The UK state broadcaster streams disinformation into our living rooms – deceptions that not only leave us clueless about important international events but drive us ever closer to global conflagration
Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net
Here is another example of utterly irresponsible journalism from the BBC on tonight’s News at Ten.
Diplomatic correspondent Caroline Hawley starts by credulously amplifying a fantastical death toll of “tens of thousands of dead” from recent protests in Iran – figures provided by regime opponents. Contrast that with the BBC’s constant, two years of caution and downplaying of the numbers killed in Gaza by Israel.
The idea that in a few days Iranian security forces managed to kill as many Iranians as Israel has managed to kill Palestinians in Gaza from the prolonged carpet-bombing and levelling of the tiny enclave, as well as the starvation of its population, beggars belief. The figures sound patently ridiculous because they are patently ridiculous.
Either the Iran death toll is massively inflated, or the Gaza death toll is a massive underestimate. Or far more likely, both are intentionally being used to mislead.
The BBC has a political agenda that says it is fine to headline a made-up, inflated figure of the dead in Iran because our leaders have defined Iran as an Official Enemy. While the BBC has a converse political agenda that says it’s fine to employ endless caveats to minimise a death toll in Gaza that is already certain to be a huge undercount because Israel is an Official Ally.
This isn’t journalism. It’s stenography for western governments that choose enemies and allies not on the basis of whether they adhere to any ethical or legal standards of behaviour but purely on the basis of whether they assist the West in its battle to dominate oil resources in the Middle East.
Notice something else. This news segment – focusing the attention of western publics once again on the presumed wanton slaughter of protesters in Iran earlier this month – is being used by the BBC to advance the case for a war on Iran out of strictly humanitarian concerns that Trump himself doesn’t appear to share.
Trump has sent his armada of war ships to the Gulf not because he says he wants to protect protesters – in fact, missile strikes will undoubtedly kill many more Iranian civilians – but because he says he wishes to force Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear programme.
There are already deep layers of deceit from western politicians regarding Iran – not least, the years-long premise that Iran is seeking a nuclear bomb, for which there is still no evidence, and that Tehran is responsible for the breakdown of a deal to monitor its civilian nuclear power programme. In fact, it was Trump in his first term as president who tore up that agreement.
Iran responded by enriching uranium above the levels needed for civilian use in a move that was endlessly flagged to Washington by Tehran and was clearly intended to encourage the previous Biden administration to renew the deal Trump had wrecked.
Instead, on his return to power, Trump used that enrichment not as grounds to return to diplomacy but as a pretext, first, to intensify US sanctions that have further crippled Iran’s economy, deepening poverty among ordinary Iranians, and then to launch a strike on Iran last summer that appears to have made little difference to its nuclear programme but served to weaken its air defences, to assassinate some of its leaders and to spread terror among the wider population.
Notice too – though the BBC won’t point it out – that the US sanctions are a form of collective punishment on the Iranian population that is in breach of international law and that last year’s strikes on Iran were a clear war of aggression, which is defined as “the supreme international crime”.
The US President is now posturing as though he is the one who wants to bring Iran to the negotiating table, by sending an armada of war ships, when it was he who overturned that very negotiating table in May 2018 and ripped up what was known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
The BBC, of course, makes no mention whatsoever of this critically important context for judging the credibility of Trump’s claims about his intentions towards Iran. Instead its North America editor, Sarah Smith, vacuously regurgitates as fact the White House’s evidence-free claim that Iran has a “nuclear weapons programme” that Trump wants it to “get rid of”.
But on top of all that, media like the BBC are adding their own layers of deceit to sell the case for a US war on Iran.
First, they are doing so by trying to find new angles on old news about the violent repression of protests inside Iran. They are doing so by citing extraordinary, utterly unevidenced death toll figures and then tying them to the reasons for Trump going on the war path. Its reporting is centring once again – after the catastrophes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere – bogus humanitarian justifications for war when Trump himself is making no such connection.
And second, the BBC’s reporting by Sarah Smith coolly lays out the US mechanics of attacking Iran – the build-up to war – without ever mentioning that such an attack would be in complete violation of international law. It would again be “the supreme international crime”.
Instead she observes: “Donald Trump senses an opportunity to strike at a weakened leadership in Tehran. But how is actually going to do that? I mean he talked in his message about the successful military actions that have definitely emboldened him after the actions he took in Venezuela and earlier last year in Iran.”
Imagine if you can – and you can’t – the BBC dispassionately outlining Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to move on from his invasion of Ukraine into launching military strikes on Poland. Its correspondents note calmly the number of missiles Putin has massed closer to Poland’s borders, the demands made by the Russian leader of Poland if it wishes to avoid attack, and the practical obstacles standing in the way of the attack. One correspondent ends by citing Putin’s earlier, self-proclaimed “successes”, such as the invasion of Ukraine, as a precedent for his new military actions.
It is unthinkable. And yet not a day passes without the BBC broadcasting this kind of blatant warmongering slop dressed up as journalism. The British public have to pay for this endless stream of disinformation pouring into their living rooms – lies that not only leave them clueless about important international events but drive us ever closer to the brink of global conflagration.
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