently get accused of fanatical colonial ‘Militant Zionism’ or the religion shared by the settlers and others, similarly lazily scapegoated as a pejorative.

Practices

Mark Curtis at Declassified UK has produced a report on BBC collusion in UK military support for Israel during the genocide, which is first-rate reference document, that also boils down its analysis into a table form.

The excellent Media Lens has been a front runner among those numerous critics –including Rami Ruhayem – documenting double-standards in the BBC’s use of journalistic language depicting Palestinians and Israelis. Palestinians usually only passively “die” but by contrast “massacre”, “slaughter”, and “atrocities” are words that are applied to Israeli losses. Media Lens offers the example of the BBC headline ‘The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome’ – this could easily apply to someone with special needs choking to death after an asthma attack. Actually, Muhammad Bhar’s (24) a man with Downs syndrome, experienced a savage death as a consequence of Israelis having ‘set a combat dog’ upon him. Media Lens noted “after a tsunami of online outrage, that the BBC updated its headline to: ‘Gaza man with Down’s syndrome attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC’,” though this still minimised Israeli military agency. On the issue of manipulative BBC language standards  Jonathan Cook is among many repeatedly pointing out “released soldiers belonging to an illegal Israeli occupation army are “hostages”. Palestinians held by that illegal occupation army – often without trial or charge – are “prisoners”.

The treatment of Palestinian representative Husam Zomlot by the BBC news anchor Kirsty Wark, from 9 October 2023, also drew widespread condemnation. At the time, because of Israeli bombings, Zomlot was bereaved having lost…

“My cousin Ayah, her two children, her husband, her mother-in-law, and two other relatives were killed instantly, and two of their youngest children, a twin, 2 years old, are now in intensive care”.

Wark’s response was to ‘browbeat him’ into condemning Hamas. Zomlot has nothing to do with Hamas. He is head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, prior to that was head of the PLO mission to the US. Wark in her ethnic ignorance, had when dealing with Palestinian identity, managed to replicate the British Empires ‘all Wogs are the same’ sentiment. Media Lens concentrated on the double-standards and inappropriateness of this repeated BBC strain of questioning. Across the unaligned news media terms such as “heartless,” “rude,” “unprofessional” and ‘Blood on their hands’ were invoked by Al Jazeera, The Nation, The London Economic – to describe Wark and those like her. By 16 February 2024 the Guardian noted Zomlot’s number of family losses had increased.

Hypocritically, US-led imperialism and its violence across the Middle-East is deemed merely ‘a Western presence’ – often spun by Wark as white saviour type ‘civilising’. In comparison to Zomlot, Alastair Campbell who produced the infamous ‘Sexed-up… dodgy dossier’ to market the conquest of Iraqis, has made numerous appearances on the BBC news apparatus, apparently without ever being asked about the responsibility for deaths of indigenous people of colour that can be laid at his door. Indeed Pt 1 of this article noted that politicians with Collective Cabinet Responsibility for the deaths and documented torture of the Blair regime were given tame public relations opportunities on the BBC News coverage. This trend has gotten worse with former ministers Ed Balls and Jacqui Smith  having been given PR rehabilitative spots on BBC a celebrity dance show.

Establishing the template for current Gaza Genocide Denial; research into deaths from previous western imperialist wars were given little prominence on the BBC News channel. By contrast, the ORB report of a million deaths in Iraq was still highlighted by mainstream international outlets like Al Jazeera and Reuters. Similarly Al Jazeera published a story largely ignored in the west; about a generation of Iraqi babies suffering mortality risk from the cruellest of ‘birth deformities’ – after western forces used Depleted Uranium ammunition in their areas. The published photographic evidence is deeply disturbing. The ‘Shock & Awe’ start of all this was actually lauded by the BBC’s Andrew Marr as Blair “proved conclusively right… he stands as a larger man and a stronger Prime Minister as a result.”

The other fake orthodoxy perpetuated by the BBC and others is ‘Hamas started this in an unprovoked attack’. However, prior to Sukkot, Democracy Now 5 Oct 2023 reported “Israeli forces, including snipers, appear to be deliberately shooting at Palestinians’ legs and ankles— wounds that are extremely difficult to treat and can lead to amputations.” Even the British  Guardian which had supported previous pro-Israel moral panics provided similar coverage. Israel’s targeting of child protestors had been regular and cyclical in its intensity in 2018 – The National cited a figure of 6,392 victims and provided photos. Prior to Sukkot also in 2018 Britain’s Independent – now in new ownership – was then willing to cite Israel’s ‘shoot to maim policy’ quoting a British surgeon in Gaza

“An 11-year-old child with his leg hanging on by a strip of skin was in one operating theatre where we were attempting a vascular repair, with an eight-year-old shot in the groin in a holding bay, when seven more arrived, also critically injured by sniper fire.”

None of this, the hundreds of children and thousands of adults held as political hostage/prisoners in Israeli jails, the initial conquest of Palestinians, or the various cycles of Nakba ethnic cleansing since 1948, count as provocations in BBC-led corporate media accounts – the BBC is now even using the Israeli word ‘evacuation’ to describe Palestinians being ripped from their neighbourhoods.

The BBC recently disinvited Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé from a show about the history of the region, meaning this ‘history show’ had no recognised academic historian on it – Pappé has been very articulate about the oppression experienced by Palestinians. This contrived anti-intellectualism is at the core of BBC and western media bias. Little coverage is given to the great scandal of colonial holocausts at western hands being excluded from Holocaust Memorial Day. These include 10 million dead in the Belgian Congo – Adam Hothschild, 100 million dead in the conquest of the Americas – David Stannard, and 35 million dead at the hand of the British in colonial India – Shashi Tharoor. The obvious effect is supportive of the ideology that supposedly history has only one primary victim. It has simultaneously been evident that the more Gazans die in the genocide, the more BBC entertainment channels, screen films about the Holocaust under the Nazis, that represent only the one victim group experience, prioritised by the Israelis. For example, the documentary ‘Hitlers’ Forgotten Victims’ (1997) which dealt with Black victims of the Nazis gets no contemporary air play.

This anti-intellectual practice also blocks broader historical context from being applied to Israeli actions. Western Colonialism took practical inspiration from the theories of population sustainability of the Reverend Thomas Malthus, which numerically formulated land limitations effect on food availability and spreading disease, in culling a populace. Imposed starvation – disease along with direct extermination therefore became the tools of empire. Despite these ubiquitous practices, empire was more successful long-term in the Americas, than in Africa. In contrast to Africans, Native Americans were overwhelmed by the huge arriving numbers of military supported settlers. Israel has been killing off Palestinians in cycles, in the most recent example of Gaza, it has similarly been targeting food supplies and hospital provision. Up until 1980 Israel’s population was comparable with Ireland’s at approximately 3.5 million. In 2025  Ireland’s population is just over 5 million, Israel’s has soared to 9.4 million, the latter coinciding with increasing land theft and settlement. Any intellectual coverage should be asking questions about Israel imposing the practices of colonial holocaust – particularly that of Native Americans – but this is entirely absent. Indeed, the current Trump/ Netanyahu plan to depopulate Gaza has fatal resonances of President Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act.

The BBC in particular has not just been applying racist double standards, it has been violating its traditional standard practices. One could easily compare the BBC’s supressed reporting of Apartheid Israel’s offences to the scrutiny it historically applied to its two-sister racist colonial projects Rhodesia and South Africa, or compare the Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria conquest coverage with historic reporting of the Vietnam War, which referenced atrocities and use of Napalm and Agent Orange – such examples are numerous. Consequently, who could argue if global consumers now regard the BBC and British news media as a dangerous, modern, politely coded version of Lord Haw-Haw & Axis Sally? Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald  observed “The worst media in the democratic world is the British media, and it’s not even close.”

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