Corbyn set up his own Gaza Tribunal last year to hear evidence on Britain’s role in the genocide
Labour yet again ignores the calls to investigate Britain’s hand in the ongoing Gaza genocide
LABOUR has refused to hold an official public inquiry into Britain’s complicity in the genocide in Gaza, it emerged today.
Campaigners immediately asked what the government was trying to hide.
The demand for an inquiry has been pushed by former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, now parliamentary leader of Your Party.
His own Gaza Tribunal held in London last year had highlighted the extent of British state involvement in support of Israel’s war crimes.
Mr Corbyn said today: “The government has officially blocked my call for a public inquiry into Britain’s role in Gaza.
“Andy Burnham rightly said that the last Labour government ‘got it wrong’ over Gaza. However, his words will mean very little if he doesn’t break with the last government’s shameful record of complicity, secrecy and evasion.
“In the aftermath of Iraq, the government of the day spent many years resisting attempts to uncover the truth. In the end, they could not prevent the inevitable. Just like Iraq, we will remember those who obstructed the path to justice.
“Delaying scrutiny will not make questions about British complicity in genocide disappear.
“The public deserve to know the full extent of Britain’s military, economic and political co-operation with Israel, including arms supplies, surveillance flights and the use of RAF bases.
“It’s not complicated: if the government has nothing to hide, then why block our efforts to expose the truth?
“Britain is still supplying arms to Israel. Britain is still supplying intelligence. Britain is still facilitating acts of genocide.
Ed Miliband claims that he and Andy Burnham have reformulated Blair’s triangulation strategy. Their new formulation entails acknowledging that they were wrong on Israel and Palestine but entails doing absolutely nothing about it and continuing exactly the same policies hoping that you’re too stupid to notice.UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.Ed Miliband says that he and the Labour Party are full of shit criminalising people holding signs as criminals despite anything he says.
The dispute over whether Israel’s assault on Gaza amounts to genocide has largely been settled. Amnesty International, a UN commission of inquiry and the International Association of Genocide Scholars have all reached that conclusion, as have many leading scholars of genocide. The question that remains is how the greatest political crime of our time was allowed to happen. Adam H. Johnson’s How to Sell a Genocide goes a long way to explaining it.
Published by Pluto Press with a foreword by the Palestinian American human rights lawyer Noura Erakat, the book covers the crucial period from October 2023 to October 2024, when Western audiences were primed for genocide. Johnson shows that the mainstream American media did much of the priming. These outlets dehumanised Palestinians, treated the life of an Israeli as having more worth than the life of a Palestinian and supplied ready-made justifications for violence against the population of Gaza. Together, he argues, they formed a media ecosystem that was essential to Israel’s campaign to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza, in whole or in part.
None of this, in Johnson’s view, was inevitable. It took “deliberate choices by deliberate moral actors” – the editors, reporters, bookers, producers and TV presenters who decided in the first weeks that protecting the powerful mattered more than the truth. Rather than report honestly on Israel’s US-backed assault on Gaza, they spun a comforting fiction for Western liberal audiences to justify the horror.
Setting out to prove, “beyond a reasonable doubt, that the genocide in Gaza was enabled, facilitated, and cheerled by establishment US media providing cover for months of a nihilistic campaign of starvation, bombing, arbitrary detention, shooting, and sexual violence,” Johnson cites hard data rather than relying on polemic or cherry-picked examples. The author draws on more than 12,000 articles and 5,000 TV clips from nine major outlets, testimony from journalists inside those newsrooms and comparisons with coverage of other recent conflicts.
Why leave out Fox News and the right-wing media? Because, says Johnson, outlets such as Fox, the Daily Wire and the Wall Street Journal are openly genocidal towards Palestinians and make no pretence otherwise; a book exposing them would be met by their own reporters and columnists with an “Okay, and?”
Instead, the author focuses on the outlets that Democrats read and watch. A Democratic president was in office when the genocide began, and support from Democrats in Congress, think tanks and the press was decisive in keeping it going. He concentrates on the first year, and above all the first few months, because that, he argues, is when the logic of the “war on Hamas” took hold, Americans grew used to mass death in Gaza and the genocide became a fait accompli.
With the destruction in Gaza too brutal and too visible to ignore, the media supplied excuses to ease the public conscience. Johnson calls these “Moats of Rationalization”: a scaffolding of deflection, double standards and orientalist tropes that allowed viewers and journalists alike to excuse the war crimes their own government was funding. The real job of the centre-left press, he argues, was not to convey reality but to “make their readers and viewers feel better” about their country, their leaders and themselves.
The first chapter shows how this worked by tracing how Israel weaponised the false claim that Hamas had beheaded 40 babies. The claim, which originated with Israeli military personnel and ZAKA, an organisation Johnson describes as far-right, spread from Israeli officials through CNN and other outlets to President Joe Biden within a day. It was part of an early push by media executives and pro-Israel groups to “ISIS-ify” Palestinian militants. Israel promoted the hashtag #HamasisISIS, and US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin called the attack “worse than ISIS”. Johnson’s analysis found that in the first month, seven major print and online outlets equated Hamas with ISIS 149 times. On air, CNN did so 350 times and MSNBC 369 times.
The media also abandoned one of its most basic duties: explaining why the attack happened. Providing context for 7 October was actively discouraged. When MSNBC’s Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin explained the history behind it on the day, Johnson’s sources say Comcast, the network’s owner, intervened; one summed up the editorial line as “We don’t want context.”
Strict gatekeeping of what can and cannot be reported also helped to sell the genocide. CNN ordered that all its reporting on Israel and Palestine be “approved in advance by the Jerusalem bureau”, which operates under Israel’s military censor. A source told The Intercept that lines were routinely edited to favour Israeli narratives. Yet lurid, unsourced claims about Palestinians were aired unchallenged, while allegations against Israelis, Johnson argues, had to be “triple vetted”.
The same double standard shaped coverage of sexual violence. Within days of 7 October, the Israeli claim that systematic rape was part of Hamas’s “terror strategy” was being repeated by liberal media outlets before Israel had offered any evidence for it. Like the “beheaded babies” story, Johnson argues, it cast Hamas as an organisation “for which any political settlement or ceasefire is not only impossible but morally objectionable”.
The flawed sourcing of the New York Times report “Screams Without Words”, Johnson says, pointed to “an ideological motivation at work” and to lower standards for stories that served Israel’s agenda. Israel’s sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, meanwhile, barely registered. In the first three months of the genocide and three months in late summer 2024, CNN and MSNBC made 502 on-air mentions of Palestinians committing mass rape and just two of Israelis raping Palestinians. The New York Times, Washington Post, Politico and Axios did the same in print: 128 mentions against nine.
An important part of selling the genocide relied on creating a two-tier moral system. In the chapter “Who is allowed to be human?”, Johnson shows how, within hours of 7 October, pundits and reporters began ranking violence and its victims on what he calls a “moral tier system”. Palestinian violence was treated as uniquely evil, driven by hatred, while Israeli violence was treated as regrettable but necessary.
Illustrating the impact of such framing, Johnson’s figures show that in the first 100 days, seven print and online outlets used “massacre” 344 times in their own reporting to describe Palestinians killing Israelis, and not once for Israelis killing Palestinians. Over the first year, the claim that Palestinians used “human shields” was aired 888 times on CNN and MSNBC, although Human Rights Watch has long rejected such a broad use of the term. Documented cases of Israeli forces using Palestinians as human shields went unmentioned. Israel’s “right to defend itself” was asserted 755 times on the two networks; Palestinians were granted the same right eight times.
Later chapters examine how US media helped the Biden administration “distance itself from the horrors of Gaza”; how it narrowed the debate to “how many Palestinians should die”; and how it covered “war crimes like earthquakes”, reporting the carnage as if it were a natural disaster and obscuring or leaving out Israel’s role entirely.
The chapter on campus protests, which Johnson calls “‘Antisemitism’ show trials”, contains the starkest comparison in the book. In the month after Harvard president Claudine Gay testified to Congress on campus antisemitism, six major print and online outlets ran 207 stories about her. In the month after six-year-old Hind Rajab was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, along with six relatives and the two paramedics sent to rescue her, the same outlets ran five. On air, the gap was wider still: CNN mentioned Gay 409 times and Hind 29; MSNBC mentioned Gay 210 times and Hind not once.
Johnson sees his job as that of a “prosecutor”, and the book reads like a case for the prosecution. It is packed with figures, which some readers may find heavy going, but the sheer weight of them makes the pattern of bias very hard to deny.
A book such as this asks us to consider what history has already taught us about the role of propaganda in mass atrocity. At Nuremberg, the Allies put on trial not only those who carried out mass murder but also the propagandists who primed the public to accept it. The lesson was that genocide does not begin with killing; it begins with words that teach people to see others as less than human. Johnson shows how US media treated Palestinian lives as worth less than Israeli ones, stripped Palestinians of their history and presented violence against them as necessary.
American newsrooms have yet to answer the questions this book raises about their coverage of Gaza. They reported the deaths, but they also offered endless excuses for them. Johnson has documented the choices that shaped that coverage. It is now for editors and journalists to explain why they so often showed more understanding for those doing the killing than for those being killed.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
New York City Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani, joined by representatives from The Doe Fund and local community leaders, breaks ground on the Casanova Residence in the Bronx borough of New York City on Monday, Aug. 3, 2026. [Selçuk Acar – Anadolu Agency]
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday highlighted US “complicity” in the genocide in the Gaza Strip on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, Anadolu reports.
“This day is profoundly painful for so many New Yorkers,” Mamdani said in a post on US social media platform X. “We grieve alongside our many friends and neighbors who still carry that unthinkable loss.”
He added that the suffering “did not begin nor end that day,” pointing to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians, including more than 21,000 children.
“Many New Yorkers are reckoning with this unbearable grief, and we mourn alongside them – all while knowing that our tax dollars fund these war crimes,” he said.
Mamdani urged people to reject “a world in which occupation and apartheid continue,” and criticized the US government for its “complicity with every arms shipment.”
“To honor the dead, we must fight for a world in which every person can live with freedom, safety, and dignity,” he added.
Following the Oct. 7 events, Israel launched a brutal offensive on Gaza, which has also injured 175,000 victims and turned the enclave into ruins.
Despite a ceasefire that took effect in October 2025, Israel has continued its daily attacks on Gaza, killing more than 1,400 Palestinians and injuring nearly 5,000, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.Ed Miliband says that he and the Labour Party are full of shit criminalising people holding signs as terrorists despite anything he says.
The change in policy is a direct result of sustained pressure from activists and organisers across the Palestine movement. But what comes next?
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We can certainly retain our anger at the government’s complicity. No sanction can offset the foreign policy decisions made by the former prime minister Keir Starmer and former foreign secretary David Lammy, the repression of domestic pro-Palestine advocacy, or the sheer loss of life. But we must balance this with cautious optimism that the political tide is turning.
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The necessary next step is a full arms embargo and an end to cooperation with Israeli security forces – to truly have teeth, these sanctions must not take with one hand and then give with another. Miliband has said that “we’ve already suspended over 30 arms licences used by the IDF in Gaza. That suspension remains fully in place”, and that the government will “now also refuse all licence applications for arms and other exports that materially contribute to the occupation”. But components of F-35 jets continue to be exported to Israel and used for operations in Gaza, as are surveillance technologies such as drones and radar made in the UK by Elbit Systems. This is a total dereliction of duty by the British government.
Miliband’s announcements were a necessary reminder that a just political future is possible and, within it, a reckoning with past crimes. As a campaigner, I have borne witness to Israel’s most egregious human rights violations: I have documented Israeli settlers committing pogroms against the community of Al-Mufaqara, sat in Palestinian villages threatened with home demolitions and army raids, and witnessed the ongoing daily misery of Israel’s apartheid policies. This has all strengthened my motivation to see the end of the Israeli occupation.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel. New Labour UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham continues Labour party policy of active support and complicity in Israel’s genocide.Genocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Britain’s newly appointed Prime Minister Andy Burnham delivers a speech outside 10 Downing Street after taking office, in London on July 20, 2026 [Isabel Infantes/Reuters]
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One of the main issues that has torn Labour apart for over a decade has been Palestine. On July 9, before his confirmation as the new prime minister, Burnham decided to address the issue in a video posted on social media, saying Labour “didn’t get it right” and needs to “do better” on Gaza.
So will he indeed “do better” on Palestine and everything else that Labour has gotten wrong over the past decade? Unlikely. That is because complicity in Israel’s genocide is deeply entrenched in the British political infrastructure. It requires radical change – something which Burnham is not offering.
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On foreign policy, Labour’s complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza will haunt the party for a generation. Starmer will be remembered for saying the Israeli army has “the right” to cut off water and electricity to a besieged population, and his government – for continuing arms sales to the Israeli regime, including components for the F-35 jets that have caused untold death and destruction in Gaza.
Burnham is not the outsider his PR machine is selling. He has been a member of Labour Friends of Israel since 2015, when he described the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement as “spiteful” and pledged that Israel would be the first country he visited as leader of Labour.
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His allies include Josh Simons, former director of the Labour Together think tank that engineered Starmer’s rise and helped purge the party of its pro-Palestinian left flank, often under the pretext of tackling anti-Semitism. The irony is that this same period saw Jewish members of the party investigated and expelled at several times the rate of non-Jewish members.
In May, Simons resigned as MP so that Burnham could run in and win a special by-election for his parliamentary seat, which enabled him to pursue the leadership of Labour and the prime minister’s post. The influence Labour Together figures retain around Burnham tells us that the machinery behind Starmer’s leadership has not been dismantled so much as quietly repositioned.
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham admits to blatently lying and engaging in deception to become leader of the UK Labour Party and Prime Minister.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
Corbyn set up his own Gaza Tribunal last year to hear evidence on Britain’s role in the genocide
