THE BBC duly reported Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s plea to students not to join pro-Palestinian protests on the second anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, warning them of ‘rising anti-Semitism on our streets’.
The report then went on to provide a platform for the thousands who shamefully paid no heed to him at all, uncritically relaying their justifications for ignoring it, starting with the news that ‘around 100 people joined a rally at the University of Sheffield’, carefully eliciting their views on the Prime Minister’s suggestion that it would be ‘un-British’ to protest on the anniversary of the mass murder of more than 1,200 Jewish civilians’.
Organiser Anton Parocki did not hold back: ‘It’s just disgraceful.What I think is insensitive is that there has been two years of genocide. Conflating that [actions of Benjamin] Netanyahu with Judaism is actually anti-Semitic’ he postulated.
‘Jewish people’ he went on mendaciously, ‘are not pro-genocide. We need to be loud about this, because there is a genocide right now, Palestinians are starving right now.’
Instead of challenging any of this the BBC not just took it as read but immediately offered support for Paroki’s assertion by quoting a UN commission of inquiry report that ‘concluded Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza’.
In a semblance of balance the BBC added, much as an afterthought, that Israel had categorically rejected the findings as ‘distorted and false’.
We are led by the BBC to believe the students. The Corporation failed to report that the UN is a structurally anti-Semitic organisation – there are 49 Muslim countries to one Jewish – or to provide reasons the Israel’s categorical rejection of this libel. Instead it continued with its report of ‘hundreds of students and staff ‘at the University of Edinburgh who marched through its campus ‘carrying flags and holding placards’ before moving location to London ‘where students marched between university campuses to criticise their “complicity through investments” and academic partnerships linked to Israel’.
To help the students to smear the institutions allegedly ‘supporting’ Israel, the BBC added their names, crowing that the rallies included ‘groups from a number of the capital’s universities including King’s College London, London School of Economics and Soas (School of Oriental and African Studies)’.
Black mark for them then. And just to make sure that we all know what’s right and what is wrong, the BBC further intoned: ‘Protest group UCL Action For Palestine, which is taking part in the London march, posted on social media that it would not be “silenced or intimidated” and stood in solidarity with the thousands of Palestinians killed before and prior to October 2023; that ‘Rallies were also organised at the Universities of Strathclyde, Manchester, Bristol and Leeds.’
You can read the full article here and decide for yourselves what this report set out to endorse.
You can also compare it to other reports, such as that of the Spectator which noted that the demonstrators were ‘celebrating the massacre and spreading the libel – the lie – that the Jewish state of Israel is carrying out a “genocide” in Gaza’.
The BBC’s reporting far from questioning the discredited genocide claim, endorsed its fake moral justification for these aggressive anti-Semitic and anti-Israel activism protests on the anniversary of the worst pogrom since the Second World War, while Hamas still has Israeli hostages in vile and cruel captivity.
Nor was there was any attempt in this report to remind the reader of unspeakable torture, murder and mayhem that took place on October 7 two years ago.
If the BBC thinks a token quote at the end of such an article from Jewish students who welcomed Starmer’s intervention constitutes balance, they are fooling no one but themselves.
Like the hollow words of Starmer himself, it was a box-ticking exercise.
