Palestinians inspect the damage following an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal aera in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 10 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants’ surprise attack. Photo by Naaman Omar apaimages. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Britain is complicit in mass slaughter on a horrifying scale. But those campaigning for our votes pretend it’s not happening
…
This week alone, Israel has threatened “all out war” with Lebanon, while Hezbollah’s leader threatens a war “without rules or ceilings”, dangling the prospect of a far graver bloodbath than that unleashed by Israel’s genocidal rampage in Gaza. The spokesperson of the Israel Defense Forces has admitted that Hamas cannot be destroyed militarily: this amounts to a confession that the central war goal used to justify the slaughter of tens of thousands is unattainable. And the UN has released a report offering evidence as to how Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza may have systematically violated the laws of war on protecting civilians and civilian infrastructure.
Remember: this is an onslaught that Britain’s government and opposition squarely backed at the start. Back in October, our prime minister promised “unequivocal” support for Israel for all time, while his inevitable successor, Keir Starmer, backed Israel’s right to cut off energy and water, though he later claimed he had been misinterpreted, and had never supported this. Neither political party will commit to ending arms sales, even though the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court – himself a British lawyer – has requested arrest warrants for both the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. This itself points to what should be a major domestic political scandal. Both party leaders should be scrutinised for having backed what became one of the great atrocities of our age, despite the bloodcurdling promises made by Israeli leaders from the start.
…
Given that this is a question of life and death on a colossal scale, our politicians should be forced to answer. Yet when our foreign secretary, David Cameron, was interrogated last week on the BBC Today programme, the interviewer spent the slot questioning him about trust and housebuilding. On Thursday night’s BBC Question Time leaders’ special, there was not a single question or answer on Gaza.
Of course, straight after 7/10, mainstream journalists were quick to promote the deployment of planes and personnel to support “our ally” in the region.
While the Sun splashed photos of British jets and frigates heading to the eastern Mediterranean with the headline “United We Stand”, the BBC basically reproduced a Ministry of Defence press release in its story, “UK to deploy Royal Navy ships to Middle East to ‘bolster security’.”
On 2 December, the Ministry of Defence released a short statement on UK military activity in the region, ostensibly to secure the release of (only) Israeli hostages.
The BBC, along with other news outlets, immediately ran a story repeating the MoD’s words verbatim (with a sprinkling of additional text from the Pentagon) as if these were to be innocent “surveillance flights” despite the fact that over 15,000 Palestinians had already been killed in brutal air strikes since 7/10.
This was followed by a flurry of highly bullish coverage of two further military interventions directly related to bolstering UK support for Israel – evidence of the “extensive defence and security cooperation” between the two countries that was embedded in the ‘Roadmap’ agreement signed in 2023 (and ignored by the media).
…
Censorship by omission
This lack of interest in the British government’s military links to Israel shouldn’t suggest, however, that there is nothing to investigate.
Indeed, Declassified UK has published multiple stories on the more opaque actions of the UK government that have been largely ignored by mainstream news including the deployment of a British spy team in Israel since 7/10, the dozens of flights by UK military aircraft to Israel in this period, the surveillance activities in support of Israel and the training of Israeli military personnel in the UK. Almost none of these have been followed up in broadcast bulletins and articles.
There is one area, however, in which the media do appear to have engaged with this topic: British arms sales to Israel that, according to the Campaign against Arms Trade, amount to £576 million since 2008.
That there were 2,648 stories mentioning “arms sales to Israel” and “UK” between 7 October and 19 June 2024 might suggest this is a major area of concern for journalists.
Not so fast. 85% of all stories appeared after 1 April when three UK citizens were among seven aid workers killed when Israeli jets attacked the food convoy they were managing.
For the 177 days between 7/10 and 1 April, the media (with the exception of the Scottish National, Guardian and BBC Parliament) showed little inclination to open up discussion on the issue.
Despite serious concerns that, through its exports of weapons to the Israeli military, the UK is complicit in ongoing war crimes, major news outlets only started to show an interest in the topic once British people, not Palestinians, were the story.
…
Response to Rishi Sunak’s extremism speech at Downing Street 1 March 2024. Second version of this image with text slightly altered.Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hugs U.S. President Joe Biden. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
The president’s level of indifference to the human suffering of Palestinians can only be described as soulless.
With the world’s sensibility already reeling from Israel’s deliberate incineration of dozens of civilians huddled in tents in a purported safe zone in Rafah, the genocidaires doubled down two weeks later by slaughtering nearly 300 Palestinians and wounding 700 more during their U.S.-aided rescue of four Israeli hostages.
Upon receiving word of the blood-drenched June 8 operation, American President Joe Biden celebrated the “safe rescue” of the hostages while wholly ignoring the so-called collateral damage—innocent civilians, most of whom were women and children. That level of indifference can only be described as soulless.
So goes the ongoing reveal of the American president’s true nature.
Nothing he’s ever done measures up to his unconscionable decision to sponsor Israel’s genocide in Palestine, while simultaneously running interference to prevent anyone else from stopping it.
Biden has sculpted his political career by leaning into his persona as an indefatigably decent and compassionate man. Until now (save for the MAGA crowd), you’d have been hard-pressed to find someone on either end of the political spectrum who disagreed with that characterization. Which is why his increasingly heartless response to Israel’s genocide in Palestine can be so difficult to process. Yet, a number of the choices he’s made in recent years offered a preview of what lies beneath his public facade.
Biden telegraphed his approach to foreign policy by choosing Israel apologist Antony Blinken to serve as secretary of state and Avril Haines (architect of Barrack Obama’s assassination-themed drone program, and whitewasher of a Senate committee report on the CIA’s torture of detainees) as his director of national intelligence.
In addition to genuflecting to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden’s tenure as president includes his embrace of strongmen Abdel Fattah al-Sissi (Egypt), Narendra Modi (India), and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (a.k.a. MBS). For good measure, he granted the latter legal immunity, sparing bin Salman the indignity of facing any consequences for orchestrating the murder of Saudi journalist, and critic of the crown prince, Jamal Khashoggi.
Closer to home, the man who’s consistently portrayed himself as someone who cares deeply about the well-being of his fellow citizens has solidified his allegiance to the insurance industry by doing everything in his power to prevent Universal Healthcare from becoming a reality in America. Along the way, Biden invited Michael McCabe—the man who advised pollution giant DuPont chemical company on how to circumvent government regulations—to join his Environmental Protection Agency transition team.
But nothing he’s ever done measures up to his unconscionable decision to sponsor Israel’s genocide in Palestine, while simultaneously running interference to prevent anyone else from stopping it. He’s even taken a page out of his political arch-enemy’s playbook by lying through his teeth every chance he gets about what the rest of us can see with our own eyes—repeatedly claiming that Israel isn’t deliberately starving the Palestinian people and that the tens of thousands of civilian casualties, as well as the trauma inflicted upon millions more, are merely a regrettable side effect of Israel’s precision-like effort to nullify Hamas militants.
Donald Trump (whose defining characteristic is his amorality, which is entirely different) can get away with spewing lie after lie without fear of losing the support of his truth-averse loyalists because he’s telling them precisely what they want to hear. Biden, on the other hand, seems to believe his base isn’t bright enough to notice his deceit, or that they just don’t care about his complicity in the ongoing massacre. He’s deluding himself on both counts.
But this condemnation isn’t about numbers. It’s about the most powerful man on the face of the Earth figuratively giving the world the finger while actively participating in a crime that has no equal.
He might as well be piloting Israeli bombers over Palestine, raining fire from the sky.
A Palestinian girl stands at the entrance of her family tent at a makeshift tent camp for those displaced by the Israeli air and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip in Khan Younis, Gaza, June 18, 2024
DOZENS of people were killed in Gaza today, including some sheltering in tents and waiting for aid, as Israeli forces push deeper into Rafah’s western neighbourhoods..
Rafah and the central regions of Deir al-Balah and Nuseirat are the current focus of attacks as Israel claims to target Hamas.
In Rafah, at least three people were killed and dozens of others wounded in air and land strikes at historic refugee camps.
A house in the al-Nurseirat camp was targeted by planes, killing two women, while tanks shelled areas in the al-Maghazi and al-Bureij camps.
Shelling was also reported in most areas of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city which was previously declared a safe zone, as well as heavy machine-gun fire.
The bombing of a road south of Gaza City killed one person.
About 37,400 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel launched its assault after the October 7 events.
CONFRONTING SIR KEIR: Andrew Feinstein is standing to unseat the Labour leaderPhoto: Marija Carter
THE latest opinion polls are showing that it is possible Rishi Sunak will lose his own parliamentary seat come July 4. The voters in Richmond, Yorkshire, may be as tired of the Tory Premier as the rest of the country.
…
The voters in Holborn and St Pancras also have the chance to speak for the nation by rejecting a bankrupt and duplicitous leader.
Did Starmer represent the people of Camden, the borough his seat sits within, when he endorsed Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza, refused to call for a ceasefire until given permission to do so by Washington, and backs continued arms sales to the aggressor? Not likely.
Do they endorse his Islamophobic political positioning, his authoritarian indifference to civil liberties, his culling of any remotely progressive Labour candidate? We doubt it.
Now they have a unique opportunity to clip Starmer’s wings. The country may want, as much through weary resignation and anti-Tory sentiment as anything else, a Labour government. There is absolutely no indication that it wants a specifically Starmer-led one.
And Holborn and St Pancras has an outstanding alternative. It is Andrew Feinstein, an independent left candidate who has parliamentary experience from his service as an African National Congress MP in his native South Africa.
Feinstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor, is well-placed to call out Starmer’s cynical abuse of anti-semitism as a political weapon against the left. He is one of many progressive Jewish men and women sanctioned by the Starmer apparatus.
Zionist Keir Starmes is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
