UK has never looked uglier and that's why I'll never stop talking about racism

Story by Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu • Today


Oh dear, Britain.


Ngozi Fulani was subjected to relentless attempts to discredit her 

(Picture: REX/ITV/Shutterstock)© Provided by Metro

This country has rarely looked uglier than it does at this moment.

Last week, with wearying predictability, I watched as a Black British woman was vilified over her experience of racism at the hands of a white member of staff in Buckingham Palace.

The ugliness of those defending racially charged comments is on public display, and while the savagery and ferocity of it is nothing new or surprising, it never fails to take my breath away.

After Ngozi Fulani shared her experience of being repeatedly challenged on ‘where she is from’, she has been subjected to an unholy combination of relentless attempts to discredit her and distortion of facts around the actions of Lady Susan Hussey, who has since resigned.

As a recipient of relentless smear campaigns, racist abuse, harassment and gaslighting on a daily basis, I know how she feels.

Instead of holding Lady Hussey to account for her actions and using this as a teachable moment for all, her defenders sanctified her record of service, and blamed her offensive line of questioning on her age or even ‘friendly curiosity.’

A strange phenomenon happens when we Black British people experience racism – our lived experience is misinterpreted as an attack on Britain itself, or British values.

Rather than dispelling my conviction that Britain is a systemically racist country, incidents like last week’s in fact validate it.

I believe that the reaction to Ngozi Fulani is both hypocritical and bigoted.

It begs the question why people continue to claim that Britain is ‘not racist’ or indeed, ‘one of the least racist countries.’



Ngozi was even accused of appropriation 

To me, the only explanation that makes sense is that those who defend racist behaviours so vehemently do so because they are guilty of racism themselves – it reflects who they are.

I think there’s a fear among some of her prominent defenders that if Lady Hussey is held to account, then they will be held to account.

According to some of her detractors, Ngozi Fulani can’t be a victim of racism because she changed her name from Marlene, apparently making her some kind of fraud.

Related video: ‘Racism Should Be…:’ Here’s What UK PM Rishi Sunak Said On Royal Family Racism Row

Duration 4:30

View on Watch

Well if Ngozi is a fraud I assume the Royal Family are too after changing their original German name to Windsor.

Ngozi was even accused of appropriation by wearing African attire, which was also used to excuse Lady Hussey’s questioning.

Apparently, Ngozi went looking for trouble and set Lady Hussey up – I assume she must have psychic powers to know Lady Hussey (someone she’s never met before) would make a beeline for her in Buckingham Palace and interrogate her on her identity.

The utter idiocy of these groundless accusations is evidence of the kind of cognitive dissonance from reality Black British people have come to expect.

Never mind that witnesses present corroborate the truth of Lady Hussey’s relentless interrogation and that Lady Hussey stood down without denying the comments.

But these are inconvenient truths to those determined to make an example of Ngozi Fulani.

As is the oversimplification of Lady Hussey’s line of question to merely ‘where are you from’?

That deliberately ignores the escalated variations of the question, including ‘where are you really from’ and ‘what part of Africa are you from’ even after Ngozi clearly told her ‘I was born here and I am British.’

There’s even been white people implying it is somehow comparable to them also being asked ‘where are you from’.

I just want people to stop with the false equivalences.

My theory is that those powerful people who use incidents like last week’s at the Palace to deny Britain’s problems with racism are sticking to their furious lies, gaslighting and smears because they have a much wider target.

I know they aren’t just trying to teach Ngozi Fulani a lesson but sending a message to all Black British people to be quiet about racism or face this kind of abuse.

The exception being the racial gatekeepers who legitimise these discredit and smear campaigns by their actions.

It’s a threat to our lives and liberty.

As one of many Black British subjected to this threat, I’m confronted with this attempted silencing every day.

But we will not be silent, and we will not be silenced.

I refuse to be cowered because of a truth the detractors cannot deny.

I am British, this is my country of birth and my home. It belongs to me too. Therefore, I will not be hushed about racism and will help build this country into something it can aspire to.

A country where, as a Black woman, I have freedom, and the right to exercise that freedom without fear, intimidation or discrimination.

I am determined to fight the good fight and rid this country of mine of the kind of ugliness we saw after Ngozi Fulani’s experience.

If you agree racism is unacceptable at any level, then you will do the right thing and join me.

D

COP27 and the 10 Rules of Corporate Greenwashing

BY THOMAS KLIKAUER

 NOVEMBER 30, 2022
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Photograph Source: IAEA Imagebank – CC BY 2.0

With the Coca-Cola sponsored blah-blah-blah festival of COP27 in the Egyptian dictatorship done and dusted – until the next one –  corporate greenwashing has worked its magic again. And this is not just because Rachel Rose Jackson of Corporate Accountability commented that, COP27 looks like a fossil fuel industry trade show.

Egypt’s Sharm El-Sheikh made itself looking green and sustainable – thanks to corporate PR superstar company Hill+Knowlton which also supplied corporate propaganda for ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and Saudi Aramco.

Like whitewashing that seeks to wash things clean, corporate greenwashing is a form of corporate marketing spin telling you that toxic sludge is good for you. In short, greenwashing is designed to make people believe that a company is doing more to protect the environment than it really does. It sells lies.

Corporate greenwashing is deceptively used to persuade the public that a company’s products, their corporate aims, their policies and politics (read: lobbying – a $3.5bn industry) are environmentally friendly.

The top-10 corporate greenwashing corporations are: Volkswagen, BP, Exxon, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, IKEA, plastic bottle water companies, major banks, and fashion companies like H&M, Zara and Uniqlo.

By now, one of the more classical textbook-style cases of corporate greenwashing remains that of the German car-giant Volkswagen. VW was forced to admit to cheating emission tests by fitting various vehicles with a so-called defeat device. This is a software that could detect when it is undergoing an emission’s test and then alters the performance to reduce the emission’s level – simple but effective.

This was done while hyping-up the low-emission features of VW vehicles through marketing campaigns. In truth, however, Volkswagen engines were emitting up to 40-times the allowed limit for nitrogen oxide pollutants.

Yet, VW still means Volkswagen and not Very Worried as VW made a whopping $15.5bn in 2021. Corporate greenwashing works – for corporations and that is the raison d’être for doing it. Yet, there are other countless cases.

Take for example, the global fossil fuel giant BP that has even changed its name. Such a move is also known as re-branding. Now, BP wants to be known as Beyond Petroleum – it sounds really green!

To greenwash one of the world’s major corporations, BP even put solar panels on their gas stations – that looks so green! Sadly for BP, the corporation got called out for their self-greening deceptions.

Next, there is also Coca-Cola. Coke also has been accused of greenwashing because of its ‘natural’ sugar claims. Coca-Cola started its marketing campaign as a way to attract more health-conscious consumers. And so, Coca-Cola turned itself into a health drink! More recently, Coca-Cola tried to beef this up through Innocent Drinks – also deemed misleading.

Yet, the reality of the Coca-Cola corporation looks rather different. For example, many of Coke’s plastic bottles probably end up polluting our environment – like oceans. Greenpeace listed Coca-Cola as the leading plastic polluter in 2019. It makes and sells around 100 billion (no spelling mistake!) single-use plastic bottles a year. In the very same year, the Coca-Cola corporationannounced,

Coca-Cola is unveiling the first ever sample bottle made using recovered and recycled marine plastics, demonstrating that, one day, even ocean debris could be used in recycled packaging for food or drinks. This sample is the first ever plastic bottle made using marine litter that has been successfully recycled and reused in food and drink packaging

Yet, their plastic bottles – whether made from recycled material or not – still end up in our oceans. Meanwhile, the Coca-Cola corporation – world’s worst corporate plastic polluter for four years in a row – has resisted legislation intended to force the company into adopting more environmentally friendly practices. At the same time, corporate greenwashing continues, for example, when Coke’s very own website says,

we make brands and products that …

build a more sustainable future

These and plenty of other companies intentionally and deliberately instigate greenwashing PR strategies. Often, they do so in order to distance themselves from their – equally intentional and deliberate – environmental vandalism.

Through corporate greenwashing, even oil corporations can be made to appear green and sustainable. The successes of, for example, oil corporations in circumventing COP27 remains hidden behind a green corporate logo.

Corporate greenwashing means that companies and corporations spend very significant resources on corporate PR advertising the false image of being green. And usually, this comes in three versions:

1. corporations’ greeewashing makes their products look sustainable;
2. corporations also greenwash the production process of these products; and
3. they greenwash themselves – as a business to make them look sustainable.

Corporate greenwashing can range from changing the name of the corporation, the logo, and the label of a certain product to pretend to be supporting the natural environment while these products still contain harmful chemicals.

Yet, there are also multi-million dollar corporate PR campaigns that portray, for example, highly-polluting energy companies as eco-friendly. The key idea behind corporate greenwashing is that it covers up unsustainable and destructive corporate agendas and policies while, simultaneously, allowing corporations to carry on making profits.

Corporate PR firms like Edelman, for example, have even facilitated climate change denial. The corporate PR industry – and more importantly “routinely” – also funds astroturf organizations. These are PR firms that set up other – even more evil – organisations that falsely pretend to be grassroots activists while being paid by corporations. Some examples are: Ethical Oil, Resource Works, and the International Climate Science Coalition.

Of course, there are also well-paid business school professors in the mix supplying the necessary ideology to camouflage corporate greenwashing. The ideologies come – mostly – in three forms:

1. Business Ethics: is an oxymoron known as business ethics pretending that corporations are ethical;
2. CSR: next is management’s all-time favourite ideology of corporate social responsibility (CSR); and finally,
3. Citizenship: there is the business school hallucination that there is something like corporate citizenship – corporations pretending to be like ordinary citizens.

Ideological support for corporate greenwashing also comes from coin-operated corporate-sponsored think tanks in which crypto-academics find additional employment particularly when they are too bad even for a business school. Their junk science contributes to the crypto-academic field of management studies.

The ideologies they create work against democratic regulation and environmental regulation. All this comes as part of an even more important ideology – the global ideology of neoliberalism.

One of the methods used by corporate greenwashing are fake grass roots campaigns involving letter-writing to legislators. This is done on behalf of an – almost always – undisclosed interest group that is in reality, financed by a corporation. Yet, this sort of greenwashing also employs real people posing as volunteers. These corporate stooges speak at public hearings and participate in real grass roots campaigns.

In any case, such planned PR deceptions are central components of the corporate propaganda filling us with doubts – and even self-doubt – as the earth confronts the environmental abyss. Many of such activities amount to very serious corporate greenwashing.

Yet, corporate greenwashing has more tricks up their sleeves. The Chicago Climate Exchange, for example, was set up by global greenwashing polluters like BP, DuPont, and the Ford Motor Company. It was a tool for voluntarily cutting emissions that fancies the neoliberal hallucination of industry self-regulation.

Some evil heretics might argue that there is a reason why, for example, there are drivers’ licenses, why they are regulated by the state, and why people cannot regulate their own driver’s license printed out on their kitchen table. The corporate greenwashing idea behind the self-regulating Chicago Climate Exchange was to reduce pollution. It failed, even as a corporate greenwashing idea.

Ideas like this are only another tool in the box of corporate greenwashing. Perhaps an even more interesting aspect of corporate greenwashing is that multi-national corporations have become bigger sources of global aid than nation states.

And of course, corporations cold-heartedly promote this fact. Their wealth is partly engineered through decades of corporate tax-cutscreated by governments that are under the spell of neoliberalism. Corporate PR sells this as sustainable corporate social responsibility (CSR).

This gives CSR a human face – as applied to capitalism and to make capitalism look human-like. It simply means that polluting corporations get up each morning, get increasingly smeared during the day, and simply wash off at night. That is the basic idea of CSR. CSR-fancying corporate polluters make particular use of greenwashing PR. It comes as part of their search for an environmental-friendly license to operate – a core ideology of CSR.

Of course, this reaches deep into company accounting where much of this is rather cosily sold as triple bottom line – people, profit, planet. Planet being a distant third! This accounting ideology emerged from none other than the corporate consultancy world.

The ideology behind it is to merge corporate profits with human society (people) and the environment (planet). Its goal: justifying profit making. Greenwashing remains a key component of this corporate strategy.

Following this business strategy, many companies and corporations have wrapped themselves in a green cloak. Today, brands even try to outdo one another with their eco-credentials to become the – hopefully undetected – master of corporate greenwashing. To win the green consumer game, companies often exaggerate environmental claims or simply make things up – whatever works best for the corporation.

Worse, criminal polluters even engage in a rather new form of corporate greenwashing. They share positive information about their environmental records while concealing negative aspects which, so the hope goes, can be offloaded onto others. This is known as externalisation. Meanwhile, the public should no longer see what is real – environmental pollution – and what a public relation constructed image of the corporation is.

One of the goals is to blur the boundary between what is reality and what is faked. This is also known as gaslighting. The idea of gaslighting is based on a 1940’s movie called Gaslight in which one is no longer sure whether the flickering of the gaslight is real or not.

Today, gaslighting is a propagandistic and manipulative-psychological tool used by, for example, global warming deniers that seeks to induce the doubting of one’s own reality and even sanity.

One of the goals of the more severe forms of corporate propaganda is that once a person’s underlying reality is lost, the person becomes more open to propaganda as words, images, and signs become self-referential while bypassing reason. Yet, the entire process is driven by the propagandist.

With no residual correspondence to the real anymore, corporate propaganda has achieved its goals. Reality has adapted to corporate propaganda. Reality has become a mere simulation. French philosopher Baudrillard calls this simularcra – the simulation of reality. For corporate greenwashing, this also means that being green and sustainable is just a matter of simulation –pretending.

The simulation of corporate sustainability is about the pretence of a corporation as being environmental. And now comes the crucial bit. This is within the dynamic core of the capitalist economy.

Necessarily, corporate greenwashing has to leave out some very uncomfortable facts, like global environmental vandalism, starvation, sweatshops, slavery, managerial despotism, mass poverty, and global warming – our highway to climate hell. To divert attention away from the pathologies of corporate capitalism, corporate greenwashing does ten things:

1) it pretends that there is a trade-off between consumer choices and sustainability;

2) many corporations offer next to no proof that their supposedly environmental initiatives have a positive impact on nature;

3) corporate greenwashing lives from general statements that are deliberately kept vague and non-specific;

4) corporate greenwashing uses false labelling – often in the form of self-invented “eco-certification” that, in reality, is no certification at all;

5) corporate greenwashing pretends to be sustainable in areas that have next to no relevance to the corporation, their product, and the production process used to make these products;

6) corporate greenwashing presents false choices, at times, framed as the lesser of two evils;

7) of course, corporate greenwashing lies by presenting something – a something that simply does not exist;

8) corporate greenwashing sells false hopes into a corporate-based environmental future that does not exist;

9) corporate greenwashing also covers up serious corporate dangers, harms to the environment, environmentally hazardous products, and negative environmental consequences; and finally,

10) corporate greenwashing converts capitalism’s reality of profits over people and the environment into pretending to be environmentally sustainable.

In the end, corporate greenwashing is an important tool in the arsenal of propaganda and corporate public relations. Capitalism not only lives by flooding us with consumer goods, it also needs an accompanying ideology telling us that two iPads will make us twice as happy.

Part of this necessary ideology to sustain capitalism is not only to hide capitalism’s environmental impact but also the pretence that capitalism and its corporations are environmentally friendly. This marks the moment when corporate greenwashing enters the scene. Corporate greenwashing is the ideological by-product of living in a capitalist society.

Thomas Klikauer is the author of Managerialism (Palgrave, 2013).

“Genocide Enablers” Gaza And The Corporate Media

by Media Lens / April 5th, 2024

A key function of the state-corporate media is to deny reality. They do supply news. But it is no accident that they supply news of a type that covers up the crimes of elite power.

However, the appalling violence and destruction being inflicted in Gaza by Israel are simply too great to conceal. We may well be living through an unprecedented era where the vast crimes of the West, and the complicity of major news organisations, have never been more exposed to the public.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the US economist and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, said in a recent interview:

‘We are seeing a massacre in front of our eyes—it is absolutely inhumane; it is absolutely war crimes; it is arguably, I personally think, likely genocidal according to the legal standards of the 1948 Genocide Convention.’

He continued:

‘We haven’t had genocides captured by video feed day by day.

‘We have IDF forces standing with their thumbs up as they blow up universities, mosques, hospitals, and apartment buildings—it’s unbelievable. We have members of the Israeli cabinet preaching hate.

‘We’ve seen these religious nationalist extremist rabbis talk about killing all the people in Gaza. “And do you mean the children?” the Rabbi is asked. “Yes, the children. They can grow up to be terrorists.”’

The indescribable horror of Israel’s genocide in Gaza has elicited little more than anguished hand-wringing from Western leaders who have continued to send weapons to the apartheid state.

Sachs made the point that matters which is so often ignored or glossed over by ‘responsible’ media, notably BBC News:

‘It could end by the United States government saying, “We are not providing the munitions for slaughter, period.”’ That would end it. Israel cannot do this one day without the United States.’

Likewise, the daily Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, the country’s most widely distributed newspaper, recently carried a key quote from its lead correspondent [cited in an interview with former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy at around 6 mins : 25 secs] that:

‘Israel could not continue this war were it not for US military support.’

Indeed, a clear-cut historical example of US leverage over Israel was provided by Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute, an American think tank specialising in US foreign policy:

‘In 1982, President Ronald Regan was “disgusted” by Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. He stopped the transfer of cluster munitions to Israel and told Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a phone call that “this is a holocaust.” Reagan demanded that Israel withdraw its troops from Lebanon. Begin caved. Twenty minutes after their phone call, Begin ordered a halt on attacks.’

Five British prime ministers have stopped arms to Israel in the past, including Margaret Thatcher when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, and Tony Blair who stopped the export of UK weapons that could be used to suppress Palestinians during the Second Intifada in 2002. But not Rishi Sunak, so far, in 2024.
‘Nothing Left To Assault’

Australian writer Caitlin Johnstone wrote this week:

‘Israel has ended its assault on the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, because there is nothing left to assault. The facility — the largest medical complex in Gaza where hundreds of civilians had been sheltering — is now an empty, unusable, burnt-out husk. Witnesses report hundreds of corpses in and around the complex, with video footage showing human body parts protruding from the earth and bodies with zip ties on their wrists.’

British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who spent over a month treating patients at Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist hospitals in Gaza, told Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now! interview:

‘I blame the Western journalists, who perpetuated the narrative that militarized the [Al-Shifa] hospital as a justifiable and an acceptable target to the Israelis. These genocide enablers, these Western journalists, from the very beginning, peddled these stories that the Israelis were feeding them about Shifa being on top of this massive complex of a command-and-control center. And their job was to enable the genocide to take place. And the genocide can only take place if the health system is destroyed.’

Dr Abu-Sittah paid tribute to Dr. Ahmad Maqadmeh, a fellow surgeon who was killed by Israeli forces at Al-Shifa alongside his mother:

‘And so, they have the blood of my friend — the blood of Ahmad Maqadmeh is on the hands of the CNN journalists and the BBC journalists and the ITV journalists, who, from the very beginning, were peddling this narrative.’

These news organisations, and others, have routinely downplayed Israeli atrocities by serially publishing deceptive headlines that mask Israel’s responsibility. For example, when seven aid workers, three of them British, were killed in an Israeli drone attack this week, targeted in three separate strikes along a supposed ‘approved’ Israeli route, the New York Times (NYT) headline was:

‘Founder of World Central Kitchen says several workers killed in Gaza airstrike’

The word ‘Israel’ was glaringly absent from the NYT headline. Middle East historian Assal Rad said:

‘Covering up Israel’s crimes enables them to commit more, name the attacker.’

If something similar had happened in Ukraine, the headline would have prominently featured the words ‘Russia’ and ‘Putin’.

Similarly, the NYT last month shielded Israel with the headline:

‘Deaths of Gazans desperate for food prompt fresh call for ceasefire’.

The phrase ‘Israeli massacre of Gazans’ was missing from the headline.

Rad pointed out yet another egregious example: an Economist article titled, ‘Gaza could face a famine by May’:

‘An entire Economist article on famine in Gaza doesn’t say the word “Israel” once. Not even when describing damage to farmland and water facilities or severely restricted aid deliveries.

‘Saying *who* is destroying the farmland and restricting aid seems like basic info to include.’

Presumably stung by public exposure and criticism, the Economist later updated its piece to include mention of Israel…by including the propaganda claim: ‘Israel insists it is not obstructing aid lorries.’ Days later, this lie – because that is simply what it is – was highlighted by the Israeli murder of the seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen.

Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN official in New York who resigned last year over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, tweeted:

‘The murder of @WCKitchen staff is only the latest. The genocidal Israeli regime has sealed the border & destroyed crops, wells, bakeries & food stores, murdered 200 aid workers, targeted security for aid, blocked aid trucks & massacred starving people lined up for aid. #genocide’

A Guardian website headline declared:

‘Israeli military investigating after foreign aid workers killed in Gaza airstrike’.

As former UK diplomat Craig Murray noted:

‘Beyond satire from @Guardian. Who killed them?

‘The Israeli military are the good guys apparently, investigating it.’

Chris Doyle, Director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, observed:

‘Israel makes allegations against UNRWA but provides zero evidence. What happens? UK suspends funding pending investigation Israel carries out three strikes against known aid worker vehicles. What happens? UK says – Israel please investigate yourself, and we’ll still sell you arms’

It is clear that Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system, and Israel’s starvation of Gazans, are deliberate. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories said via X (formerly Twitter):

‘Knowing how Israel operates, my assessment is that Israeli forces intentionally killed #WCK workers so that donors would pull out & civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly. Israel knows Western countries & most Arab countries won’t move a finger for the Palestinians.’

Israel’s intention, made clear in multiple public statements, is to get rid of Palestinians from Gaza and to impose Israeli sovereignty ‘from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea’.

It is significant that even establishment-friendly figures on prominent platforms are finally speaking out. Richard Madeley of ITV’s Good Morning Britain, clearly appalled by Israel’s killing of seven aid workers, described it as an ‘execution’ while Nick Ferrari of LBC called for the suspension of UK arms sales to Israel, adding:

‘It could’ve been our missiles that killed them.’

One could rightly argue that such outrage is long overdue. At the time of writing, the death toll in Gaza is 33,000, including more than 13,000 children. There is even overwhelming evidence that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted by Israeli snipers in Gaza. In a dramatic front-page spread under the stark headline, ‘Enough’, the Independent loudly declared:

‘It may seem wrong that, after more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have perished, it took the deaths of just seven international aid workers to stir Western governments into a sense of outrage, but that is the reality.’

‘It may seem wrong’? It is wrong. It is damning evidence that Palestinian lives are deemed by those in power to be less valuable than the lives of Westerners. But it is right that so many are now saying, ‘Enough’, regardless of the motivation.
‘Not A Normal War’

Dr Fozia Alvi, a Canadian physician who founded the US-based charity Humanity Auxilium, left Gaza in the third week of February as Israeli forces were threatening a ground assault against Rafah. She said:

‘This is not a normal war. The war in Ukraine has killed 500 kids in two years and the war in Gaza has killed over 10,000 in less than five months. We have seen wars before but this is something that is a dark stain on our shared humanity.’

Claudia Webbe, the independent MP for Leicester East, summarised where we are:

‘Israel is out of control.

‘Israel is deliberately killing International aid workers. It has now passed a law to ban journalists.

‘Israel is killing Palestinians in Gaza. Murder and genocide in plain sight. They don’t want you to know the truth. Our political leaders are complicit’

But the complicit role of the media also needs to be highlighted. Des Freedman, a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, believes that:

‘We need journalism that is committed to accurate and uncompromising investigation and not a spurious “impartiality” that hides brutal facts of occupation and genocide.’

Freedman noted that the BBC, along with other major news outlets, largely ignored growing claims of Israeli genocide until the South African government brought evidence to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024. The ICJ then found that there was a ‘plausible’ case that genocide was taking place.

Freedman continued:

‘Since then, references to genocide on broadcasters’ ‘X’ (formerly Twitter) feeds – a sign of their editorial priorities – have virtually disappeared. While there are 54 mentions of genocide in Al Jazeera’s feed since 1 February, there is not a single one in the feeds of @BBCNews, @BBCWorld or @Channel4News.’

The BBC actually made the rare concession of a ‘mistake’ in their live coverage of the ICJ genocide case against Israel. BBC editorial policy director David Jordan made the admission to MPs after BBC editors had chosen to show Israel’s defence against genocide charges in full, while only showing clips of South Africa’s case arguing Israel is committing genocide.

Despite Jordan’s denial, the unequal coverage was indicative of serious BBC bias on Israel and Palestine, as has been demonstrated over many years by the Glasgow University Media Group, for example, and by a recent report from the Centre for Media Monitoring.

One glaring aspect of the crisis in what passes for ‘democracy’ in this country is that there is no real party of opposition in Westminster. Labour under Sir Keir Starmer has done its best to divest itself of anything that smacks of socialism, cleaving as closely as possible to the establishment, and not daring to ruffle the feathers of the billionaire-owned press.

Peter Oborne, former Telegraph chief political writer, observed recently that:

‘From the suffragettes to Gandhi, those who challenged the British state and were labelled extremists ended up being vindicated. The pro-Palestine protesters will be too.’

He warned that the real extremists are those running the country or who wish to do so:

‘I am coming to believe that the real extremists can be found in Downing Street, the Conservative Party, and in Starmer’s Labour Party.’

In a scathing column explaining why he was rescinding his Labour party membership, Owen Jones wrote:

‘The assault on Gaza, the great crime of our age, adds moral indecency to the pile of dishonesty and vacuity. When Starmer declared Israel had the right to cut off energy and water to Palestinian civilians, he did so as a human rights lawyer who understands the Geneva conventions. After letting shadow cabinet ministers defend him, he claimed it “has never been my view that Israel had the right to cut off water, food, fuel or medicines”. We all have political red lines: mine is supporting what would amount to war crimes against innocent civilians, toddlers and newborn babies among them, then gaslighting the public over doing so.’

There are now belated and sporadic calls from Westminster demanding British arms be ‘suspended’. Insufficient media attention has focused on the damaging revelation that the Tory government has been told by its lawyers that Israel is in breach of international law and that the UK ‘has to cease all arms sales to Israel without delay’ or it could be found to be complicit in genocide. The government wishes to bury these truths.

But pressure continues to mount on Downing Street: more than 600 lawyers, academics and retired senior judges, including three former supreme court justices, have signed a letter to the prime minister warning that the UK government is breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel. Neither the Tory government nor the Labour ‘opposition’ have yet agreed to stop selling arms to Israel. ‘Shameful’ hardly sums it up.

Meanwhile, Department for Business and Trade civil servants who administer licenses for arms exports to Israel have raised concerns with their trade union that they could be complicit in war crimes in Gaza. They wish to cease such work ‘immediately’. As reported by Sky News, the Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents civil servants, has requested an urgent meeting with the department to discuss ‘the legal jeopardy faced by civil servants who are continuing to work on this policy.’

What does it say about the state of British society, and indeed democracy itself, that the public is being denied a realistic political choice to dissociate itself from mass slaughter and to stop the genocide in Gaza?

Noam Chomsky has often pointed out that ‘the ideological system is bounded by the consensus of the privileged’ and that ‘elections are largely a ritual form.’ In other words, the public is technically allowed to participate in ‘democracy’ by pushing buttons every few years. But we have ‘essentially no role in formulating policy’. Our function is largely reduced to ratifying decisions made by the people in power. (Quoted in ‘Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime: Why Ideas Matter’, Noam Chomsky and James Kelman, PM Press, 2021, pages 103 and 159).

If public awareness of this reality becomes widespread, then, and only then, is there hope of real progress in society.

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Media Lens is a UK-based media watchdog group headed by David Edwards and David Cromwell. The most recent Media Lens book, Propaganda Blitz by David Edwards and David Cromwell, was published in 2018 by Pluto Press. Read other articles by Media Lens, or visit Media Lens's website.