Saturday, December 21, 2024

UN Special Rapporteur Exposes Crime Of The Century

Source: Double Down News

Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories


Source: Democracy Now!


Human Rights Watch is accusing Israel of committing acts of extermination and genocide by deliberately restricting safe water for drinking and sanitation to the Gaza Strip. The report details how Israel has cut off water and blocked fuel, food and humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip, and deliberately destroyed or damaged water and sanitation infrastructure and water repair materials. We speak to one of the report’s editors, Bill Van Esveld, the acting Israel and Palestine associate director at Human Rights Watch, who describes “a clear state policy of depriving people in Gaza of water,” that HRW is, for the first time in the current Israeli assault on Gaza, characterizing as a genocidal act.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In a major new report, Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of committing acts of extermination and genocide by deliberately restricting safe water for drinking and sanitation to the Gaza Strip. Tirana Hassan, the executive director at Human Rights Watch, said, quote, “This isn’t just negligence; it is a calculated policy of deprivation that has led to the deaths of thousands from dehydration and disease that is nothing short of the crime against humanity of extermination, and an act of genocide,” she said. The report details how Israel has cut off water and blocked fuel, food and humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip. In addition, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of deliberately destroying and damaging water and sanitation infrastructure, as well as water repair materials.

Israel has rejected the Human Rights Watch findings, saying, quote, “The truth is the complete opposite of HRW’s lies.” But just in the past day, the United Nations said Israel had once again denied requests to deliver aid to Palestinians in Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia and Jabaliya — areas that have been under Israeli siege for months.

AMY GOODMAN: We go right now to Bill Van Esveld, acting Israel and Palestine associate director at Human Rights Watch. He helped edit the Human Rights Watch report, just out today, titled “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water.” He’s joining us from Athens, Greece.

Bill, thanks so much for being with us. Why don’t you lay out your findings?

BILL VAN ESVELD: Thank you very much for having me on this issue.

I think this report lays out a clear state policy of depriving people in Gaza of water. So, we looked at four different ways in which all access has been controlled and restricted.

First, there are the water pipelines that come from Israel to Gaza. They supply only about 20% of the water in Gaza, but about 50% of the drinking water, because Gaza’s aquifer underground has been completely contaminated over years and years of closure. So, the first thing was cutting off those water pipes.

The second thing was, there are water resources inside Gaza, so those were cut off, too. Those are desalination plants. Those are water pumps going to the aquifer. Those are water sanitation facilities, water treatment facilities. They all need energy. They need electricity. They need fuel. Israel cut off electricity and fuel within the first few days of the war. But that wasn’t enough. Four of those six water treatment plants I was talking about in Gaza had solar panel fields that were their source of electricity in case electricity got cut off, because electricity has been terrible in Gaza for many years as a result of the siege. It wasn’t enough for Israel to cut off the electricity coming from outside; they also sent in military bulldozers to systematically destroy every one of the solar panels in those solar fields, rendering those sanitation facilities completely offline.

And two more issues. One is, you know, the infrastructure of water in Gaza has been so destroyed and damaged by the hostilities that it needs urgent repair. There was a major warehouse inside Gaza with a lot of spare parts. It was bombed. And the Palestinian staff who were there, with their families, some of them were killed in that bombing.

Finally, humanitarian agencies, such as Oxfam, UNICEF and others, have been trying, since the war started, to get water and sanitation materials imported into Gaza to help purify water, chlorine tablets, all sorts of things to fix the network. Those were systematically blocked. Even at moments when the Israeli military was allowing other civilian items into Gaza, we were told those were blocked. That is a complete state policy of denial of access to water, and the results are horrifying.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Bill, just to convey, you begin the report by citing World Health Organization figures about the amount of water, minimum amount of water, that’s required per person per day to sustain life. What the WHO recommends is 247 liters per person per day. And since October 7th, 2023, people in Gaza — an individual in Gaza has access to two to nine liters per day, as against the 247 that the WHO recommends. So, if you could say, Bill, on the basis of the people that you spoke to, that Human Rights Watch spoke to, what has the impact of this been on people in Gaza? What did medical personnel that you spoke to say? Also, in terms of excess deaths, we hear, of course, of this horrific figure of 45,000 people who have been killed by direct attacks by the Israeli military, but how many more deaths are likely the result of water deprivation?

BILL VAN ESVELD: Thank you. Yeah, that’s right. So, in Israel, the average consumption per day is 247 liters per person per day of water. The minimum, absolute minimum, required for life, even in an emergency situation, is 15 liters a day. And people in Gaza have been getting two to nine liters a day on average. Now, that’s an average that — and, you know, I should say, in northern Gaza, for example, for five months, people got zero liters of drinkable water per day.

The effects are as horrifying as you might expect. We spoke to 115 or more people, people in Gaza, healthcare providers. And, you know, the lack of water kills you in a million different ways. There are babies who have died directly from dehydration, but there’s also people who are dying from disease and contracting terrible illness. I mean, you cannot take — you cannot bathe if you have no water. And a quarter of a million people, at least, in Gaza now have skin disease as a result. I mean, one five-minute shower is more water than people in Gaza get in an entire week. We spoke to surgeons who said that wounds are not healing because the bodies of the patients are so dehydrated. Kids were coming in, dying in the hospital, because they were drinking from contaminated water sources. Now, if you add to this the decimation of the healthcare sector in Gaza, that means that people are coming in with waterborne diseases that can no longer be treated. So, children dying at large numbers of hepatitis A, which normally would have a death rate, but very, very small, that has ballooned horrifyingly in Gaza.

If you add all of these things up, there is a huge hidden death toll. We know that 45,000 names have been collected by the Gaza Ministry of Health, but those are almost all people who were killed directly by explosive weapons or shot directly during the course of the hostilities. That doesn’t include the hidden death toll of people dying from dehydration, starvation, disease and illness. Now, there were 99 healthcare professionals who wrote a letter to President Biden and his administration in October. And they calculated, on the basis of the international committee that tracks famine and that has sort of global standards for the numbers of deaths expected, that based on the assessment of starvation and hunger and lack of water in Gaza, at least 62,000 more people may be dead in Gaza. That is — you know, we say thousands in the report. It could easily be tens of thousands or more. We are talking about a mass death situation that is the result of deliberate policy.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go, Bill, to one of the many comments by Israeli officials quoted in your report to determine Israel’s genocidal intent in Gaza. This is the former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant speaking just days after the October 7th, 2023, attacks.

YOAV GALLANT: [translated] I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk, Bill Van Esveld, about the significance of what he said here, again, Yoav Gallant at the time the defense minister of Israel. And actually, recently, he — well, the ICC has issued arrest warrants for him and Netanyahu. And even with those arrest warrants issued, the International Criminal Court, he just recently went to Washington, D.C., to meet with officials.

BILL VAN ESVELD: Yes, the same Yoav Gallant, an indicted war criminal by the International Criminal Court, was just meeting with the U.S. defense secretary and President Biden’s senior Middle East adviser. You know, it’s really, really shocking. This is the same man who once said, when the United States was going to sanction an Israeli military unit, “We don’t listen to the United States. No one will teach us about morality.” Really disappointing move by the Biden administration there, and others who met with him.

What that statement of his and statements by other senior Israeli leaders in positions of control and command in the Israeli army and over this issue of denial of access to water, their statements are evidence of an intent. And they were also carried out by the military and, you know, by the authorities. So it’s not just they said something and it sounds bad. No, what they said was actually what they did.

That’s extremely serious, and that is part of what led us to the conclusion of extermination. That is a crime against humanity, of deliberately causing mass death. And one of the ways that, you know, that can be committed is by depriving people of what they need to stay alive, such as water. That same crime, which we define and conclude is the crime of extermination, is the same act as one of the acts of genocide listed in the Genocide Convention and, indeed, in the International Criminal Court statute on its article on genocide: deliberately inflicting conditions of life on people calculated to bring about the destruction of that group.

Now, what Gallant said there could be evidence of genocidal intent. Genocide is an extraordinarily difficult crime to prove, because the intent must be, according to international law, that you are not just killing people in large numbers, which is extermination, but that you are killing them specifically because you want to destroy the group they are part of. And if you look at the evidence of Israeli military and government actions on water, and statements like that one on water, we think you may have evidence already of genocidal intent.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can I ask you, Bill Van Esveld, is this the first time that Human Rights Watch is accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza?

BILL VAN ESVELD: This is the first time that we’ve made a finding of genocidal acts in Gaza. It is not an accusation that we level lightly. We have not done this very often in our history. We accused the Myanmar military of genocidal acts against the Rohingya in 2017, and we found full-blown genocide against the Kurds in Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign in Iraq in the ’80s — sorry, in the ’90s, and we found genocide against — also in Rwanda in the ’80s. It is, you know, an extremely difficult crime to prove. It is, you know, mass killing deliberately to destroy people because they’re part of the group, not something we level lightly, but, yes, we found it here.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Van Esveld, we thank you so much for being with us, acting Israel and Palestine associate director at Human Rights Watch. He helped edit the Human Rights Watch report, just out today, titled “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water.” We’ll link to that report at democracynow.org. Bill Van Esveld, joining us from Athens, Greece.


The World Owes Palestine This Much – Please Stop Censoring Palestinian Voices

December 20, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.



Social media censorship is a global phenomenon, but the war on pro-Palestinian views on social media represents a different kind of censorship, with consequences that can only be described as dire.

Long before the current devastating war on Gaza and the escalation of Israeli violence and repression in the occupied West Bank, Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices have been censored.

Some date the censorship to an agreement in 2016 that, according to the Israeli government, sought to “force social networks to remove content that Israel considers to be incitement.”

This was translated, almost immediately, to the shutting down of thousands of accounts and the barring of many social media influencers, with the hope of slowing down the vastly growing pro-Palestinian tendencies in all Meta-linked platforms.

The war on Gaza, however, has escalated the censorship. In a report submitted to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Human Rights Watch noted that the documented restrictions on freedom of speech “undermine the fundamental human rights to freedom of expression and assembly.”

The censorship became so sophisticated and increasingly involved a direct Israeli role. To ensure that ‘offenders’ to Israeli sensibilities were eliminated in large numbers, Meta began censoring specific words, thus deeming entire contents offensive, racist, and antisemitic.

But Meta was not the only social media network involved in this practice. On November 17, 2023, the X platform (previously known as Twitter) declared that users who write terms like “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea”, or similar expressions would be suspended.

One year later, the social media platform Twitch followed suit by revising its ‘Hateful Content Policy’ to include “Zionist” as a potential slur.

Not only do these decisions, and many others, directly impair the freedom of speech and press, but they also confuse rational conversations with anti-Jewish sentiments.

The word ‘genocide’, for example, is not a swear word, but a common term, embraced by numerous countries around the world, accusing Israel of carrying out acts of genocide, meaning the “systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race”.

Under pressure from many countries, and after presenting a powerful case at the Hague, South Africa managed to compel the International Court of Justice to investigate Israel’s acts of genocide in the Gaza Strip in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention.

In other words, this is not a matter for Mark Zuckerberg or any other social media company to decide, based on direct consultations with those carrying out the mass killings in Gaza.

The same applies to Zionism, an ideologically situated political movement, that traces its history to 19th-century Europe, thus, neither to a specific race nor a religious text.

While many are, rightly, outraged by the fact that this kind of widespread, and growing, censorship directly challenges the main tenants of democracy, the actual harm for Palestinians is much bigger.

According to a November 2024 report by the Sada Social Center for Digital Rights, the surge in digital violations targeting Palestinian content could not come at a worse time.

According to the organization, “Meta platforms accounted for the largest share of violations at 57%, followed by TikTok at 23%.” YouTube and X follow at 13 and 7% respectively.

This censorship, according to Sada, includes the shutting down of WhatsApp accounts, another Meta-owned platform that is also tightly controlled.

Unlike most of us, Palestinians in Gaza use these platforms to communicate with one another, to know who is dead and who is alive, and to raise awareness of certain massacres, often taking place in isolation, especially in the northern Gaza Strip.

Regarding northern Gaza, Sada Social spoke of a ‘digital blackout’, which has compounded the horror of that region – famine, mass killing, destruction of all hospitals, etc.

In the specific case of social media censorship in Gaza, lives are literally being lost as a result of politically motivated decisions.

HRW was one of many rights groups that have routinely spoken about the ‘systematic censorship’ by Meta. A December 2023 HRW report identified the following recurring patterns of censorship: removal of content, suspension of pro-Palestinian accounts, the reduction of visibility, known as ‘shadow-banning’, the restrictions on engagement, and the deliberate misuse of policies on hate speech and graphic content.

The danger of this kind of censorship is multilayered. It is a direct threat to one of the most basic freedoms guaranteed under the law in any democratic society. In the case of Gaza, the censorship takes a dark, deadly turn as it could make the difference between people dying under the rubble of their homes or receiving assistance.

Additionally, censorship of this magnitude often creates precedents and often leads to other forms of censorship that, in fact, are already taking place against other vulnerable communities, whether on a national stage or globally.

While the international community is yet to translate its verbal solidarity with Palestinians into any meaningful action, the least we could do is to give Palestinians their full rights to express their views, share their pain, and raise awareness of their collective plight. The world owes them that much, and no social media company should be permitted to hinder such a simple and reasonable demand.

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Ramzy Baroud  is a US-Palestinian journalist, media consultant, an author, internationally-syndicated columnist, Editor of Palestine Chronicle (1999-present), former Managing Editor of London-based Middle East Eye, former Editor-in-Chief of The Brunei Times and former Deputy Managing Editor of Al Jazeera online. Baroud’s work has been published in hundreds of newspapers and journals worldwide, and is the author of six books and a contributor to many others. Baroud is also a regular guest on many television and radio programs including RT, Al Jazeera, CNN International, BBC, ABC Australia, National Public Radio, Press TV, TRT, and many other stations. Baroud was inducted as an Honorary Member into the Pi Sigma Alpha National Political Science Honor Society, NU OMEGA Chapter of Oakland University, Feb 18, 2020.


Source: Drop Site

The BBC is facing an internal revolt over its reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza.

Their primary battlefield has become the online news operation. Drop Site News spoke to 13 current and former staffers who mapped out the extensive bias in the BBC’s coverage and how their demands for change have been largely met with silence from management. At times, these journalists point out, the coverage has been more credulous about Israeli claims than the UK’s own Conservative leaders and the Israeli media, while devaluing Palestinian life, ignoring atrocities, and creating a false equivalence in an entirely unbalanced conflict.

The BBC journalists who spoke to Drop Site News believe the imbalance is structural, and has been enforced by the top brass for many years; all of them requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution. The journalists also overwhelmingly point to the role of one person in particular: Raffi Berg, BBC News online’s Middle East editor. Berg sets the tone for the BBC’s digital output on Israel and Palestine, they say. They also allege that internal complaints about how the BBC covers Gaza have been repeatedly brushed aside. “This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” one former BBC journalist said.

In November, the journalists’ outrage at the Corporation’s overall coverage spilled out into the open after more than 100 BBC employees signed a letter accusing the organization, along with other broadcasters, of failing to adhere to its own editorial standards. The BBC lacked “consistently fair and accurate evidence-based journalism in its coverage of Gaza” across its platforms, they wrote. The employees also requested that the BBC make a series of specific changes:

reiterating that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza, making it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims, highlighting the extent to which Israeli sources are reliable, making clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines, providing proportionate representation of experts in war crimes and crimes against humanity, including regular historical context predating October 2023, use of consistent language when discussing both Israeli and Palestinian deaths, and robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews.

One BBC journalist told me that the letter was “a last resort after several tried to engage using the usual channels with management and were just ignored.” Another journalist tells me they hadn’t signed the letter because they weren’t aware of it, stating the strength of feeling went “way beyond” the signatories.

BBC management has rejected claims that such dissent has been ignored. In the reply sent by Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News, which Drop Site News obtained, Turness told them to “please note we would not normally reply to unsigned, anonymous correspondence,” adding that “BBC News is proud of its journalism and always open to discussion about it, but this is made more difficult when parties are not willing to do so openly and transparently.” She claimed the BBC engaged with internal BBC staff and “external stakeholders” on coverage of Israel and Palestine, and argued “the BBC does not and cannot reflect any single world view, and reports without fear of [sic] favour.” One BBC journalist told me this reflected the BBC’s desire to “frame this as an identity politics issue, when it’s not. It’s about not blindly accepting the Israeli line.” Another called it “very patronizing.”

Email from Deborah Turness

The internal critique peaked again in December, after journalists say the BBC failed to highlight Amnesty International’s report concluding that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Senior correspondents expressed their dismay at the angle chosen for the limited broadcast coverage. In a WhatsApp group of senior Middle East correspondents, editors, and producers—referred to as ‘the big dogs’ by BBC management—one posted the chyron during coverage on the BBC news channel: “Israel rejects ‘fabricated’ claims of genocide.” Another commented: ‘FFS!!—It’s an open goal for those who say we’re frit [afraid] of upsetting the Israelis and keep on couching our stories in an ‘Israel says’ narrative’. As one BBC journalist puts it to me: “These are established senior correspondents—and it’s even bothering them.”

In response to this criticism by their own senior journalists, a BBC spokesperson said: “We take feedback on our coverage seriously, but criticism of BBC output based on a single screenshot taken during a few seconds of coverage, or on false assertions that topics ‘haven’t been covered’ when they have is invalid and disingenuous.”

Another strapline was also used that day: “Amnesty International accuses Israel of genocide.” While it was discussed on BBC radio stations, journalists note that the report was not covered at all on the BBC’s flagship news programmes—BBC One’s News At One, News At Six or News At Ten or its flagship current affairs programme, BBC Two’s Newsnight. According to broadcast regulator Ofcom, BBC One is the most frequented news source in Britain. On December 5, the day the Amnesty report was released, 3.7 million viewers tuned into the BBC News At Six alone. The News Channel attracts only a small fraction of that audience.

The Amnesty International report was also not afforded proper attention by BBC online, the staffers say. It appeared on the BBC front page, but long after the embargo on reporting ended, leading award-winning TV producer Richard Sanders to ask “Why on earth did it take them 12 hours?” Even then, it appeared as the seventh item in order of importance. And for a week after it was reported, the story about the world’s most famous human rights organization concluding that Israel was committing genocide did not appear in the ‘Israel-Gaza war’ index tab which remains fixed at the top of the BBC news front page. The BBC told Drop Site News that this was a mistake. The Amnesty story was added to the index several days after the report was released, meaning traffic to the story was suppressed.

According to data seen by BBC journalists, in the first few days the story received around 120,000 hits. One BBC journalist suggests that—if it had been on the Israel-Gaza index featured on the BBC news front page—it would have attracted far more traffic. They note a story which appeared on the Israel-Gaza index and was just one day older, concerning the recovery of the body of an Israeli hostage from Gaza, garnered around 370,000 hits.

In addition to what they see as a collective management failure, journalists expressed concerns over bias in the shaping of the Middle East index of the BBC news website. Several allege that Berg “micromanages” this section, ensuring that it fails to uphold impartiality. “Many of us have raised concerns that Raffi has the power to reframe every story, and we are ignored,” one told me.

The BBC journalists also point to Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, and Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC’s news division, as standing in the way of change. Both are aware of the outrage against Berg, the journalists said. “Almost every correspondent you know has an issue with him,” one said. “He has been named in multiple meetings, but they just ignore it.”

It is difficult to overstate the influence of the BBC’s online operation. According to media watchdog Press Gazette, the BBC news website, which includes both news and non-news content, is the most-visited news site on the internet. In May alone, it had 1.1 billion visits, dwarfing second-place finisher msn.com, which had 686 million visits.

Berg’s influence has a ripple effect, the journalists say. While BBC broadcasters write and produce their own reports, editors and reporters across the organization frequently draw on web articles such as those edited by Berg to flesh out their stories. “Part of the problem is that the staff on Today [the BBC’s flagship radio current affairs programme] and domestic outlets in general are pretty ignorant about Israel/Gaza,” says one BBC journalist, “as anyone who goes to work there from World Service realizes very quickly.” BBC news broadcasts are centered on coverage by veteran journalists with on-the-ground experience like Jeremy Bowen who are regarded as more balanced.

In response to a request for comment, the BBC said it unequivocally stood by Berg’s work and that Drop Site News’s descriptions of Berg “fundamentally misdescribe this person’s role, and misunderstand the way the BBC works.” The organization rejected “any suggestion of a ‘lenient stance’” towards Israel or Palestine, and asserted that the BBC was “the world’s most trusted international news source” and that its “coverage should be judged on its own merits and in its entirety.”

“If we make mistakes we correct them,” the BBC said. More on that later.

“This is about editorial standards”

In November 2023, BBC senior management attended a morning meeting with at least 100 staffers to discuss coverage of Gaza. It soon descended into a fiery debate. “We’ve got to all remember that this all started on 7 October,” Deborah Turness, the CEO of the news division, called out, in an attempt to assert control of the meeting, two attendees told me. Liliane Landour, the former head of the BBC World Service, disagreed, pointing to the decades of Israeli occupation before October 7: “No, I’m going to have to say that’s not the case, and I’m sure that’s not how you meant to phrase it.” People were “livid” about Turness’s remarks, one journalist said. When asked for comment, the BBC pointed to a blog post Turness authored in October 2023 detailing the organization’s approach to the conflict.

Internal tensions over the BBC’s coverage of Gaza had been rising for weeks. On October 24, Rami Ruhayem, a Beirut-based BBC Arabic correspondent, sent an email to Tim Davie, BBC’s director general, laying out the concerns he and his fellow journalists had shared about the organization’s lack of impartiality in its Gaza coverage. While stories “prominently” used words like “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “atrocities” to refer to Hamas, they “hardly, if at all,” used them “in reference to actions by Israel,” he wrote.

Ruhayem singled out the use of the word “massacre,” in particular, which the BBC had not used to describe mass slaughters perpetrated by Israeli forces. By contrast, on October 10, 2023, the organization published a story with the headline “Supernova festival: How massacre unfolded from verified video and social media.”

Ruhayem also noted the organization-wide failure to frame reporting and analysis around Israeli statements signifying war crimes and genocidal intent. He pointed out the lack of “historical context,” emphasizing that “apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler-colonialism” were “terms used by many experts and highly respected organizations to which the BBC usually defers.”

On October 31, 2023, for example, the BBC published a story with a headline that excised Israel’s role: “Israel Gaza: Father loses 11 family members in one blast.” When the BBC does mention Israel as a perpetrator, including when large numbers of civilians are killed by its missiles, the organization’s headlines use the caveat “reportedly.” The BBC repeats the Israeli authorities’ use of “evacuate” to describe the forcible transfer of civilians—effectively using a euphemism for a war crime. Instead of describing Israel’s total siege on Gaza for what it is, an all-encompassing blockade on aid was framed in an October 20, 2023 headline as “Israel aims to cut Gaza ties after war with Hamas.”

In November, around the same time as the meeting with Turness, eight BBC journalists sent a 2,300-word letter to Al Jazeera outlining how their employer had failed to accurately depict the Israel-Palestine story “through omission and lack of critical engagement with Israel’s claims” and a “double standard in how civilians are seen.” In the preceding weeks, the BBC had either buried or failed to report on a number of official statements announcing Israel’s intent to perpetrate war crimes. Defense minister Yoav Gallant’s commitment to impose a “full siege” on Gaza and its “human animals” received just one mention in BBC online content, towards the end of an article headlined “Israel’s military says it fully controls communities on Gaza border.” No context about the illegality of the statement was offered. A statement by Israeli General Ghassan Alian addressed to both Hamas and “the residents of Gaza”—which unambiguously denounced the Palestinians of Gaza as “human beasts” and promised a total blockade on life’s essentials and the unleashing of “damage” and “hell”—was not covered at all.

By comparison, weeks after the start of the war in Ukraine, the BBC’s online coverage clearly identified war crimes committed by Russia, even without official rulings from international courts. “Gruesome evidence points to war crimes on road outside Kyiv,” read one headline 36 days into the invasion. After October 7, war crimes committed by Hamas were treated as objective fact requiring no legal verdict: “Israeli community frozen as Hamas atrocities continue emerge.” When strong evidence similarly shows Israel committing atrocities, the same editorial guidance does not apply.

In the weeks after October 7, a number of BBC journalists began venting their intense frustrations in forums like WhatsApp groups, where they collected the “bullshit reasons given for not commissioning stories.” They singled out Berg, one of whom says plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of “systematic Israeli propaganda.” After staffers were told by the BBC’s top brass to come forward with any concerns about coverage, in meetings with senior management, journalists have flagged numerous examples of problematic editing by Berg. Again, having been invited to do so by BBC management, journalists have sent large numbers of emails identifying problems with such news stories. Staff members report rarely receiving responses to such emails.

Instead, the BBC’s approach has been to pathologize the problem. In early November 2023, management convened several roundtables, described as “listening sessions,” where, as one attendee told me, it became clear that management sought to recast factual objections and bias concerns raised by staff as emotional struggles. “They said they were concerned about mental health [and] offered the telephone number of the BBC support group,” one journalist who attended said.

“They wanted to turn it into a ‘Muslim thing,’ that ‘we’re worried about your community.’ We said, ‘We appreciate your concern about our mental health, but this is about editorial standards. It’s about being a public service broadcaster and impartiality not being abided by. They realized they’d let the genie out of the bottle. We said: ‘What’s the next session? We want a progress report, collating the evidence.’” Another attendee said management told staff to “be as frank as possible” and that it sought “honest thoughts on coverage.” Despite management efforts to pigeonhole the objections to BBC’s coverage, the internal dissent extended far beyond Muslim staff.

“It was quite bad, staff were not treated well,” says one BBC journalist. “They were speaking their mind, then being shut down. They were told to be honest, but managers didn’t want that and snapped.” Since the meeting with Turness in November, staffers have asked, on three occasions, for updates on whether there had been any progress on responding to and acting on claims about biased coverage. “Three times there has been nothing back,” one staffer said.

In March 2024, the Centre for Media Monitoring, a watchdog group established by the Muslim Council of Britain, released “Media Bias: Gaza 2023-24,” a 150-page document detailing numerous allegations against the BBC’s reporting on Israel and Gaza. That included stripping away context such as Israel’s occupation of Palestine and siege of Gaza, far greater use of emotive language to describe Israeli suffering or deaths than that used when the victims are Palestinians and a pattern that BBC’s position “has often been to push the Israeli line whilst casting doubt on Pro-Palestinian voices.”

The BBC journalists said they presented the document to Richard Burgess, the BBC‘s director of news content who oversees content across BBC platforms. His response: He did not “recognize the bias.”

Without Fear or Favor

Between November 2023 and July 2024, BBC management held five listening sessions on Israel-Gaza. In a group meeting with Davie in May 2024, staffers at the meeting acknowledged the pressure the BBC faced from pro-Israel lobbyists. They also emphasized that their sole objective was to uphold the BBC’s values of fairness and impartiality and to produce content “without fear or favor”—principles staffers told me had been cast aside in deference to Israeli narratives. They also noted examples of individual senior journalists who had sent dozens of complaints about coverage of Israel and Gaza, only to be consistently brushed off.

The staffers also identified the website, headed by Berg, as the BBC’s most egregious violator of editorial standards on impartiality on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Davie, BBC’s director-general, was already aware that many BBC journalists had specific concerns about Berg. “He did very little to hide his objective of watering down anything critical of Israel,” said a former BBC journalist.

Berg wasn’t the only senior figure discussed at the meeting in May. The role of another powerful individual raised Robbie Gibb—one of five people who serve on the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee along with Director-General Tim Davie, BBC News CEO Deborah Turness, the Chairman of the Arts Council Nicholas Serota, and BBC Chair Samir Shah. In September 2024, when discussing “the Israel-Gaza story,” Shah told British parliamentarians that the committee was “part of the process where complaints are discussed, talked about and addressed.” He added that the BBC’s next “thematic review” should focus on Israel and Palestine.

Gibb is charged with helping to define the BBC’s commitment to impartiality, and to respond to complaints about the BBC’s coverage on Israel and Palestine—but his ultra-partisan record speaks for itself. The brother of a former Conservative minister, he is a veteran of the revolving door between Britain’s worlds of media and politics. In his thirties, Gibb was the chief of staff for Conservative MP Francis Maude before becoming deputy political editor of Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship current affairs show, and, later, editor of BBC politics programs. Between 2017 and 2019, he served as director of communications for Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, and was knighted by her upon her resignation. In 2020, Gibb also led a consortium to rescue the Jewish Chronicle from bankruptcy. In 2021, Gibb returned to the BBC, joining its board as a non-executive director. In 2022, former senior BBC journalist Emily Maitlis described Gibb as an “active agent of the Conservative party” who shaped the broadcaster’s coverage by acting “as the arbiter of BBC impartiality.” Similarly, Lewis Goodall, her colleague, said editors told him to “be careful: Robbie is watching you.”

Gibb’s deep involvement with the Jewish Chronicle continued after he took up his BBC role. In the November 2023 BBC Declaration of Personal Interests, he declared he was the 100% owner of the newspaper, before being replaced by a venture capitalist in August 2024. One former Jewish Chronicle journalist declared that, “since the change in ownership, the paper has read more like a propaganda sheet for Benjamin Netanyahu,” and that Gibb regularly appeared in the office “to check up on what stories were topping the news list and offering a view.” Since the acquisition, Jake Wallis Simons, its editor since 2021, has focused on zealously supporting Israel’s onslaught since October 2023. In one example, he tweeted a video of a 2,000-pound bomb exploding in Gaza City with the caption “Onwards to victory!,” before deleting with no apology.

In September 2024, four Jewish Chronicle columnists resigned in protest after the paper published a story that included fabricated quotes from Israeli officials, with one declaring that “too often the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic.” Four Israelis, including an aide to Netanyahu, were subsequently arrested on charges of falsifying and distributing fabricated documents to the Jewish Chronicle and Germany’s largest newspaper Bild.

In September, the Muslim Council of Britain wrote a letter expressing concern with Gibb’s position on the editorial standards committee, noting his involvement with the Jewish Chronicle, its political orientation, the fact that it had been repeatedly reported to the Independent Press Standards Organisation. At that May meeting, BBC journalists had emphasized that Gibbs’s agenda was widely understood in British media circles, referring to his links to the Jewish Chronicle and noting its right-wing partisan orientation and slavish pro-Israel stance.

But it was Berg’s key role in shaping online coverage of the Middle East that the staffers emphasized the most at the “listening session” meeting with the BBC director general, Tim Davie, in May. They noted Berg’s history and associations as indicative of bias, pointing to instances where journalists’ copy had been changed prior to publication. They made specific requests: that stories should, as a rule, emphasize that Israel had not granted the BBC access to Gaza, that the network should end the practice of presenting the official Israeli versions of events as fact, and that the BBC should do more to offer context about Israeli occupation and the fact that Gaza is overwhelmingly populated by descendants of refugees forcibly driven from their homes beginning in 1948. While Davie told staff that management would “look into” staff objections, to date no response ever came back.

A crucial part of the BBC news website is its curation department, which selects the stories that are displayed on each section’s “front page,” as well as the overall BBC news homepage. If a story appears on the front page, it often receives hundreds of thousands or even millions of views, BBC staffers said, adding that stories published on regional index pages tend to attract only a fraction of that number. BBC staffers allege that Berg plays a powerful role in deciding which Middle East stories appear on the BBC News front page. The BBC denies that he has a veto, and claims staffers are assigning “outsize importance” to Berg’s influence. Given that only a handful of stories are published to the Middle East index each day, it is relatively easy for a single editor to have an effect while also influencing coverage outside of the index. “If it’s Israel/Palestine, it has to go through Raffi before curation even OK it,” one journalist said. “Anyone who writes on Gaza or Israel is asked: ‘Has it gone to edpol [editorial policy], lawyers, and has it gone to Raffi?’” another said.

In response to BBC management claims that Berg’s power is being exaggerated by staff, a former journalist at the BBC World Service says: “I was working for a World Service department, producing content for language services. ‘We have to run this past Raffi’ was the reflex answer to any producer pitching anything on Israel.” The journalist said that other editors were reluctant to sign off content, treating Berg’s verdict as “their safety step” in the editorial process. “There was an extreme fear at the BBC, that if you ever wanted to do anything about Israel or Palestine, editors would say: ‘If you want to pitch something, you have to go through Raffi and get his signoff.”

This dynamic was corroborated by a third journalist, who said that even if a story which touched on Israel and Palestine appeared on another news index, it would still be flagged for Berg’s attention and approval. “How much power he has is wild,” said the journalist. “His reach goes beyond just the Middle East index, but to adjacent subject matters.”

Raffi Berg on Netanyahu’s Bookshelf

Raffi Berg began his career in local radio, later spending nearly a year as a news editor for the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, an outlet he later discovered was run by the CIA—a fact he was “absolutely thrilled” to learn.

Berg’s first job at the BBC was as a reporter. His bylined work included “Israel’s teenage recruits,” a story published in 2002 that presented young IDF soldiers as courageous defenders of their country while failing to mention the occupation and settlement of Palestinian land or the widespread allegations of crimes documented by human rights organizations, including in Israel, and even the U.S. State Department. One BBC journalist described the article as an “IDF puff piece.”

Berg’s reported work also included a three-part series on Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. The series presented them as victims seeking “a better quality of life” and did not mention the fact that the settlements have been repeatedly deemed illegal. Instead, the series included a boxed sidebar, outside the text of the actual story, to relay that the settlements are “widely regarded by international community as illegal under international law,” but Israel maintains that “international conventions do not apply in the West Bank and Gaza because they were not under the legitimate sovereignty of any state in the first place.”

On January 11, 2009, demonstrators held a rally in London’s Trafalgar Square in support of Operation Cast Lead, an Israeli military onslaught against Gaza in which up to 1,400 Palestinians were killed, most of them believed to be civilians. Demonstrators held Israeli flags and placards emblazoned with the words: “END HAMAS TERROR! PEACE FOR THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL AND GAZA.” While the event was billed as supporting “Peace in Israel, Peace in Gaza,” speakers at the rally voiced support for Israel’s military offensive. “In this case, I think there is no such thing as disproportion. If you have got a war to fight, then you fight,” one speaker said.

The BBC coverage of the event proclaimed: “Thousands call for Mid-East peace.” Its story opened with several paragraphs that described the rally as showcasing speeches that characterized the Israeli military offensive as pro-peace and repeated without skepticism the claims of the organizers:

Thousands of pro-Israel supporters have gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square to call for an end to the violence in the Middle East.

Organizers said they wanted people in Gaza and Israel to live in peace, but argued that Hamas must accept responsibility for the conflict.

Berg did not write the unbylined piece. But he attended the event “in a personal capacity” prior to becoming the BBC’s “Middle East online editor, or indeed acting editor,” the BBC said. Yet Berg was still a BBC staffer at the time, working on the website’s Middle East desk. In an article in which the BBC omitted key details about the nature of the rally, the organization interviewed Berg, a member of its own staff, as a participant in the pro-Israel protest. Berg even went to the trouble of writing a letter to Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post to take issue with its suggestion that only 5,000 people had attended what he called the “Israel solidarity rally at Trafalgar Square on Sunday.” “This is actually well short of the actual number,” he wrote. “The organizers, the Board of Deputies, said it was 15,000, and in my opinion (I was there) that is probably accurate.”

A decade later, the BBC amended its editorial guidelines to clarify that “people working in news and current affairs and factual journalism… should not participate in public demonstrations or gatherings about controversial issues.” By then, the BBC had concluded that the mere act of attending a protest in a personal capacity was a threat to perceptions of impartiality.

In 2013, Berg became Middle East editor for BBC news online. It was in this role where he encountered material that would form the basis for his book, “Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort,” an account of the Israeli spy services’ efforts to evacuate Jews from Ethiopia between 1979 and 1983. In the book, Berg describes Mossad in glowing terms, calling the agency “much vaunted.” Berg received extensive cooperation from Mossad for the book, including “over 100 hours of interviews” of “past and present agents and Navy and Air Force personnel.” It was published in 2020. In an interview to promote the book, Berg said he collaborated on the project with “Dani,” a former senior Mossad commander he described as a “legend” who later became “a very close friend.”

An expert on Mossad who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal from within their professional circles told Drop Site News that the book failed to present crucial context surrounding Israel’s intelligence services, including their record of human rights violations, assassinations, and extraordinary renditions. Berg’s close relationship with Dani “raises the risk of adopting the viewpoints and value judgements of intelligence agencies,” the expert said, raising questions about Berg’s interest in the book’s subject. Books that romanticize the operations of spy agencies are “a powerful legitimizing device for intelligence services,” the expert said. “Authors who don’t even bother to raise tough questions about intelligence services are the best spokesperson these services could have hoped for. At the beginning of February 2020, Ohad Zemet, the spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in London, attended a launch event for Berg’s book, where he posed for a photo with the author and Mark Regev, then Israel’s ambassador to the UK. Zemet posted the photo in a tweet in which he called the book “wonderful.” A year later, Berg retweeted Zemet’s post, with the words: “big honour for me on a very special night.”

On August 23, 2020, Berg posted an image of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu taking a phone call at his desk. In his post, Berg has zoomed in on and circled a copy of Red Sea Spies visible on a bookshelf behind the prime minister. “First time I’ve been on a prime minister’s bookshelf!” he wrote. “I know I’ve got one of  PM @netanyahu’s books on mine—but wow!” He tweeted a similar image in January 2021.

Source: Twitter/X
Source: Twitter/X

The BBC’s editorial guidelines concerning personal views and bias are clear. They state that “views or opinions expressed elsewhere, on social media or in articles or in books, can … give the impression of bias or prejudice and must also be avoided.” BBC journalists far more junior than Berg have been reprimanded or even disciplined for social media output seen as biased in favor of the Palestinian cause.

BBC journalists emphasize this context when they point to how Berg reshapes everything from headlines, to story text, to images, arguing he repeatedly seeks to foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity, with one journalist characterizing his approach as “death by a thousand cuts.”

In response to a request for comment from Berg, Drop Site News was informed that Berg had hired British-Israeli lawyer Mark Lewis, who is described as “the UK’s foremost media, libel and privacy lawyer.” The former director of UK Lawyers for Israel, Lewis attended the 2018 launch of Likud-Herut UK, a right-wing Zionist organisation, whose national director is his wife, Mandy Blumenthal. At the launch, Lewis emphasized the importance of “unapologetic Zionism.” Citing rising antisemitism, he announced that he and Blumenthal had immigrated to Israel in December 2018. “Europe in my view is finished,” he declared. His Twitter profile cites his current location as “Israel (legal work England).”

The BBC then informed Drop Site that its responses to our questions covered both Berg and the BBC. The BBC disputed the journalists’ characterization of Berg’s role and alleged bias, though the network declined to answer specific questions about claims made by current and former staffers.

Muhammed Bhar’s “Lonely Death”

In July, the BBC published a story on its website about Muhammed Bhar, a 24-year-old Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome and autism. He lived in Gaza with his family, who provided him with around-the-clock care. Since Israel began its assault on Gaza, he had been terrified of the shells exploding around him, caused by violence he was unable to understand. On July 3, the Israeli military raided Bhar’s home. The family begged for mercy for their disabled son, but the unit’s dog savaged him. He begged the dog to stop, using the only language he could access in that moment: “Khalas ya habibi” (“that’s enough, my dear”). The soldiers then put the injured man in a separate room, locked the door, and forced the family to leave at gunpoint. A week later, the family returned home to find Bhar’s decomposing body.

Bhar’s story was originally documented by Middle East Eye on July 12, with the headline: “Gaza: Palestinian with Down syndrome ‘left to die’ by Israeli soldiers after combat dog attack.” British newspaper The Independent covered it with the headline: “Gaza man with Down’s syndrome mauled by Israeli attack dog and left to die, family says.” Four days later after the first reports, the BBC published its own version of the story. Its headline: “The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome.”

The headline did not reflect the hideous circumstances of Bhar’s death and omitted the specifics of who did what to whom—a recurring theme in complaints made by BBC reporters and presenters to management regarding the Corporation’s online coverage. In the original version of the story, it took 500 words to learn that an Israeli army dog had attacked Bhar, and a further 339 to discover how he had died.

Berg was the one to hit publish on the story, according to the edit history obtained by Drop Site. Optimo, the BBC’s content management system, shows that Berg made a series of pre-publication edits, before publishing the story, meaning that Berg himself must have signed off on its framing and deemed that the headline erasing Israeli responsibility satisfied the BBC’s editorial standards.

The article about Bhar sparked an outpouring of fury both internally at the BBC and on social media. In a post liked by 14,000 users, Husam Zomlot, Palestine’s ambassador to the UK, tweeted: “I don’t think there could be a worst murder in human history, still @BBCWorld headlines this as ‘death of a Gaza man’ to abdicate Israel of responsibility. Abhorrent!” Palestinian-American writer Tariq Kenney-Shawa mocked the absurdity of the framing. “A ‘lonely death,’ as if he died after a long battle with cancer or was perhaps swept away by the sea or lost under the rubble of an earthquake,” he tweeted.

Eventually, the BBC decided to rewrite the story. It changed the headline to “Gaza man with Down’s syndrome attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC.” It also inserted two new paragraphs at the top of the piece informing readers that the Israeli military had admitted “that a Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome who was attacked by an army dog in Gaza was left on his own by soldiers, after his family had been ordered to leave,” and that he was “found dead by his family a week later.” Even with the new phrasing, the story implied that the dog had attacked Bhar of its own volition, not that it was under the control of IDF personnel.

In its updated post, the BBC did not acknowledge that its previous version of the story omitted or downplayed key facts or explain to readers why it changed the headline. It did add a note at the bottom of the story: “This story was updated on 19 July with an IDF response.” The BBC also tweeted the article under its new headline, writing: “This post replaces an earlier version in order to update a headline that more accurately represents the article.”

The Bhar story symbolizes what the BBC staffers who spoke to Drop Site News say they want: Stronger assurances that BBC’s Israel and Gaza coverage upholds the organization’s policies around impartiality. As one BBC journalist told me: “There has to be a moral line drawn in the sand. And if this story isn’t it, then what?”

The objections over Berg’s role extend to his own writing. One BBC staffer highlighted Berg’s December 2022 article “Israel says likely killed Palestinian girl in error,” about Jana Zakarneh, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli snipers. The first two paragraphs read:

Israel says its forces appear to have unintentionally killed a 16-year-old Palestinian girl amid a gun battle with militants in the occupied West Bank.

The body of Jana Zakarneh was found on the roof of her house in Jenin after the firefight on Sunday night.

The story foregrounds the Israeli narrative—that Zakameh had been near gunmen who’d opened fire at Israeli troops, and that the Israeli military had been conducting near nightly raids in the West Bank as part of an operation against militants whose attacks on Israel had left the country “in shock.” Only in the third paragraph does the story quote the Palestinian prime minister’s accusation that Israel had killed the teenager “in cold blood.”

Wafa, the Palestine News Agency, released an image of Zakarneh, which CNN published with its story on her killing. By contrast, the BBC, in its story on the killing, used a photo depicting three members of Zakarneh’s family on the roof of their home.

In stories reporting attacks against young Israelis, the BBC often adopts a different approach to photos. A story about Emily Hand, an Israeli child who had been presumed killed on October 7 but was later released, features her image. A story about a 14-year-old Israeli boy who was killed in the West Bank earlier this year also included a picture of him. Late last year, a story about a 19-year-old British-Israeli IDF soldier—not a civilian—who was killed in combat was accompanied by his photo.

In other cases, facts unfavorable to Israel have been stripped out of Berg’s reports. In a May 2022 story about an annual march of far-right Israeli extremists through Palestinian areas celebrating the capture and occupation of East Jerusalem, Berg’s original copy described the marchers as singing “patriotic songs,” which traditionally included inflammatory, racist anti-Arab lyrics that went unmentioned by Berg. Indeed, when the march took place, the BBC initially reported chants of “death to Arabs!” and “may your village burn.” A BBC crew came under attack during the march; Israeli forces stopped the attack but took no further action. But these details did not appear in a later version of the story. The headline refers euphemistically to “Israeli nationalists stream through Muslim Quarter.” All of this caused a huge outcry on social media and among some BBC staff. These details were later reinstated, with an update noting they had been restored “to give a fuller picture of events.”

On one occasion, the BBC was forced to change Berg’s copy following external and internal backlash, BBC journalists said. In May 2022, an Israeli sniper killed Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Israel has diligently tried to cover up her murder.

Berg’s original text about her funeral read:

Violence broke out at the funeral in East Jerusalem of reporter Shireen Abu Aqla, killed during an Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank.

Her coffin was jostled as Israeli police and Palestinians clashed as it left a hospital in East Jerusalem.

The editorial decision not to ascribe responsibility triggered widespread outrage, including from Chris Doyle, the director of the Council for Arab British Understanding and a prominent commentator who has repeatedly appeared on the BBC news channel. He tweeted: “how…Raffi Berg @bbcnews thinks ‘violence broke out’, ‘jostled’ and ‘clashes’ were appropriate terms I cannot fathom.” After widespread anger, the BBC updated the text to correctly open with “Israeli police have hit mourners at the funeral of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Aqla,” adding “Her coffin almost fell as police, some using batons, waded into a crowd of Palestinians gathered around it.” Nonetheless, the headline still lacked a sense of causality: “Shireen Abu Aqla: Violence at Al Jazeera reporter’s funeral in Jerusalem.”

Despite significant evidence of bias and internal protest, BBC journalists allege that the network has refused to investigate Berg’s crucial role in what they see as conduct that imperils the integrity of the BBC. “We have provided a pretty watertight account about what he’s said and done,” one journalist told me. The response from management has been limited to “Tim Davie saying: ‘It’s good you’ve raised this. We’ll look into it.’”

A Systematic Look at Coverage

Despite the grave concerns over bias and manipulation present in its coverage of Israel and Palestine, the fact is that the BBC is a juggernaut in world journalism. It employs a range of skilled journalists who have done principled and groundbreaking work, including on the Gaza war.

The site has run articles about British Palestinians grieving loved ones killed by the Israeli military, Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in the West Bank, and Israel being accused of a “possible war crime” in the killing of children in the West Bank. Berg himself has written articles on South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice and the court’s recent ruling, with accurate headlines: “UN top court says Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal.” In addition, the BBC’s seasoned broadcast journalists have produced damning stories about Israel. In such cases, Berg is less likely to push for sweeping edits in such cases, some staff have suggested.

But an unprecedented analysis of more than 2,900 stories and links on the BBC news website in the year following October 7, 2023 reveals a profound imbalance in how the organization has reported Palestinian and Israeli deaths.

The total number of Israelis killed on and since October 7 is around 1,410, while the official Palestinian death toll is conservatively estimated at 45,000 people, a vast undercount. Yet according to new research by data journalists Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava, which builds on their previous work, the BBC is less likely to use humanizing language to refer to Palestinians than to Israelis. Najjar and Lietava also found that the organization refers to Palestinian deaths only slightly more often than Israeli deaths, despite the fact the Palestinian death toll is now the higher of the two by a factor of at least 28.

There is one exception to this latter trend. On April 1, Israeli drones targeted a three-car convoy belonging to the NGO World Central Kitchen, which was transferring food to a warehouse in northern Gaza after coordinating its movements with Israeli military authorities. Because six of the seven slain aid workers were westerners, their killings received widespread western media attention. The seventh worker killed in the attack was a Palestinian driver named Saifeddin Abu Taha. In each of the numerous BBC articles about the killing of the group, he is referred to as their Palestinian colleague” or “the Palestinian driver.”

Because of this, mentions of Palestinian deaths surged. “It is the single-largest spike in the whole period in terms of the mentions of the deaths of Palestinians,” Lietava told me. “Even then, Saifeddin Abu Taha is very rarely mentioned directly, often only in association with the Western, majority white, group.”

This analysis is an expansion of Holly Jackson’s work analyzing bias in media coverage of Israel and Palestine. Mentions are grouped by week. Death counts for Gaza are from Tech for Palestine and likely vastly undercounted. Death counts for Israel are from the IDF official website. See Github for complete methodology.

Najjar and Lietava also looked at causal versus non-causal headlines that mentioned death, dying, killing, suffering, starvation, or hunger—that is, headlines explicitly describing who killed who (e.g. “A was killed by B” or even “B killed A”), compared to those that did not (e.g. “A was found dead”). In the first nine months after October 7, just 27% of BBC news story headlines about Palestinian deaths explicitly mentioned who killed them. In the case of Israeli deaths, 43% identified the perpetrator. By contrast, when covering the Russian war against Ukraine, the BBC identified the killer in 74% of its reports of Ukrainian deaths.

A similar disparity emerged when analyzing the use of humanizing and emotive words to describe the deaths of Palestinians versus those of Israelis as the researchers found they were used proportionately far less for Palestinians. It was also present when examining terms such as “massacre,” “assault,” “slaughter,” “atrocity” and other terms—these were all applied disproportionately to Palestinian actions when compared to those committed by Israel. Only Israeli strikes were described as “retaliatory”—210 times—compared to 0 for Palestinians’ use of weapons during the period covered by the report.

“Look at the sheer number of stories about October 7 and the hell individuals went through—but not Palestinians, despite the disparity of scale,” one BBC journalist said. “It took until babies started starving to death [in Gaza] before we stopped focusing on the hostages.” Another is even more damning. “We’ve never known the racism to be so overt,” the journalist said.

In response to the overall findings of the study, the BBC said: “The algorithm does not provide insight into the context of the usage of particular words, either in relation to the attacks of 7 October or the Israeli offensive in Gaza. We do not think coverage can be assessed solely by counting particular words used and do not believe this analysis demonstrates bias.”

In response to the BBC’s statement, the researchers told me “We are not ascribing bias based on some perfunctory analysis of word frequency devoid of any other context,” emphasizing the abundance of evidence pointing towards the same conclusions. “Every word is a choice,” they said, “and words chosen or omitted repeatedly over the course of a full year of coverage are very strong indicators of editorial policy and/or prejudice. Likewise, disproportionately highlighting Israeli suffering and death when Palestinians are dying in far greater numbers tells us a great deal about whose lives matter and whose lives don’t.”

Deference to Israeli Claims

Since Israel’s onslaught against Gaza began in October 2023, BBC online’s deference to Israeli narratives has been apparent. BBC journalists pointed to specific examples—beginning with the fate of Nasser hospital in Gaza.

In February, the Israeli army laid siege to the hospital. “The evidence at our disposal points to deliberate and repeated attacks by the Israeli forces against Nasser hospital, its patients and its medical staff,” reads a report by NGO Médecins Sans Frontières that detailed the incident. That evidence includes repeated sniper attacks causing multiple deaths and injuries, fatal shell attacks, and the storming of the hospital in February, with the Israeli military detaining an MSF staff member and refusing to offer details on his condition until his release two months later.

The original BBC news headline for an article co-authored by Berg had been updated from “Israel special forces enter besieged Nasser hospital” to “Nasser hospital in catastrophic condition as Israeli troops raid.” The article’s framing aligns with Israeli narratives. The first two paragraphs read:

Israel’s military claims it has captured “dozens” of terror suspects during a raid on southern Gaza’s main hospital, as staff and patients were forced to flee under gunfire.

Israel said it launched a “precise and limited mission” at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, adding it had intelligence that Hamas had held hostages there.

No hostages were ever found in Nasser hospital.

Deference to Israel also surfaced in the BBC’s first story on the Israeli army massacre of hungry Palestinians waiting for food in February, an article accompanied with the headline “Israel-Gaza war: More than 100 reported killed in crowd near Gaza aid convoy.” The next day, the headline for a second story was “Large number of bullet wounds among those injured in Gaza aid convoy rush—UN.” The language is puzzling: as the article notes, there were multiple eyewitness accounts of the massacre, along with “the presence of Israeli tanks.” As one BBC journalist said, “‘Israel accused of firing on civilians’ would be more accurate.”

On March 8, the BBC published a subsequent piece by Berg with the headline: “Gaza convoy: IDF says it fired at ‘suspects’ but not at aid trucks.” The article foregrounds Israeli denials and claims, noting only fleetingly that a UN team had visited the injured and found “a large number of people with bullet wounds” (as per the BBC’s own headline from a few days before). Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that Israeli accounts were contradictory: Mark Regev, now a special advisor to Netanyahu, originally claimed Israeli troops were not involved at all. What makes this even harder to defend on editorial grounds is that BBC Verify—launched in May 2023 as the BBC’s fact checking and anti-disinformation department—published a separate piece on March 1 challenging Israeli claims about the massacre. That work was not woven into Berg’s article.

Source: Twitter/X.

Two days before the publication of the report, the NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor had released detailed evidence of Israeli responsibility, including the apparent use of bullets that matched those in Israeli army weapons. A month later, CNN published a detailed piece based on video and eyewitness accounts discrediting Israeli claims, making it clear that the IDF had fired on crowds without warning, as survivors had said from the start.

In May 2024far-right Israeli extremists blocked aid from getting into Gaza, in part by attacking and destroying the aid; the BBC headlined its story on the incident: “Israeli activists battle over Gaza-bound aid convoys.” As one BBC journalist said, an accurate headline would have been: “Far-right Israeli activists block aid convoys.” “Aid convoy denied entry to northern Gaza, UN says,” reads another headline from June 2024, neglecting to mention that Israel had been the responsible party.

One staffer believes the BBC has largely sought to align its journalism with the UK government’s foreign policy. As far as top brass is concerned, “Israel is treated like Ukraine, Palestinians like Russia,” the staffer said. If a journalist tries to challenge the double standards applied to Russia and Ukraine, managers are baffled, treating both Ukraine and Israel as British allies. “Look at headlines on what Russia does in Ukraine. But the headlines around Gaza are generally entirely unclear, and are never clear that Israel has been the perpetrator.”

Yet even in cases where the UK government has allowed for dissent, the BBC has largely clung to the Israeli narrative.

In January, the ICJ issued provisional orders to Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide.” But not only do the BBC online articles about famine fail to mention this—they also repeatedly fail to detail the actions being taken by Israel to block aid.

This is despite the fact that Lord David Cameron, the then-foreign secretary, wrote a letter in March to Alicia Kearns, the chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, outlining multiple ways in which the Israeli state was preventing aid from entering Gaza. Even the emphatically pro-Israel Jewish Chronicle ran the damning headline: “David Cameron condemns Israel for arbitrarily blocking Gaza aid.” The BBC website did not report on Cameron’s letter.

Earlier that month, the BBC ran an interview with Cameron on the same subject, with the headline, “David Cameron urges Israel to fix Gaza aid shortages.” Some, though not all, of the points Cameron raised in the letter were covered in the interview, but as one journalist pointed out, examples of Israeli obstructions to aid should be cited in every article on the subject. “Articles on famine in Gaza won’t mention the International Court of Justice rulings, or relevant stuff. The full context is lacking,” another journalist said.

This is consistent with the BBC news website’s coverage under Berg’s editorship. “Palestinian sources need to be verified, but Israeli sources do not,” one journalist said. “There’s red flags if linked to Hamas, but you can quote the IDF freely.”

The BBC’s Response

In response to this story’s allegations surrounding BBC’s coverage of Israel and Palestine and Berg’s role and background, a spokesperson for the network told Drop Site News: “We reject your attack on an individual member of staff. Like every journalist at the BBC, they must adhere to the BBC’s editorial guidelines which ensure that we report impartially and without fear or favor.” The statement continued:

The allegations you’ve made fundamentally misdescribe this person’s role, and misunderstand the way the BBC works.

More broadly, we reject any suggestion of a ‘lenient stance’ towards either side in this conflict. The Israel/Gaza conflict is a challenging and polarising subject to cover, but when asked to choose the one provider they would turn to for impartial reporting on this story, three times as many pick the BBC as choose our closest competitor. The BBC remains the world’s most trusted international news source.

We have transparently set out our approach to reporting the conflict—for example in this blog from Deborah Turness—and if we make mistakes we correct them. Our coverage should be judged on its own merits and in its entirety.

The BBC’s defenders point to the fact that the organization is criticized from “both sides.” But even Turness dismissed this as a defense in a blog post titled “How the BBC is covering Israel-Gaza,” published on October 25, 2023. “We cannot afford to simply say that if both sides are criticizing us, we’re getting things right,” she wrote. “That isn’t good enough for the BBC or for our audiences. At the BBC we hold ourselves to a higher standard and rightly challenge ourselves to listen to our critics and consider what changes to make where we think that criticism is fair.”

The BBC told Drop Site News that it corrects mistakes in its stories. Yet one BBC journalist has pointed out that the organization has failed to correct claims in published stories about specific atrocities alleged to have been committed on October 7 that have since been proven false.

Hamas fighters and other armed Palestinian militants undoubtedly committed grave war crimes in the attacks of October 7. But the BBC website published a number of unverified claims about the attacks, a significant number of which originated from the accounts of the religious emergency response team Zaka; many of these claims have since been proven to be false and discredited, most prominently by Israeli media outlets. Yet BBC news stories still include these disproven claims, including those of multiple babies being killed or the bodies of 20 children being tied together and burned. Other media organizations, including the New York Times, have printed articles correcting some of the false claims they made about October 7, though, like the BBC, a staggering number of false reports remain on the websites of many major news organizations.

Even if BBC license payers complained about such false claims remaining in published stories, the organization would be unlikely to act on them: Their standard complaints process only deals with items broadcast or published in the last 30 days.

After 14 months of witnessing the BBC’s failures up close, these disenchanted journalists are divided between believing it is important to stay and try and make changes and wanting to abandon what feels like an irreparable systemic feature. But all agree that the gap between BBC coverage and the gravity of the atrocities committed is indefensible.

As one concludes: “Most people with a conscience here have found that the coverage is frankly despicable and certainly not up to our editorial standards.”

 

Source: Jacobin

During the first Republican debate in 2015, Donald Trump positioned himself as a bold truth-teller, almost a whistleblower, about the corrupt influence he’d exercised on politicians as a wealthy donor. The moderators asked why he’d given money to Democrats in the past, and he replied:

I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.

As Andrew Prokop dryly noted at the time, it was an unusual pitch. “Reformers usually present themselves as blameless.” Trump, instead, almost sounded like he was bragging. He presented himself as someone who’d played the system himself, knew it inside and out, and could thus be clear-eyed about what needed to be fixed.

Nine years later, Trump is preparing to start his second term as president. And one of his closest associates (and by far his most important political donor), billionaire Elon Musk, just used his wealth to influence the political process in a far more flagrant way than anything Trump was talking about on that debate stage in 2015.

Musk bought the social media platform then known as Twitter (now X) for $44 billion dollars in 2022. There’s every reason to suspect that he’s manipulated the site’s algorithm to boost his own posts. However that may be, he’s Twitter/X’s most popular user, with 207.9 million followers. Even the president-elect only has 96.2 million. Starting in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, he used that megaphone to post 150 times about his opposition to a bipartisan spending deal intended to stop the government from shutting down just before Christmas.

During the election, Musk spent well over $200 million on two pro-Trump PACs, making him by far the highest-spending donor on either side of the race. He was rewarded with such a prominent place by Trump’s side that a casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that Musk rather than J. D. Vance was Trump’s running mate. The combination of the close association he bought with the president-elect and his prominence on the social media platform he had purchased would be enough, all on its own, for Musk’s noisy opposition to the spending deal to turn the heads of many Republican lawmakers. Not content with this level of influence, though, Musk used his day of rage-posting to publicly threaten that he would personally finance a primary challenge against any Republican congressman who voted for the deal.

When Money Talks

That’s not a threat any Republican with an instinct for political preservation would take lightly. Musk is the world’s richest man, with a reported net worth of $455 billion. To put that into perspective, it’s more than sixty-nine times Trump’s own estimated worth of $6.61 billion. Musk could finance a lot of primary challenges before he would feel his wallet getting lighter.

The combination of this threat, and a desire to be seen as siding with a figure who has bought himself prestige with Trump’s base, was enough to kill a spending deal that the Speaker of the House, Republican Mike Johnson, had spent months negotiating with Democrats. It’s now unclear whether a shutdown can be averted at all. Don’t be surprised if many federal employees end up having to spend a month working without pay like they did in 2018, or if Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits — i.e., food stamps  — grind to a halt. Even if that outcome is averted, though, this was a remarkably blatant way for a billionaire to flex his political muscles, and it should deeply bother anyone who takes democracy seriously.

Allowing billionaires to exist in the first place is absurd. A million and a billion are both amounts of money that greatly exceed what most of us can ever hope to have in our bank accounts, so it’s easy to forget the enormity of the difference. But to put this into perspective, if we imagine a long-lived being (perhaps a vampire) who came to the western hemisphere with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and somehow managed to earn and save the equivalent of a thousand contemporary US dollars every day since he arrived, the vampire would have $1 million by sometime in 1495. He wouldn’t even be a fifth of the way to $1 billion dollars in 2024.

It’s hard to stretch your mind to even imagine how much money $455 billion is. As a matter of distributive justice, letting one man have that much while others struggle to make rent or afford groceries is an abomination. But when we combine that kind of wealth with letting billionaires buy political influence, the consequences for anything resembling meaningful democracy are grim.

A Bipartisan Plutocracy

The problem, however, goes much deeper than Musk himself. The ultrapublic nature of his intervention in the political process made the reality of billionaire rule blindingly obvious, but most of the ways billionaires spend some of their wealth on securing political outcomes are less like that than they are like the process Trump was describing in 2015 — whereby he’d establish relationships with politicians of both parties, and both sides of that relationship would do each other favors. Or like the way Jeff Bezos can influence the political discourse through his ownership of the Washington Post. Or the way anyone rich enough to own businesses that employ lots of people and generate lots of tax revenue can make politicians sweat bullets by threatening to move their operations to a different jurisdiction or overseas.

At this moment, as Musk is rubbing the political power conferred by his wealth in all of our faces, many Democrats may be tempted to make populist hay out of this. That’s a good instinct in the abstract: the talking points write themselves. But Democrats’ own credibility on the issue of billionaire influence is in the gutter. As of the end of October, Forbes estimated that eighty-three billionaires were backing the candidacy of Kamala Harris, compared to only fifty-two for Trump. Of course, given that one of those fifty-two was the man in the world with the most billions, and that he gave more lavishly than any of Kamala’s eighty-three, Trump was still in the better position. But there’s only so much populism you can pull off while cashing checks from eighty-three billionaires.

Of course, many plutocrats prefer to hedge their bets and spread their influence far and wide. They would say what Trump said in 2015. “I give to everyone. When they call, I give!” As long as politicians of both parties keep making phone calls to the ultrarich, rule-by-billionaire in the United States will continue.

 

Source: Foreign Policy In Focus

War mongers, professional soldiers, weapon industries, arms dealers, smugglers, and criminals around the world are having a field day. The wars and conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and Syria are just begging for the import of weaponry, the testing of new equipment, and the execution of planning strategies. At the same time, the obsession with personal weapons, predominantly but not exclusively in the United States, is not diminishing.

Politicians have played their part by generously supplying arms to their counterparts in faraway countries, even those involved in genocide. But producing weapons at an ever-accelerating level can only expand current conflicts or generate new ones. Continuing on such a path is the equivalent of a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the geopolitical arena, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to fight Hamas and Hezbollah militants, including children as young as two years old. Donald Trump is planning his war against migrants, while simultaneously preparing measures to teach China, the EU, and NATO some lessons about economics. What China is going to do next is not clear, but NATO, now led by former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, is all for more armaments, warning Europeans that Putin wants a bigger conflict somewhere on their soil. In his speech in Brussels on December 12, Rutte said it is “time to prepare ourselves mentally for war.” He also called on citizens of countries in the alliance to actively “urge banks and pension funds to invest in the defense industry” for the purposes not of attack, but of deterrence.

Arms Race

An arms race is in full swing and not for the first time. As Carlo Rovelli notes in The Guardian,

As the war cry on both sides intensified, a young Albert Einstein, together with the astronomer Wilhelm Foerster, physiologist Georg Friedrich Nicolai and philosopher Otto Buek, signed a Manifesto to the Europeans, inviting scholars and artists, “those of whom one should expect such convictions,” to speak against the escalation, think in terms of a common culture, transcend nationalist passions and call for a “union of Europeans” to prevent Europe from perishing in a “fratricidal war.” Few listened. Europe sank into the catastrophes of the two world wars.

Rovelli continues to describe the current geopolitical power struggle of hostile rhetoric, arms buildup, and trade tensions. Militaristic choices, cloaked under hypocritical rhetoric, are forestalling a more sober discussion,” he writes. “We are not risking the deaths of 20 million people: we risk total nuclear winter.”

According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reports, top arms-producing and military services companies are doing very well, with United States at the top.  In Europe, The European Defense Fund (EDF) supports companies across member states to develop competitive and collaborative defense projects that will deliver innovative and interoperable defense technologies and equipment. It offers support and advice to participants throughout the entire cycle of research and development. The Fund has a budget of nearly 8 billion euros for 2021-2027, with 2.7 billion euros allocated for collaborative defense research and 5.3 billion euros for collaborative capability development projects that complement national contributions.

It is anybody’s guess if Trump and Putin are in contact and, if so, what they are speaking about. However, the Dutch Ministry of Defense is implying that Putin is the one who will attack. To that end, the ministry has declared that it will

work with our partners to provide the deterrent capability needed to keep Russia and other adversaries at bay… To ensure the security of the Netherlands, we will invest heavily in our contribution to the NATO alliance. The army will once again have its own tanks, the air force will receive additional F-35s and the navy will take delivery of additional frigates for anti-submarine warfare. The military police will also be strengthened, and the Ministry of Defence will structurally allocate an additional EUR 260 million to attract and retain personnel. It will also invest in innovation and the defence industry to boost and sustain the production of military equipment.

Part of the aforementioned 260 million euros designed to “attract personnel” went to the production of a promotion video that appeared on Dutch TV. It is a call for enlistment into the armed forces. In this short video, young, fit, self-assured, and smiling people in ironed uniforms are moving around in sunny, exotic places. The producers of the video left out the images of the miserable and scared Dutch soldiers in the UN compound near Srebrenica. They’d been sent to the war poorly instructed and ill-equipped and were at the mercy of Serbian paramilitary troops. Such images of the reality and brutality of war would not have been inviting.

Cuts in Education

The ENF offers support and advice to participants throughout the entire R & D cycle. But it seems that the new Dutch government doesn’t like academic research. Already in May this year, it announced plans to slash a billion euros from the higher education budget, including 300 million euros from its international education budget, which supports international students. The goal is to limit the number of international students in the country, reduce overcrowding in universities and colleges, and restrict English-taught courses in Dutch universities, which the education minister argues put “the Dutch language under pressure.”

The cuts, which added up to $2 billion euros over all, include plans to scratch PhD grants for teachers and reduce funding for scientific infrastructure and the innovation budget, specifically the National Growth Fund. Yarin Eski, an associate professor at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, has predicted that social science programs will be hit hardest, due to what he said was the right-wing government’s “suspicion of disciplines that study racism, colonialism, and gender politics.” And all of this will inevitably lead to the closure of courses, research projects, and a huge reduction in the range of education programs on offer.

“This affects not only our students and staff but also the future of the Netherlands as a whole,” says Anton Pijpers at the University of Utrecht. “Universities play a crucial role in addressing societal challenges, such as research into new medicines, food security, clean drinking water, quality education, animal welfare, economic growth, and employment. These areas are now under threat.”

Gathering Protests

Malieveld is large grass field in The Hague across the central station and close to the city center and government’s offices. It is often used for festivals, concerts, and other forms of public entertainment. But it is also widely known for being the location of many large-scale demonstrations such as one organized by Extinction Rebellion around climate changes. Remembrances of the Srebrenica massacre have been organised there. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators (including Jewish participants) took place on the same grass, demanding that the government stop its military support of the Israeli regime.

In November, protest concerning the higher education cuts attracted an estimated 20,000 participants, including students, staff, and educators from universities and colleges across The Netherlands. They are ready to gather again.

In the meantime, discussions in the parliament between the governmental coalition and opposition have continued. Pressed by the opposition, the government coalition has agreed to reverse almost 750 million euros in proposed cuts to education, and now the plans have sufficient support in both chambers. The remaining 1.2 billion euros in cuts to education will continue. “A historic blunder,” tweeted Luc Stultiens, education spokesperson in the House of Representatives for the opposition party GroenLinks-PvdA. And Mirjam Bikker, party leader of the Christian Union, said when the deal was done that “we have made a bad budget less bad.” The expectation is that the Senate will not vote on the budget until after New Year’s Eve.

In a way, the saber-rattlers have already won. Nobody is questioning their budget and only a few concerned citizens are questioning the Dutch government’s unhealthy relationship with a children-killing regime. Far-right politician Geert Wilders visited Israel just a few days ago and denounced the arrest warrants issued against Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant as “the world gone mad,” stressing that Israel should be supported in its efforts “to drive out barbaric terrorists who shelter in hospitals and schools.”

Last February, the Hague Court of Appeal ordered the government to block exports of parts for F-35 fighter jets over concerns that they were being used to violate international law. The Dutch government filed an appeal against this judgment on September 6. On November 29, the Advocate General advised the Supreme Court to uphold the Hague Court ruling, agreeing with Oxfam Novib, PAX, and The Rights Forum on all points and rejecting all of the state’s arguments, saying the Dutch state must put an end to those exports to Israel.

For now, F-35 parts and other weapons supplied from the Netherlands can still end up in Israel. It is now up to the Supreme Court to give a final ruling, which is expected in February 2025. Wilders, as the unofficial leader of the ruling coalition, is not going to let the Advocate General’s advice stand without a fight.


LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY

US Health Insurance Execs Should Live in Fear of Prison, Not Murder

The U.S. political system is owned by corporations despised by the American people. Luigi Mangione is the result.
December 20, 2024
Source: The Intercept


Pictures of Money - Health Insurance. Flickr.

The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is a profoundly revealing moment in American politics. Not only has it opened the floodgates of public anger at health insurance companies, but it has also demonstrated just how avoidant most U.S. politicians are when it comes to acknowledging that anger or doing anything about it.

The surge of online excitement surrounding the man accused of murdering Thompson, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, is a symptom of a much larger problem: an oligarchic U.S. political system that repeatedly fails to respond to the needs of the people. In the absence of effective government, vigilante violence becomes much more likely.

Mangione has found popularity precisely because the man he is accused of killing ran a company that routinely boosted profits by pushing its customers closer to illness and death. Earlier this year, a U.S. Senate committee investigated UnitedHealthcare and determined that the insurance company frequently denied nursing care to patients who were recovering from falls and strokes in order to boost its profits. Health news platform Stat reported that a UnitedHealthcare subsidiary called NaviHealth systematically denied care for seriously ill seniors. Thompson himself was facing a class-action lawsuit for insider trading amid a Department of Justice investigation.

Of course, it is easy to treat UnitedHealthcare’s abuses as the actions of just one evil company run by a handful of bad men. But these companies are owned by Wall Street. Institutional investors and shareholders reward and punish corporate executives based on the profits they generate and the share prices they produce. In causing harm to so many Americans, Thompson was meeting the demands of his corporate board members and the even wealthier interests that they serve.

These profits generated by denying Americans medical care are in turn converted into campaign contributions and lobbying dollars that block our political system from doing anything about it. In 2023 and 2024, UnitedHealth Group’s political action committee reported donating $2.95 million to federal campaigns and spending $16.62 million on lobbying expenses. Meanwhile, the top federal recipient of campaign contributions from UnitedHealth Group executives and employees was Kamala Harris. Perhaps this is why Harris flip-flopped on abolishing private health insurance during her first of two failed runs for president: she knew just how much money was on the table.

Harris, of course, isn’t the only major recipient of campaign contributions from UnitedHealth Group employees in 2024. The Democratic National Committee received $103,022; the Republican National Committee received $207,125; and the Trump campaign took in $144,297. And UnitedHealth Group is not alone. A quick review of other major health insurance companies demonstrates that each of them has spent heavily in recent campaign cycles to maintain a political system that responds to their corporate interests, while undermining the health of the American people.

Perhaps this is why prominent Democratic politicians like Pennsylvania’s Sen. John Fetterman and Gov. Josh Shapiro were so quick to condemn the murder of Thompson, while saying little or nothing about the thousands of people who have been denied coverage for their medical care by UnitedHealthcare under Thompson’s management. And perhaps this has something to do with why New York Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a statement regarding the murder of Thompson and personally joined a virtual convening of some 175 corporate representatives who were concerned about their safety, but has said nothing regarding the insurance abuses of UnitedHealthcare.

With Republicans about to control all three branches of the U.S. government, any real accountability for health insurance companies, including criminalization of their abuses, is highly unlikely. But even under the best of circumstances, we shouldn’t expect much from our status quo political system. The high-water mark of health care reform in recent American history was the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.” Obama’s signature achievement was originally a conservative Heritage Foundation plan previously implemented by former private equity executive Mitt Romney when he was the governor of Massachusetts. And even this market-friendly approach was later disavowed and attacked by Republicans.

But despite these tremendous hurdles — or because of them — a clear public rage exists that would be foolish to ignore. For progressives seeking to reboot the Democratic Party, this is the time to turn public outrage at UnitedHealthcare into tangible pressure that breaks the back of business-as-usual.

In evaluating the present moment, it is worth remembering just how often Republicans leverage false crises to capture the national debate. The hysterias over the so-called war on Christmas, transgender access to bathrooms, critical race theory, “all lives matter,” and “they’re eating the cats” are all examples of moments when conservatives have created controversies or flipped the script on real-world events to shift headlines and distract the public from the actual problems of concentrated power and wealth in America.

Republicans have long been better at this than Democrats, because Republicans use their meme wars to punch down and target the powerless, while Democrats are usually too fearful to punch up and target the corporate elites who fund their campaigns while driving many of America’s ills.

But unlike many Republican attacks, the problems with health insurance are real, and public concern is quite broad. A recent Economist/YouGov poll revealed that 62 percent of those polled blamed health insurance companies for problems with the health care system, and the same percentage blame corporate executives. Democrats would be foolish to let the public’s focus on UnitedHealthcare dissipate, but as the 2024 elections revealed, Democratic Party leaders have a long track record of such foolishness.

Given that Republicans will soon hold a trifecta in Washington, and that many Democrats are too fearful of their paymasters to bluntly criticize the corporate classes, how can we push our political system to hold health insurers and Wall Street accountable? One answer might be found in abandoning any hope of seeking immediate redress through our legislative process. Instead we should treat health insurance companies, their dominant shareholders, and the politicians who serve them in the same way that one would treat a repressive government that one is trying to reform — or overthrow. In this context, our tools of battle become cultural delegitimization, demand radicalization, economic pressure, and (nonviolent) political war.
Cultural Delegitimization

Our goal should be to build an American political culture in which health insurance executives and their companies are viewed and treated the same way that child molesters and drug cartels are. They should be ostracized, stigmatized, and demonized. By doing so, we will shift American politics and create a more hospitable environment for pursuing the long-term accountability that health care reformers seek.

This cultural delegitimization can be accomplished through a series of campaigns that target health insurance executives, demonize employment in their businesses, and create a broader negative environment in which no one wants to be associated with them. When it comes to finding opportunities to stigmatize these individuals and corporations, there are likely to be many opportunities to choose from.

One recent example? Even as Thompson and UnitedHealthcare were denying sectors of the public access to valuable medical coverage, they were allowed to “sportswash” their reputations by serving as sponsors of the 2026 Special Olympics USA Games. The next time a philanthropic or community initiative unrolls a red carpet for a health insurance executive, there should be a dramatic public backlash.
Radicalize the Demands

We must shift the Overton window far enough that legislative reforms and accountability become the moderate position in American politics. This means speaking bluntly and directly about what should happen to predatory health insurance executives, their corporations, and their enablers.

Health insurance CEOs who implement denial of coverage practices to boost profits should go to jail. Health insurance companies that enable this behavior should face revocation of their corporate charters. And shareholders and investors who financially benefit from these ugly profits should be made directly and criminally liable.

Finally, the thousands upon thousands of people who have been unjustly denied coverage for their medical services should be introduced to a new concept: reparations.
Economic Pressure

Every entity that profits from predatory health insurance practices should be made to face economic costs. Corporate accountability campaigners and health insurance exchange experts should put their heads together to determine the best ways to undermine abusive health insurance companies’ access to new customers and policy holders.

In addition, investors in UnitedHealth Group and other abusive health insurers should face direct pressure to divest from these companies. Investment funds, retirement funds, university endowments, and other major investment players should all be pushed to take their money elsewhere.

As documented by Derek Seidman in Truthout, the top two shareholders of UnitedHealthcare parent company UnitedHealth Group “are the world’s two biggest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard,” which oversee a combined total of over $20 trillion in assets. Not only that, but BlackRock and Vanguard are also the top two shareholders of each of the top four U.S. health insurers. Both investment firms should face public demands to stop building their wealth off of the suffering of the thousands of people denied coverage for their medical needs.
Political War

Finally, the days of prominent politicians taking money from UnitedHealth Group must come to an end. It’s not hard to imagine a large number of senior citizens signing on to a demand that politicians should not take money from health insurance companies that are denying older Americans health care coverage.

With elections for the next Democratic National Committee chair coming up in February 2025, now is the time to push the DNC to stop taking money from UnitedHealth Group and other major health insurers. Politicians who stay silent on these demands and who refuse to bluntly criticize health insurance executives and companies should face electoral boycotts in which voters commit to voting against them.
Moving From Anger to Action

In a fairer world, Brian Thompson wouldn’t have been murdered. He would already have been put behind bars.

Health insurance executives profiting off of human suffering should live in fear. But what they should fear is jail, not murder. We don’t want to live in a society where private individuals become judges, juries, and street executioners based simply on their own determinations of morality or crime. That is the world in which anti-abortion activists kill doctors and nurses. It is the world where white supremacist gunmen assume Black community members are “criminals” to be executed. In the space between illegal vigilante violence and deference to a broken political system is a vast opportunity for constructive and sustained political disruption that eliminates the “safe space” for business executives who profit from the destruction of human life.

One can easily condemn the murder of Thompson while simultaneously condemning who Thompson was and what UnitedHealthcare is known to have done. Denying countless people access to the medical coverage they needed has caused significant pain and suffering, and may have even caused many unnecessary and early deaths. That it took a murder of a health insurance CEO for us to be talking about this reveals just how broken our political, legal, and media systems are.

Health insurance executives, investors, and the politicians who they purchase should all fear social ostracism, financial collapse, and political defeat. This is entirely possible if the political rage of the American public is combined with a strategic road map that turns that anger into action. The fundamental question is whether or not progressive leaders and health care reformers have the courage to turn this moment into something of lasting significance.

America’s Health Insurance Grinches: A Scathing Indictment of “Market” Economics

The country’s flawed insurance model, driven by greed, leads to inefficiency, inequality, and denied care - a colossal scam that has sparked fury across the nation.

December 21, 2024
Source: Institute for New Economic Thinking





In the past two weeks, one thing has become crystal clear in America: the public outrage after the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson exposed a seething fury over the health insurance racket. No amount of media finger-wagging at public perversity or partisan attempts to frame Luigi Mangione’s act as a statement from the left or right can hide the reality: the people, from all sides, are livid about the healthcare system—and with good reason.

In the 21st century, Americans have expressed their view that healthcare is deteriorating, not advancing. For example, according to recent Gallup polls, respondents’ satisfaction with the quality of healthcare has reached its lowest level since 2001. Key point: Americans in those polls “rate healthcare coverage in the U.S. even more negatively than they rate quality.”

Coverage is the core failure, driven by the insurance industry’s profit-first approach to denying care.

So here we are, regardless of politicians’ rosy narratives or avoidance of the topic. Politicians on both sides of the aisle should be motivated to take on this scandalous state of affairs, but, as journalist Ken Klippenstein pointed out, presidential nominees Kamala Harris and Donald Trump barely acknowledged healthcare, mentioning it only twice, between them, in their convention speeches. “This is the first election in my adult memory that I can recall healthcare not being at the center of the debate,” Klippenstein remarked, recalling Biden’s 2020 nod to the public option and Bernie Sanders’ strong calls for universal healthcare in 2016.

Meanwhile, Americans are crushed by skyrocketing premiums, crippling medical debt, and denial of care that devastates millions of lives. It should be no surprise that frustration has reached a boiling point, igniting a fierce, widespread demand for real, systemic change. Ordinary people are clear that insurance companies don’t exist to protect their health, but to protect and maximize profits for shareholders.

Economist William Lazonick points out that we have every right to expect quality at a fair price, noting that a good health insurance policy should ensure accessible care with the insurer covering the costs—something a single-payer system could deliver. “A for-profit (business-sector) insurer such as UnitedHealthcare could make a profit by offering high-quality insurance,” Lazonick told the Institute for New Economic Thinking, “but they have chosen a business model that seeks to make money by denying as many claims as possible, delaying the payment of claims that they cannot avoid paying, and defending their positions in the courts, if need be.”

This is capitalism run amok.

And the profits are rolling in. Lazonick notes that in 2023, UnitedHealthcare enjoyed an operating profit margin of 8% on revenues of an eye-popping $281.4 billion, insuring 52,750,000 people, which equals revenues (premiums) of $5,334 per insured. The insured, meanwhile, pay not only the premiums, but deductibles, copays, and things like surprise billing. He argues that while the cost of medical care is artificially inflated, health insurers strategize to keep costs in check by enrolling young, healthy people—a windfall provided by the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, which forced consumers into the system while allowing insurers to keep operating as usual, engaging in their profit-maximizing schemes. In his view, the inflated costs of medical care are partly thanks to financialization — a process where healthcare companies prioritize financial strategies like stock buybacks and dividend payouts over actually improving patient care, investing in useful innovations, or lowering premiums.

Alongside his colleague Oner Tulum, Lazonick has shown that the biggest health insurance companies have been on a stock buyback binge, padding their profits and lining the pockets of executives and shareholders: classic Wall Street greed in action. They note that of the top four companies by revenues over the most recent decade, UnitedHealth, CVS Health, Elevance, and Cigna, average annual buybacks were a stunning $3.7 billion. “Ultimately, the manipulative boosts that these buybacks give to the health insurers’ stock prices come out of the pockets of U.S. households in the form of higher insurance premiums,” they write.

It’s easy to see why health insurance executives are obsessed with stock buybacks. Lazonick and Tulum point out that from 2000 to 2017, Stephen J. Helmsley, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group, raked in an annual average of $37.3 million—86% of it coming from stock-based compensation. His successor, Andrew Witty, wasn’t exactly slumming it either, pulling in $17 million a year (79% stock-based) between 2018 and 2023. And then there’s the assassinated Brian Thompson, former CEO of the UnitedHealth subsidiary UnitedHealthcare, who bagged $9.5 million a year (73% stock-based) from 2021 to 2023. It’s a deadly scam, to be sure —inflate the stock price with buybacks, fatten the paychecks for executives (not rank-and-file employees), and deny patients the care they need.

Lazonick observes that the more profits that UnitedHealth Group makes, the more extra cash is available to distribute to shareholders as dividends and buybacks, “and, generally, the higher the stock price, the potential for higher top executive pay.” The unpleasant reality, according to him, is that “given UHC’s predatory business model, Thompson was incentivized by his stock-based pay to rip off customers, and he ascended to the United Healthcare CEO position because he was good at it.”

Perhaps this helps explain why many Americans are not exactly mourning his passing.

The roots of this mess trace back to the neoliberal, market-driven ideology that underpins the system. Neoclassical economics, the theory behind this philosophy, is all about maximizing profit and trusting the market to sort things out—like some magical invisible hand. In reality, it’s a blueprint for inequality: the rich, like insurance CEOS, get richer, and everyone else is subject to exploitation. Healthcare is a perfect example of why this system doesn’t work. When you turn human health into a business, where access is determined by how much you can pay, only the wealthy can count on top-notch, reliably available care. The fundamental contradiction at the heart of the U.S. system is simple: health is treated as a commodity, not a human right.

This current system make sense to the economists still clinging to their outdated, flawed neoclassical principles, but for regular folks? It’s crystal clear: our system is untenable.

The myth that the U.S. health insurance system runs efficiently in a competitive market is just that—a myth. In reality, a handful of for-profit insurers dominate, focused not on providing care, but on extracting profits. It’s a textbook case of “market failure.” Instead of healthy competition lowering prices and improving services, what we have is an oligopoly that drives up costs and leaves millions uninsured. Let’s go over three examples of this failure.

1. Information Asymmetry: In a real competitive market, you’d have clear, straightforward information to make good choices. But in the U.S. health insurance system? Not happening. Insurers deliberately obscure policy details, leaving you to guess the true costs and coverage – even the percentage of claims denied. This gives them all the power while you’re stuck with confusing, impenetrable contracts. They know exactly what they’re doing—and it’s not about helping you.

Say you’re self-employed and stuck buying private insurance on the Health Insurance Marketplace. You don’t qualify for subsidies, so you figure the best you can do is a silver plan with a $1,000 monthly premium. It’s steep, but at least it lists a $45 co-pay for an in-network doctor visit — and it’s got to be in-network because the plan won’t cover a dime of out-of-network care. You sign up for the plan, and then you go to the doctor for a respiratory infection. Surprise! You’re hit with a $200 bill. Why? Because co-pays only apply after you meet your $2,200 deductible – that was in the fine print.

At this point, avoiding the doctor sounds like the best plan.

But wait, isn’t the Health Insurance Marketplace a government-driven system? How could it be so unfair and deceptive? Well, it isn’t exactly a government-driven system. The Marketplace is government-run in name, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, with the feds running HealthCare.gov. — but let’s be clear: it’s controlled by private insurers. The government sets some rules, but the real power lies with for-profit companies pulling the strings. What’s sold as a consumer-friendly system is really just a cash cow for the insurance industry.

2. Adverse Selection: Let’s go back to that self-employed person hit with a $200 doctor bill. The next time they get sick, they decide to skip the doctor—why risk a bigger bill? The insurance companies love this—they don’t have to pay a thing while you must keep paying your premium. This is adverse selection in action. Healthy people forgo care to save money, while the sick are stuck with costly plans. Insurers raise premiums, pushing even more people out of the system. The result? A vicious cycle where prices keep climbing, and care becomes harder to access.

3. Externalities: The U.S. health insurance system’s failure to provide universal coverage creates what economists call “negative externalities.” Our self-employed person who didn’t go to the doctor to save money has ended up in the emergency room, where the costs quickly balloon. What started as a simple issue becomes a preventable hospitalization, driving up healthcare costs for everyone and straining public health resources. These added costs don’t just hit the individual—they’re a drag on society as a whole, with taxpayers and the healthcare system picking up the tab. And on top of it all, the person has missed work and spread their illness to others, amplifying both the social and economic damage.

If you want to see information asymmetry, adverse selection, and externalities really come together, look no further than Medicare Advantage, which economist Eileen Appelbaum plainly calls a “scam” – and one that is liable to expand under Trump’s second term.

As Appelbaum explains, Medicare Advantage is neither Medicare nor is it to anyone’s advantage except insurance companies.

Medicare Advantage is actually a private insurance program that is sold as an alternative to traditional Medicare, advertised to combine hospital, medical, and often prescription coverage, and offer perks such as gym membership coverage. It was originally created in 1997 as part of the Balanced Budget Act under President Bill Clinton to allow private insurers to manage Medicare benefits with a focus on cost control and efficiency.

Proponents claim that privately-run Medicare Advantage plans, which now enroll over half of all people eligible for Medicare, offer good value, but Appelbaum notes this is only the case if you manage not to get a chronic condition — you’d better not get cancer or get too sick.

A 2017 report by the Government Accountability Office found that sicker patients not only don’t benefit from these plans, they are worse off than they would be under Medicare, barred from access to their preferred doctors and hospitals.

Appelbaum notes that the Medicare Advantage program is really a patchwork of private plans run by for-profit companies that rake in billions in taxpayer subsidies while finding new ways to deny care—like endless preauthorizations and rejecting expensive post-acute treatments. Unlike traditional Medicare, which directly pays for services, these private insurers are paid per subscriber, boosting their profits by upcoding and cherry-picking healthier clients. The result: taxpayers lose $88 to $140 billion a year. But what a boon to the insurers: Appelbaum notes that they now make more from Medicare Advantage than from all their other products combined.

In a 2023 report, Appelbaum and her colleagues noted that recent evidence reveals that Medicare Advantage insurers have been denying claims at unreasonably high rates, particularly for home health services. They point to a 2022 report from the Office of the Inspector General for the U.S. Health and Human Services, which found that in 2019, 13% of prior authorization requests for medically necessary care, including post-acute home health services, were denied despite meeting Medicare coverage rules. These services would have been covered under traditional fee-for-service Medicare. Though some denied requests were later approved, the delays jeopardized patients’ health and imposed administrative burdens. On top of that, a 2021 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services study showed that over 2 million of 35 million prior authorization requests were denied, with only 11% appealed. Of those, 82% of appeals were successful, highlighting a high rate of incorrect denials.

Appelbaum points out that, despite the similar names, Medicare and Medicare Advantage are worlds apart. Medicare is a trusted public program, while Medicare Advantage is really just private insurance that’s marketed to look like the real thing, luring people in with misleading ads and false promises. The goal of Medicare Advantage supporters is to replace traditional, publicly funded Medicare with private, for-profit insurers—pushing for market competition and cost-cutting at the expense of direct, government-provided healthcare. It’s a prime example of what happens when neoclassical economics gets its way.

“It goes back to the Affordable Care Act,” she explained in a conversation with the Institute for New Economic Thinking. “The ACA introduced many beneficial reforms, but it also required Medicare to experiment with Medicare Advantage plans as part of a broader push for “value-based” care, where providers are going to be incentivized to skimp on your care.” She stressed that this isn’t just financially harmful for patients—it can be deadly. It’s not merely about denying care; it’s about using delaying tactics that put lives at risk: “Widespread delay is a serious problem – when someone has cancer, two weeks of delays waiting for coverage to be approved can be deadly.”

The reality is that with value-based care, providers are rewarded for reducing costs, rather than being paid for the volume of services they deliver, which can encourage cost-cutting measures that potentially compromise care quality.

And as to that much-touted competition that neoclassical economists insist will lower costs and boost efficiency among insurers — good luck finding an example of that. The administrative costs of private insurers are staggering compared to single-payer systems. According to a 2018 study in The Lancet, the U.S. spends 8% of total national health expenditures on activities related to planning, regulating, and managing health systems and services, compared to an average of only 3% spent in single-payer systems. The excess administrative burden in the U.S. is a direct consequence of having to navigate a fragmented system with multiple insurers, each with its own rules, coverage policies, and approval processes.

Beyond the outrageous administrative costs, the U.S. healthcare system’s reliance on employer-based insurance is a relic of 20th-century policy decisions that are downright outdated in today’s gig economy. It ties access to care to your job, effectively locking out millions of gig and part-time workers, freelancers, and the unemployed. The notion that people can “shop around” for insurance plans like they’re picking a toaster is absurd when the stakes are life and death.

The exorbitant cost of this flawed approach to healthcare is borne by society—through higher overall health spending, worse outcomes, and a public system buckling under the weight of the uninsured and underinsured. The system doesn’t just fail to provide equitable care; it deepens social and economic inequality. Health should be a public good, with care guaranteed for all—regardless of income, job, or pre-existing conditions.

Many argue that the solution isn’t patching the system with small reforms, but rethinking it entirely – or, as documentary maker Michael Moore recently put it, “Throw this entire system in the trash.” That means embracing models like single-payer, where the state ensures health for all and care is based on need, not profit.

Until the U.S. abandons its current insurance model, we’ll remain stuck with a system that enriches a few while exploiting the many—and the many are well and truly sick of it.

America is ready to say goodbye to the Grinches that operate 365 days a year.


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