{"id":312514,"date":"2025-07-22T06:00:24","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T06:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=312514"},"modified":"2025-07-23T07:47:15","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T07:47:15","slug":"the-bbc-isnt-failing-its-job-is-to-obscure-the-uks-partnership-in-israels-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=312514","title":{"rendered":"The BBC Isn\u2019t Failing. Its Job Is to Obscure the UK\u2019s Partnership in Israel\u2019s Genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Cook \u2013 jonathancook.net July 18,2025<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The confected Gaza \u2018scandals\u2019 are designed to browbeat the BBC into even greater cravenness. If it was reluctant before to give Palestinians a voice, now it will avoid doing so entirely<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

After months of a confected furore over a BBC documentary supposedly demonstrating pro-Hamas bias, followed by the shelving of a second film on Gaza, an independent review found this week that the broadcaster had not breached impartiality guidelines.<\/p>\n

A long list of complaints against Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone<\/em> \u2013 all pushed for months by the Israel lobby, and amplified by the British establishment media \u2013 were dismissed<\/a> one after the other by Peter Johnston, director of the editorial complaints and review body that reports to the BBC director general.<\/p>\n

Not that you would know any of this from the eagerness of BBC executives to continue apologising<\/a> profusely for the failings the corporation had just been cleared of. It almost sounded as if they wanted to be found guilty<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The row is now set to drag on for many months more after Ofcom, the UK\u2019s communications regulator, announced<\/a> it too would investigate the programme.<\/p>\n

All of this is exactly what the Israel lobby and the billionaire-owned media had hoped for.<\/p>\n

The aim of manufacturing this protracted storm in a teacup was twofold.<\/p>\n

First, the furore was designed to distract from what the documentary actually showed: the horrors facing children in Gaza as they have had to navigate a tiny strip of land in which Israel has trapped them, bombed their homes, levelled their schools, exposed them to relentless carnage for 21 months, destroyed the hospitals they will need in time of trouble, and is starving them and their loved ones.<\/p>\n

Second, it was intended to browbeat the BBC into adopting an even more craven posture towards Israel than it had already. If it was reluctant before to give Palestinians a voice, now it will avoid doing so at all costs.<\/p>\n

True to form, executives hurriedly removed How to Survive a Warzone<\/em> from its iPlayer catch-up service the moment the lobby went into action.<\/p>\n

Dangerous consequences<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The BBC\u2019s ever greater spinelessness has real-world, and dangerous, consequences.<\/p>\n

Israel will feel even freer to intensify what the International Court of Justice already suspected back in January 2024 was a genocide and what leading genocide and Holocaust scholars have subsequently concluded<\/a> is<\/em> a genocide.<\/p>\n

There will be even less pressure on the British government to stop partnering Israel in its genocide by supplying weapons<\/a>, intelligence and diplomatic cover.<\/p>\n

The enduring row will also hand a bigger stick to Rupert Murdoch and other media moguls with which to beat the BBC, making it cower even further.<\/p>\n

Signs of the BBC\u2019s defensiveness were already all too evident. While it was waiting for the Johnston report, the corporation ditched a separate documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack<\/em>, on Israel\u2019s systematic destruction of Gaza\u2019s hospitals and murder<\/a> of some 1,600 health workers.<\/p>\n

It has since been shown<\/a> by Channel 4.<\/p>\n

The BBC argued that \u2013 even though this second programme had repeatedly passed its editorial checks \u2013 airing it risked contributing to a \u201cperception of partiality<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

What that bit of BBC gobbledygook actually meant was that the problem was not \u201cpartiality\u201d. It was the perception<\/em> of it by vested interests \u2013 Israel, its apologists, the Starmer government and the British corporate media \u2013 who demand skewed BBC coverage of Gaza so that Israel can carry on with a genocide the British establishment is utterly complicit in.<\/p>\n

In other words, truth and accuracy be damned. This is about Israel \u2013 and the Starmer government \u2013 dictating to the BBC the terms of what can be said about Israel\u2019s treatment of Palestinians.<\/p>\n

Caving in to pressure<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Which brings us back to the Johnston report. The only significant finding against the BBC was on a single issue in its documentary on Gaza\u2019s children, How to Survive a Warzone<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The film had not disclosed that its 13-year narrator was the son of an official in Gaza\u2019s Hamas-run government.<\/p>\n

Even in the current febrile atmosphere, Johnston found no grounds to uphold the manifold accusations of a breach by the BBC of impartiality rules. Nothing in the film, he concluded, was unfair to Israel.<\/p>\n

Instead, he stated that it was a breach of \u201cfull transparency\u201d not to have divulged the child-narrator\u2019s tenuous connection to Hamas through his father\u2019s governmental work.<\/p>\n

Paradoxically, the BBC\u2019s coverage of Johnston\u2019s findings has been far more inaccurate about the child-narrator than the original documentary. But there has been no uproar because this particular inaccuracy from the BBC squarely benefits Israel.<\/p>\n

On the News at Ten last week, reporting on the Johnston report, presenter Reeta Chakrabati claimed that the film\u2019s narrator was \u201cthe son of an official in the militant group Hamas\u201d.<\/p>\n

\n
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The only “inaccuracy” in the confected row about the BBC’s Gaza film is the continuing lie that the young narrator is “the son of an official in the militant group Hamas”.<\/p>\n

No, he’s the son of a scientist who directed agricultural policy in Gaza’s government, which is run by\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/POm9HR0Hg5<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 14, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n