The media war against Israel

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The apparent bias of the US-based ABC TV moderators in failing to call out the falsehoods reportedly spoken by U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party presidential candidate, in the debate with former President Donald Trump this week has attracted much critical comment.

Melanie Phillips

It remains to be seen, however, how that debate influenced voters.

When looking at a set-piece contest like this, voters aren’t necessarily swayed by behavior they’ve already priced in. They know that politicians evade, lie and bloviate. Voters usually focus on different issues, such as which candidate might make them better off.

The point isn’t that journalistic bias is irrelevant. On the contrary, over the past few years, the media’s shocking pro-Democrat, anti-Trump partisanship has destroyed its role as the guardian of democracy and established it instead as an army of ruthless activists for a political cause.

Nevertheless, when it comes to assessing rival candidates for the presidency, the media’s narrative has to compete with the mass of information that voters already know about them: their achievements and failures, their strengths and flaws.

The media’s effect on public attitudes towards Israel, however, is very different indeed. That’s because the Western public, by and large, knows virtually nothing about Israel, the Middle East or Jewish history. On Israel, the public mind is therefore a blank page on which can be imprinted whatever picture the media wishes to paint.

And the picture of Israel that’s been painted over the last few decades—and even more intensely since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led pogrom against southern Israel communities—is a vicious and wildly distorted caricature.

Last week, a high-ranking delegation of former NATO military officers was in Israel on a fact-finding mission to assess the conduct of the Israeli Defense Forces in the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Members of the group subsequently expressed admiration for the way the IDF has been conducting the war in an unprecedentedly challenging combat environment.

Gen. Sir John McColl, the British former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, said: “I came away from the trip satisfied that the IDF’s operations and rules of engagement were rigorous compared to the British Army and our Western allies … Israeli soldiers are fighting in conditions of extraordinary complexity and risk.”

This was a sharp if tacit rebuke to Britain’s Starmer administration, which has announced a partial arms embargo against Israel on the grounds that such weapons “might” be used in a “serious violation” of humanitarian law and that there had been “credible” claims about the mistreatment of detainees.

But what was particularly striking about McColl’s remarks was that he had apparently arrived in Israel predisposed to believe the allegations made against it. He said: “Basing my views about the Israel-Hamas war on U.K. media coverage, I arrived in Israel critical and skeptical of their military operations. … There is balance missing in the reporting of events in Gaza.”

The impression given by the British media for the past 11 months of this war has been that Israel is willfully killing huge numbers of Gaza’s women and children, recklessly bombing hospitals and schools full of displaced people, and preventing humanitarian aid from getting to civilians.

Those claims are the reverse of the truth. Yet a very senior military figure seems to have believed them because this media narrative is omnipresent. Even in newspapers whose editorial line is broadly sympathetic to Israel, the reporting is massively distorted by the promulgation of Hamas propaganda as news reports.

The most egregious serial offender is the BBC, whose global reach and reputation for integrity and trustworthiness make it the most influential media outlet in the world. For decades, it has sanitized Palestinian Arab terrorism and painted Israel falsely as the aggressor in the region. And during the current war in Gaza, its coverage has been overwhelmingly malevolent.

A major study published this week by Trevor Asserson, a British lawyer based in Tel Aviv, laid bare the staggering scale of this betrayal of BBC and journalistic standards.

A dedicated team he set up used AI to crunch four months of war coverage. It identified 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s own guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. It also revealed moderate or strong pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli sentiment in more than 90% of broadcasts on the network’s flagship shows.

Israel was associated with war crimes in BBC reporting 592 times but Hamas (whose entire campaign from Oct. 7 onwards has consisted of war crimes against both Israeli and Gaza civilians) only 98 times.

Worse still—because far more explosive—was the distorted coverage on the BBC Arabic service whose output displayed 90% bias. Most shocking of all, across all its output the network repeatedly used journalists who had shown hostility to Israel, sympathy for Hamas or outright Jew-hatred.

BBC Arabic contributor Mayssaa Abdul Khalek reportedly called for “death to Israel” and defended a journalist who tweeted: “Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned.”

Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, whose relentless prejudice against Israel necessitated a schedule to the report devoted entirely to him, is accused of excusing Hamas’s terrorist activities and comparing Israel to Putin’s Russia. Chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet is said to have downplayed Hamas’s culpability.

In response to this devastating body of evidence, the BBC simply brushed it aside. Two days after its publication—and after sundry executives had dismissed it in public—the BBC’s Director-General requested a copy. BBC sources accused Asserson of bias, criticized the report’s methodology and said that its claims lacked context.

These weaselly criticisms are merely a way of dodging the fact that the evidence is true.

Take, for example, the claim made by numerous media outlets last October that the IDF had targeted Gaza’s Al Ahli Hospital in an airstrike, killing 500 people. It was soon revealed that the blast had occurred in the hospital grounds killing fewer people—and had been caused by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that was misfired and fell inside Gaza.

Several media outlets subsequently apologized. But at the BBC, Bowen doubled down. He said: “I don’t regret a single thing in my report, because I think I’m measured all the way, I don’t feel bad at all.”

The network’s double standards in item after item, the soft-soaping of Palestinian supporters and the aggressive interruptions of Israel’s defenders, the acceptance of Hamas propaganda and blood libels about Israeli “war crimes” as fact and the equally knee-jerk assumption that the Israelis are lying, all demonstrate the true context of the examples produced by the Asserson team—that the BBC is institutionally hostile to both Israel and the truth. It is therefore a national disgrace.

The reason its executives airily dismiss such evidence is that they genuinely believe they are upholding the highest journalistic standards of balance and fairness. And that’s because they believe everything they stand for as “progressives” is the political center ground.

So anyone pointing out the murderous lies they are promoting is by definition extreme. The BBC is thus a hermetically sealed thought system.

As a result of this mental distortion in liberal circles, the BBC and other media outlets have left the public in the dark about a number of crucial issues arising from the war against Israel.

They have failed to report on Hamas’s role as the military arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, which operates in Britain and America and seeks to conquer the West.

They have failed to report the war in Gaza “in context” as part of an eight-front war by Iran to destroy Israel and America.

They have failed to report the hailstorms of rockets and missiles fired daily at northern Israel by Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. They have failed to investigate the corruption by Hamas or the United Nations and international courts.

Instead, they have been inciting often murderous hatred of Israel around the world.

The media may have subverted and undermined American democracy. But when it comes to Israel, it has blood on its hands.