Offending or over-accusing sides of this conflict is a very asymmetric risk. Misrepresent Palestinians negatively and you may eventually get an angry, vague letter - with a quarter of signatories doing so anonymously. Misrepresent Israelis negatively and you get very powerful and well-organised protests. BBC is sadly doing the rational thing of staying clear of suggesting Israel may be doing some bad things. It is a Corporation after all and so acts in corporate ways.
But this is also the example coming to them from the top. On the occasions where Israel has clearly committed egregious violations, such as shooting at people massed at the aid dispensal locations or the medics who then got buried in shallow graves, Israel gets barely a whimper of criticism from European politicians - and apparently full-throated cheering and support from the US. The ICC arrest warrant is as forgotten as last year's snow.
So why are we surprised the BBC doesn't want to stick its head above the parapet?
I think what is upsetting is that BBC is public service broadcaster where the whole point is that they are financially independent of government so they can do whatever journalism their employees deem necessary. They should be insulated from political pressure as much as possible.
Self censoring their own documentary does not align with that.
> Misrepresent Palestinians negatively and you may eventually get an angry, vague letter - with a quarter of signatories doing so anonymously
No, you get "fiery but mostly peaceful" campus protests and every BBC interviewer asking you in the perfectly aggrieved RP tones why you hate children so much.
> > you get "fiery but mostly peaceful" campus protests
> oh no, not students checks notes exercising their rights.
Check your notes again. At least part of the "fiery" was not within students' rights. The "not peaceful" was definitely not within students' rights. Harassing Jewish students is not within students' rights; not being harassed by other students is.
> So why are we surprised the BBC doesn't want to stick its head above the parapet?
Whenever a group publicly criticizes a behavior, you see the rhetorical question “Why are you surprised?”, and that feels dismissive and disingenuous.
Yes, BBC has some reasons to behave the way they do, sure. It’s really not relevant to the points being brought.
Every actor has reasons to behave. People are critical of the behavior, whatever the actor’s incentives are. Because a behavior feels more logical or rational it shouldn’t be discussed? If you would answer negatively then what’s the point of asking your question? Is it just to express your cynicism of that whole situation?
> Yes, BBC has some reasons to behave the way they do, sure. It’s really not relevant to the points being brought
My point is they are responding to external constraints shaped by the broader society - the very same group who seems to put up with Israel's outrageous stunts. To angst about the first but not the second is the illogical bit to me. The BBC is not quite a weathervane, but like so many commentators in this space, is so heavily constrained in what it can do that it's meaningless to focus on the actions, not the constraints.
It's like when people are shocked that politicians are not morally superior to the average person in the society that raised them. You sample from a group, you're going to mimick its distribution.
So I am not surprised or shocked how the BBC is acting. I am surprised and shocked that the many societies (Europe, America, ME) seems to accept this situation, as a root cause if you like.
>To angst about the first but not the second is the illogical bit to me.
Where are you getting this from, this idea that the ones that are angsting about the first, are not angsting about the second?
pg just recently tweeted about the ludicrousness of the 83 year-old historian (?) getting arrested for holding up a sign in support of Palestian Action, now effectively deemed a terrorist organization in the UK as I understand it.
This post is about the BBC, so the comments are about this specific news about the BBC. The BBC is constrained but not as much as the UK government obviously. It even tries to report objectively on scandals inside the BBC, to what extent it succeeds is always up for debate, as it is in this case debated here.
> Do you have a single example of a protest you try to summon here? I very much doubt it
Here's one example. The UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, faced calls to have her visit to the LSE cancelled by various groups, including
Campaign Against Antisemitism and Union of Jewish Students. She was also called unfit for office by the US ambassador to the UN.
On another occasion, an organization called UK Lawyers for Israel attacked an article in the Lancet, a medical journal, claiming a high projected death toll and decrease in health in Gaza as a result of the hostilities. A key point made by the organization was that the famine would help reduce obesity prevalent in the territory. UKLFI is an all-star group of legal heavyweights and not one you can easily cross.
And since you ask for sources, could you kindly share yours please?
> There was a study about negative bias towards Israel at the BBC. It contradicts your explanation.
You mean Albanese? Well, special rapporteur indeed. Objectively she isn't procecuted as she holds a high official position. I believe her to be unfit as well, but that isn't dangerous criticism and she isn't procecuted or in any form of danger.
What the lawyers did is certainly tasteless, but it also doesn't fit procecution.
I won't give you any sources, but these are utter trivialities to what some Jewish people have to endure. And I have yet to see a mob threatening anyone you mentioned, because they don't exist.
You don't link to why she was called unfit. There are seemingly valid concerns with her ability to be an impartial UN Rapporteur as required for that position.
The Lancet item was a letter, not an article. It is a speculative letter than was then pushed as a 'Lancet article' (something you do in your comment) to give it credibility/authority it does not have.
If so, then you're spreading misinformation. This is not a study. It's a report sponsored by Israel. It has flawed methodology and they made heavy use of ChatGPT.
> So why are we surprised the BBC doesn't want to stick its head above the parapet?
Well, I'm not surprised by that as I've seen the way that the BBC approaches "impartiality" (e.g. have experts explaining one side of an issue and then allow non-experts to spout falsehoods which aren't challenged despite them being demonstrably false).
As a license-fee payer, I detest the way that the BBC is ignoring its journalistic duty to present the facts in a non-partisan manner or at least attempt to do so. However, they consistently use different language to report on the different sides of the war.
BBC had to hide and never release the report that found that they constantly paint Israel as much worse than they are. Also they publish Hamas press releases as facts while everything from Israel as claims.
My favorite was when BBC said that "IDF went into hospital and targeted arab speaking doctors" that they later corrected to "IDF brought to hospital multiple arab speaking doctors"
Coming from an outsider, the letter is frustratingly vague. The only concrete allegation is the pulling of the documentary "Gaza: Medics Under Fire", but without a statement from BBC explaining why they pulled it, it's basically impossible from an outsider to know whether censorship is indeed happening or not. The rest of the letter basically down to a he-said-she-said over bias/censorship happening. Owen's article doesn't really add much either, seeming to take everything at face value and then using that to slam the BBC. This is all great if you're already predisposed to think the MSM has a pro-Israel bias, but otherwise leaves you at least confused.
Is there another source that does a better job at substantiating the claim that BBC has a pro-Israel bias?
"Instead, the report says, the BBC’s coverage has involved the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and unquestioning acceptance of Israeli PR. This has allegedly been overseen by BBC Middle East Editor and apparent Binyamin Netanyahu admirer, Raffi Berg, who is accused by anonymous journalists of “micromanaging” the section." - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...
"Comprehensive new research finds the BBC coverage of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza is systematically biased against Palestinians and fails to reach standards of impartiality.
Analysis of more than 35,000 pieces of BBC content by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) shows Israeli deaths are given 33 times more coverage per fatality, and both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards. BBC content was found to consistently shut down allegations of genocide." - https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/16/bbc-systematically-biased...
The tagline is "As many question BBC’s coverage, three academics tell openDemocracy why they don't think the broadcaster is impartial", which I think sums up the article accurately. That doesn't seem to add much aside from proving that there are outsiders (impartial or biased, we don't really know) that agree with one side. It shouldn't be surprising that with any culture war issue, than you can find some academics to be on your side.
Skimming the article, the methodology used is very questionable. For instance:
>Despite Gaza suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel, the BBC ran almost equal numbers of humanising victim profiles.
If you think 1 death = 1 coverage, then clearly BBC is biased. However, 1 death = 1 coverage is clearly not how anyone expect the media should operate. How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting? Does that mean the BBC has a anti-Sudan bias? Moreover should each death really merit equal coverage? Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?
>It was also found to have attached “Hamas-run health ministry” to Palestinian casualty figures in 1,155 articles – almost every time the Palestinian death toll was referenced across BBC articles.
Why is this an issue? In the Russsia-Ukranie war for instance, if you cite casualty figures from Russia, it's pretty obvious that it's from the Kremlin. The Gaza Health Ministry is actually Hamas run, and that fact isn't readily apparent.
There are other serious allegations made in that piece that I don't have expertise to comment on, but the above two snippets don't inspire much confidence.
>>It was also found to have attached “Hamas-run health ministry” to Palestinian casualty figures in 1,155 articles – almost every time the Palestinian death toll was referenced across BBC articles.
> Why is this an issue? In the Russsia-Ukranie war for instance, if you cite casualty figures from Russia, it's pretty obvious that it's from the Kremlin. The Gaza Health Ministry is actually Hamas run, and that fact isn't readily apparent.
Hamas is the legitimate government of Palestine. "Health Ministry" would be just as accurate and much less biased than "Hamas-run Health Ministry". The implicit accusation of bias against them by emphasizing the identity of the source is also extremely glaring when put into context; nearly every outside observer that's not an Israeli or US government organization to analyze the data and numbers has come to the conclusion that the "Hamas-run Health Ministry"'s number are an undercount.
They might have defacto control, but most countries don't recognize Hamas as the "legitimate government".
>Hamas is the legitimate government of Palestine. "Health Ministry" would be just as accurate and much less biased than "Hamas-run Health Ministry". The implicit accusation of bias against them by emphasizing the identity of the source is also extremely glaring when put into context; nearly every outside observer that's not an Israeli or US government organization to analyze the data and numbers has come to the conclusion that the "Hamas-run Health Ministry"'s number are an undercount.
So if the BBC was covering the election in Venezuela, would it be "biased" to point out that the election results were from the "government controlled" electoral commission, and that it was packed with Maduro's cronies? After all, the electoral commission is probably the "legitimate" authority for counting votes, so why point out it's staffed by government cronies? Just say that the opposition claims that their guy won, but the electoral authority said Maduro won. End of story. Or is it only biased if the journalist thinks something fishy is going on (ie. the vote was rigged in favor of Maduro)? How would we adjudicate this? This just inevitably devolves into "if you support Israel then saying anything bad about them is bias, and if you oppose Israel then saying anything good about them is bias".
The current US administration was elected less than one year ago. Hamas was elected 19 years ago. By law they should have held another election in 2009, but they refused to hold that election and have refused to hold any other elections since. This would seem to raise some doubts as to their status as a legitimate elected government.
Yet, when was the last time 100+ concerned journalists penned a open letter saying that we needed more coverage of the genocide in Sudan? It's all good if it's some sort of principle that's being applied evenly, but it's pretty clear in the case of the Israel vs Palestine conflict, most people are invoking that principle are doing it only when it suits them.
Aside from the fact that nobody is lionizing a group in Sudan (vs say Israel), and so there's no direct comparison here?
One major difference that I see - though of course I can't speak for the journalists - is that my country and tax dollars are directly involved in this conflict. Every child who burns alive, every man woman and child raped in an Israeli camp, every doctor or medic killed by targeted drone or sniper fire is in a sense in my name. I'm not saying Sudanese political instability isn't impacted by western actions, but this conflict is very real for a lot of people because of a direct, material involvement.
Journalists maybe feel this way, too?
I do also think this is a pretty straightforward distinction, and suspect your bringing up a fundamentally different conflict to say something like "well you think Israeli deaths get too much coverage in this war, why do Sudanese deaths not get very much?" is weird and borderline disingenuous.
No. pointing out genocide, attacks that kill hungry or starving people trying to get food is not some special unusual mean thing. It's something that all decent peoples should be against. I'm against all attacks on the innocent. It doesn't need to be repeated, but I'll do it - I was against the attacks by Hamas on Israel too.
Even calling this genocide is biased. Going into a country to kill the people from it of a race, and then texting celebratory texts that you killed some of that race, and capturing people of that race, is at least attempted genocide, if not completed.
Retaliating to that to get your hostages back and to stop the endless attacks on your race is not genocide.
I do not agree. Unless this applies to European Jews then? They were not all killed. Some were captured, some were used as labor or for experimentation. Some started a new state! If a sustained campaign is not successful in killing every single individual, how many before you might call it a genocide? This is a poor metric. If the borders of a country are eliminated (first politically, then practically), alongside hundreds of thousands of deaths targeted by culture/location/race, and confiscation of their property, there has been a genocide as far as most of the world is concerned. These are elements of culture and they can only be recreated or replaced or lost to time.
> Retaliating to that to get your hostages back and to stop the endless attacks on your race is not genocide.
The retaliation sped up the ongoing genocide as a pretext. Each side has wrongs they are retaliating from. The hostages are a justification to do what was already an official state goal. Complete annexation of Palestine. Imagine if any US state (or country) was slowly swallowed by a neighbor encroaching with violent and disposable settlers, the violence would be the same. This is the state of modern warfare demonstrated repeatedly over the last 200 years. Further imagining there is a moral actor, is arbitrarily picking a side.
> Unless this applies to European Jews then? They were not all killed.
I didn't say anything about "not all killed". Please - all these silly distractions and fallacies permeate any attempts to discuss this. You're not talking to an avatar representing all the worst, easiest to counter arguments from the "other side". You're talking to a real person who is articulating a view.
Characterizing history is complicated. Going about the thought process as to how I've come to my views, from a base set of assumptions, is not silly. Good luck with whatever.
> However, 1 death = 1 coverage is clearly not how anyone expect the media should operate.
How often should the media report deaths? Each time a group of people die? Each time bodies are found?
> How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting? Does that mean the BBC has a anti-Sudan bias?
Are you familiar with the saying, “when a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, then does it make a sound”?
> Moreover should each death really merit equal coverage?
I would assume that an individual or a group of people that aspire towards neutrality, fairness, and humanitarian principles would treat one life as the same as another.
>> Our mission is "to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain".
>> The Charter also sets out our five public purposes:
>> 1. To provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them
>> The BBC should provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression, so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.
>> 2. To support learning for people of all ages
>> The BBC should help everyone learn about different subjects in ways they will find accessible, engaging, inspiring and challenging. The BBC should provide specialist educational content to help support learning for children and teenagers across the United Kingdom. It should encourage people to explore new subjects and participate in new activities through partnerships with educational, sporting and cultural institutions.
>> 3. To show the most creative, highest quality and distinctive output and services
>> The BBC should provide high-quality output in many different genres and across a range of services and platforms which sets the standard in the United Kingdom and internationally. Its services should be distinctive from those provided elsewhere and should take creative risks, even if not all succeed, in order to develop fresh approaches and innovative content.
>> 4. To reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all of the United Kingdom’s nations and regions and, in doing so, support the creative economy across the United Kingdom
>> The BBC should reflect the diversity of the United Kingdom both in its output and services. In doing so, the BBC should accurately and authentically represent and portray the lives of the people of the United Kingdom today, and raise awareness of the different cultures and alternative viewpoints that make up its society. It should ensure that it provides output and services that meet the needs of the United Kingdom’s nations, regions and communities. The BBC should bring people together for shared experiences and help contribute to the social cohesion and wellbeing of the United Kingdom. In commissioning and delivering output the BBC should invest in the creative economies of each of the nations and contribute to their development.
>> 5. To reflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world
>> The BBC should provide high-quality news coverage to international audiences, firmly based on British values of accuracy, impartiality, and fairness. Its international services should put the United Kingdom in a world context, aiding understanding of the United Kingdom as a whole, including its nations and regions where appropriate. It should ensure that it produces output and services which will be enjoyed by people in the United Kingdom and globally.
> Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?
Yes, it would be biased in the same way that the BBC runs more pieces about Ukrainian civilians than it does about Palestinian civilians. There are likely more published BBC articles about Ukrainian civilians with photographs, audio, video, and documents than there are about Palestinian civilians.
There is BBC staff reporting from Ukraine and/or with the help of Ukrainian media affiliates and Ukrainian sources.
A European news agency reporting more about a war in Europe than a war outside Europe is relevance bias, not a pro-Israel bias. I get more weather reports for my state than for outside it. That isn't a bias against the weather in Mexico by my local news.
I’ve read all three articles, and I skimmed them again quickly to verify that none of the three mention that “At least 78 Palestinians have been killed since the morning” like Al Jazeera does (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/7/8/live-israel...).
If the BBC is willing to publish 3 separate articles about recent developments in the Israel/Palestine conflict in the same day, then why does the BBC not also report the casualties of said conflict that happened on said day? Not even breaking news with reports of unknown casualties. Just nothing about it and no indication of anything having happened at all.
Your Al Jazeera link goes to a page that now states at 'least 95 Palestinians killed' but when I click the link next to that stat it takes me to an article that gives no numbers, no sources for numbers. I'm not sure why you would expect the BBC to publish something like that or why you hold that up to be good journalism?
I also find these live blog style news pages confusing. Scrolling down, I find the following
> Gaza death toll hits 95 as Khan Younis attack casualties rise
> At least 95 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli attacks since dawn, hospital sources in Gaza tell Al Jazeera.
> According to Nasser Hospital in the southern part of the enclave, the death toll of the Israeli attack on the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis that we reported on earlier has increased to seven people.
> Translation: A Palestinian boy injured in an Israeli bombing asks his sister for food as he is starving while he waits to receive treatment.
My reply still stands in that BBC still has made no visible attempt to report a story with any casualty figures for Gaza this day even though they did publish 3 other pieces of news concerning the conflict. Therefore, the "relevancy bias" does not apply to the BBC here because the BBC considers the conflict relevant enough to report on 3 times within 24 hours.
Why does the BBC not consider the daily toll of casualties in this very same conflict sufficiently relevant to report on?
No "preliminary estimates on this breaking story"?
Looks like we reached the message reply limit, so I am replying here.
Pasting again
> At least 95 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli attacks since dawn, hospital sources in Gaza tell Al Jazeera.
> According to Nasser Hospital in the southern part of the enclave, the death toll of the Israeli attack on the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis that we reported on earlier has increased to seven people.
We will have to agree to disagree if hospital sources and the Nasser Hospital are not sufficient.
What source would be sufficient?
This approach towards determining relevancy is what I meant by “if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, then does it make a sound” earlier.
> However, 1 death = 1 coverage is clearly not how anyone expect the media should operate.
In armed conflict far away from the country in question, comparatively for each side, yes, both sides' deaths getting similar coverage is how one should expect the media to operate.
If Chile and Peru get into a war tomorrow, the expectation would absolutely be that coverage of deaths by the BBC would be similar for both.
>How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting?
The obvious key difference here is that in those wars both sides of those conflicts do still tend to get similar coverage per death; which is almost none. At the very least there's not orders of magnitudes difference. Not sure how you missed this, but it doesn't inspire much confidence.
> Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?
No, as Russia is a reasonable threat to the UK whereas Hamas is clearly not.
Anyone who call it "Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza" is hardly a reliable source.
And the entire criticism is amount of coverage per death? I men the Israeli deaths have names attached to them and you can verify them, the Palestinian ones are just numbered by Hamas. Obviously the coverage will be different.
I skimmed the article by CfMM and it's hardly a neutral source. Like they complain that BBC doesn't call Palestinian prisoners hostages. Well obviously they don't them them that, because they aren't hostages.
The Palestinian dead have names too, and it doesn’t take much to verify them.
Beyond the deaths, the hostages taken by both sides are exactly that: hostages. Why do you suggest Palestinian prisoners are not? What makes you think anything akin to “due process” is happening in Gaza right now?
It doesn't matter if the the original cause for the war is just or not if the war involves mass slaughter of civilians, and concealing this fact is deeply unethical. This is true in all other cases that you mention - whether civilians are targeted by the West and its allies in the war against ISIS, or by Ukraine in the war against Russia, that should all be covered objectively, not suppressed.
Separately from that, you seem to be conflating Hamas with Palestinians in general. Most people killed by Israel in Gaza are not Hamas.
Global news media is dominated by Rupert Murdoch (not Jewish) and while the second tier lesser Murdochs are mostly rich billionaires not many are Jewish.
eg: Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (recent chair of The New York Times company) is neither Jewish by birth—according to traditional Jewish law—nor by choice. (He was raised Episcopalian, his mother’s faith.)
News media isn't separate from Hollywood. Disney owns ABC. Paramount Global owns CBS. CNN is owned by Warner Bros Discovery. NBC Universal owns NBC, MSNBC, and Telemundo; they also own Universal Pictures. All the major US news networks are owned by companies that also own Hollywood studios, except for Fox, which sold its studio to Disney recently.
Murdoch (owner of Fox, Sky, NY Post, and WSJ, among others) gets a lot of (negative) attention as a dissenting voice, but I'd hardly say he dominates news media.
And couldn't you find a better second example than someone who is only technically not Jewish, because his father is Jewish, not his mother? His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather (all Jewish) previously ran the NY Times.
I can see how it’s read that way but people really do seem to forget that billionaires buy media companies as an investment. It’s not a strictly financial investment, either; they get to shape public opinion with them.
How many people know that Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post? How many people know that MSNBC is owned by Comcast? How many people know that Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post are all owned by Rupert Murdoch? How many UK citizens know that he also owns Sky News and The Times of London? How many people have heard the name Rupert Murdoch? (Everybody knows Elon Musk owns Twitter. Why do people say he bought an election again? How did that happen?)
They have a point and it is not anti-Semitic. The people who own the means to shape public opinion are exclusively in the billionaire class.
Western propaganda lies not only about this, corruption in the EU reaches incredible proportions, censorship, violations of freedom of speech, but Putin is always to blame.
Nobody here even mentioned Putin, and you conspicuously didn't cite additional sources for your imperative claims. It's not just baseless, it's also a non-sequitur in the context of the article.
You sound like a deeply insecure and paranoid individual, perhaps distancing yourself from politics would be healthy?
> Because they didn't, their original comment stands as logical fallacy, ad-hominem.
I do not want to make the same mistake as you, turning discussions into personal attacks (aka ad-hominem), but you were the only one using ad-hominem in this discussion, if you felt attacked because OP said that western leaders use Putin as a scapegoat, I think that is totally on you.
It's about the careful wording, about who gets to be on the spotlight, about who gets to call the other side a tyrant, an evil state, about saying things like "regime change" and no-one batting an eye. Slowly, but surely, you form an opinion as to who the bad actor is as you've seen or read about its bad behaviour (but not of the behavior of the other party)
Most interestingly, it's about who holds the microphone and is allowed to say whatever they want, unquestioned.
In a meta sense, yes, but in practice it’s mostly just a large collection of journalists and editors, real humans, working in a chaotic information space where there’s a large variety of angles and sources being put out at all times depending on the context.
It’s equally easy to cherry pick this sort of thing to build a narrative of some ulterior agenda. Especially given the high pace that news demands in the social media age.
What gets covered could simply be who a journalist happened to talked to the past week or what is trending on social media that will get clicks.
This is the kind of comment that at first glance seems measured and well-phrased. I’m sure it depicts a common situation in journalism too, after all they’re just humans like the rest of us.
The problem here is the enormity of what is actually going on in Gaza: a slaughter and a terror campaign we haven’t seen the likes of since Pol Pot. It is not two sides in disagreement, each jostling for attention on roughly equal terms, each somewhat right and somewhat wrong. Two years in, we’re well beyond that and the only thing that matters is that one side is sadistically slaughtering the other and the world is pretending it’s not happening.
> What gets covered could simply be who a journalist happened to talked to the past week or what is trending on social media that will get clicks.
Do you believe this with regard to what is happening in Israel/Palestine?
The chaos of information and what is truth is only bubbled up when 1) there's very few journalists in the area or 2) all the journalists are being killed or 3) there's no journalists and only special interests.
Consider that even if it was a "narrative" which at this point is controlled by social media, as it stands it seems to be: "these people are evil, they should be killed, sorry not sorry about the babies" or "these people are committing genocide, this bad."
Call me crazy, but neutral journalists should not be calling either side "evil". They should be reporting what each side does and let the reader draw their own moral conclusions.
and that's why you don't listen to only a single source of news.
Find multiple, ideally both geographic as well as political alignment.
Learn to discern what is a fact, and what is opinion presented as fact, and learn to read critically - such as question if there would be any omissions, or misrepresentations of facts to make persuasions. Learn to dissect the works, such as dramatic music and literary methods of persuasion, and how it affects the reader's perceptions.
All of this was taught in highschool literary criticism classes - just on old books and such, rather than modern material. But the same exact lessons could've been applied. Except people merely either half-assed those classes and use cliff notes, or just straight skipped them - leading to today's world where most adults are unable to critically examine the media they consume.
Sure, as a consumer, that is what you should do. But the issue at hand is that the BBC and its employees hold the BBC to a journalistic standard that it does not meet (according to those employees).
> and that's why you don't listen to only a single source of news.
> Find multiple, ideally both geographic as well as political alignment.
Easy to say in the abstract, harder to do when many "credible" sources toe the line and the ones that don't are discredited as "state sponsored news" or worse.
> Easy to say in the abstract, harder to do when many "credible" sources toe the line and the ones that don't are discredited as "state sponsored news" or worse.
Even when a source is unreliable, probable half-truths and lies are still valuable information when read critically and juxtaposed with many sources. Observing and noting when different factions agree and disagree on basic facts can be highly enlightening even when it's impossible to make a judgement on whether either side is right or wrong and to what degree. Identifying and recognizing the use and proliferation of canned phrases is also very helpful in constructing a mental map of the global journo-political landscape.
Also, highly credible organizations will be wrong sometimes and vice versa. One is never enough.
It's mostly anout how Israel army controls the way journalists report the war or regime in west bank that walks, quacks, and swims like an apartheid but apparently they can't call it that.
Sadly no one will be able to document the carnage in gaza. They plan to create an internment camp in the south and move civilians into at after making sure they are not linked to Hamas. Then they are going to basically follow Trump's plan to clean Gaza by building new jewish settlements and kill anyone outside the internment camp. While doing that they will not allow independent journalists to go in gaza.
As much as there are barriers to reporters here, it seems less than most other conflicts. Its not like journalists have unrestricted access to the Ukraine/Russia front line. Access to other conflicts like Sudan or Myanmar are also very restricted in practise.
If we define “worse” as higher journalist deaths, zero press freedom, no access, and active targeting, then Gaza is clearly worse for journalists right now.
Ukraine/Russia conflict is obviously extremely dangerous but it allows far more media access, transparency, and foreign presence.
According to the world press freedom index, Israel has the third highest press freedom of all middle eastern countries (Qatar and Cyprus are a bit higher, everyone else in the middle east is lower in most cases much lower).
"Comprehensive new research finds the BBC coverage of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza is systematically biased against Palestinians and fails to reach standards of impartiality.
Analysis of more than 35,000 pieces of BBC content by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) shows Israeli deaths are given 33 times more coverage per fatality, and both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards. BBC content was found to consistently shut down allegations of genocide."
The self-described mission of the Centre For Media Monitoring is "Promoting Fair And Responsible Reporting Of Muslims And Islam", so they might be slightly biased...
According to your own logic I should not even bother providing any evidence when you can simply assume any organization to be biased based on identity alone instead of addressing the evidence they provide, like the BBC operates under a Royal Charter agreed upon with the britsh government, "so they might be slightly biased..."
"Instead, the report says, the BBC’s coverage has involved the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and unquestioning acceptance of Israeli PR. This has allegedly been overseen by BBC Middle East Editor and apparent Binyamin Netanyahu admirer, Raffi Berg, who is accused by anonymous journalists of “micromanaging” the section." - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...
Would you honestly accept a report by an Israeli think tank that came to the opposite conclusion? I feel like most people would be suspicious of such a report.
It's worth noting the BBC has also been accused of an anti-Israel bias including but not limited to airing a documentary produced by a Hamas linked individuals[1].
> The only other BBC documentary which focused on the apocalyptic plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza was taken down as a result of a hysterical pro-Israel campaign - because the father of the child narrator’s son had a junior technocratic position in the Hamas administration. Irrelevant, given the narrator’s words were written for him by the documentary producers.
The kid was the son of Ayman Alyazouri, who yes is a Hamas minor official, but the thing was that the documentary makers knew that and hid it from the BBC who commissioned the documentary by pretending he had a different surname. The documentary showed the boy's "father" but it was actually his uncle. The kid's grandad, Ibrahim al-Yazouri, was one of the founding members of Hamas.
They translated the documentary's participants use of the word Yehud i.e. Jew into 'Israeli'. One of the cameramen Amjad Al Fayoumi (who effectively directed it, since the 'directors' were based in the UK) had posted on Facebook support about the 7th October terrorist attacks that kicked all of this off.
The problem is that the BBC and other media producers need to be squeaky clean when doing reporting on this, on both sides. It's not even like this was a quick news broadcast where accuracy needed to be checked, it was commissioned well in advance, they followed the boy around for months.
this was confusing but I think it's supposed to just be "father of the child narrator." Also kind of weird they (the original parent link, it is in the bbc article) didn't name the documentary (maybe it's common knowledge to their audience?).
Well, we should accept that it was a bit hysterical. "Terror chief's son" [1]? Really? Apparently he's the deputy minister of agriculture. Ministers, bureaucrats and civil servants in Gaza are appointed by Hamas [2]
Bob Vylan said "death to the IDF." He didn't call for the death of Israelis. It's the difference between saying "death to the RMP" in Ireland during the troubles versus calling for the deaths of British people themselves.
You can disagree with Mr. Vylan or that the BBC should have cut the broadcast but let's not misrepresent the situation.
It's true the phrase, as he uttered it, is ambiguous.
Amusingly, he probably didn't intend for it to be ambiguous, since on a previous occasion he chose the wording
"death to every single IDF soldier out there"
Pretty much all Israeli serve in the IDF. He called for their death. The mental gymnastics. He chanted for death but he didn't call for the death of Israelis. Right. He also chanted "From the River to the Sea" which is another call for the death of Israelis and he had some other antisemitic content to add to that. But yeah, he's just a great guy and BBC just let him have a stage.
I believe there are religious exemptions for some Israeli Jews that legally permits them to not serve in the IDF. In addition, I believe that Israeli Arabs are not required to serve in the IDF, but some do serve willingly. Finally, there are Israeli conscientious objectors who end up serving a prison sentence in order to avoid serving in the IDF.
Yes, but I don't see how that helps - it's still mostly conscripts who didn't really choose to enlist, let alone choose to fight in Gaza, let alone commit any war crimes.
> Pretty much all Israeli serve in the IDF. He called for their death. The mental gymnastics.
This argument makes no sense to me. You're basically saying that it's bad to call for the deaths of a genocidal military… once a certain percentage of the country enlists? Like, at what threshold do you think it would have been unacceptable to chant "death to the Nazis" or "death to the Imperial Japanese Army"?
- Israel is at war with Gaza after it was attacked by Gaza. This war will end as soon as Hamas surrenders and the hostages are returned. Could have ended a long time ago.
- Gaza is ruled by Hamas that just like Bob Vylan advocates for the murder of all Israelis and Jews. That is the genocidal party to this conflict, by their own declaration and actions.
- The correct analogy is the US going to war with Japan after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. Even that analogy is weak because Pearl Harbour was a military target while Gaza attacked civilians including massacring random people who went to a music festival. Just like Glastonbury. What would the UK do if Glastonbury was attacked by ISIL, 10's of thousands of people murdered, and thousands taken hostage? I mean we've seen what it did for a lot less than that.
- Israel's defensive war looks exactly like this war would look like if any other western country had similar military action. It is generally targeting military targets and civilians unfortunately also get hurt. If you compare to similar recent campaigns and adjust for the significantly more dense population, tunnels, the use of civilian infrastructure, you will see that Israel is waging this war with less impact to civilians compared to e.g. the western allies war against ISIL or Al Qaeda. None of Israel's critics are able to give a realistic option here for Israel to achieve its legitimate goals of self defense. Hamas has been attacking Israeli cities with rockets and massacred Israeli civilians. Israel can not let it remain in control, and a force, in Gaza.
- No other country in the world would do less in terms of military action under similar circumstances. We've seen countries like the US, the UK, Australia, France, take significantly more violent measures in significantly less serious (to their self defense) circumstances.
- The argument that Gaza was somehow occupied before Oct 7th and Palestinians had no choice to improve their situation without violence is a lie. Their violence, against civilians, is an explicit, declared, contiunous, choice. Gaza was handed to the Palestinians in 2005. Even if you can somehow twist the blockade on Gaza to be something else there is still no other country in the world that would act any differently. Gaza has received billions of dollars in support since 2005 and Hamas has invested it in weapons and tunnels.
- The IDF is not a "genocidal military". It's just a military. It's fighting a difficult war to defeat a brutal enemy that is holding hostages, doesn't care about deaths of its own people, and refuses to surrender. No other western military would fight in a more "clean" or "fair" way under the same circumstances and non-western militaries would be a lot more brutal and violent (like Russia did to the Chechens or Turkey to the Kurds). The allegations of genocide are false. They are an antisemitic blood libel. Civilian casualties are unfortunately an outcome of this kind of war which Hamas started and is continuing to date.
- The media, including the BBC, is reporting Hamas PR as news and certain media (like Al-Jazeera) is basically engaged in a PR campaign on behalf of Hamas. According to Hamas any militant that dies is a civilian and civilians that die without relation to any military activities are also killed by the IDF, including Palestinians killed by Hamas. According to the media there are no combatants and no military infrastructure and no tunnels e.g. in Gaza. All targets are civilians and all infrastructure is civilian. The truth is the opposite.
- According to the media "there is no safe place in Gaza". The truth is the humanitarian zone, designated as a safe area, accounts for a tiny minority of casualties in this war, mostly related to Hamas commanders hiding there. Palestinians who have chosen to move there are significantly more safer than those who for whatever reason do not.
It's generally bad to call for the death of anyone. Doing it in a music festival given Hamas' massacre of music festival goers is doubly stupid/insensitive/evil. Sometimes you have to fight, and kill, but you should never wish for anyone to be dead.
At this point what you're doing is tantamount to writing long essays trying to convince people that the Earth is flat. It is very very obviously a genocide — probably the most well-documented one since the Shoah! — and everyone but the most hardline Israel supporters can see that.
There's a reason that support for Israel in the US has dropped to just 12% among Democrats. [1] Even among Republicans, it's down 18 percentage points! And this is despite heavy censorship of pro-Palestinian narratives (as evidenced by the article).
This argument seems so counterproductive to me. Israel is obviously committing war crimes, attempting ethnic cleansing and any number of other horrible violations of international law and common standards.
But I don't see how it is committing genocide. They are not trying to destroy the people, the genus. There are 2+ mill people in Gaza and with all those bombs they killed 100k or less? Basically that is just what urban warfare looks like.
This is like the Diddy trial, where you give the perp a way out by overprosecuting.
Here's another comment I left in response to this same person (YZF) [1] with 13 examples of Israeli MKs and other government officials declaring their intent to kill civilians. Many of these are explicit calls for genocide.
That was in December 2023, after two months, when the death toll was only around 17,000 [2]. It's now been 19 months of near constant siege; if you check Wikipedia, as of today the official count is around 58,000 people killed directly. That's likely to be a vast undercount of the total number of deaths: an estimated 64,620 had died from traumatic injury by June 2024 [3], and probably many thousands more from malnutrition and disease. There are also thousands of uncounted bodies buried under the rubble. Israel has (intentionally) destroyed almost every hospital in Gaza, damaged or destroyed at least 92% of residential buildings [4] and cut off all food and water at least twice (and repeatedly massacred civilians at aid sites).
Do you really think fewer than 100k people have died as a result of this?
The point is that what you are describing is not genocide. "The legal term “genocide” refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." Israel does not do that. Russia does do that to the Ukrainians. Putin thinks Ukraine is not a real nation and he thinks the Ukrainians are not a separate genus. That is why Ukrainian children are getting indoctrinated in the occupied territories and the Ukrainian language getting suppressed.
Does that mean that Ukrainian civilians are worse off than Palestinians?
No, obviously not.
Israel is guilty of many crimes and many of them are worse than some forms of genocide.
Words have meaning and you are offering the Israeli apologetics an easy way out arguing semantics and the easy way is that they are right.
> "The legal term “genocide” refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." Israel does not do that.
Israel "does not do that" only if you ignore remarks by IDF members, MKs and the Prime Minister himself explicitly saying they are doing that.
Wasn't it calling for death to a military force leading a campaign of total war, and not a death call against Israelis in general?
Like nobody would say "death to the Khmer Rouge" is a death call against Cambodians. It technically would be, since it was Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge who were killing innocent children, but it's a specific subset of Cambodians (the Khmer Rouge) and only those who were actually doing the killing.
Yes, the coverage of this has been a weird one to watch.
How does this remark differ from what the Israeli government regularly says about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, just as much an official body in Iran as the IDF is in Israel? No one, to my knowledge, would consider calling for the demise of the IRGC to be hate speech against Iranians. No one has ever shut off a live transmission of a Netanyahu speech because he advocated for violence against the IRGC.
(Not defending the IRGC here, they are ghouls. Just noting the intellectual dishonesty.)
Nobody chants "death to the IRGC" in music festivals in Israel (or anywhere in Israel). Not to mention we're talking a third party here, the UK.
The Israeli government doesn't say "Death to the IRGC". Iran however regularly (like weekly) has massive crowds chanting "Death to the USA" and "death to Israel", stepping on and burning Israeli and American flags.
Israel consistently says they consider the Iranians their friends who are also oppressed by the regime. There are zero calls for death of anyone from Israel.
And Iran sponsors Jewish groups that are critical of the state of Israel. Both sides claim to be critical solely of the other's state, never the people. Sadly, neither side is credible in this, there's ample evidence of prejudice and hatred all round.
They also regularly say there are no innocent Palestinians [1] [2] [3] [too many others to count] but weirdly it's not considered evidence of genocidal intent when Zionists say it!
A minority of Israelis do say this. It's not something shouted in a music festival e.g. The official position and policy of the IDF is that Israel does not target civilians. I would say the majority of Israelis do not agree with this statement. [EDIT: for clarity that there are no innocents in Gaza]
Not to justify but they (the minority) are partly referring to the complicity of random Palestinians in cheering and participating in parading hostages and dead bodies brought in from the Oct 7th attacks. Civilians that followed the militants on Oct 7th to pillage and kill. The general support Hamas has in the population, including for the Oct 7th attacks. The celebrations after the attack. Civilians involved in holding Israeli hostages (some/many of the Israeli hostages were held by civilians) and otherwise actively participating in the conflict.
Either way civilians should not be a target, regardless of the views they hold. Trying to draw a target on all civilians, is not ok. The statement that there are no innocents in Gaza (that's usually the framing) is also very obviously wrong. Even if a large number is Hamas and engages in the kinds of behavior described above it's certainly far from all. Many Palestinians are under death threats from Hamas as well.
This expression isn't at the same level of calling for their death (though "Death to Arabs" has been chanted by the Israeli right wing after e.g. terrorist attacks in the past). It's possible some Israelis use this to support more aggressive tactics but in general the official policy is that the IDF targets Hamas and not civilians. It's also different when these things come out of parties to the conflict vs. random third parties.
It must not be the entire BBC. In the US I listen to the World Service radio news, and they do not shy away from reporting the horrors of war in Gaza. Even their interviews with Israeli representatives are shockingly unfiltered.
"To know who rules over you, simply notice who you are not allowed to criticize: capital owners". There, fixed it. As it stands the quote is supposed to make you "notice" a fantasized jewish cabal that would own the world. In reality, the most powerful sionists in America are christians.
Oh that’s hilarious because it has been misattributed to Voltaire and TIL it was from 1993
Wtf, I hate that quote now! Just kidding its still accurate: In the East you don’t criticize the party, in the West you don’t criticize one particular designated genocidal foreign army. Easy enough to follow.
The world has been a sad state of affairs since Covid. People in power need more power for themselves, view the world as a zero sum game, use coercion, deceiving, propaganda to achieve their goals, in this case a territorial expansion. Anyone who opposes the means it's currently being carried out is a anti-.... whatever.
Imo the world was the same before in terms of corruption and propaganda, it’s mostly us, the common folks, who changed radically.
There are only binary states and opinions, either you’re a genocide supporter or an antisemite. Internet discussion on politics have gotten too toxic. Covid brought everyone online and we’ve been stuck in echochambers ever since.
The BBC having 21,000 employees (5500 journalists). Only 100 signed.
From my perspective the BBC is extremely anti-Israeli but for some people this is obviously not good enough. They want the BBC to champion their cause. Naturally people supporting the anti-Israeli cause who only get anti-Israeli content will feel that the BBC is "pro" Israel. Nothing could be farther from the truth and Pro-Israeli media looks nothing like the BBC.
"We were appointed by the Governors to assess whether the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict meets the required standards of impartiality."
...
"apart from individual lapses, sometimes of tone, language or attitude, there was little to
suggest systematic or deliberate bias; on the contrary there was evidence, in the programming
and in other ways, of a commitment to be fair, accurate and impartial;"
...
"these shortcomings include:"
...
"Equally in the months preceding the Palestinian elections there was little hard questioning of their leaders"
...
This has been a big criticism of the BBC which is still not addressed:
"The term "terrorism" should
accordingly be used in respect of relevant events since it is the most accurate expression for
actions which involve violence against randomly selected civilians with the intention of causing
terror for ideological, including political or religious, objectives, whether perpetrated by state
or non-state agencies."
I guess it's hard to define words. Surely terrorism has this vague meaning of doing very evil and violent things.
But a picked up a random dictionary and it says: "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims".
I struggle to understand what political aim Israel is pursuing when using unlawful violence and intimidation.
If you believe that Israel is performing a genocide what is the point of explicitly instilling more fear in the victims? Just sadism? I genuinely don't understand what advantage would Israel have in employing terror tactics against Palestinians. Is the idea that they do so in order to make them even more angry so they can justify their genocide? Is that the argument? Or am I not giving the same meaning to the word "terrorism" as you do?
I don't want to argue about which side is on the right side or whatnot; I found that this kind of conversation is is highly unproductive online. But I am interested in understanding how words have changed their meaning over time. Is terrorist now just a synonym for "murdering civilians"?
Based on that definition alone, the occupation of the West Bank and the discrimination against its original people breaks international law, is enforced by violence and intimidation against civilians, and from the unlawful settlement in it, seems to be in service of the political Zionist aim of settling the region, let alone Gaza.
If any form of coercion and prevarication is labeled terrorism we then lack a word to describe the act of plowing through a crowd with a truck or planting a bomb in an everyday place with the intention of instilling terror in the population.
Those acts are different from military occupation or apartheid or genocide. It's not a judgement of value. It's a description of a method.
My point is that the word "terrorism" transcended the description of a technique for reaching certain goals, to a general blanket term used to describe "pure evil" and so people started to use it to describe very bad things even if they are not technically terrorism
Make no mistake, occupiers can and frequently will use terror tactics.
They don't plow through a crowd with a truck or plant a bomb in an everyday place because they don't need to do that to instill terror, those are tactics of the weak. No, they disappear the people around you, with the same aim, and from a position of power. Which is the greater terror? A truck that detonated downtown or knowing a relative that got killed, locked up, or tortured? Apartheid and genocide are worse terrors than that, and by a stronger oppressor.
Many Palestinians in the West Bank have to pass through military checkpoints daily just to go about their daily lives, and at every point, one wonders if it is on that day that their life goes sideways.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to diminish the suffering of people who have to live through this degrading and stressful experience. I just think the word terrorism used to describe the action of (usually militarily weaker) insurgent actors trying to destabilize a society is not the same as using the word terrorism used to describe the intentional oppression by a state (using military and police) towards a minority.
We have "repression","oppression", "persecution", "subjugation".
Why do we need to use the word "terrorism" there? I suspect it has to do with the fact the word "terrorism" has been abused by american right wing after 9/11 to just describe "any muslim" and "any evil" and there has been appetite ever since to have some retribution and use this term back to label the west (and israel as its proxy).
Again, I'm not trying to defend the actions of israel against the palestinian population of the west bank in particular, but I find that "repression","oppression", "persecution", "subjugation" are already strong words enough and we don't need to strip the word "terrorism" from its specific meaning.
- settlement and expulsion of Palestinians (think the bulldozer tactics)
- a testing ground for weapons: Israel routinely uses footage and draws evidence about how they’ve battle tested their weapons and tech they’re selling in the West Bank. There’s a book about this: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2684-the-palestine-labor...
Anyway I think there’s probably more goals I can think of but these might be enough for now. Makes me too sad otherwise.
Sadism for some, sure. For most IDF personnel I guess it’s more about “operational expediency”: if the population is terrified they’ll listen to your evacuation orders and show up to your aid distribution/killing fields on time. Finding terrorists one by one is hard work; tossing a bomb on a whole building is quicker and safer.
War sucks and soldiers don't want to die. As true today as it has been since forever. My grandfather a Marine in the Pacific used to call in flamethrowers instead of going in after Japanese soldiers in bunkers. Helped burn people alive. Was a burden he carried the rest of his life. War sucks. It sucks young men are put in these situations making these kinds of calls.
> "The term "terrorism" should accordingly be used in respect of relevant events since it is the most accurate expression for actions which involve violence against randomly selected civilians with the intention of causing terror for ideological, including political or religious, objectives, whether perpetrated by state or non-state agencies."
I have never heard the BBC accuse the Israeli settlers of terrorism against West Bank Palestinian villages.
You can look at the post history of some of the comments here - some of the most prolific commenters in this thread appear to only comment on the Israel/Palestine conflict.
One party starts with the "moral advantage" — but as soon as conflict escalates, sides look more alike than different. This is war after all. Media is entrenched, disregarding their own side's actions. We've seen it in Ukraine-Russia. And now in Israel-Palestine.
Sadly it seems like this is indicative of a broader trend in Public Broadcast in the west. In Australia we've seen similar internal criticism of the ABC of an anti-palestinian bias in reporting[1].
It's deeply concerning that these publicly funded media outlets are being co-opted and manipulated by a foreign power.
>Wanting Israel to exist because the world has shown it will not allow Jews to be safe anywhere else does not make someone manipulated by a foreign power.
Is this an alt account? This is basically the exact wording as another comment flagged minutes ago.
You're seeing what you see all over the web: (badly imho) organized attempted to control public opinion. It's no different than the "50 cent army"[0] commentators and just as obvious to anyone paying attention. These are standard talking points regurgitated ad nauseam anytime certain topics come up. It was always inevitable that social media would devolve into this, but still sad to see it happen in so many places.
Many US states actually have laws on the books that prohibits anybody that works with or I think event contracts with the state gov from "discrimination against Israel", in various forms, etc, depending on the particular state.
To my knowledge, no US state has any other sort of legal recognition of any other foreign government/state.
Defence contractors hire a lot of people which in turn create a lot of ancillary jobs to support said industries.
Defence contractors are also becoming increasingly sophisticated so they use more software, more chips, more clouds, and more information security.
Almost all of MAFANG has some defence-related footprint, and some have multiple. You might see a few defence/defence adjacent companies in the monthly WhoIsHiring posts as well as https://www.workatastartup.com .
The simple truth is there are a lot of zionists in powerful positions both in terms of governmental and monetary. Open wikipedia and look up cabinets and powerful people in US government since WW2. Pay attention to their ethnicity; even if half are zionists, that's a lot of people.
Edit: people downvoting this, first part of the comment is just facts, second part is plausible speculation. Why are you downvoting?
No, you are putting words in my mouth and being very reductive. Majority of powerful people is not jewish nor zionist, but there is probably a lot of zionists amongst them. And no, not all jews are zionists, nor all jews are in powerful positions.
> Christian Zionism is a political and religious ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land.[1] Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with biblical prophecies transmitted through the Old Testament: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant—the eschatological "Gathering of Israel"—is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.[1][2][3] The term began to be used in the mid-20th century, in place of Christian restorationism, as proponents of the ideology rallied behind Zionists in support of a Jewish national homeland.[1][4][5]
One theory is that an abundance of American Christians believe in dispensational premillennialism[0], which rebukes orthodox Judaism in the hopes of returning Christ. Many dispensationalists (including Issac Newton[1]) attempted to interpret the Bible as a function of divine will, and argued that the foundation of Israel is directly imperative due to the prophecy of Daniel. This seems to go against the majority orthodox Judaism interpretation that the Third Temple (as well as the return of Christ) is willed by God alone and not predetermined conditions that men can control.
It's a bit out-there, but unfortunately I can't write-off DJT accepting it all at face-value. He's got conspicuous in-laws and an awfully weird track-record writing policy for the Levant. A religious conviction to defend Israel on behalf of his savior seems to slot rather neatly into his internal belief system.
Dispensationalism is a heresy that flows out of the Scofield Bible, created by a con artist, Cyrus Scofield. He was likely funded and supported by Zionists.
The Israel of the Bible does not refer to the country Israel, but many Christians have been deceived.
Yes, you are exactly right and I salute you for posting this. I believe the vast majority would say both of your thoughts here. Stop attacks and genocide on all. Hamas was awful on Oct 7, and the attacks on the innocent in Gaza, they are starving them are also.
I don’t think the country of Israel is explicitly doing the manipulating, I think one country’s allies are just statistically richer and more influential than the other
In the case of Australia you're correct in that it's not Israel reaching into Australia to alter opinion.
What is the case (in a many layered complex fabric) is that Australian Jewish groups have both actively pushed a narrative and worked hard to discredit any inkling of voice given to Palenstine by the public broadcaster that does work hard to be in the vicinity of neutral.
For better or worse they have gamed the Australian media system in their favour.
This recently hit the Federal Court of Australia which determined that (former) ABC executives (senior staff of the public broadcaster) caved to a pressure campaign to fire a radio broadcaster who tweeted a link to a Human Rights Watch report (that was unfavourable to Isreal) "in her own time" (not on the public clock and not contrary to any employment agreement).
As an outsider, I feel the narrative has totally turned for the rest of the world.
Israeli citizens protesting against the genocide and war crimes rekindled faith that it's mostly the top of govts and military industrial complexes pushing for this.
Not just BBC, most media ended up out in the open this time around. Or maybe it has always been like this, we are just growing up now and taking notice.
I'm starting to realize, very belatedly in life, that we suffer from an end-of-history illusion in politics and political economy. I used to think we live in a golden age because a hundred years ago, democracy broadly replaced monarchies, market economies replaced feudalism and other coercive systems, and with it went many of the old, indirect mechanisms of subjugating large populations (e.g. moral imperatives through the Church, legitimization of rule through concepts such as the divine right of kings, control of education etc).
But it seems we've only replaced those mechanisms with more refined versions (manufacturing consent through mass media, surveillance and indirect indentured servitude through student debt, rent and health insurance).
We probably have another century of socioeconomic and political evolution to go before we reach a decent end state.
I like your optimism that a decent end state can be reached at all.
There are so many ideas that sound good on paper but are bad in practice, and that happen to be convenient for the goals of unscrupulous powerful people.
The notion that society as a whole will at some point stop falling for such ideas seems very optimistic to me.
Society came very close to realizing the beginnings of a decent state in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell faught in it, and wrote about what he saw that society achieving in his book, Homage to Catalonia.
It's not that hard for a new idea to look good for a couple short months/years. Building an ongoing, self-sustaining society that doesn't go completely off the rails is a whole other thing. There's a reason all these idyllic examples people give (Catalonia, Pre-USSR Ukrainian socialism, Paris Commune) were short-lived. If the Bolshevist revolution had been quashed in 1919, it would be idealized today.
> If the Bolshevist revolution had been quashed in 1919, it would be idealized today.
I don't think so. Pretty much all the negative things about Bolsheviks were already prominently there by 1919. Anti-democracy, mass terror, torture, concentration camps, you name it.
They never collapsed from anything innate, though. They were always destroyed from outside forces. When your society represents actual freedom, you become the enemy of everyone, from capital to stalinism.
Centralization of power has so far made every society deeply flawed or even hellish. The three societies you mentioned are the only ones where power was purposefully decentralized, and that seems to be the most promising path forward that was never allowed to stretch its legs.
I would argue that Rojava is one modern case that still shows hope. Although not as decentralized as those other examples, perhaps this is also why they're still there 11 years later.
I agree. Though unfortunately there have been reports of them slowly centralizing power away from community councils toward the military over time. Even still, it's offering far more freedom and diversity than any of the surrounding countries. I'm rooting for them to succeed.
Please don't give some tripe about medecine or something...sure we have some fancy new techniques and the like, but that doesn't matter if those systems aren't generally available or rejected on pseudo-religious grounds.
It might be true we have been living longer for a while, but that's a trend of the past 50 years in some areas, not some inexorable progress towards longer lives...
Maybe we have lots of food and entertainment. I suppose that is good, in theory. But again, not something of recent history, that has more to do with the availability of large shipping vessels and TV production...
The part people may find optimistic is continuing to improve in any appreciable manner, versus some gains made decades ago...
Well, for one thing, neither me nor my son work in coal mines. We don’t have to breathe any of the sooty gases that coal burning spews forth, and can turn on airconditioning in summer when it’s hot. Also, heated toilet seats in winter.
Both of which are improvements not unique to even the past 10 years - even if you only recently experienced these improvements, that merely makes you "late adopters".
You can have personal improvement, and you can continue to reap the benefits of existing systems, this is not the same as general progress or, progress made by society, much less any sort of indication that progress will continue...
I felt a glimmer hope from Grok believe it not. On X it has been showing the potential of an AI being seen as a trusted authority to cut through a lot of propaganda based on facts. But then elon didn't like the "facts are liberal" vibes and nerfed it and now it can't be trusted, it's just another propaganda mouthpiece.
This points to what I think is the missing amendment to the US constitution, when a media company gets big enough to influence significant portions of the electorate it should not be allowed to be owned by a single billionaire or a small family. Large media ownership should be distributed as widely as possible across society so that one rich guy isn't able to force his opinions on everyone.
It's math. You can model what happens in n-player repeated games of incomplete information, and you'll realize we're far from any stable point. And it's not even that hard to understand that the narrative of "end of history" benefits the people who get to say that and uphold that narrative.
Concur, but from a control systems point of view. Any system that does not define upper/lower limits and does not address feedback loops, are prone to oscillations, and if the size of the system grows over time, the oscillations can become progressively more violent.
Our socioeconomic/political systems currently do not define any hard upper or lower limits on its primary driver (economic power) and does not address feedback loops (e.g. more capital availability -> larger scale -> more economies of scale -> more market share -> more capital -> more scale).
Could just be cyclic? 1776->1861 (romanticism leading into civil war), 1861->1940 (modernism leading into WWII), [weird cold war baby boomer era of prosperity] 1970->2025 (post-modernism leading into..)
For more on this exact topic I strongly recommend Plato's "The Republic". The entire book is phenomenal, but "book" (chapter) 8 [1] is something that just completely reshaped my world view. There is an occasional reference that will make you think we've genuinely made progress, like casual acceptance of slavery, but when one reads just the political timelines and transitions he speaks of, he sounds like he's describing modern times, with a bit of edgelord flair, with complete hindsight bias. But that book was written 2,400 years ago!
It was a realization that nothing, except technology, is changing. We're not entering into some scary unknown time, but just regressing to the mean. Humanity seems to be stuck on a perpetual loop, probably because we really suck at learning from the past and inevitably convince ourselves that 'this time it'll be different.' And even on those issues we do seem to have made progress on, like slavery - is it just a coincidence that slavery ended universally, after millennia of efforts, only just after the Industrial Revolution and mass urbanization which effectively obsoleted it?
On the theme of slavery, consider that we mostly don't even blink twice now a days when a country drags men off the street, separates them from their family, puts a gun in their hand, and throws them in a trench to kill and most likely die. Those that continue to refuse to kill not infrequently end up 'dying in training.' To say nothing of barrier troops. This is all much worse than even slavery, but we casually accept it, because it hasn't yet been obsoleted. If the role of humans in warfare is ever minimized, imagine what lovely things they'll write about our morality and hypocrisy, just as we are wont to do about the past today.
---
As for the chapter referenced, Ctrl+F for "And democracy has her own good" and read from there. "Drone" is a term you'll see throughout classical writings. It's a reference to drone bees who contribute nothing to a hive, but exist solely to consume and mate if they can. So it's a term that refers to everything from beggars to criminals to corrupt politicians who prefer enriching themselves and special interests over broadly socially motivated politicking. So in modern times it would include practically all politicians.
The myth of social progress conflated with technological advancement. Even that isn't assured when corruption, apathy, and cult of insane beliefs defund the "Library of Alexandria" and the world slips back into relative darkness again.
I agree human nature hasn't really changed since Plato's time and technology is the main thing that has. But the tech provides much more information and communication which leads to things like slavery going. Also I think most people are shocked that trench warfare is still going on but the Russian leadership seems a bit behind the times. Apparently Putin spent time during the lockdown reading previous centuries history and here we are.
It cannot happen in even 1000 years because it would need evolutionary pressures to select for saner and more intelligent people. The idiocracy ain't going to let the happen.
I think there's a more fundamental issue at play. Two people, both rather intelligent and completely sane, can come to complete different conclusions on things. For instance, I think fertility is one of the most critical issues facing civilization in modern times. I can offer reasons why, though you've already done so yourself in part, but that's outside the scope of this post for now.
By contrast, others may see the fertility crisis as not even an issue, let alone a crisis. After all humanity's not going to go extinct anytime in the foreseeable future, and billions of people is a lot of people. There are even some who think it may be a good thing - fewer people could reduce the impact of human emissions for instance.
So this difference in worldview would lead to radically different perspectives on seemingly completely unrelated things, like LGB representation in childhood education. Add in a bit of a radicalism and these otherwise reasonable disagreements gradually breed extreme hostility.
And I don't think there's any real solution here. No side can ever win, because neither view is really wrong. The best solution is probably general decentralization. But most people don't realize their opinions are opinions, and think they are factually and objectively correct - and want to impose their views on everybody, which trends towards attempts at centralization, inevitable collapse, and repeat.
Russia is neither forcibly conscripting nor are they preventing anyone from leaving the country should they wish.
Ukraine is doing both at an increasingly absurd scale, all the while people wave their flag-of-the-week in their social media profile, either aloof of what they support or seeing no problem with it.
The same was probably, more or less the same, during slavery. People adopting views based on tribe rather than any real thought or even knowledge of what they support. The overwhelming majority of everybody obviously never owned a slave and likely had an idealized view of the institution.
You're conflating two things. There is indeed conscription in Russia, Scandinavia, and many countries in the world where people are expected to do some period of time of military training within a country. These people are generally not used in active conflicts, though it does entail enrollment in the equivalent of Selective Service in the US meaning they can be called up later (2 years in Russia) for "real" service in the case of a draft/mobilization. Russia carried out a limited mobilization once early on in the war in 2022, and it was horrifically unpopular, leading to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians from the country. People don't want to risk being called up to possibly die for a war they may not even agree with. Since then they have relied exclusively on volunteer forces.
Ukraine, by contrast, immediately after the war began they made it illegal for men of "fighting age", which they define as between the ages of 18 and 60, to leave the country. And they have been relying on forced conscription for an ever larger percent of their entire armed forces since then. This is why you can find countless highly disturbing videos of Ukrainian TCC (conscription) officers brutalizing and even killing civilians in efforts to conscript them and throw them on the front lines. Wiki has some sampling of incidents here [1] which I will not quote. In many cases they are, again, quite disturbing.
People really have no clue what they are supporting over there.
There's a difference that Ukraine had not much choice after being invaded but a larger enemy, aside from maybe surrendering and letting Putin take over. Russia's invasion however was almost entirely their choice and could be stopped tomorrow if Putin just told them to stop.
That's a bit of a false dichotomy as the early terms were relatively modest but, in general terms, I would agree with the point you're making. However the issue you run into is that the exact same arguments were made in favor of slavery. For instance even Aristotle some 2400 years ago predicted the end of slavery, if slaves only were not necessary:
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." [1]
Of course society could have gotten by without slavery, but it wouldn't have been as convenient, particularly for the wealthy and political classes who were the exact sort that could afford to own slaves. And the exact same is true of conscription. If people are not willing to die for the political class of a country, who are the political class to insist they die for them? And the greatest irony is that the most 'brave' of the political class are often made up of cowards and draft dodgers themselves. But it's an entirely different game when it's not their life on the line anymore.
People, who live in a time when humans in warfare are obsoleted, will look back upon this as even more vile and barbaric than slavery. And they'll damn us all for it. Yet it's an issue that "we", the people without power, mostly do not even really think about one way or the other - because it's just how it is. We might speak out against it, those in affected regions might even start their own 'Underground Railroads' to escape tyranny, but everybody knows it won't end.
You forgot to mention the widespread coercion of Russian conscripts into "voluntarily" enlisting for the war in Ukraine. Stories like this are extremely common:
Semyon* (name changed) was conscripted in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, having served in the Pskov region of northwestern Russia for the first five months, where he was asked to sign a contract several times but refused. On 20 April, he was transferred to the Chebarkul garrison and signed up for professional service after just two and a half hours.
His mother says that on the way to the unit he complained of being actively pressured into signing a contract, after which Semyon was taken to a separate office, where a sergeant fired a gun next to him and showed him a video of dead and wounded people, threatening that the same thing would happen to him if he didn’t sign. Semyon broke under the pressure, his family says. On the same day, he applied to have the contract annulled, saying he had signed under duress, asking for it to be declared invalid as the commander had not yet signed it, but to no avail.
Not to mention authorities raiding places like gyms to get the conscripts in the first place:
Russian police are targeting migrants and draft-age men in a wave of raids on gyms and martial arts clubs across major cities, with activists describing them as part of a broader crackdown that intensified ahead of the country’s spring military draft. Lawyers in multiple regions told Sever Realii that gym raids now happen at least twice a month in major cities. Russian citizens are typically sent to enlistment offices, while foreign nationals are taken to temporary detention centers. Many are ultimately deported.
In one raid, a military officer reportedly accompanied police to hand out conscription notices directly. Activists say authorities are also targeting naturalized citizens who have obtained Russian passports but avoided military service, pressuring them to sign military contracts under threat of deportation or loss of citizenship.
Thats called illusion of control. Just look at your family and friends.
Some will always want much more than others. Some will always take paths that are easy. Some will have no problem taking advantage of the weak.
Keeping all those traits in check is a full time job. Its not free. It eats into limited time and energy. Sooner or later compromises are made.
Therefore parasites and predators always find space in any ecosystem you look at. You might be able to turn off/keep in check behavior of a few. But never all.
Consider how insignificant your worries will seem to future generations in one, two, ten centuries from now.
Or maybe you think we’ll destroy the world or something, in which case that’s “chicken little syndrome.”
It’s hard to imagine we will regress in any meaningful way. That’s basically never happened, and even when it did, during the “dark ages,” we recovered – on a long enough timeline (which isn’t even that long) we’ve made exponential progress in every facet of life. There’s a lot to look forward to. Or you can be pessimistic about it during the few brief years you have in this world…
The way I look at it - you can be optimistic and hope that your actions can have a positive effect on your life and the world - if you’re wrong, you’re no more fucked than if you’d been pessimistic the whole time, and you at least felt better during said time.
Same, and it's quite obvious. You will get the same government regardless of who you vote for, its controlled opposition design to cushion some of your grievances but policies are set in stone.
We are going up, slowly, in health, literacy, education - globally.
But, like all progress, it is up up and down, then again up up and down. Thanks to retro grades like Putin and Trump.
As to health indenture -that form of slavery is primarily in USA. Most other countries have figured it out.
I agree with hope for the future though.
Star Trek, not Star Wars!
The "end of history illusion" is not the belief that there is a decent end state, but the belief of each generation that that state has been reached, and that they were to first to reach it.
Actually, this expression "end of history" has been coined, and the ideology(*) behind it promoted, in the 1990s after the collapse of the eastern block. Before that, for what I can tell, the prevaling idea seems to have been that of an "ustoppable march of progress". Long before that, I would guess that the most common ideology was that of a persistant, immuable order.
(*) That's the proper term to denote a concept that justify the will of a group, regardless of its veracity.
Considering history, I see no signs of converging to some end state. I guess technical progress and knowledge accumulate somehow, but even this is not linear and history shows plenty of exemples of drastic step backs. But even assuming an ever increasing technical progress, in a world with infinite resources (that's a very big assumption), what would be the end state? I guess, given we are on HN, a state were humans program conscious machines which then do all the hard work? In other words, the ideology of bigtech?
Thought experiment - how many generations does it take to forget grandpa?
If Grandpa is the issue, their grandchildren may have falsely optimistic opinions of their corrupt roots. Their children (grand grand children) don't have the same rosy memories, and don't get why Mom and Dad are into their weird rituals. But it's Mom and Dad so it can't be so bad, right?
It's not till their grandchildren, normally, that (assuming they are decent people and the trait isn't genetic or somehow encouraged by society) people can maybe see what utter crappy people their grand grand grand grand parents were, and maybe do something about it.
The problem is you can't even point a finger or single out people responsible for the current state of things. Unless we collectively accept there is a problem, the solution will not get implemented.
I can think of numerous people who while not solely responsible for the state of things, have certainly fanned the flames to attain great personal prosperity at the expense of our collective psyche. Those people have names and addresses and they are not as they may believe immune from retribution.
I don’t want to live through any more historical times but I increasingly believe we’re on a precipice of incredible amounts of political violence, both against people who don’t deserve it, and people who do. And those people would be wise to pump the brakes a little.
This is why monarchies are better than democracies. There is no accountability or ownership. A king wants to pass down something better to his progeny. A politician wants to make money and generally doesn’t care what state he leaves things in.
I never said either of those things. By progeny, I meant both the heirs of the king and the common race of people belonging to the kingdom. Kings were the head of different races of people and as the head, they looked after their people (if they were a good king). For example, a good king wouldn’t import millions of people who are different from those in his kingdom for economic reasons, and you don’t see this in history. It is his job to take care of his people and if he suddenly gave them an incredible amount of competition for resources, he would be responsible for causing his people great difficulty. He cares about them and wouldn’t do that.
Politicians don’t have this headship and from their behavior clearly don’t view themselves as stewards of their country and people (they do care about their own children though). An example of this would be Mike Lee’s attempt to sell off American public lands to foreign interests. The money raised from this would not make a dent in the deficit or debt, and it would take away beautiful fishing and hiking from Americans. Thankfully this was done away with, but a good king would never consider selling public land in the middle of his country to foreigners.
I was in the same place not long ago, convinced that democracy’s march and market liberalization meant we’d finally broken the old chains. But the more I watched what people actually do, versus the rhetoric they spew, the clearer it became that most of our "freedoms" are just stage props. We have the illusion of democracy so we can feel free, the illusion of equal justice under law so we can feel secure, the illusion of meritocracy so we can feel hopeful. And thanks to this, they get stability. In reality, there are always those who want to be above the law and steer the masses and today’s new kings just wear different robes.
Media conglomerates manufacture consent far more subtly than the Church ever could. Student debt servitude, rent extraction, and opaque health insurance bureaucracy bind millions in ways that feel inescapable. Yet because it’s all cloaked in market-speak and "public interest" we barely notice our chains. Recognizing these illusions is painful, but it’s also the first step toward tearing them down. If we’re honest, the next century of political and economic evolution won’t be about perfecting the PR, it’ll be about building genuine checks on power, creating institutions that can’t be gamed, and demanding real accountability, even when the robes change.
> We have the illusion of democracy so we can feel free, the illusion of equal justice under law so we can feel secure, the illusion of meritocracy so we can feel hopeful.
All values and freedoms need to be fought for constantly and perpetually. They are not hard constants outside rare exceptions when it’s very clearly defined law. It’s simply the sum of the efforts of people currently on the planet. They are always under threat by people with good intentions or more overt bad ones.
What you may be seeing is a decline in people publicly pushing for them, especially in our institutions (politics, press, academia etc). But you can still find plenty of people fighting for them if you look deeper.
I still cannot get over the fact that we, in Europe, have banned RT on the grounds that it is a publication sponsored by a "foreign" government and, as such, it cannot be trusted.
For one, so many publications here in Europe are financed by the local governments and we have no problem allowing them to function and act in the interest or said governments. Two, it flies in the face of an independent, free individual who can choose what to read and discern what the truth is. By blocking it, you are saying, "You, as an individual, are not able to take your own decisions, you are not able to separate truth from lies and fiction." If, supposing the later is actually the case, then all this "free" media is actually dangerous as it becomes a game of "don't trust them, trust us!" and whoever has the better image, the best marketing and exposure wins over the others.
As a Russian, I wouldn’t trust anything that comes out on RT. Banning it though is a really bad move – something I would expect from the Russian government itself, not Europe. One of the reasons I’ve become disillusioned in EU recently.
The problem is, we've seen how that ends up: you get bad actors masquerading as news (e.g., Fox News, Info Wars, OAN, etc.) and people flocking to low information, high entertainment vendors over good faith (if sometimes or even often flawed) traditional news (e.g., Associated Press, Reuters, BBC News, etc.).
As such, you end up with a large cohort of people believing immigrants eat their pets, vaccines have microchips in them and are more harmful than the diseases they protect against, 5g towers cause cancer, chemtrails are a thing, and trickle-down economics benefits working people.
Now, I may ultimately accept the idea that no matter what we do, we're always inevitably screwed, and even the smallest attempt to curtail speech will always end in an even worse outcome (like how there exist some infinities larger than others), but even I get a little uncomfortable being that nihilistic.
Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and freedom of receiving and imparting information and ideas. The United Nations was fully aware when making the declaration of human rights that bad actors existed. However the outcome of not having those rights have shown to be universally worse.
It is not that one has to accept that we are inevitably screwed. That assumes that no amount of work or effort can address social problems peacefully, and that the only way for a functional society is through force.
Im hoping that current decades of polarization and championing of censorship will end up resulting in similar conclusions as the UN did after world war 2. Censorship and violence only breed higher quantity and intensity of censorship and violence.
Here's the rub: the current polarization and championing of censorship have come from abuse of free speech protections.
We've had decades of Fox News and the like declaring things like "War on Christmas" and "War on Christianity" to make people in the majority feel like victims, presenting immigrants as subhumans that take jobs and commit crimes as they invade our country, and presenting trans people as deviant threats to our children, trying to make them all trans, too.
This is a completely fictional world, but such a large number of people have become believers that they've now been able to take over political power.
As a result, we get state laws that directly attack freedom of speech via book bans and scrubbing school curriculum of anything parents deem objectionable, which can include innocuous things like acknowledging gay people exist or that the civil war was fought over slavery. We also got our current administration, which has used lawsuits and other threats to attack any speech the president doesn't like.
I don't see where it gets better anytime soon - and I think it's a foregone conclusion that it's going to get a lot worse before they do get better, because a large cohort of people are cheering it on.
And before anyone chimes in that this is a both sides issue: I've yet to see actual legal action taken by the left wing to curtail speech. Instead, I've seen social pressure levied - largely in the form of freedom not to associate with individuals or businesses that engage in speech people find objectionable. This is the correct way to engage in an environment of free speech, even if I find it distasteful how far it's been taken and how petty it's been in some cases.
I'm not really advocating for censorship myself. Ultimately, I'm merely reflecting upon how an environment of nearly absolute adherence to free speech has been eroded by a number of bad actors utilizing propaganda and lies to chip away at that very free speech over the decades, bringing us to a point where we're sliding down the very same slope towards destruction of freedoms that free speech absolutism was intended to prevent. The whole exercise feels like a Catch-22, hence my prodding for something a little more concrete yet specific than "censorship = bad".
Trying to solve bad speech by censorship will never work, and there has never been an authoritarian movement that has been silenced by censorship. It do not work. At best it does nothing, and at worst it increase their support and reduce any internal resistance. The purpose of human rights is to create common shared values between people from all political spectrum and create some internal resistance.
It is fairly common belief that lies and propaganda is stronger than truth. However rather than see it as a fundamental part of nature, I would propose an alternative theory. Lies and propaganda is a symptom when social trust in society start to break down. You could ban Fox news or any other right-leaning media and there is little to no evidence that society would be any different.
The idea of free speech absolutism is an concept that people build to attack free speech. Free speech is about valuing and believing that people should be free to hold and express their opinions and beliefs without fear of retaliation. Fear can be created by law, by mobs or by those who hold some form of power like employers, but regardless of method the result is the same. Society need to value the idea of free speech. Absolutism has nothing to do with that. The idea that people should not fear the government for beliefs they hold, but should fear their employer, is inconsistent with free speech as a human right.
If you are looking for something more concrete, I would point towards research that that looks at social trust and its roles in conflicts. There exist a fair amount of research on this topic, some which is left politics and others which is right politics. One major finding are the importance of shared values. What kind of values those are is less important than that they are shared. If they aren't shared, then the next most important part is that they aren't shoved into the face of people who do not share them. Trying to stamp out opposing values, especially in a public and diffused way, has a long history of creating violence, fear and mistrust.
There isn't "polarization". There's no zero sum team sports going on. There's a cult and then there's everyone else wondering why they have such crazy, hateful beliefs. It's because the Paul Harvey's, Rush Limbaugh's, and Alex Jones' weren't countered or restrained effectively. And so the Overton Window of America was dragged right past Reagan voodoo economics and into Nixon agro "get off my lawn" religious-ethnonationalism with people who wore the hoods.
Most thinking people will try not to take current event reporting at face value. For many Americans, it's easy to accept a lot of things your Mainstream Media Source gives you (including NPR or NYTs), and ironically when one of the current themes is to distrust mainstream media.
FWIW, I trust NPR reporting to only make true statements.
What they're sometimes guilty of (in my judgement) is one-sided reporting. E.g., regarding illegal immigration, providing sympathetic personal stories of illegal immigrants, but not of the persons hurt by illegal immigration.
It's also possible they've gotten better about this. I stopped listening years ago.
It's not really that it's sponsored by a "foreign" government and, as such cannot be trusted. It's more we are pissed off with Russia's invasion rape murder torture and the like and they can take their propaganda somewhere else.
> have banned RT on the grounds that it is a publication sponsored by a "foreign" government
Not just a "foreign" government, but a government that is waging a hybrid war against the European Union, which includes disinformation through outlets such as RT.
flamebait gets removed all the time because there's no way there's going to be a productive, illuminating, curious conversation about it. doesn't mean there's a conspiracy to prevent discussion.
How is this flamebait? Is there another way to report on this topic that would be less inflammatory? Or should media manipulation by foreign governments simply not be discussed and we should just keep quiet less someone get upset?
Surely if Russia was manipulating BBC reporting it would be note-worthy as well no?
I think parent just means that it’s a divisive topic, which means on the internet, that inherently makes it flamebait (and not necessarily through any fault of the reporting).
Even on HN (and sometimes, especially on HN).
There are some divisive topics that are less prone to flame wars on HN vs. other discussion platforms, but those are fairly limited, and often not political (in my experience).
The problem with this logic is that it is very, very easy for even a small number of people interested in silencing a topic on any issue they're concerned about "divisive" just by intentionally flooding the comments with knowingly inflammatory responses.
This has already be used on HN to essentially silence any serious reporting on climate change. Anyone technical with an interest in data will find most climate change related studies interesting, but a small minority of people who are fearful of the consequences will make sure to create an issue and shut down conversation, organically getting posts "flagged".
It's not some theoretical 'divisive', you can read how these threads go yourself, including this one. The meta discussions also make these a lot worse so it's hard to blame this on some 'small number' of people.
A lot of the flagged posts look completely fine, to me. Basically the entire discussion is greyed out, which suggests a pretty intense unwillingness to talk about the subject on principles alone.
I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides. If every HN thread resorted to this logic, nobody would want to use the site.
>I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides."
The brinksmanship card of HN is the reverse of this framing: There must be level-headed discussion. To wit:
>The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial.
It's better to link the things you want to use as examples because otherwise we aren't really talking about anything concrete. The thread on this submission is awful, for instance - so that's my first link.
I think the flag system in HN is unnecessary and prone to abuse in threads like these.
Some comments that clearly break the rules should be removed by the community. But that should take multiple downvotes.
The flagging just allows one or two people to remove a part of the discussion, and we rely on other users to view dead or flagged comments to “rescue” them
I don’t disagree. I’m just afraid it’s a hard problem to solve, at least an automated one.
At one point, I proposed a read-only option for (well-reported) divisive articles to help raise awareness without resulting in flame wars.
But there are downsides to that, too — either they can still get flagged away, there’s a risk of garbage remaining on the FP if you disable the flag feature, and/or HN gets accused of bias if they manipulate certain articles this way (by disabling flags and/or commenting).
I feel like it’s wrong to call this topic divisive. It doesn’t adequately address that one side of the divide seems to consistently advocate for condoning genocide in broad daylight.
not sure which side you mean. gaza and israel have had officials advocate for the destruction of the other. that's kinda what makes it an existential total war.
But I think, by definition, if an article draws a lot of flagged/downvoted comments (as this one has), it’s hard to argue that it’s not divisive, at least to this audience.
This rhetoric is delusional. If you’re a real person arguing in good faith, I beg you to stop pretending that American politics is a two-team sport. This is not a tactic worth employing.
I mean I almost flagged it: the headline absolutely does not match the letter, and it’s clickbait by a well-known polemicist. Israel’s continued actions in the West Bank are somewhere between apartheid and ethnic-cleansing, the civilian deaths in Gaza are beyond appalling, and there are genocidal maniacs in their current cabinet, but this article is trash.
Iran isn't an ally of any country in the west. The west says "Iran is an awful, oppressive country" basically daily. What's new to report there? They're already economically cut off from most of the world. There's not much else for us to do.
Israel is an ally of every country in the west. People say "stop criticizing them because you can't do that until you complain about every other problem on earth first!" and it's a very strange, conditioned behavior not seen when problems pertaining to any other country are brought up. And the big difference between Iran and Israel: Israel isn't cut off from the world economically, and in some places (many US states), boycotting them is even illegal.
None of my tax dollars or purchases fund the Iranian government. Lots of our money funds Israel against our will. That's why people get angry.
Most of the west is definitely not Israel's ally based on their lack of support.
The US does support Israel but this is a story about the UK. The UK does not support Israel and even partially boycotts Israel at the moment.
If you're American then your tax money e.g. funds Egypt. Egypt is a dictatorship, no human rights, involved in the Sudan civil war where millions are dying. Not a beep on Hacker News.
EDIT: Not to mention the billions of dollars, including indirectly to Hamas, coming from the west.
The Prime Minister of the UK recently said he supported Israel's attacks on Iran. The UK even helps arm Israel. [1] Not sure what the basis of your claims are but they're quite different from reality.
And I apologize in advance to any Egyptian readers out there, but Egypt has a very low reputation these days. I've not once seen a positive comment about the country in these past 10 years. Nobody is flooding in to defend Egypt when their problems are brought up and saying "Before you criticize Egypt, what about..."
And if you hold your country to the standards of, as you said, oppressive dictatorships that support brutal wars, that's a low standard and will attract criticism.
Partial arms sales ban is not an ally in my book. Many countries sell arms to other countries they are not even close to being allied with.
EDIT:
Also count for me how many anti-Egypt stories made HN front page over the last 2 (or 10) years and how many anti-Israel stories made it.
> I've not once seen a positive comment about the country in these past 10 years.
We are not talking about positive comments (even though I'm sure we've seen some) we're talking about Israel being singled out for attack and being denied the right to defend itself against Hamas.
A sales ban would simply be in compliance with international law, and the UK is a member of the ICC, so even a partial ban is failing to live up to their obligations. The US is not currently a signatory but it's own laws make it illegal to export arms to Israel, so I guess we're "more" of an ally, as we're willing to more flagrantly break the rules in this regard, but the UK is still pretty far in favor of Israel with their current stance.
Gaza doctor whose nine children were killed in Israeli strike dies from injuries (June 2)
Gaza now worse than hell on earth, humanitarian chief tells BBC (June 4)
Three journalists among five killed in Israeli strike on Gaza hospital (June 5)
Four killed near Gaza aid centre, health workers say (June 8)
Dozens of Palestinians killed while seeking aid in Gaza, hospitals say (June 11)
More than 20 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire near Gaza aid sites, Hamas-run ministry says (June 16)
Israeli forces kill 51 Palestinians waiting for flour at Gaza aid site, witnesses and rescuers say (June 17)
Eleven killed by Israeli fire while seeking aid in Gaza, rescuers say (June 18)
At least 12 Palestinians killed waiting for aid in Gaza, say medics (June 19)
Israeli military kills 23 Palestinians near aid site in Gaza, witnesses and medics say (June 20)
GHF boss defends Gaza aid operation after hundreds of Palestinians killed near sites (June 27)
At least 81 people killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza, Hamas-run health ministry says (June 28)
Israeli military investigates 'reports of harm to civilians' after hundreds killed near Gaza aid sites (June 30)
Hundreds of families displaced by wave of Israeli air strikes on Gaza, Palestinians say (June 30)
Dozens killed in Gaza as Israel intensifies bombardment, rescuers say (July 3)
Israel's strike on bustling Gaza café killed a Hamas operative - but dozens more people were killed (July 4)
Now, perhaps these anonymous staff make some distinction between headlines and whatever they mean by "PR," but there appears to be zero hesitation reporting everything the BBC can find on the crimes of Israel, real or imagined. Reading the open letter makes no such distinction, citing "reporting" many times. At least two of the above are directly attributed to "Hamas-run ministry," which is somehow a source for BCC's supposedly pro-Israel reporting.
How am I supposed to not see what I'm seeing with my lying eyes? I don't believe I'm capable of this tier of cognitive dissonance.
1. You don't have the counterfactual here, so who's to say how the world would have turned out without exhortations from top brass.
2. Recent is the keyword. The tide of public sentiment has shifted somewhat against Israel in this conflict as the civilian casualties mount & theater of combat expands, so maybe it's easier to be a Brave Truth-Teller in the past 2 months of a conflict whose most recent flare-up dates back going on 2 years now.
3. These seem like fairly sanitized headlines considering what they're actually talking about. Consider the last one vs "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens, Though They Claim One Murdered Individual Among the Group Not So Innocent" or something. So even though some of the facts are getting reported on, how they're reported on (arguably almost as important) could still be an editorial decision from higher echelons.
>1. You don't have the counterfactual here, so who's to say how the world would have turned out without exhortations from top brass.
This presumes the journalists are somehow neutral to begin with. If they're biased to be anti-israel, then arguably the top brass telling them to tone it down a notch would make the coverage more neutral.
>3. These seem like fairly sanitized headlines considering what they're actually talking about. Consider the last one vs "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens, Though They Claim One Murdered Individual Among the Group Not So Innocent" or something. So even though some of the facts are getting reported on, how they're reported on (arguably almost as important) could still be an editorial decision from higher echelons.
This presumes there's some Objectively Neutral™ version of a headline for a story, but how do know what that should be? Is the "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens ..." wording supposed to be the neutral version? If that's the neutral version, I can't imagine what the anti-israeli version is supposed to be.
> This presumes the journalists are somehow neutral to begin with
I don't think it presumes that, I'm just pointing out that the existence of articles reporting on Israeli war crimes doesn't preclude bias.
> How do you define what the neutral version of the headline should be?
I don't really believe that true neutrality exists, we're always exposed to biases. Which and to what degree are at question here. My hypothetical headline was specifically meant to highlight this - the same events can be reported on "accurately" in many ways, with many biases. The existence of those facts in a newspaper doesn't mean there's no bias. That's all.
"Brave Truth Tellers"? There were protests on the 8th october after Israel was attacked and didn't even retaliate yet. Nothing happened to the people that shared their thoughts. I personally think they should improve their education on the topic, but that is my opinion.
This is a thorough victim complex if you really apply a neutral perspective.
Just because you can list a bunch of article headlines that seem to not show bias, it doesn't mean there isn't bias. That takes a much deeper analysis.
Having anti Israeli headlines is not the same as having pro-Israeli proganda. If the writers/editors believe what they are writing, well I suppose I don't an issue with that.
So it it seems like a legitimate letter, what's less clear is which, if any, of their pro Israeli articles are written by people who believe what they are saying...
The narrative of "pro-/anti-" is part of the problem.
Zionist settlers are outright evil, while most Israelis don't care or are unaware of what's going on in Gaza. Unfortunately, the world has been being paying attention and has had enough of the hasbara of ethno-nationalist supremacy BS that is plain to see. A lesson that the Holocaust/Shoah didn't teach properly to much of anyone now that those who survived it and are mostly gone, while those here now lack the oral history continuity of it. It's an intentional Pyrrhic victory in the tradition of the American western frontier and the Trail of Tears. There's now a plan to create a "humanitarian zone" concentration camp in Rafah requiring security screening and involuntary captivity for 600k.
I am curious as to when and how journalists use language. Looking at the headlines you chose, I see that some are written in active voice and some are in passive voice. When do journalists choose to use active voice over passive voice?
Imagine China started doing to the Uyghurs exactly what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and on the exact same scale. For that matter you can even say for the exact same justification - there have indeed been multiple mass death terrorist style incidents carried out by Uyghurs. Would you expect remotely similar framing?
The entire population of Gaza was only ~2 million and Israel has now killed/wounded hundreds of thousands of Palestinians directly, and it's likely some multiple of that have been killed indirectly (starvation, disease, deaths of despair, etc). If this was China, we would have long since been calling it a systemic genocide, done all we could to economically sanction them out of existence, and perhaps even flirted with direct invasions which would entail risking not only WW3 but global nuclear warfare.
But because it's Israel, we're instead shipping them weapons to keep carrying out this "war" and the media continues framing it as just a regrettable conflict with unfortunate collateral damage.
> we would have long since been calling it a systemic genocide
Without knowing what "we" means, allow me to cite a few more recent BBC headlines, these related to "genocide":
Gaza war: UN rights expert accuses Israel of acts of *genocide* (March 26)
UN experts accuse Israel of sexual violence and *'genocidal acts'* in Gaza (March 13)
Human Rights Watch accuses Israel of *acts of genocide* in Gaza over water access (December 19, 2024)
Amnesty accuses Israel of *genocide* against Palestinians in Gaza (December 5, 2024)
Saudi crown prince says Israel committing *'genocide'* in Gaza (November 11, 2024)
Brazil's Lula compares Israel's Gaza campaign to the Holocaust (February 28, 2024)
ICJ says Israel must prevent *genocide* in Gaza (January 26, 2024)
So the "genocide" narrative appears to be alive and well around the world, and the BBC is a fine place to read all about it. The ICJ is literally investigating a genocide case against Israel as we speak.
Again, this notion that there is some pro-Israel bias plaguing the BBC just doesn't compute for me. Were the claims of this anonymous open letter valid, I wouldn't be able to tap a couple keywords into X and dump a list of such BBC headlines. Apparently any leader, pressure group or institution on Earth that cares to make a headline need only accuse Israel of "genocide" and it will be on the BBC the same day. Whatever supposed editorial bias is in effect appears to be highly ineffective.
Effective propaganda, when truth is not on its side, does not simply ignore the truth. There's an ICC arrest warrant out for Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and so forth. Never saying genocide and ignoring all allegations would be a red flag to the point of absurdity. You'd never convince anybody that wasn't already completely convinced.
So the way that real propaganda works is by taking some issue people generally feel a way about, expressing some empathy towards that, and then working to shift that person's perspective. For instance here [1] is the first article you linked: "UN rights expert accuses Israel of acts of genocide". It not only spends much of the article softly trying to undermine these claims, but even leans on one of the most classical propaganda techniques - appeals to emotion. This is a quote from that article:
----
Not surprisingly, Israeli diplomats are angry [at the claims]. Its ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar, described the report as "an obscene inversion of reality", and accused Ms Albanese of questioning Israel's right to exist. Many Israelis, too, are likely to be shocked. And the suggestion of genocide, towards a state which was founded as a direct result of Nazi Germany's genocide of Jews, will cause deep offence.
In the wake of 7 October attack, and the fact that so many Israeli families are still waiting for news of loved ones taken hostage, hearing such outspoken condemnation is hard. Noam Peri, whose father Chaim was taken hostage, also travelled to Geneva. Her focus, naturally, is that her father not be forgotten.
"My father was kidnapped from his own home," she said. "He's an 80-year-old person that was sitting in his home with my mother, and he was brutally taken from there, and has essentially disappeared since. He has no communication, with no-one in the world."
Interestingly you only picked the latest ones and even those still contain bias. The evidence needs to be analyzed holistically, from start to finish. BBC consistently used passive voice when it comes to Palestinian deaths like "20 Palestinians 'died' in Airstrike" which can appear "non-biased" but becomes clearer when compared to proper headlines like "20 Palestinians, including children, were killed in an ISRAELI Airstike"
"Instead, the report says, the BBC’s coverage has involved the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and unquestioning acceptance of Israeli PR. This has allegedly been overseen by BBC Middle East Editor and apparent Binyamin Netanyahu admirer, Raffi Berg, who is accused by anonymous journalists of “micromanaging” the section."
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...
> BTW, this article doesn't mention that Gazans are still holding Israelis hostage, nor October 7th...
Ah yes, the 7 remaining hostages. But don’t forget that that counter is still zero for Israel only because all the people that could have been taken hostage have instead been killed.
Owen Jones is a UK political commentator and activist who reaches a large audience via Youtube etc. He has covered the latest Israel Palestinian war extensively and continuously from the start. is that a fair summary?
> Owen Jones (born 8 August 1984)[2] is a left-wing British newspaper columnist, commentator, journalist, author and political activist.[3][4][5][6]
> He writes a column for The Guardian and contributes to the New Statesman, Tribune, and The National[7] and was previously a columnist for The Independent. He has two weekly web series, The Owen Jones Show and The Owen Jones Podcast.
The parent submission is off-topic and spreads Jew hatred (attack on a person because Robbie Gibb is Jew and should be removed from board, similar to Columbia University president Claire Shipman comments). As someone who's grandparents experienced similar attacks during Stalinism because they were Jewish aka "zionists", this is extremely scary and totalitarian.
This is a non exhaustive list of news where the BBC started by blaming Israel of some war crime since the October 7th massacre occurred, and then had to remove, recant or apologize about after overwhelming evidence against it came to light:
- Al-Ahli hospital explosion (Oct 2023)
- Al-Shifa hospital “medical teams targeted” (Nov 2023)
- Summary executions claim (Dec 24)
- Aid‑centre shooting attribution (Jun 2025)
- Al‑Shifa “raid on medical teams” redux (Jun 2025)
Imagine if the journalists weren’t “forced to do pro Israel PR”.
BBC needs a proper external investigation on the levels of anti semitism that clearly permeate the ranks of their so called journalists.
>after overwhelming evidence against it came to light
Or maybe they removed articles because of political pressure? Post overwhelming evidence against the fact that the Al-Ahli hospital explosion was caused by an Israel airstrike, for example.
Not only every expert consulted by every journal agreed that the explosion was not even caused by an airstrike, but they also agreed it was caused by a projectile launched from Palestinian territory.
You are posting, with a straight face, a link that repeats in all its entirety how nothing conclusive can be stated, how no expert has ever given a definitive answer, and you are saying the article affirms the opposite.
When some of my more privileged Jewish friends are feeling glee, they proudly say their people do control the news
Feels kind of gaslighty when we can all perceive that there is a disproportionate overrepresentation of exactly that, but if us gentiles say it is called an “antisemitic trope”
not every observation is based on wanting a hurtful outcome against jewish people, but every reaction to that observation seems like thats the assumption. doesnt seem productive though, counterproductive and self fulfilling is what it seems like
There was a report commissioned into alleged bias at the BBC called the Balen Report. Some people report that it found no bias, but it hasn't been published to this day.
Like for example, your comment makes no sense. It reads like you got paid to write it. You're not contributing anything at all - just expressing that you feel something that most people would call "exaggerated" and "performative" and "embarrassing"
since key players realized decades ago how much sway news outlets hold over public opinion, a vast amount of them have been co-opted to spread propaganda [0]. at least a dozen countries and probably more (including Israel) are tapped directly into the five/fourteen eyes [1][2] intelligence network, countries which share "raw sigint" [3] with each other and strategically disseminate international propaganda to the alliance's benefit.
watching or reading publications from any of these nation's news outlets is intended and virtually guaranteed to paint them all as the "good guys", and any other countries as "bad guys". just like BBC is doing here. this is not a conspiracy, it's all fairly well documented.
murdoch empire, from zero to hero. also broligarchs are falling over themselves to own media companies. it doesnt take an einstein to see whats going on.
The BBC recently showed a documentary that was pro-Palestinian and factually wrong. They also paid Hamas affiliates and relations to star in it. I have no idea where the "BBC are pro-Israel" thoughts come from but as a brit - I don't see it.
Offending or over-accusing sides of this conflict is a very asymmetric risk. Misrepresent Palestinians negatively and you may eventually get an angry, vague letter - with a quarter of signatories doing so anonymously. Misrepresent Israelis negatively and you get very powerful and well-organised protests. BBC is sadly doing the rational thing of staying clear of suggesting Israel may be doing some bad things. It is a Corporation after all and so acts in corporate ways.
But this is also the example coming to them from the top. On the occasions where Israel has clearly committed egregious violations, such as shooting at people massed at the aid dispensal locations or the medics who then got buried in shallow graves, Israel gets barely a whimper of criticism from European politicians - and apparently full-throated cheering and support from the US. The ICC arrest warrant is as forgotten as last year's snow.
So why are we surprised the BBC doesn't want to stick its head above the parapet?
I think what is upsetting is that BBC is public service broadcaster where the whole point is that they are financially independent of government so they can do whatever journalism their employees deem necessary. They should be insulated from political pressure as much as possible.
Self censoring their own documentary does not align with that.
> the whole point is that they are financially independent of government
Hasn't been the case for a long time though, eg. [0]
[0] https://www.mediareform.org.uk/blog/the-bbc-mid-term-charter...
> Misrepresent Palestinians negatively and you may eventually get an angry, vague letter - with a quarter of signatories doing so anonymously
No, you get "fiery but mostly peaceful" campus protests and every BBC interviewer asking you in the perfectly aggrieved RP tones why you hate children so much.
> you get "fiery but mostly peaceful" campus protests
oh no, not students checks notes exercising their rights.
> every BBC interviewer asking you in the perfectly aggrieved RP tones why you hate children so much
dude you're literally commenting in a thread about how the BBC is complicit in preventing coverage of Israeli crimes because of conflicts of interest.
> > you get "fiery but mostly peaceful" campus protests
> oh no, not students checks notes exercising their rights.
Check your notes again. At least part of the "fiery" was not within students' rights. The "not peaceful" was definitely not within students' rights. Harassing Jewish students is not within students' rights; not being harassed by other students is.
I doubt anyone’s surprised in here. I’m certainly not. Angry? Absolutely. Sick to my stomach? Yep. But surprised? Not even a little.
> So why are we surprised the BBC doesn't want to stick its head above the parapet?
Whenever a group publicly criticizes a behavior, you see the rhetorical question “Why are you surprised?”, and that feels dismissive and disingenuous.
Yes, BBC has some reasons to behave the way they do, sure. It’s really not relevant to the points being brought.
Every actor has reasons to behave. People are critical of the behavior, whatever the actor’s incentives are. Because a behavior feels more logical or rational it shouldn’t be discussed? If you would answer negatively then what’s the point of asking your question? Is it just to express your cynicism of that whole situation?
> Yes, BBC has some reasons to behave the way they do, sure. It’s really not relevant to the points being brought
My point is they are responding to external constraints shaped by the broader society - the very same group who seems to put up with Israel's outrageous stunts. To angst about the first but not the second is the illogical bit to me. The BBC is not quite a weathervane, but like so many commentators in this space, is so heavily constrained in what it can do that it's meaningless to focus on the actions, not the constraints.
It's like when people are shocked that politicians are not morally superior to the average person in the society that raised them. You sample from a group, you're going to mimick its distribution.
So I am not surprised or shocked how the BBC is acting. I am surprised and shocked that the many societies (Europe, America, ME) seems to accept this situation, as a root cause if you like.
>To angst about the first but not the second is the illogical bit to me.
Where are you getting this from, this idea that the ones that are angsting about the first, are not angsting about the second?
pg just recently tweeted about the ludicrousness of the 83 year-old historian (?) getting arrested for holding up a sign in support of Palestian Action, now effectively deemed a terrorist organization in the UK as I understand it.
This post is about the BBC, so the comments are about this specific news about the BBC. The BBC is constrained but not as much as the UK government obviously. It even tries to report objectively on scandals inside the BBC, to what extent it succeeds is always up for debate, as it is in this case debated here.
This thread is literally full of confused commentary, which is what my (slightly meta) post obliquely referred to.
I ma glad there are people out there who do care.
There was a study about negative bias towards Israel at the BBC. It contradicts your explanation.
Do you have a single example of a protest you try to summon here? I very much doubt it.
BBC had a report from 2006[1] which admitted that its coverage was biased towards Israel on top all the recent coverage.
> - that a disparity (in favour of Israelis) existed in BBC coverage taken as a whole in the amount of talk time given to Israelis and Palestinians;
Do you have any credible source that shows the opposite?
[1]: https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_wo...
> Do you have a single example of a protest you try to summon here? I very much doubt it
Here's one example. The UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, faced calls to have her visit to the LSE cancelled by various groups, including Campaign Against Antisemitism and Union of Jewish Students. She was also called unfit for office by the US ambassador to the UN.
On another occasion, an organization called UK Lawyers for Israel attacked an article in the Lancet, a medical journal, claiming a high projected death toll and decrease in health in Gaza as a result of the hostilities. A key point made by the organization was that the famine would help reduce obesity prevalent in the territory. UKLFI is an all-star group of legal heavyweights and not one you can easily cross.
And since you ask for sources, could you kindly share yours please?
> There was a study about negative bias towards Israel at the BBC. It contradicts your explanation.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/nov/11/pro-israel-camp...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/10/uk-lawyers-for...
You mean Albanese? Well, special rapporteur indeed. Objectively she isn't procecuted as she holds a high official position. I believe her to be unfit as well, but that isn't dangerous criticism and she isn't procecuted or in any form of danger.
What the lawyers did is certainly tasteless, but it also doesn't fit procecution.
I won't give you any sources, but these are utter trivialities to what some Jewish people have to endure. And I have yet to see a mob threatening anyone you mentioned, because they don't exist.
You don't link to why she was called unfit. There are seemingly valid concerns with her ability to be an impartial UN Rapporteur as required for that position.
The Lancet item was a letter, not an article. It is a speculative letter than was then pushed as a 'Lancet article' (something you do in your comment) to give it credibility/authority it does not have.
Do you mean a report by the Israeli-based lawyer Trevor Asserson, maybe?
https://campaignformediastandards.org.uk/asserson-report.pdf
If so, then you're spreading misinformation. This is not a study. It's a report sponsored by Israel. It has flawed methodology and they made heavy use of ChatGPT.
I rest my case.
> So why are we surprised the BBC doesn't want to stick its head above the parapet?
The reaction is not surprise. Its disappointment. The same you might feel whenever you see a blatantly selfish act.
What has surprise got to do with it?
> So why are we surprised the BBC doesn't want to stick its head above the parapet?
Well, I'm not surprised by that as I've seen the way that the BBC approaches "impartiality" (e.g. have experts explaining one side of an issue and then allow non-experts to spout falsehoods which aren't challenged despite them being demonstrably false).
As a license-fee payer, I detest the way that the BBC is ignoring its journalistic duty to present the facts in a non-partisan manner or at least attempt to do so. However, they consistently use different language to report on the different sides of the war.
BBC had to hide and never release the report that found that they constantly paint Israel as much worse than they are. Also they publish Hamas press releases as facts while everything from Israel as claims. My favorite was when BBC said that "IDF went into hospital and targeted arab speaking doctors" that they later corrected to "IDF brought to hospital multiple arab speaking doctors"
Coming from an outsider, the letter is frustratingly vague. The only concrete allegation is the pulling of the documentary "Gaza: Medics Under Fire", but without a statement from BBC explaining why they pulled it, it's basically impossible from an outsider to know whether censorship is indeed happening or not. The rest of the letter basically down to a he-said-she-said over bias/censorship happening. Owen's article doesn't really add much either, seeming to take everything at face value and then using that to slam the BBC. This is all great if you're already predisposed to think the MSM has a pro-Israel bias, but otherwise leaves you at least confused.
Is there another source that does a better job at substantiating the claim that BBC has a pro-Israel bias?
Other sources:
- https://cfmm.org.uk/bbc-on-gaza-israel-one-story-double-stan...
- July 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jul/03/gaza-film-prod...
- February 2025 https://www.declassifieduk.org/battle-for-the-truth-pro-isra...
- November 2024 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bbc-israel-g...
- November 2023 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/23/as-israel-pounds-g...
Review of documentary BBC refused to air: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jul/03/gaza-do...
"Instead, the report says, the BBC’s coverage has involved the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and unquestioning acceptance of Israeli PR. This has allegedly been overseen by BBC Middle East Editor and apparent Binyamin Netanyahu admirer, Raffi Berg, who is accused by anonymous journalists of “micromanaging” the section." - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...
"Comprehensive new research finds the BBC coverage of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza is systematically biased against Palestinians and fails to reach standards of impartiality.
Analysis of more than 35,000 pieces of BBC content by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) shows Israeli deaths are given 33 times more coverage per fatality, and both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards. BBC content was found to consistently shut down allegations of genocide." - https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/16/bbc-systematically-biased...
>https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...
The tagline is "As many question BBC’s coverage, three academics tell openDemocracy why they don't think the broadcaster is impartial", which I think sums up the article accurately. That doesn't seem to add much aside from proving that there are outsiders (impartial or biased, we don't really know) that agree with one side. It shouldn't be surprising that with any culture war issue, than you can find some academics to be on your side.
>https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/16/bbc-systematically-biased...
Skimming the article, the methodology used is very questionable. For instance:
>Despite Gaza suffering 34 times more casualties than Israel, the BBC ran almost equal numbers of humanising victim profiles.
If you think 1 death = 1 coverage, then clearly BBC is biased. However, 1 death = 1 coverage is clearly not how anyone expect the media should operate. How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting? Does that mean the BBC has a anti-Sudan bias? Moreover should each death really merit equal coverage? Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?
>It was also found to have attached “Hamas-run health ministry” to Palestinian casualty figures in 1,155 articles – almost every time the Palestinian death toll was referenced across BBC articles.
Why is this an issue? In the Russsia-Ukranie war for instance, if you cite casualty figures from Russia, it's pretty obvious that it's from the Kremlin. The Gaza Health Ministry is actually Hamas run, and that fact isn't readily apparent.
There are other serious allegations made in that piece that I don't have expertise to comment on, but the above two snippets don't inspire much confidence.
>>It was also found to have attached “Hamas-run health ministry” to Palestinian casualty figures in 1,155 articles – almost every time the Palestinian death toll was referenced across BBC articles.
> Why is this an issue? In the Russsia-Ukranie war for instance, if you cite casualty figures from Russia, it's pretty obvious that it's from the Kremlin. The Gaza Health Ministry is actually Hamas run, and that fact isn't readily apparent.
Hamas is the legitimate government of Palestine. "Health Ministry" would be just as accurate and much less biased than "Hamas-run Health Ministry". The implicit accusation of bias against them by emphasizing the identity of the source is also extremely glaring when put into context; nearly every outside observer that's not an Israeli or US government organization to analyze the data and numbers has come to the conclusion that the "Hamas-run Health Ministry"'s number are an undercount.
>Hamas is the legitimate government of Palestine.
They might have defacto control, but most countries don't recognize Hamas as the "legitimate government".
>Hamas is the legitimate government of Palestine. "Health Ministry" would be just as accurate and much less biased than "Hamas-run Health Ministry". The implicit accusation of bias against them by emphasizing the identity of the source is also extremely glaring when put into context; nearly every outside observer that's not an Israeli or US government organization to analyze the data and numbers has come to the conclusion that the "Hamas-run Health Ministry"'s number are an undercount.
So if the BBC was covering the election in Venezuela, would it be "biased" to point out that the election results were from the "government controlled" electoral commission, and that it was packed with Maduro's cronies? After all, the electoral commission is probably the "legitimate" authority for counting votes, so why point out it's staffed by government cronies? Just say that the opposition claims that their guy won, but the electoral authority said Maduro won. End of story. Or is it only biased if the journalist thinks something fishy is going on (ie. the vote was rigged in favor of Maduro)? How would we adjudicate this? This just inevitably devolves into "if you support Israel then saying anything bad about them is bias, and if you oppose Israel then saying anything good about them is bias".
> They might have defacto control, but most countries don't recognize Hamas as the "legitimate government".
They might be murderous terrorists, but they were, in fact, elected in as free an election as Gaza was likely to get.
They're as much a legitimate government there as the current US administration is here.
The current US administration was elected less than one year ago. Hamas was elected 19 years ago. By law they should have held another election in 2009, but they refused to hold that election and have refused to hold any other elections since. This would seem to raise some doubts as to their status as a legitimate elected government.
[flagged]
You're bringing logic to a gunfight.
> How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting? Does that mean the BBC has a anti-Sudan bias?
Yes.
Yet, when was the last time 100+ concerned journalists penned a open letter saying that we needed more coverage of the genocide in Sudan? It's all good if it's some sort of principle that's being applied evenly, but it's pretty clear in the case of the Israel vs Palestine conflict, most people are invoking that principle are doing it only when it suits them.
Aside from the fact that nobody is lionizing a group in Sudan (vs say Israel), and so there's no direct comparison here?
One major difference that I see - though of course I can't speak for the journalists - is that my country and tax dollars are directly involved in this conflict. Every child who burns alive, every man woman and child raped in an Israeli camp, every doctor or medic killed by targeted drone or sniper fire is in a sense in my name. I'm not saying Sudanese political instability isn't impacted by western actions, but this conflict is very real for a lot of people because of a direct, material involvement.
Journalists maybe feel this way, too?
I do also think this is a pretty straightforward distinction, and suspect your bringing up a fundamentally different conflict to say something like "well you think Israeli deaths get too much coverage in this war, why do Sudanese deaths not get very much?" is weird and borderline disingenuous.
No. pointing out genocide, attacks that kill hungry or starving people trying to get food is not some special unusual mean thing. It's something that all decent peoples should be against. I'm against all attacks on the innocent. It doesn't need to be repeated, but I'll do it - I was against the attacks by Hamas on Israel too.
Even calling this genocide is biased. Going into a country to kill the people from it of a race, and then texting celebratory texts that you killed some of that race, and capturing people of that race, is at least attempted genocide, if not completed.
Retaliating to that to get your hostages back and to stop the endless attacks on your race is not genocide.
> Even calling this genocide is biased.
I do not agree. Unless this applies to European Jews then? They were not all killed. Some were captured, some were used as labor or for experimentation. Some started a new state! If a sustained campaign is not successful in killing every single individual, how many before you might call it a genocide? This is a poor metric. If the borders of a country are eliminated (first politically, then practically), alongside hundreds of thousands of deaths targeted by culture/location/race, and confiscation of their property, there has been a genocide as far as most of the world is concerned. These are elements of culture and they can only be recreated or replaced or lost to time.
> Retaliating to that to get your hostages back and to stop the endless attacks on your race is not genocide.
The retaliation sped up the ongoing genocide as a pretext. Each side has wrongs they are retaliating from. The hostages are a justification to do what was already an official state goal. Complete annexation of Palestine. Imagine if any US state (or country) was slowly swallowed by a neighbor encroaching with violent and disposable settlers, the violence would be the same. This is the state of modern warfare demonstrated repeatedly over the last 200 years. Further imagining there is a moral actor, is arbitrarily picking a side.
> Unless this applies to European Jews then? They were not all killed.
I didn't say anything about "not all killed". Please - all these silly distractions and fallacies permeate any attempts to discuss this. You're not talking to an avatar representing all the worst, easiest to counter arguments from the "other side". You're talking to a real person who is articulating a view.
Characterizing history is complicated. Going about the thought process as to how I've come to my views, from a base set of assumptions, is not silly. Good luck with whatever.
> However, 1 death = 1 coverage is clearly not how anyone expect the media should operate.
How often should the media report deaths? Each time a group of people die? Each time bodies are found?
> How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting? Does that mean the BBC has a anti-Sudan bias?
Are you familiar with the saying, “when a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, then does it make a sound”?
> Moreover should each death really merit equal coverage?
I would assume that an individual or a group of people that aspire towards neutrality, fairness, and humanitarian principles would treat one life as the same as another.
For reference, here is the BBC mission and excerpts from its charter available at https://www.bbc.com/aboutthebbc/governance/mission .
>> Our mission is "to act in the public interest, serving all audiences through the provision of impartial, high-quality and distinctive output and services which inform, educate and entertain".
>> The Charter also sets out our five public purposes:
>> 1. To provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them
>> The BBC should provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming to build people’s understanding of all parts of the United Kingdom and of the wider world. Its content should be provided to the highest editorial standards. It should offer a range and depth of analysis and content not widely available from other United Kingdom news providers, using the highest calibre presenters and journalists, and championing freedom of expression, so that all audiences can engage fully with major local, regional, national, United Kingdom and global issues and participate in the democratic process, at all levels, as active and informed citizens.
>> 2. To support learning for people of all ages
>> The BBC should help everyone learn about different subjects in ways they will find accessible, engaging, inspiring and challenging. The BBC should provide specialist educational content to help support learning for children and teenagers across the United Kingdom. It should encourage people to explore new subjects and participate in new activities through partnerships with educational, sporting and cultural institutions.
>> 3. To show the most creative, highest quality and distinctive output and services
>> The BBC should provide high-quality output in many different genres and across a range of services and platforms which sets the standard in the United Kingdom and internationally. Its services should be distinctive from those provided elsewhere and should take creative risks, even if not all succeed, in order to develop fresh approaches and innovative content.
>> 4. To reflect, represent and serve the diverse communities of all of the United Kingdom’s nations and regions and, in doing so, support the creative economy across the United Kingdom
>> The BBC should reflect the diversity of the United Kingdom both in its output and services. In doing so, the BBC should accurately and authentically represent and portray the lives of the people of the United Kingdom today, and raise awareness of the different cultures and alternative viewpoints that make up its society. It should ensure that it provides output and services that meet the needs of the United Kingdom’s nations, regions and communities. The BBC should bring people together for shared experiences and help contribute to the social cohesion and wellbeing of the United Kingdom. In commissioning and delivering output the BBC should invest in the creative economies of each of the nations and contribute to their development.
>> 5. To reflect the United Kingdom, its culture and values to the world
>> The BBC should provide high-quality news coverage to international audiences, firmly based on British values of accuracy, impartiality, and fairness. Its international services should put the United Kingdom in a world context, aiding understanding of the United Kingdom as a whole, including its nations and regions where appropriate. It should ensure that it produces output and services which will be enjoyed by people in the United Kingdom and globally.
> Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?
Yes, it would be biased in the same way that the BBC runs more pieces about Ukrainian civilians than it does about Palestinian civilians. There are likely more published BBC articles about Ukrainian civilians with photographs, audio, video, and documents than there are about Palestinian civilians.
There is BBC staff reporting from Ukraine and/or with the help of Ukrainian media affiliates and Ukrainian sources.
Where are the BBC reporters in Gaza?
> Where are the BBC reporters in Gaza?
Israel doesn't allow reporters in Gaza, and has systematically murdered the ones who were there.
A European news agency reporting more about a war in Europe than a war outside Europe is relevance bias, not a pro-Israel bias. I get more weather reports for my state than for outside it. That isn't a bias against the weather in Mexico by my local news.
I would agree with you if the BBC simply chose to not report any news on the Israel/Palestine conflict.
However, as luck would have it, the BBC published 3 separate pieces of news about Israel/Palestine today.
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mz8gxzg82o
2. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rp31lk7mzo
3. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2k14n9d8y9o
I’ve read all three articles, and I skimmed them again quickly to verify that none of the three mention that “At least 78 Palestinians have been killed since the morning” like Al Jazeera does (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/7/8/live-israel...).
If the BBC is willing to publish 3 separate articles about recent developments in the Israel/Palestine conflict in the same day, then why does the BBC not also report the casualties of said conflict that happened on said day? Not even breaking news with reports of unknown casualties. Just nothing about it and no indication of anything having happened at all.
Your Al Jazeera link goes to a page that now states at 'least 95 Palestinians killed' but when I click the link next to that stat it takes me to an article that gives no numbers, no sources for numbers. I'm not sure why you would expect the BBC to publish something like that or why you hold that up to be good journalism?
I also find these live blog style news pages confusing. Scrolling down, I find the following
> Gaza death toll hits 95 as Khan Younis attack casualties rise
> At least 95 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli attacks since dawn, hospital sources in Gaza tell Al Jazeera.
> According to Nasser Hospital in the southern part of the enclave, the death toll of the Israeli attack on the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis that we reported on earlier has increased to seven people.
then there is this tweet that is Arabic and contains a video > https://twitter.com/AJA_Palestine/status/1942671277883273250
with the following translation
> Translation: A Palestinian boy injured in an Israeli bombing asks his sister for food as he is starving while he waits to receive treatment.
My reply still stands in that BBC still has made no visible attempt to report a story with any casualty figures for Gaza this day even though they did publish 3 other pieces of news concerning the conflict. Therefore, the "relevancy bias" does not apply to the BBC here because the BBC considers the conflict relevant enough to report on 3 times within 24 hours.
Why does the BBC not consider the daily toll of casualties in this very same conflict sufficiently relevant to report on?
No "preliminary estimates on this breaking story"?
No "unconfirmed reports at this time"?
Nothing.
Looks like we reached the message reply limit, so I am replying here.
Pasting again
> At least 95 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli attacks since dawn, hospital sources in Gaza tell Al Jazeera.
> According to Nasser Hospital in the southern part of the enclave, the death toll of the Israeli attack on the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis that we reported on earlier has increased to seven people.
We will have to agree to disagree if hospital sources and the Nasser Hospital are not sufficient.
What source would be sufficient?
This approach towards determining relevancy is what I meant by “if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, then does it make a sound” earlier.
I mean you still haven't established that there is a source that this story you want published could accurately report on.
> However, 1 death = 1 coverage is clearly not how anyone expect the media should operate.
In armed conflict far away from the country in question, comparatively for each side, yes, both sides' deaths getting similar coverage is how one should expect the media to operate.
If Chile and Peru get into a war tomorrow, the expectation would absolutely be that coverage of deaths by the BBC would be similar for both.
>How many people die in civil wars in Sudan or Congo, compared to how much coverage are they getting?
The obvious key difference here is that in those wars both sides of those conflicts do still tend to get similar coverage per death; which is almost none. At the very least there's not orders of magnitudes difference. Not sure how you missed this, but it doesn't inspire much confidence.
> Would it be biased if BBC ran more pieces about the sad plight of Ukrainian soldiers compared to Russian soldiers?
No, as Russia is a reasonable threat to the UK whereas Hamas is clearly not.
Yes... that's what the Muslim media monitoring organization says.
It's like the olden Google days - where people were doing SEO campaigns measured in deepness of the links...
Anyone who call it "Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza" is hardly a reliable source.
And the entire criticism is amount of coverage per death? I men the Israeli deaths have names attached to them and you can verify them, the Palestinian ones are just numbered by Hamas. Obviously the coverage will be different.
I skimmed the article by CfMM and it's hardly a neutral source. Like they complain that BBC doesn't call Palestinian prisoners hostages. Well obviously they don't them them that, because they aren't hostages.
The Palestinian dead have names too, and it doesn’t take much to verify them. Beyond the deaths, the hostages taken by both sides are exactly that: hostages. Why do you suggest Palestinian prisoners are not? What makes you think anything akin to “due process” is happening in Gaza right now?
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It doesn't matter if the the original cause for the war is just or not if the war involves mass slaughter of civilians, and concealing this fact is deeply unethical. This is true in all other cases that you mention - whether civilians are targeted by the West and its allies in the war against ISIS, or by Ukraine in the war against Russia, that should all be covered objectively, not suppressed.
Separately from that, you seem to be conflating Hamas with Palestinians in general. Most people killed by Israel in Gaza are not Hamas.
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This goes on all over western media not only the bbc.
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It could be because your comment is too vague, personally I don't understand what you mean. Who are the ownership/leadership of media companies?
I saw this in a comment here recently and thought it was informative about this topic:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-dec-19-oe-stein...
The thread topic is News media, not Hollywood.
Global news media is dominated by Rupert Murdoch (not Jewish) and while the second tier lesser Murdochs are mostly rich billionaires not many are Jewish.
eg: Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (recent chair of The New York Times company) is neither Jewish by birth—according to traditional Jewish law—nor by choice. (He was raised Episcopalian, his mother’s faith.)
News media isn't separate from Hollywood. Disney owns ABC. Paramount Global owns CBS. CNN is owned by Warner Bros Discovery. NBC Universal owns NBC, MSNBC, and Telemundo; they also own Universal Pictures. All the major US news networks are owned by companies that also own Hollywood studios, except for Fox, which sold its studio to Disney recently.
Murdoch (owner of Fox, Sky, NY Post, and WSJ, among others) gets a lot of (negative) attention as a dissenting voice, but I'd hardly say he dominates news media.
And couldn't you find a better second example than someone who is only technically not Jewish, because his father is Jewish, not his mother? His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather (all Jewish) previously ran the NY Times.
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You're not the only one ...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly3zr8p46eo
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-15/nsw-antisemitism-crim...
Fake terror plots became criminal currency for a while in Australia.
Which part was antisemitic and which part was the conspiracy? The ownership is factual.
What are the 'facts' about ownership "all over western media"?
I can see how it’s read that way but people really do seem to forget that billionaires buy media companies as an investment. It’s not a strictly financial investment, either; they get to shape public opinion with them.
How many people know that Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post? How many people know that MSNBC is owned by Comcast? How many people know that Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post are all owned by Rupert Murdoch? How many UK citizens know that he also owns Sky News and The Times of London? How many people have heard the name Rupert Murdoch? (Everybody knows Elon Musk owns Twitter. Why do people say he bought an election again? How did that happen?)
They have a point and it is not anti-Semitic. The people who own the means to shape public opinion are exclusively in the billionaire class.
Why would Bezos / Washington Post be an example of pro-Israel bias?
Well, it's not. It's an example of a billionaire-owned media company.
Western propaganda lies not only about this, corruption in the EU reaches incredible proportions, censorship, violations of freedom of speech, but Putin is always to blame.
Nobody here even mentioned Putin, and you conspicuously didn't cite additional sources for your imperative claims. It's not just baseless, it's also a non-sequitur in the context of the article.
You sound like a deeply insecure and paranoid individual, perhaps distancing yourself from politics would be healthy?
the one that insults the other first loses the argument.
Quite the opposite. The last person to present credible evidence is often the only person telling the truth.
If you can forever prove the West wrong, don't keep us waiting.
could be but you brought no new information besides a low level personal insult so the person you insulted added more to the discussion than you
They would have, if they remembered to cite their sources. Because they didn't, their original comment stands as logical fallacy, ad-hominem.
You're welcome to correct their error.
> Because they didn't, their original comment stands as logical fallacy, ad-hominem.
I do not want to make the same mistake as you, turning discussions into personal attacks (aka ad-hominem), but you were the only one using ad-hominem in this discussion, if you felt attacked because OP said that western leaders use Putin as a scapegoat, I think that is totally on you.
I read the article but not sure which pro Israeli editorials the BBC has published.
My experience is quite the opposite with BBC having a clear anti war stance.
It's about the careful wording, about who gets to be on the spotlight, about who gets to call the other side a tyrant, an evil state, about saying things like "regime change" and no-one batting an eye. Slowly, but surely, you form an opinion as to who the bad actor is as you've seen or read about its bad behaviour (but not of the behavior of the other party)
Most interestingly, it's about who holds the microphone and is allowed to say whatever they want, unquestioned.
In a meta sense, yes, but in practice it’s mostly just a large collection of journalists and editors, real humans, working in a chaotic information space where there’s a large variety of angles and sources being put out at all times depending on the context.
It’s equally easy to cherry pick this sort of thing to build a narrative of some ulterior agenda. Especially given the high pace that news demands in the social media age.
What gets covered could simply be who a journalist happened to talked to the past week or what is trending on social media that will get clicks.
This is the kind of comment that at first glance seems measured and well-phrased. I’m sure it depicts a common situation in journalism too, after all they’re just humans like the rest of us.
The problem here is the enormity of what is actually going on in Gaza: a slaughter and a terror campaign we haven’t seen the likes of since Pol Pot. It is not two sides in disagreement, each jostling for attention on roughly equal terms, each somewhat right and somewhat wrong. Two years in, we’re well beyond that and the only thing that matters is that one side is sadistically slaughtering the other and the world is pretending it’s not happening.
"...a slaughter and a terror campaign we haven’t seen the likes of since Pol Pot."
So you are saying, you dont know of:
The genocide in Tigray
The Darfur genocide
The history of the DRC
The Rwandan genocide
The Genocide of Isaaqs ...
Thats a very reductive view of the situation, have you been keeping track of the headlines or are you just a disinterested outsider?
> What gets covered could simply be who a journalist happened to talked to the past week or what is trending on social media that will get clicks.
Do you believe this with regard to what is happening in Israel/Palestine?
The chaos of information and what is truth is only bubbled up when 1) there's very few journalists in the area or 2) all the journalists are being killed or 3) there's no journalists and only special interests.
Consider that even if it was a "narrative" which at this point is controlled by social media, as it stands it seems to be: "these people are evil, they should be killed, sorry not sorry about the babies" or "these people are committing genocide, this bad."
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Call me crazy, but neutral journalists should not be calling either side "evil". They should be reporting what each side does and let the reader draw their own moral conclusions.
and that's why you don't listen to only a single source of news.
Find multiple, ideally both geographic as well as political alignment.
Learn to discern what is a fact, and what is opinion presented as fact, and learn to read critically - such as question if there would be any omissions, or misrepresentations of facts to make persuasions. Learn to dissect the works, such as dramatic music and literary methods of persuasion, and how it affects the reader's perceptions.
All of this was taught in highschool literary criticism classes - just on old books and such, rather than modern material. But the same exact lessons could've been applied. Except people merely either half-assed those classes and use cliff notes, or just straight skipped them - leading to today's world where most adults are unable to critically examine the media they consume.
Sure, as a consumer, that is what you should do. But the issue at hand is that the BBC and its employees hold the BBC to a journalistic standard that it does not meet (according to those employees).
> and that's why you don't listen to only a single source of news.
> Find multiple, ideally both geographic as well as political alignment.
Easy to say in the abstract, harder to do when many "credible" sources toe the line and the ones that don't are discredited as "state sponsored news" or worse.
> Easy to say in the abstract, harder to do when many "credible" sources toe the line and the ones that don't are discredited as "state sponsored news" or worse.
Even when a source is unreliable, probable half-truths and lies are still valuable information when read critically and juxtaposed with many sources. Observing and noting when different factions agree and disagree on basic facts can be highly enlightening even when it's impossible to make a judgement on whether either side is right or wrong and to what degree. Identifying and recognizing the use and proliferation of canned phrases is also very helpful in constructing a mental map of the global journo-political landscape.
Also, highly credible organizations will be wrong sometimes and vice versa. One is never enough.
> are discredited as "state sponsored news" or worse
and who's doing that discrediting? That's also a source.
A sin of omission, not commission.
> We believe the refusal to broadcast the documentary ‘Gaza: Medics Under Fire’ is just one in a long line of agenda driven decisions.
It's mostly anout how Israel army controls the way journalists report the war or regime in west bank that walks, quacks, and swims like an apartheid but apparently they can't call it that.
Sadly no one will be able to document the carnage in gaza. They plan to create an internment camp in the south and move civilians into at after making sure they are not linked to Hamas. Then they are going to basically follow Trump's plan to clean Gaza by building new jewish settlements and kill anyone outside the internment camp. While doing that they will not allow independent journalists to go in gaza.
As much as there are barriers to reporters here, it seems less than most other conflicts. Its not like journalists have unrestricted access to the Ukraine/Russia front line. Access to other conflicts like Sudan or Myanmar are also very restricted in practise.
That doesn't appear to be correct. How have you reached that conclusion?
Israel has not granted access to journalists to report independently since October 2023.
There has been very limited escorted trips with external journalists but all tightly supervised by the IDF.
Journalists already in Gaza have been killed regularly and there are credible accusations that many are deliberately targeted by the IDF.
> Israel has not granted access to journalists to report independently since October 2023.
Has Russia granted access by independent journalists to russian occupied Ukraine in that time period? As far as i know the answer is no.
And even on the Ukraine side there has been significant restrictions
E.g. a quote from https://theintercept.com/2023/06/22/ukraine-war-journalists-...
“The Ukrainian government has made it virtually impossible for journalists to do real front line reportage.”
Maybe its hard to say which one is worse, but they seem to be at least in the same neighbourhood
If we define “worse” as higher journalist deaths, zero press freedom, no access, and active targeting, then Gaza is clearly worse for journalists right now.
Ukraine/Russia conflict is obviously extremely dangerous but it allows far more media access, transparency, and foreign presence.
> zero press freedom
According to the world press freedom index, Israel has the third highest press freedom of all middle eastern countries (Qatar and Cyprus are a bit higher, everyone else in the middle east is lower in most cases much lower).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Press_Freedom_Index#Rank...
I'm not saying its a paradise for reporters. There are clearly issues. But saying "zero press freedom" is a massive overstatement.
"Comprehensive new research finds the BBC coverage of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza is systematically biased against Palestinians and fails to reach standards of impartiality.
Analysis of more than 35,000 pieces of BBC content by the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) shows Israeli deaths are given 33 times more coverage per fatality, and both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards. BBC content was found to consistently shut down allegations of genocide."
https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/16/bbc-systematically-biased...
The self-described mission of the Centre For Media Monitoring is "Promoting Fair And Responsible Reporting Of Muslims And Islam", so they might be slightly biased...
According to your own logic I should not even bother providing any evidence when you can simply assume any organization to be biased based on identity alone instead of addressing the evidence they provide, like the BBC operates under a Royal Charter agreed upon with the britsh government, "so they might be slightly biased..."
"Instead, the report says, the BBC’s coverage has involved the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and unquestioning acceptance of Israeli PR. This has allegedly been overseen by BBC Middle East Editor and apparent Binyamin Netanyahu admirer, Raffi Berg, who is accused by anonymous journalists of “micromanaging” the section." - https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...
Would you honestly accept a report by an Israeli think tank that came to the opposite conclusion? I feel like most people would be suspicious of such a report.
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I'd think this is more an example of a "genetic fallacy" rather than "ad hominem".
I.e., impugning the argument based on who presents it.
Thank you for the correction! Won't mix up my fallacies next time.
Isn’t military service in Israel compulsory?
You must refuse to participate in the forces committing these acts.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MQ1TAOibLss
And if the state is compelling its subjects to participate, let's have an honest discussion about what that says about this state.
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Imagine all the other things they have not published because even with what they've written, it's still pro-Israeli bias.
It's worth noting the BBC has also been accused of an anti-Israel bias including but not limited to airing a documentary produced by a Hamas linked individuals[1].
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c07zz5937llo
From the article
> The only other BBC documentary which focused on the apocalyptic plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza was taken down as a result of a hysterical pro-Israel campaign - because the father of the child narrator’s son had a junior technocratic position in the Hamas administration. Irrelevant, given the narrator’s words were written for him by the documentary producers.
The kid was the son of Ayman Alyazouri, who yes is a Hamas minor official, but the thing was that the documentary makers knew that and hid it from the BBC who commissioned the documentary by pretending he had a different surname. The documentary showed the boy's "father" but it was actually his uncle. The kid's grandad, Ibrahim al-Yazouri, was one of the founding members of Hamas.
They translated the documentary's participants use of the word Yehud i.e. Jew into 'Israeli'. One of the cameramen Amjad Al Fayoumi (who effectively directed it, since the 'directors' were based in the UK) had posted on Facebook support about the 7th October terrorist attacks that kicked all of this off.
The problem is that the BBC and other media producers need to be squeaky clean when doing reporting on this, on both sides. It's not even like this was a quick news broadcast where accuracy needed to be checked, it was commissioned well in advance, they followed the boy around for months.
> the father of the child narrator’s son
this was confusing but I think it's supposed to just be "father of the child narrator." Also kind of weird they (the original parent link, it is in the bbc article) didn't name the documentary (maybe it's common knowledge to their audience?).
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The fact that they have the same complaint from both "sides" suggests to me that they are doing a good job providing balanced coverage.
It certainly convinced you anyway
True! Apparently I am not alone, either, at least for a US audience. Here are some data.
https://www.allsides.com/blog/bias-killing-news-trust
Cheers!
In todays times, both sides will always complain anyway.
That, or they’re doing a bad job and excusing it as balance.
The article mentions this.
Apologies for the oversight. However I feel the author's phrasing "hysterical pro-Israel campaign" to downplay their concerns is telling.
Well, we should accept that it was a bit hysterical. "Terror chief's son" [1]? Really? Apparently he's the deputy minister of agriculture. Ministers, bureaucrats and civil servants in Gaza are appointed by Hamas [2]
[1] https://www.gbnews.com/news/bbc-hamas-propaganda-documentary...
[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/exclusive-palestinian-chi...
Where?
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Bob Vylan said "death to the IDF." He didn't call for the death of Israelis. It's the difference between saying "death to the RMP" in Ireland during the troubles versus calling for the deaths of British people themselves.
You can disagree with Mr. Vylan or that the BBC should have cut the broadcast but let's not misrepresent the situation.
It's true the phrase, as he uttered it, is ambiguous.
Amusingly, he probably didn't intend for it to be ambiguous, since on a previous occasion he chose the wording "death to every single IDF soldier out there"
https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2025/0702/1521558-uk-police...
As they say, a lie travels across the world before the truth can get its boots on.
Pretty much all Israeli serve in the IDF. He called for their death. The mental gymnastics. He chanted for death but he didn't call for the death of Israelis. Right. He also chanted "From the River to the Sea" which is another call for the death of Israelis and he had some other antisemitic content to add to that. But yeah, he's just a great guy and BBC just let him have a stage.
I believe there are religious exemptions for some Israeli Jews that legally permits them to not serve in the IDF. In addition, I believe that Israeli Arabs are not required to serve in the IDF, but some do serve willingly. Finally, there are Israeli conscientious objectors who end up serving a prison sentence in order to avoid serving in the IDF.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
Yes, but I don't see how that helps - it's still mostly conscripts who didn't really choose to enlist, let alone choose to fight in Gaza, let alone commit any war crimes.
> Pretty much all Israeli serve in the IDF. He called for their death. The mental gymnastics.
This argument makes no sense to me. You're basically saying that it's bad to call for the deaths of a genocidal military… once a certain percentage of the country enlists? Like, at what threshold do you think it would have been unacceptable to chant "death to the Nazis" or "death to the Imperial Japanese Army"?
Let's help you make sense of this:
- Israel is at war with Gaza after it was attacked by Gaza. This war will end as soon as Hamas surrenders and the hostages are returned. Could have ended a long time ago.
- Gaza is ruled by Hamas that just like Bob Vylan advocates for the murder of all Israelis and Jews. That is the genocidal party to this conflict, by their own declaration and actions.
- The correct analogy is the US going to war with Japan after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. Even that analogy is weak because Pearl Harbour was a military target while Gaza attacked civilians including massacring random people who went to a music festival. Just like Glastonbury. What would the UK do if Glastonbury was attacked by ISIL, 10's of thousands of people murdered, and thousands taken hostage? I mean we've seen what it did for a lot less than that.
- Israel's defensive war looks exactly like this war would look like if any other western country had similar military action. It is generally targeting military targets and civilians unfortunately also get hurt. If you compare to similar recent campaigns and adjust for the significantly more dense population, tunnels, the use of civilian infrastructure, you will see that Israel is waging this war with less impact to civilians compared to e.g. the western allies war against ISIL or Al Qaeda. None of Israel's critics are able to give a realistic option here for Israel to achieve its legitimate goals of self defense. Hamas has been attacking Israeli cities with rockets and massacred Israeli civilians. Israel can not let it remain in control, and a force, in Gaza.
- No other country in the world would do less in terms of military action under similar circumstances. We've seen countries like the US, the UK, Australia, France, take significantly more violent measures in significantly less serious (to their self defense) circumstances.
- The argument that Gaza was somehow occupied before Oct 7th and Palestinians had no choice to improve their situation without violence is a lie. Their violence, against civilians, is an explicit, declared, contiunous, choice. Gaza was handed to the Palestinians in 2005. Even if you can somehow twist the blockade on Gaza to be something else there is still no other country in the world that would act any differently. Gaza has received billions of dollars in support since 2005 and Hamas has invested it in weapons and tunnels.
- The IDF is not a "genocidal military". It's just a military. It's fighting a difficult war to defeat a brutal enemy that is holding hostages, doesn't care about deaths of its own people, and refuses to surrender. No other western military would fight in a more "clean" or "fair" way under the same circumstances and non-western militaries would be a lot more brutal and violent (like Russia did to the Chechens or Turkey to the Kurds). The allegations of genocide are false. They are an antisemitic blood libel. Civilian casualties are unfortunately an outcome of this kind of war which Hamas started and is continuing to date.
- The media, including the BBC, is reporting Hamas PR as news and certain media (like Al-Jazeera) is basically engaged in a PR campaign on behalf of Hamas. According to Hamas any militant that dies is a civilian and civilians that die without relation to any military activities are also killed by the IDF, including Palestinians killed by Hamas. According to the media there are no combatants and no military infrastructure and no tunnels e.g. in Gaza. All targets are civilians and all infrastructure is civilian. The truth is the opposite.
- According to the media "there is no safe place in Gaza". The truth is the humanitarian zone, designated as a safe area, accounts for a tiny minority of casualties in this war, mostly related to Hamas commanders hiding there. Palestinians who have chosen to move there are significantly more safer than those who for whatever reason do not.
It's generally bad to call for the death of anyone. Doing it in a music festival given Hamas' massacre of music festival goers is doubly stupid/insensitive/evil. Sometimes you have to fight, and kill, but you should never wish for anyone to be dead.
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At this point what you're doing is tantamount to writing long essays trying to convince people that the Earth is flat. It is very very obviously a genocide — probably the most well-documented one since the Shoah! — and everyone but the most hardline Israel supporters can see that.
There's a reason that support for Israel in the US has dropped to just 12% among Democrats. [1] Even among Republicans, it's down 18 percentage points! And this is despite heavy censorship of pro-Palestinian narratives (as evidenced by the article).
[1] https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/the-shift-just-12-of-dem-vote...
This argument seems so counterproductive to me. Israel is obviously committing war crimes, attempting ethnic cleansing and any number of other horrible violations of international law and common standards.
But I don't see how it is committing genocide. They are not trying to destroy the people, the genus. There are 2+ mill people in Gaza and with all those bombs they killed 100k or less? Basically that is just what urban warfare looks like.
This is like the Diddy trial, where you give the perp a way out by overprosecuting.
Here's another comment I left in response to this same person (YZF) [1] with 13 examples of Israeli MKs and other government officials declaring their intent to kill civilians. Many of these are explicit calls for genocide.
That was in December 2023, after two months, when the death toll was only around 17,000 [2]. It's now been 19 months of near constant siege; if you check Wikipedia, as of today the official count is around 58,000 people killed directly. That's likely to be a vast undercount of the total number of deaths: an estimated 64,620 had died from traumatic injury by June 2024 [3], and probably many thousands more from malnutrition and disease. There are also thousands of uncounted bodies buried under the rubble. Israel has (intentionally) destroyed almost every hospital in Gaza, damaged or destroyed at least 92% of residential buildings [4] and cut off all food and water at least twice (and repeatedly massacred civilians at aid sites).
Do you really think fewer than 100k people have died as a result of this?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38576316
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestini...
[3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[4] https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/04/1162491
The point is that what you are describing is not genocide. "The legal term “genocide” refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." Israel does not do that. Russia does do that to the Ukrainians. Putin thinks Ukraine is not a real nation and he thinks the Ukrainians are not a separate genus. That is why Ukrainian children are getting indoctrinated in the occupied territories and the Ukrainian language getting suppressed.
Does that mean that Ukrainian civilians are worse off than Palestinians? No, obviously not. Israel is guilty of many crimes and many of them are worse than some forms of genocide.
Words have meaning and you are offering the Israeli apologetics an easy way out arguing semantics and the easy way is that they are right.
> "The legal term “genocide” refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." Israel does not do that.
Israel "does not do that" only if you ignore remarks by IDF members, MKs and the Prime Minister himself explicitly saying they are doing that.
Wasn't it calling for death to a military force leading a campaign of total war, and not a death call against Israelis in general?
Like nobody would say "death to the Khmer Rouge" is a death call against Cambodians. It technically would be, since it was Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge who were killing innocent children, but it's a specific subset of Cambodians (the Khmer Rouge) and only those who were actually doing the killing.
Yes, the coverage of this has been a weird one to watch.
How does this remark differ from what the Israeli government regularly says about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, just as much an official body in Iran as the IDF is in Israel? No one, to my knowledge, would consider calling for the demise of the IRGC to be hate speech against Iranians. No one has ever shut off a live transmission of a Netanyahu speech because he advocated for violence against the IRGC.
(Not defending the IRGC here, they are ghouls. Just noting the intellectual dishonesty.)
Nobody chants "death to the IRGC" in music festivals in Israel (or anywhere in Israel). Not to mention we're talking a third party here, the UK.
The Israeli government doesn't say "Death to the IRGC". Iran however regularly (like weekly) has massive crowds chanting "Death to the USA" and "death to Israel", stepping on and burning Israeli and American flags.
Israel consistently says they consider the Iranians their friends who are also oppressed by the regime. There are zero calls for death of anyone from Israel.
And Iran sponsors Jewish groups that are critical of the state of Israel. Both sides claim to be critical solely of the other's state, never the people. Sadly, neither side is credible in this, there's ample evidence of prejudice and hatred all round.
They also regularly say there are no innocent Palestinians [1] [2] [3] [too many others to count] but weirdly it's not considered evidence of genocidal intent when Zionists say it!
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/israel-posts-video...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eICdhG1qgI
[3] https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/poll-overwhelming-majority-of...
A minority of Israelis do say this. It's not something shouted in a music festival e.g. The official position and policy of the IDF is that Israel does not target civilians. I would say the majority of Israelis do not agree with this statement. [EDIT: for clarity that there are no innocents in Gaza]
Not to justify but they (the minority) are partly referring to the complicity of random Palestinians in cheering and participating in parading hostages and dead bodies brought in from the Oct 7th attacks. Civilians that followed the militants on Oct 7th to pillage and kill. The general support Hamas has in the population, including for the Oct 7th attacks. The celebrations after the attack. Civilians involved in holding Israeli hostages (some/many of the Israeli hostages were held by civilians) and otherwise actively participating in the conflict.
Either way civilians should not be a target, regardless of the views they hold. Trying to draw a target on all civilians, is not ok. The statement that there are no innocents in Gaza (that's usually the framing) is also very obviously wrong. Even if a large number is Hamas and engages in the kinds of behavior described above it's certainly far from all. Many Palestinians are under death threats from Hamas as well.
This expression isn't at the same level of calling for their death (though "Death to Arabs" has been chanted by the Israeli right wing after e.g. terrorist attacks in the past). It's possible some Israelis use this to support more aggressive tactics but in general the official policy is that the IDF targets Hamas and not civilians. It's also different when these things come out of parties to the conflict vs. random third parties.
64% of Israelis is not a minority.
The second paragraph from your link says the calls were to the “IDF”.
It must not be the entire BBC. In the US I listen to the World Service radio news, and they do not shy away from reporting the horrors of war in Gaza. Even their interviews with Israeli representatives are shockingly unfiltered.
That’s not “unknown”, that’s an antisemitic quote from neo-nazi Kevin Alfred Strom.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Do any of those qualifiers make it less true?
"To know who rules over you, simply notice who you are not allowed to criticize: capital owners". There, fixed it. As it stands the quote is supposed to make you "notice" a fantasized jewish cabal that would own the world. In reality, the most powerful sionists in America are christians.
Oh that’s hilarious because it has been misattributed to Voltaire and TIL it was from 1993
Wtf, I hate that quote now! Just kidding its still accurate: In the East you don’t criticize the party, in the West you don’t criticize one particular designated genocidal foreign army. Easy enough to follow.
The world has been a sad state of affairs since Covid. People in power need more power for themselves, view the world as a zero sum game, use coercion, deceiving, propaganda to achieve their goals, in this case a territorial expansion. Anyone who opposes the means it's currently being carried out is a anti-.... whatever.
Imo the world was the same before in terms of corruption and propaganda, it’s mostly us, the common folks, who changed radically.
There are only binary states and opinions, either you’re a genocide supporter or an antisemite. Internet discussion on politics have gotten too toxic. Covid brought everyone online and we’ve been stuck in echochambers ever since.
The BBC having 21,000 employees (5500 journalists). Only 100 signed.
From my perspective the BBC is extremely anti-Israeli but for some people this is obviously not good enough. They want the BBC to champion their cause. Naturally people supporting the anti-Israeli cause who only get anti-Israeli content will feel that the BBC is "pro" Israel. Nothing could be farther from the truth and Pro-Israeli media looks nothing like the BBC.
This is from 2006:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/our_work/governors_archive/im...
"We were appointed by the Governors to assess whether the BBC's coverage of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict meets the required standards of impartiality."
...
"apart from individual lapses, sometimes of tone, language or attitude, there was little to suggest systematic or deliberate bias; on the contrary there was evidence, in the programming and in other ways, of a commitment to be fair, accurate and impartial;"
...
"these shortcomings include:"
...
"Equally in the months preceding the Palestinian elections there was little hard questioning of their leaders"
...
This has been a big criticism of the BBC which is still not addressed:
"The term "terrorism" should accordingly be used in respect of relevant events since it is the most accurate expression for actions which involve violence against randomly selected civilians with the intention of causing terror for ideological, including political or religious, objectives, whether perpetrated by state or non-state agencies."
That definition of Terrorism would make Israel a terrorist state.
I guess it's hard to define words. Surely terrorism has this vague meaning of doing very evil and violent things.
But a picked up a random dictionary and it says: "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims".
I struggle to understand what political aim Israel is pursuing when using unlawful violence and intimidation.
If you believe that Israel is performing a genocide what is the point of explicitly instilling more fear in the victims? Just sadism? I genuinely don't understand what advantage would Israel have in employing terror tactics against Palestinians. Is the idea that they do so in order to make them even more angry so they can justify their genocide? Is that the argument? Or am I not giving the same meaning to the word "terrorism" as you do?
I don't want to argue about which side is on the right side or whatnot; I found that this kind of conversation is is highly unproductive online. But I am interested in understanding how words have changed their meaning over time. Is terrorist now just a synonym for "murdering civilians"?
Based on that definition alone, the occupation of the West Bank and the discrimination against its original people breaks international law, is enforced by violence and intimidation against civilians, and from the unlawful settlement in it, seems to be in service of the political Zionist aim of settling the region, let alone Gaza.
Traffic laws are enforced by violence and intimidation.
If any form of coercion and prevarication is labeled terrorism we then lack a word to describe the act of plowing through a crowd with a truck or planting a bomb in an everyday place with the intention of instilling terror in the population.
Those acts are different from military occupation or apartheid or genocide. It's not a judgement of value. It's a description of a method.
My point is that the word "terrorism" transcended the description of a technique for reaching certain goals, to a general blanket term used to describe "pure evil" and so people started to use it to describe very bad things even if they are not technically terrorism
Make no mistake, occupiers can and frequently will use terror tactics.
They don't plow through a crowd with a truck or plant a bomb in an everyday place because they don't need to do that to instill terror, those are tactics of the weak. No, they disappear the people around you, with the same aim, and from a position of power. Which is the greater terror? A truck that detonated downtown or knowing a relative that got killed, locked up, or tortured? Apartheid and genocide are worse terrors than that, and by a stronger oppressor.
Many Palestinians in the West Bank have to pass through military checkpoints daily just to go about their daily lives, and at every point, one wonders if it is on that day that their life goes sideways.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to diminish the suffering of people who have to live through this degrading and stressful experience. I just think the word terrorism used to describe the action of (usually militarily weaker) insurgent actors trying to destabilize a society is not the same as using the word terrorism used to describe the intentional oppression by a state (using military and police) towards a minority.
We have "repression","oppression", "persecution", "subjugation".
Why do we need to use the word "terrorism" there? I suspect it has to do with the fact the word "terrorism" has been abused by american right wing after 9/11 to just describe "any muslim" and "any evil" and there has been appetite ever since to have some retribution and use this term back to label the west (and israel as its proxy).
Again, I'm not trying to defend the actions of israel against the palestinian population of the west bank in particular, but I find that "repression","oppression", "persecution", "subjugation" are already strong words enough and we don't need to strip the word "terrorism" from its specific meaning.
As is the illegal annexation of the Golan Heights.
Are you seeing the problem, yet?
I appreciate the synchronicity between your username and words being hard to define! If only I had the spare time to pick up such a difficult conlang.
Political aims that come to mind:
- settlement and expulsion of Palestinians (think the bulldozer tactics)
- a testing ground for weapons: Israel routinely uses footage and draws evidence about how they’ve battle tested their weapons and tech they’re selling in the West Bank. There’s a book about this: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2684-the-palestine-labor...
Anyway I think there’s probably more goals I can think of but these might be enough for now. Makes me too sad otherwise.
Sadism for some, sure. For most IDF personnel I guess it’s more about “operational expediency”: if the population is terrified they’ll listen to your evacuation orders and show up to your aid distribution/killing fields on time. Finding terrorists one by one is hard work; tossing a bomb on a whole building is quicker and safer.
Terror is just a tool in the end.
War sucks and soldiers don't want to die. As true today as it has been since forever. My grandfather a Marine in the Pacific used to call in flamethrowers instead of going in after Japanese soldiers in bunkers. Helped burn people alive. Was a burden he carried the rest of his life. War sucks. It sucks young men are put in these situations making these kinds of calls.
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As a point of fact, at least one “flour massacre” does exist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_Massacre
Here is a news article where the IDF is quoted directly, admitting that troops opened fire on “dozens of people” at that location at that time: https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/08/middleeast/gaza-flour-mas...
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> "The term "terrorism" should accordingly be used in respect of relevant events since it is the most accurate expression for actions which involve violence against randomly selected civilians with the intention of causing terror for ideological, including political or religious, objectives, whether perpetrated by state or non-state agencies."
I have never heard the BBC accuse the Israeli settlers of terrorism against West Bank Palestinian villages.
If it meets the definition then they should.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
edit: honestly, look at the comment quality on this post. There's a reason that HN should avoid purely political stuff like this.
You can look at the post history of some of the comments here - some of the most prolific commenters in this thread appear to only comment on the Israel/Palestine conflict.
War is complex.
One party starts with the "moral advantage" — but as soon as conflict escalates, sides look more alike than different. This is war after all. Media is entrenched, disregarding their own side's actions. We've seen it in Ukraine-Russia. And now in Israel-Palestine.
F*ck war.
Sadly it seems like this is indicative of a broader trend in Public Broadcast in the west. In Australia we've seen similar internal criticism of the ABC of an anti-palestinian bias in reporting[1].
It's deeply concerning that these publicly funded media outlets are being co-opted and manipulated by a foreign power.
[1]https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/26/australias-abc-staf...
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>Wanting Israel to exist because the world has shown it will not allow Jews to be safe anywhere else does not make someone manipulated by a foreign power.
Is this an alt account? This is basically the exact wording as another comment flagged minutes ago.
You're seeing what you see all over the web: (badly imho) organized attempted to control public opinion. It's no different than the "50 cent army"[0] commentators and just as obvious to anyone paying attention. These are standard talking points regurgitated ad nauseam anytime certain topics come up. It was always inevitable that social media would devolve into this, but still sad to see it happen in so many places.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
How is it possible they influence so much of what happens in western politics, or at least how whole nations respond to their genocidal war anyway?
Many US states actually have laws on the books that prohibits anybody that works with or I think event contracts with the state gov from "discrimination against Israel", in various forms, etc, depending on the particular state.
To my knowledge, no US state has any other sort of legal recognition of any other foreign government/state.
Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws
Defence contractors hire a lot of people which in turn create a lot of ancillary jobs to support said industries.
Defence contractors are also becoming increasingly sophisticated so they use more software, more chips, more clouds, and more information security.
Almost all of MAFANG has some defence-related footprint, and some have multiple. You might see a few defence/defence adjacent companies in the monthly WhoIsHiring posts as well as https://www.workatastartup.com .
The simple truth is there are a lot of zionists in powerful positions both in terms of governmental and monetary. Open wikipedia and look up cabinets and powerful people in US government since WW2. Pay attention to their ethnicity; even if half are zionists, that's a lot of people. Edit: people downvoting this, first part of the comment is just facts, second part is plausible speculation. Why are you downvoting?
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No, you are putting words in my mouth and being very reductive. Majority of powerful people is not jewish nor zionist, but there is probably a lot of zionists amongst them. And no, not all jews are zionists, nor all jews are in powerful positions.
In addition, not all Zionists are Jews.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism
> Christian Zionism is a political and religious ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land.[1] Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with biblical prophecies transmitted through the Old Testament: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant—the eschatological "Gathering of Israel"—is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.[1][2][3] The term began to be used in the mid-20th century, in place of Christian restorationism, as proponents of the ideology rallied behind Zionists in support of a Jewish national homeland.[1][4][5]
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One theory is that an abundance of American Christians believe in dispensational premillennialism[0], which rebukes orthodox Judaism in the hopes of returning Christ. Many dispensationalists (including Issac Newton[1]) attempted to interpret the Bible as a function of divine will, and argued that the foundation of Israel is directly imperative due to the prophecy of Daniel. This seems to go against the majority orthodox Judaism interpretation that the Third Temple (as well as the return of Christ) is willed by God alone and not predetermined conditions that men can control.
It's a bit out-there, but unfortunately I can't write-off DJT accepting it all at face-value. He's got conspicuous in-laws and an awfully weird track-record writing policy for the Levant. A religious conviction to defend Israel on behalf of his savior seems to slot rather neatly into his internal belief system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premillennialism#Dispensationa...
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16878
Dispensationalism is a heresy that flows out of the Scofield Bible, created by a con artist, Cyrus Scofield. He was likely funded and supported by Zionists.
The Israel of the Bible does not refer to the country Israel, but many Christians have been deceived.
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You can be very much in favor of Israel the country existing, and even defending itself, while still being opposed to Israel's actions in Gaza.
I have not seen credible people call such a stance "being manipulated by the Jews".
You leapt to at least 3 conclusions in only two sentences. That's talent.
1. "The world" is too broad of an audience to indict.
2. "Anywhere else" does not necessitate the endless support of a rogue state.
3. Israeli statehood is a Zionist matter with a highly mixed opinion among Jews (especially under the current Likud admin).
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It's possible to believe that both October 7th and the subsequent genocide of Palestinians are horrific.
It's the duty of the press to report on these horrors in an unbiased and impartial manner.
> You few bleeding heart lefties
Ad hominems aren't arguments, fyi
Sorry, that was supposed to say “a few” not “you few”, dunno how I managed that.
Yes, you are exactly right and I salute you for posting this. I believe the vast majority would say both of your thoughts here. Stop attacks and genocide on all. Hamas was awful on Oct 7, and the attacks on the innocent in Gaza, they are starving them are also.
I don’t think the country of Israel is explicitly doing the manipulating, I think one country’s allies are just statistically richer and more influential than the other
Like Qatar?
Qatar's riches are not that _unique_. It's just oil. It's a commodity.
Qatar sells natural gas not oil
Same idea
In the case of Australia you're correct in that it's not Israel reaching into Australia to alter opinion.
What is the case (in a many layered complex fabric) is that Australian Jewish groups have both actively pushed a narrative and worked hard to discredit any inkling of voice given to Palenstine by the public broadcaster that does work hard to be in the vicinity of neutral.
For better or worse they have gamed the Australian media system in their favour.
This recently hit the Federal Court of Australia which determined that (former) ABC executives (senior staff of the public broadcaster) caved to a pressure campaign to fire a radio broadcaster who tweeted a link to a Human Rights Watch report (that was unfavourable to Isreal) "in her own time" (not on the public clock and not contrary to any employment agreement).
Court Documents: https://www.fedcourt.gov.au/services/access-to-files-and-tra...
Extensive other reporting elsewhere.
And I assume the BBC are completely impartial regarding the conflict.
As an outsider, I feel the narrative has totally turned for the rest of the world.
Israeli citizens protesting against the genocide and war crimes rekindled faith that it's mostly the top of govts and military industrial complexes pushing for this.
Not just BBC, most media ended up out in the open this time around. Or maybe it has always been like this, we are just growing up now and taking notice.
"Stars and media figures", what an appeal to authority.
LOL. Well this is how the Israelis see the BBC:
https://youtu.be/gHTNuBKtzHc?si=aRYVjkzgj-U-yZIo
I remember seeming the event that was based on near the start of the war. It's not far off what I saw in the media.
Things are a bit different now though.
The left blames BBC, calling them Tory shills, the right blames them, calling them woke activists.
Dont know--seems to me they are doing the right thing.
I'm starting to realize, very belatedly in life, that we suffer from an end-of-history illusion in politics and political economy. I used to think we live in a golden age because a hundred years ago, democracy broadly replaced monarchies, market economies replaced feudalism and other coercive systems, and with it went many of the old, indirect mechanisms of subjugating large populations (e.g. moral imperatives through the Church, legitimization of rule through concepts such as the divine right of kings, control of education etc).
But it seems we've only replaced those mechanisms with more refined versions (manufacturing consent through mass media, surveillance and indirect indentured servitude through student debt, rent and health insurance).
We probably have another century of socioeconomic and political evolution to go before we reach a decent end state.
I like your optimism that a decent end state can be reached at all.
There are so many ideas that sound good on paper but are bad in practice, and that happen to be convenient for the goals of unscrupulous powerful people.
The notion that society as a whole will at some point stop falling for such ideas seems very optimistic to me.
Society came very close to realizing the beginnings of a decent state in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell faught in it, and wrote about what he saw that society achieving in his book, Homage to Catalonia.
It's not that hard for a new idea to look good for a couple short months/years. Building an ongoing, self-sustaining society that doesn't go completely off the rails is a whole other thing. There's a reason all these idyllic examples people give (Catalonia, Pre-USSR Ukrainian socialism, Paris Commune) were short-lived. If the Bolshevist revolution had been quashed in 1919, it would be idealized today.
> If the Bolshevist revolution had been quashed in 1919, it would be idealized today.
I don't think so. Pretty much all the negative things about Bolsheviks were already prominently there by 1919. Anti-democracy, mass terror, torture, concentration camps, you name it.
They never collapsed from anything innate, though. They were always destroyed from outside forces. When your society represents actual freedom, you become the enemy of everyone, from capital to stalinism.
Centralization of power has so far made every society deeply flawed or even hellish. The three societies you mentioned are the only ones where power was purposefully decentralized, and that seems to be the most promising path forward that was never allowed to stretch its legs.
I would argue that Rojava is one modern case that still shows hope. Although not as decentralized as those other examples, perhaps this is also why they're still there 11 years later.
I agree. Though unfortunately there have been reports of them slowly centralizing power away from community councils toward the military over time. Even still, it's offering far more freedom and diversity than any of the surrounding countries. I'm rooting for them to succeed.
> I like your optimism that a decent end state can be reached at all.
For a few brief years, it looked like we were there.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
Well, we have been improving. I don’t consider it too optimistic we’ll continue to do so.
Improving at...what exactly?
Please don't give some tripe about medecine or something...sure we have some fancy new techniques and the like, but that doesn't matter if those systems aren't generally available or rejected on pseudo-religious grounds.
It might be true we have been living longer for a while, but that's a trend of the past 50 years in some areas, not some inexorable progress towards longer lives...
Maybe we have lots of food and entertainment. I suppose that is good, in theory. But again, not something of recent history, that has more to do with the availability of large shipping vessels and TV production...
The part people may find optimistic is continuing to improve in any appreciable manner, versus some gains made decades ago...
Well, for one thing, neither me nor my son work in coal mines. We don’t have to breathe any of the sooty gases that coal burning spews forth, and can turn on airconditioning in summer when it’s hot. Also, heated toilet seats in winter.
Both of which are improvements not unique to even the past 10 years - even if you only recently experienced these improvements, that merely makes you "late adopters".
You can have personal improvement, and you can continue to reap the benefits of existing systems, this is not the same as general progress or, progress made by society, much less any sort of indication that progress will continue...
I felt a glimmer hope from Grok believe it not. On X it has been showing the potential of an AI being seen as a trusted authority to cut through a lot of propaganda based on facts. But then elon didn't like the "facts are liberal" vibes and nerfed it and now it can't be trusted, it's just another propaganda mouthpiece.
This points to what I think is the missing amendment to the US constitution, when a media company gets big enough to influence significant portions of the electorate it should not be allowed to be owned by a single billionaire or a small family. Large media ownership should be distributed as widely as possible across society so that one rich guy isn't able to force his opinions on everyone.
It's math. You can model what happens in n-player repeated games of incomplete information, and you'll realize we're far from any stable point. And it's not even that hard to understand that the narrative of "end of history" benefits the people who get to say that and uphold that narrative.
Concur, but from a control systems point of view. Any system that does not define upper/lower limits and does not address feedback loops, are prone to oscillations, and if the size of the system grows over time, the oscillations can become progressively more violent.
Our socioeconomic/political systems currently do not define any hard upper or lower limits on its primary driver (economic power) and does not address feedback loops (e.g. more capital availability -> larger scale -> more economies of scale -> more market share -> more capital -> more scale).
Could just be cyclic? 1776->1861 (romanticism leading into civil war), 1861->1940 (modernism leading into WWII), [weird cold war baby boomer era of prosperity] 1970->2025 (post-modernism leading into..)
See the Fourth Turning!
- Strauss & Howe. Exactly
For more on this exact topic I strongly recommend Plato's "The Republic". The entire book is phenomenal, but "book" (chapter) 8 [1] is something that just completely reshaped my world view. There is an occasional reference that will make you think we've genuinely made progress, like casual acceptance of slavery, but when one reads just the political timelines and transitions he speaks of, he sounds like he's describing modern times, with a bit of edgelord flair, with complete hindsight bias. But that book was written 2,400 years ago!
It was a realization that nothing, except technology, is changing. We're not entering into some scary unknown time, but just regressing to the mean. Humanity seems to be stuck on a perpetual loop, probably because we really suck at learning from the past and inevitably convince ourselves that 'this time it'll be different.' And even on those issues we do seem to have made progress on, like slavery - is it just a coincidence that slavery ended universally, after millennia of efforts, only just after the Industrial Revolution and mass urbanization which effectively obsoleted it?
On the theme of slavery, consider that we mostly don't even blink twice now a days when a country drags men off the street, separates them from their family, puts a gun in their hand, and throws them in a trench to kill and most likely die. Those that continue to refuse to kill not infrequently end up 'dying in training.' To say nothing of barrier troops. This is all much worse than even slavery, but we casually accept it, because it hasn't yet been obsoleted. If the role of humans in warfare is ever minimized, imagine what lovely things they'll write about our morality and hypocrisy, just as we are wont to do about the past today.
---
As for the chapter referenced, Ctrl+F for "And democracy has her own good" and read from there. "Drone" is a term you'll see throughout classical writings. It's a reference to drone bees who contribute nothing to a hive, but exist solely to consume and mate if they can. So it's a term that refers to everything from beggars to criminals to corrupt politicians who prefer enriching themselves and special interests over broadly socially motivated politicking. So in modern times it would include practically all politicians.
[1] - https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.9.viii.html
The myth of social progress conflated with technological advancement. Even that isn't assured when corruption, apathy, and cult of insane beliefs defund the "Library of Alexandria" and the world slips back into relative darkness again.
I agree human nature hasn't really changed since Plato's time and technology is the main thing that has. But the tech provides much more information and communication which leads to things like slavery going. Also I think most people are shocked that trench warfare is still going on but the Russian leadership seems a bit behind the times. Apparently Putin spent time during the lockdown reading previous centuries history and here we are.
It cannot happen in even 1000 years because it would need evolutionary pressures to select for saner and more intelligent people. The idiocracy ain't going to let the happen.
I think there's a more fundamental issue at play. Two people, both rather intelligent and completely sane, can come to complete different conclusions on things. For instance, I think fertility is one of the most critical issues facing civilization in modern times. I can offer reasons why, though you've already done so yourself in part, but that's outside the scope of this post for now.
By contrast, others may see the fertility crisis as not even an issue, let alone a crisis. After all humanity's not going to go extinct anytime in the foreseeable future, and billions of people is a lot of people. There are even some who think it may be a good thing - fewer people could reduce the impact of human emissions for instance.
So this difference in worldview would lead to radically different perspectives on seemingly completely unrelated things, like LGB representation in childhood education. Add in a bit of a radicalism and these otherwise reasonable disagreements gradually breed extreme hostility.
And I don't think there's any real solution here. No side can ever win, because neither view is really wrong. The best solution is probably general decentralization. But most people don't realize their opinions are opinions, and think they are factually and objectively correct - and want to impose their views on everybody, which trends towards attempts at centralization, inevitable collapse, and repeat.
Russia is neither forcibly conscripting nor are they preventing anyone from leaving the country should they wish.
Ukraine is doing both at an increasingly absurd scale, all the while people wave their flag-of-the-week in their social media profile, either aloof of what they support or seeing no problem with it.
The same was probably, more or less the same, during slavery. People adopting views based on tribe rather than any real thought or even knowledge of what they support. The overwhelming majority of everybody obviously never owned a slave and likely had an idealized view of the institution.
Totally wrong. Are you a Russian bot or simply ill-informed, unserious human talking out of your posterior?
Russia doesn't give out passports to men until they've fulfilled military requirements. Please inform yourself.
https://youtube.com/channel/UC9HHZMXng9reLBQmNc1Y8iA
You're conflating two things. There is indeed conscription in Russia, Scandinavia, and many countries in the world where people are expected to do some period of time of military training within a country. These people are generally not used in active conflicts, though it does entail enrollment in the equivalent of Selective Service in the US meaning they can be called up later (2 years in Russia) for "real" service in the case of a draft/mobilization. Russia carried out a limited mobilization once early on in the war in 2022, and it was horrifically unpopular, leading to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians from the country. People don't want to risk being called up to possibly die for a war they may not even agree with. Since then they have relied exclusively on volunteer forces.
Ukraine, by contrast, immediately after the war began they made it illegal for men of "fighting age", which they define as between the ages of 18 and 60, to leave the country. And they have been relying on forced conscription for an ever larger percent of their entire armed forces since then. This is why you can find countless highly disturbing videos of Ukrainian TCC (conscription) officers brutalizing and even killing civilians in efforts to conscript them and throw them on the front lines. Wiki has some sampling of incidents here [1] which I will not quote. In many cases they are, again, quite disturbing.
People really have no clue what they are supporting over there.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_Center_of_Recruitm...
There's a difference that Ukraine had not much choice after being invaded but a larger enemy, aside from maybe surrendering and letting Putin take over. Russia's invasion however was almost entirely their choice and could be stopped tomorrow if Putin just told them to stop.
That's a bit of a false dichotomy as the early terms were relatively modest but, in general terms, I would agree with the point you're making. However the issue you run into is that the exact same arguments were made in favor of slavery. For instance even Aristotle some 2400 years ago predicted the end of slavery, if slaves only were not necessary:
"For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'Of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods.' If, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves." [1]
Of course society could have gotten by without slavery, but it wouldn't have been as convenient, particularly for the wealthy and political classes who were the exact sort that could afford to own slaves. And the exact same is true of conscription. If people are not willing to die for the political class of a country, who are the political class to insist they die for them? And the greatest irony is that the most 'brave' of the political class are often made up of cowards and draft dodgers themselves. But it's an entirely different game when it's not their life on the line anymore.
People, who live in a time when humans in warfare are obsoleted, will look back upon this as even more vile and barbaric than slavery. And they'll damn us all for it. Yet it's an issue that "we", the people without power, mostly do not even really think about one way or the other - because it's just how it is. We might speak out against it, those in affected regions might even start their own 'Underground Railroads' to escape tyranny, but everybody knows it won't end.
[1] - https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.mb.txt
You forgot to mention the widespread coercion of Russian conscripts into "voluntarily" enlisting for the war in Ukraine. Stories like this are extremely common:
https://novayagazeta.eu/articles/2025/05/14/unwilling-signat...Not to mention authorities raiding places like gyms to get the conscripts in the first place:
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/05/01/russian-police-rai...Thats called illusion of control. Just look at your family and friends.
Some will always want much more than others. Some will always take paths that are easy. Some will have no problem taking advantage of the weak.
Keeping all those traits in check is a full time job. Its not free. It eats into limited time and energy. Sooner or later compromises are made.
Therefore parasites and predators always find space in any ecosystem you look at. You might be able to turn off/keep in check behavior of a few. But never all.
Consider how insignificant your worries will seem to future generations in one, two, ten centuries from now.
Or maybe you think we’ll destroy the world or something, in which case that’s “chicken little syndrome.”
It’s hard to imagine we will regress in any meaningful way. That’s basically never happened, and even when it did, during the “dark ages,” we recovered – on a long enough timeline (which isn’t even that long) we’ve made exponential progress in every facet of life. There’s a lot to look forward to. Or you can be pessimistic about it during the few brief years you have in this world…
The way I look at it - you can be optimistic and hope that your actions can have a positive effect on your life and the world - if you’re wrong, you’re no more fucked than if you’d been pessimistic the whole time, and you at least felt better during said time.
Same, and it's quite obvious. You will get the same government regardless of who you vote for, its controlled opposition design to cushion some of your grievances but policies are set in stone.
We are going up, slowly, in health, literacy, education - globally. But, like all progress, it is up up and down, then again up up and down. Thanks to retro grades like Putin and Trump. As to health indenture -that form of slavery is primarily in USA. Most other countries have figured it out. I agree with hope for the future though. Star Trek, not Star Wars!
Globally this is true because of improvements in developing countries. Not uniform improvement everywhere. Some places backslide.
What is this "end of history illusion", if not the belief that there is a "decent end state"?
There will always be reasons to oppose any current equilibrium for improvements, and that's ok.
The "end of history illusion" is not the belief that there is a decent end state, but the belief of each generation that that state has been reached, and that they were to first to reach it.
Actually, this expression "end of history" has been coined, and the ideology(*) behind it promoted, in the 1990s after the collapse of the eastern block. Before that, for what I can tell, the prevaling idea seems to have been that of an "ustoppable march of progress". Long before that, I would guess that the most common ideology was that of a persistant, immuable order.
(*) That's the proper term to denote a concept that justify the will of a group, regardless of its veracity.
Considering history, I see no signs of converging to some end state. I guess technical progress and knowledge accumulate somehow, but even this is not linear and history shows plenty of exemples of drastic step backs. But even assuming an ever increasing technical progress, in a world with infinite resources (that's a very big assumption), what would be the end state? I guess, given we are on HN, a state were humans program conscious machines which then do all the hard work? In other words, the ideology of bigtech?
We are probably several centuries out.
Thought experiment - how many generations does it take to forget grandpa?
If Grandpa is the issue, their grandchildren may have falsely optimistic opinions of their corrupt roots. Their children (grand grand children) don't have the same rosy memories, and don't get why Mom and Dad are into their weird rituals. But it's Mom and Dad so it can't be so bad, right?
It's not till their grandchildren, normally, that (assuming they are decent people and the trait isn't genetic or somehow encouraged by society) people can maybe see what utter crappy people their grand grand grand grand parents were, and maybe do something about it.
gd it why did my ancestors never warn me about the end-of-history illusion
>We probably have another century of socioeconomic and political evolution to go before we reach a decent end state.
I agree with everything you said, but that's a rather odd conclusion. things are getting worse, not better.
The problem is you can't even point a finger or single out people responsible for the current state of things. Unless we collectively accept there is a problem, the solution will not get implemented.
I can think of numerous people who while not solely responsible for the state of things, have certainly fanned the flames to attain great personal prosperity at the expense of our collective psyche. Those people have names and addresses and they are not as they may believe immune from retribution.
I don’t want to live through any more historical times but I increasingly believe we’re on a precipice of incredible amounts of political violence, both against people who don’t deserve it, and people who do. And those people would be wise to pump the brakes a little.
This is why monarchies are better than democracies. There is no accountability or ownership. A king wants to pass down something better to his progeny. A politician wants to make money and generally doesn’t care what state he leaves things in.
Why don't politicians care about their kids and why do monarchs not care about money?
I never said either of those things. By progeny, I meant both the heirs of the king and the common race of people belonging to the kingdom. Kings were the head of different races of people and as the head, they looked after their people (if they were a good king). For example, a good king wouldn’t import millions of people who are different from those in his kingdom for economic reasons, and you don’t see this in history. It is his job to take care of his people and if he suddenly gave them an incredible amount of competition for resources, he would be responsible for causing his people great difficulty. He cares about them and wouldn’t do that.
Politicians don’t have this headship and from their behavior clearly don’t view themselves as stewards of their country and people (they do care about their own children though). An example of this would be Mike Lee’s attempt to sell off American public lands to foreign interests. The money raised from this would not make a dent in the deficit or debt, and it would take away beautiful fishing and hiking from Americans. Thankfully this was done away with, but a good king would never consider selling public land in the middle of his country to foreigners.
> a good king...
Now compare a good king to a good politician.
That's insane nonsense.
I was in the same place not long ago, convinced that democracy’s march and market liberalization meant we’d finally broken the old chains. But the more I watched what people actually do, versus the rhetoric they spew, the clearer it became that most of our "freedoms" are just stage props. We have the illusion of democracy so we can feel free, the illusion of equal justice under law so we can feel secure, the illusion of meritocracy so we can feel hopeful. And thanks to this, they get stability. In reality, there are always those who want to be above the law and steer the masses and today’s new kings just wear different robes.
Media conglomerates manufacture consent far more subtly than the Church ever could. Student debt servitude, rent extraction, and opaque health insurance bureaucracy bind millions in ways that feel inescapable. Yet because it’s all cloaked in market-speak and "public interest" we barely notice our chains. Recognizing these illusions is painful, but it’s also the first step toward tearing them down. If we’re honest, the next century of political and economic evolution won’t be about perfecting the PR, it’ll be about building genuine checks on power, creating institutions that can’t be gamed, and demanding real accountability, even when the robes change.
> We have the illusion of democracy so we can feel free, the illusion of equal justice under law so we can feel secure, the illusion of meritocracy so we can feel hopeful.
All values and freedoms need to be fought for constantly and perpetually. They are not hard constants outside rare exceptions when it’s very clearly defined law. It’s simply the sum of the efforts of people currently on the planet. They are always under threat by people with good intentions or more overt bad ones.
What you may be seeing is a decline in people publicly pushing for them, especially in our institutions (politics, press, academia etc). But you can still find plenty of people fighting for them if you look deeper.
I still cannot get over the fact that we, in Europe, have banned RT on the grounds that it is a publication sponsored by a "foreign" government and, as such, it cannot be trusted.
For one, so many publications here in Europe are financed by the local governments and we have no problem allowing them to function and act in the interest or said governments. Two, it flies in the face of an independent, free individual who can choose what to read and discern what the truth is. By blocking it, you are saying, "You, as an individual, are not able to take your own decisions, you are not able to separate truth from lies and fiction." If, supposing the later is actually the case, then all this "free" media is actually dangerous as it becomes a game of "don't trust them, trust us!" and whoever has the better image, the best marketing and exposure wins over the others.
As a Russian, I wouldn’t trust anything that comes out on RT. Banning it though is a really bad move – something I would expect from the Russian government itself, not Europe. One of the reasons I’ve become disillusioned in EU recently.
> Banning it though is a really bad move
Why? With how confidently you state that, I'm rather curious what reasons you have.
Because free people should be able to decide for themselves what to read and listen to.
If you want a longer answer, George Orwell penned an eloquent one all the way back in 1944: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
The problem is, we've seen how that ends up: you get bad actors masquerading as news (e.g., Fox News, Info Wars, OAN, etc.) and people flocking to low information, high entertainment vendors over good faith (if sometimes or even often flawed) traditional news (e.g., Associated Press, Reuters, BBC News, etc.).
As such, you end up with a large cohort of people believing immigrants eat their pets, vaccines have microchips in them and are more harmful than the diseases they protect against, 5g towers cause cancer, chemtrails are a thing, and trickle-down economics benefits working people.
Now, I may ultimately accept the idea that no matter what we do, we're always inevitably screwed, and even the smallest attempt to curtail speech will always end in an even worse outcome (like how there exist some infinities larger than others), but even I get a little uncomfortable being that nihilistic.
The problem with the opposite is that you get bad actors deciding on what you are or aren't allowed to read.
Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and freedom of receiving and imparting information and ideas. The United Nations was fully aware when making the declaration of human rights that bad actors existed. However the outcome of not having those rights have shown to be universally worse.
It is not that one has to accept that we are inevitably screwed. That assumes that no amount of work or effort can address social problems peacefully, and that the only way for a functional society is through force.
Im hoping that current decades of polarization and championing of censorship will end up resulting in similar conclusions as the UN did after world war 2. Censorship and violence only breed higher quantity and intensity of censorship and violence.
Here's the rub: the current polarization and championing of censorship have come from abuse of free speech protections.
We've had decades of Fox News and the like declaring things like "War on Christmas" and "War on Christianity" to make people in the majority feel like victims, presenting immigrants as subhumans that take jobs and commit crimes as they invade our country, and presenting trans people as deviant threats to our children, trying to make them all trans, too.
This is a completely fictional world, but such a large number of people have become believers that they've now been able to take over political power.
As a result, we get state laws that directly attack freedom of speech via book bans and scrubbing school curriculum of anything parents deem objectionable, which can include innocuous things like acknowledging gay people exist or that the civil war was fought over slavery. We also got our current administration, which has used lawsuits and other threats to attack any speech the president doesn't like.
I don't see where it gets better anytime soon - and I think it's a foregone conclusion that it's going to get a lot worse before they do get better, because a large cohort of people are cheering it on.
And before anyone chimes in that this is a both sides issue: I've yet to see actual legal action taken by the left wing to curtail speech. Instead, I've seen social pressure levied - largely in the form of freedom not to associate with individuals or businesses that engage in speech people find objectionable. This is the correct way to engage in an environment of free speech, even if I find it distasteful how far it's been taken and how petty it's been in some cases.
I'm not really advocating for censorship myself. Ultimately, I'm merely reflecting upon how an environment of nearly absolute adherence to free speech has been eroded by a number of bad actors utilizing propaganda and lies to chip away at that very free speech over the decades, bringing us to a point where we're sliding down the very same slope towards destruction of freedoms that free speech absolutism was intended to prevent. The whole exercise feels like a Catch-22, hence my prodding for something a little more concrete yet specific than "censorship = bad".
Trying to solve bad speech by censorship will never work, and there has never been an authoritarian movement that has been silenced by censorship. It do not work. At best it does nothing, and at worst it increase their support and reduce any internal resistance. The purpose of human rights is to create common shared values between people from all political spectrum and create some internal resistance.
It is fairly common belief that lies and propaganda is stronger than truth. However rather than see it as a fundamental part of nature, I would propose an alternative theory. Lies and propaganda is a symptom when social trust in society start to break down. You could ban Fox news or any other right-leaning media and there is little to no evidence that society would be any different.
The idea of free speech absolutism is an concept that people build to attack free speech. Free speech is about valuing and believing that people should be free to hold and express their opinions and beliefs without fear of retaliation. Fear can be created by law, by mobs or by those who hold some form of power like employers, but regardless of method the result is the same. Society need to value the idea of free speech. Absolutism has nothing to do with that. The idea that people should not fear the government for beliefs they hold, but should fear their employer, is inconsistent with free speech as a human right.
If you are looking for something more concrete, I would point towards research that that looks at social trust and its roles in conflicts. There exist a fair amount of research on this topic, some which is left politics and others which is right politics. One major finding are the importance of shared values. What kind of values those are is less important than that they are shared. If they aren't shared, then the next most important part is that they aren't shoved into the face of people who do not share them. Trying to stamp out opposing values, especially in a public and diffused way, has a long history of creating violence, fear and mistrust.
There isn't "polarization". There's no zero sum team sports going on. There's a cult and then there's everyone else wondering why they have such crazy, hateful beliefs. It's because the Paul Harvey's, Rush Limbaugh's, and Alex Jones' weren't countered or restrained effectively. And so the Overton Window of America was dragged right past Reagan voodoo economics and into Nixon agro "get off my lawn" religious-ethnonationalism with people who wore the hoods.
Most thinking people will try not to take current event reporting at face value. For many Americans, it's easy to accept a lot of things your Mainstream Media Source gives you (including NPR or NYTs), and ironically when one of the current themes is to distrust mainstream media.
FWIW, I trust NPR reporting to only make true statements.
What they're sometimes guilty of (in my judgement) is one-sided reporting. E.g., regarding illegal immigration, providing sympathetic personal stories of illegal immigrants, but not of the persons hurt by illegal immigration.
It's also possible they've gotten better about this. I stopped listening years ago.
It's not really that it's sponsored by a "foreign" government and, as such cannot be trusted. It's more we are pissed off with Russia's invasion rape murder torture and the like and they can take their propaganda somewhere else.
> have banned RT on the grounds that it is a publication sponsored by a "foreign" government
Not just a "foreign" government, but a government that is waging a hybrid war against the European Union, which includes disinformation through outlets such as RT.
I mean RT is bad. You're going to need a better example of something good that got banned.
Better source: [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/jul/02/more-than-400-...
Thanks, we updated the URL to this from https://www.owenjones.news/p/bbc-staff-were-forced-to-do-pro....
The Guardian article does not have a link to the letter itself unlike the Owen Jones page.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n3926pSPNwXd8j7I716CBJEz...
Thanks, we added this to the thread's top text.
Watch how quickly this disappears from the front page despite getting the most upvotes.
I don’t disagree, but it does seem to fit squarely in a culture war (and or) political topic.
It's gone. I found this article in the Hacker News Digest
flamebait gets removed all the time because there's no way there's going to be a productive, illuminating, curious conversation about it. doesn't mean there's a conspiracy to prevent discussion.
How is this flamebait? Is there another way to report on this topic that would be less inflammatory? Or should media manipulation by foreign governments simply not be discussed and we should just keep quiet less someone get upset?
Surely if Russia was manipulating BBC reporting it would be note-worthy as well no?
I think parent just means that it’s a divisive topic, which means on the internet, that inherently makes it flamebait (and not necessarily through any fault of the reporting).
Even on HN (and sometimes, especially on HN).
There are some divisive topics that are less prone to flame wars on HN vs. other discussion platforms, but those are fairly limited, and often not political (in my experience).
The problem with this logic is that it is very, very easy for even a small number of people interested in silencing a topic on any issue they're concerned about "divisive" just by intentionally flooding the comments with knowingly inflammatory responses.
This has already be used on HN to essentially silence any serious reporting on climate change. Anyone technical with an interest in data will find most climate change related studies interesting, but a small minority of people who are fearful of the consequences will make sure to create an issue and shut down conversation, organically getting posts "flagged".
It's not some theoretical 'divisive', you can read how these threads go yourself, including this one. The meta discussions also make these a lot worse so it's hard to blame this on some 'small number' of people.
A lot of the flagged posts look completely fine, to me. Basically the entire discussion is greyed out, which suggests a pretty intense unwillingness to talk about the subject on principles alone.
I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides. If every HN thread resorted to this logic, nobody would want to use the site.
>I think by playing the brinksmanship card of "there can be no level-headed discussion" you inadvertently discount a lot of perfectly coherent and important digression, on both sides."
The brinksmanship card of HN is the reverse of this framing: There must be level-headed discussion. To wit:
>The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: civil and substantial.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
It's better to link the things you want to use as examples because otherwise we aren't really talking about anything concrete. The thread on this submission is awful, for instance - so that's my first link.
I think the flag system in HN is unnecessary and prone to abuse in threads like these.
Some comments that clearly break the rules should be removed by the community. But that should take multiple downvotes.
The flagging just allows one or two people to remove a part of the discussion, and we rely on other users to view dead or flagged comments to “rescue” them
I don’t disagree. I’m just afraid it’s a hard problem to solve, at least an automated one.
At one point, I proposed a read-only option for (well-reported) divisive articles to help raise awareness without resulting in flame wars.
But there are downsides to that, too — either they can still get flagged away, there’s a risk of garbage remaining on the FP if you disable the flag feature, and/or HN gets accused of bias if they manipulate certain articles this way (by disabling flags and/or commenting).
I feel like it’s wrong to call this topic divisive. It doesn’t adequately address that one side of the divide seems to consistently advocate for condoning genocide in broad daylight.
not sure which side you mean. gaza and israel have had officials advocate for the destruction of the other. that's kinda what makes it an existential total war.
I’m not necessarily saying it is or isn’t.
But I think, by definition, if an article draws a lot of flagged/downvoted comments (as this one has), it’s hard to argue that it’s not divisive, at least to this audience.
Yeah. I won’t argue with the label. Just feel like we ought to have a better label for topics of this kind.
[flagged]
Curious why you think I would find that an exception? I most certainly would also want reporting on that.
This rhetoric is delusional. If you’re a real person arguing in good faith, I beg you to stop pretending that American politics is a two-team sport. This is not a tactic worth employing.
It’s gone.
I mean I almost flagged it: the headline absolutely does not match the letter, and it’s clickbait by a well-known polemicist. Israel’s continued actions in the West Bank are somewhere between apartheid and ethnic-cleansing, the civilian deaths in Gaza are beyond appalling, and there are genocidal maniacs in their current cabinet, but this article is trash.
[flagged]
Iran isn't an ally of any country in the west. The west says "Iran is an awful, oppressive country" basically daily. What's new to report there? They're already economically cut off from most of the world. There's not much else for us to do.
Israel is an ally of every country in the west. People say "stop criticizing them because you can't do that until you complain about every other problem on earth first!" and it's a very strange, conditioned behavior not seen when problems pertaining to any other country are brought up. And the big difference between Iran and Israel: Israel isn't cut off from the world economically, and in some places (many US states), boycotting them is even illegal.
None of my tax dollars or purchases fund the Iranian government. Lots of our money funds Israel against our will. That's why people get angry.
Most of the west is definitely not Israel's ally based on their lack of support.
The US does support Israel but this is a story about the UK. The UK does not support Israel and even partially boycotts Israel at the moment.
If you're American then your tax money e.g. funds Egypt. Egypt is a dictatorship, no human rights, involved in the Sudan civil war where millions are dying. Not a beep on Hacker News.
EDIT: Not to mention the billions of dollars, including indirectly to Hamas, coming from the west.
The Prime Minister of the UK recently said he supported Israel's attacks on Iran. The UK even helps arm Israel. [1] Not sure what the basis of your claims are but they're quite different from reality.
And I apologize in advance to any Egyptian readers out there, but Egypt has a very low reputation these days. I've not once seen a positive comment about the country in these past 10 years. Nobody is flooding in to defend Egypt when their problems are brought up and saying "Before you criticize Egypt, what about..."
And if you hold your country to the standards of, as you said, oppressive dictatorships that support brutal wars, that's a low standard and will attract criticism.
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/may/07/uk-sent-isra...
Iran is not the Palestinians. Iran supplies Russia and the UK considers it a threat but it is not acting in any way as an "ally" to Israel here.
"UK defends partial Israel arm sales ban"
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2np2l5mlko
Partial arms sales ban is not an ally in my book. Many countries sell arms to other countries they are not even close to being allied with.
EDIT: Also count for me how many anti-Egypt stories made HN front page over the last 2 (or 10) years and how many anti-Israel stories made it.
> I've not once seen a positive comment about the country in these past 10 years.
We are not talking about positive comments (even though I'm sure we've seen some) we're talking about Israel being singled out for attack and being denied the right to defend itself against Hamas.
A sales ban would simply be in compliance with international law, and the UK is a member of the ICC, so even a partial ban is failing to live up to their obligations. The US is not currently a signatory but it's own laws make it illegal to export arms to Israel, so I guess we're "more" of an ally, as we're willing to more flagrantly break the rules in this regard, but the UK is still pretty far in favor of Israel with their current stance.
[flagged]
Recent BBC World headlines:
Now, perhaps these anonymous staff make some distinction between headlines and whatever they mean by "PR," but there appears to be zero hesitation reporting everything the BBC can find on the crimes of Israel, real or imagined. Reading the open letter makes no such distinction, citing "reporting" many times. At least two of the above are directly attributed to "Hamas-run ministry," which is somehow a source for BCC's supposedly pro-Israel reporting.How am I supposed to not see what I'm seeing with my lying eyes? I don't believe I'm capable of this tier of cognitive dissonance.
1. You don't have the counterfactual here, so who's to say how the world would have turned out without exhortations from top brass.
2. Recent is the keyword. The tide of public sentiment has shifted somewhat against Israel in this conflict as the civilian casualties mount & theater of combat expands, so maybe it's easier to be a Brave Truth-Teller in the past 2 months of a conflict whose most recent flare-up dates back going on 2 years now.
3. These seem like fairly sanitized headlines considering what they're actually talking about. Consider the last one vs "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens, Though They Claim One Murdered Individual Among the Group Not So Innocent" or something. So even though some of the facts are getting reported on, how they're reported on (arguably almost as important) could still be an editorial decision from higher echelons.
>1. You don't have the counterfactual here, so who's to say how the world would have turned out without exhortations from top brass.
This presumes the journalists are somehow neutral to begin with. If they're biased to be anti-israel, then arguably the top brass telling them to tone it down a notch would make the coverage more neutral.
>3. These seem like fairly sanitized headlines considering what they're actually talking about. Consider the last one vs "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens, Though They Claim One Murdered Individual Among the Group Not So Innocent" or something. So even though some of the facts are getting reported on, how they're reported on (arguably almost as important) could still be an editorial decision from higher echelons.
This presumes there's some Objectively Neutral™ version of a headline for a story, but how do know what that should be? Is the "Israeli Terrorist Strike Murders Dozens ..." wording supposed to be the neutral version? If that's the neutral version, I can't imagine what the anti-israeli version is supposed to be.
> This presumes the journalists are somehow neutral to begin with
I don't think it presumes that, I'm just pointing out that the existence of articles reporting on Israeli war crimes doesn't preclude bias.
> How do you define what the neutral version of the headline should be?
I don't really believe that true neutrality exists, we're always exposed to biases. Which and to what degree are at question here. My hypothetical headline was specifically meant to highlight this - the same events can be reported on "accurately" in many ways, with many biases. The existence of those facts in a newspaper doesn't mean there's no bias. That's all.
"Brave Truth Tellers"? There were protests on the 8th october after Israel was attacked and didn't even retaliate yet. Nothing happened to the people that shared their thoughts. I personally think they should improve their education on the topic, but that is my opinion.
This is a thorough victim complex if you really apply a neutral perspective.
"Counterfactual" my arse...
Just because you can list a bunch of article headlines that seem to not show bias, it doesn't mean there isn't bias. That takes a much deeper analysis.
It's ~1% click through most just get the news from the headline.
Having anti Israeli headlines is not the same as having pro-Israeli proganda. If the writers/editors believe what they are writing, well I suppose I don't an issue with that.
At least it seems widely reported on https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/100-bbc-insiders-pen-lette...
So it it seems like a legitimate letter, what's less clear is which, if any, of their pro Israeli articles are written by people who believe what they are saying...
The narrative of "pro-/anti-" is part of the problem.
Zionist settlers are outright evil, while most Israelis don't care or are unaware of what's going on in Gaza. Unfortunately, the world has been being paying attention and has had enough of the hasbara of ethno-nationalist supremacy BS that is plain to see. A lesson that the Holocaust/Shoah didn't teach properly to much of anyone now that those who survived it and are mostly gone, while those here now lack the oral history continuity of it. It's an intentional Pyrrhic victory in the tradition of the American western frontier and the Trail of Tears. There's now a plan to create a "humanitarian zone" concentration camp in Rafah requiring security screening and involuntary captivity for 600k.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-07/ty-article/.p...
> I don't believe I'm capable of this tier of cognitive dissonance.
Well, you're capable of some level. The allegations in no way suggest that articles critical of Israel aren't run.
Good question. I don’t have the answers.
I am curious as to when and how journalists use language. Looking at the headlines you chose, I see that some are written in active voice and some are in passive voice. When do journalists choose to use active voice over passive voice?
Imagine China started doing to the Uyghurs exactly what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and on the exact same scale. For that matter you can even say for the exact same justification - there have indeed been multiple mass death terrorist style incidents carried out by Uyghurs. Would you expect remotely similar framing?
The entire population of Gaza was only ~2 million and Israel has now killed/wounded hundreds of thousands of Palestinians directly, and it's likely some multiple of that have been killed indirectly (starvation, disease, deaths of despair, etc). If this was China, we would have long since been calling it a systemic genocide, done all we could to economically sanction them out of existence, and perhaps even flirted with direct invasions which would entail risking not only WW3 but global nuclear warfare.
But because it's Israel, we're instead shipping them weapons to keep carrying out this "war" and the media continues framing it as just a regrettable conflict with unfortunate collateral damage.
> we would have long since been calling it a systemic genocide
Without knowing what "we" means, allow me to cite a few more recent BBC headlines, these related to "genocide":
So the "genocide" narrative appears to be alive and well around the world, and the BBC is a fine place to read all about it. The ICJ is literally investigating a genocide case against Israel as we speak.Again, this notion that there is some pro-Israel bias plaguing the BBC just doesn't compute for me. Were the claims of this anonymous open letter valid, I wouldn't be able to tap a couple keywords into X and dump a list of such BBC headlines. Apparently any leader, pressure group or institution on Earth that cares to make a headline need only accuse Israel of "genocide" and it will be on the BBC the same day. Whatever supposed editorial bias is in effect appears to be highly ineffective.
Effective propaganda, when truth is not on its side, does not simply ignore the truth. There's an ICC arrest warrant out for Netanyahu for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and so forth. Never saying genocide and ignoring all allegations would be a red flag to the point of absurdity. You'd never convince anybody that wasn't already completely convinced.
So the way that real propaganda works is by taking some issue people generally feel a way about, expressing some empathy towards that, and then working to shift that person's perspective. For instance here [1] is the first article you linked: "UN rights expert accuses Israel of acts of genocide". It not only spends much of the article softly trying to undermine these claims, but even leans on one of the most classical propaganda techniques - appeals to emotion. This is a quote from that article:
----
Not surprisingly, Israeli diplomats are angry [at the claims]. Its ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Meirav Eilon Shahar, described the report as "an obscene inversion of reality", and accused Ms Albanese of questioning Israel's right to exist. Many Israelis, too, are likely to be shocked. And the suggestion of genocide, towards a state which was founded as a direct result of Nazi Germany's genocide of Jews, will cause deep offence.
In the wake of 7 October attack, and the fact that so many Israeli families are still waiting for news of loved ones taken hostage, hearing such outspoken condemnation is hard. Noam Peri, whose father Chaim was taken hostage, also travelled to Geneva. Her focus, naturally, is that her father not be forgotten.
"My father was kidnapped from his own home," she said. "He's an 80-year-old person that was sitting in his home with my mother, and he was brutally taken from there, and has essentially disappeared since. He has no communication, with no-one in the world."
----
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68667556
I think the vibe is changing and BBC is letting these go on-air with care.
Do you remember when headlines with Israel's atrocities would be rewritten to not upset them? This was <1y back even.
Interestingly you only picked the latest ones and even those still contain bias. The evidence needs to be analyzed holistically, from start to finish. BBC consistently used passive voice when it comes to Palestinian deaths like "20 Palestinians 'died' in Airstrike" which can appear "non-biased" but becomes clearer when compared to proper headlines like "20 Palestinians, including children, were killed in an ISRAELI Airstike"
"Instead, the report says, the BBC’s coverage has involved the systematic dehumanisation of Palestinians and unquestioning acceptance of Israeli PR. This has allegedly been overseen by BBC Middle East Editor and apparent Binyamin Netanyahu admirer, Raffi Berg, who is accused by anonymous journalists of “micromanaging” the section." https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/bbc-impartiality-trust-isra...
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Are BBC staff the last people to realise this?
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> BTW, this article doesn't mention that Gazans are still holding Israelis hostage, nor October 7th...
Ah yes, the 7 remaining hostages. But don’t forget that that counter is still zero for Israel only because all the people that could have been taken hostage have instead been killed.
It would be alot more than 7 if Hamas didn't murder a bunch.
Sure, but they’ve pretty much stopped now (presumably mostly because they ran out). Israel continues to rack up a larger count every single day.
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Oh look the Israeli tech workers are online. Everyone knows it's a genocide. "Gaza victim narrative", the absolute state of you.
I’m not Israeli tech worker.
Care to refute with facts any of my points?
Or all you can do is drop words and call names?
Everyone knows this is the only tactics of pro-xamas lunatics - just to scream loud. No facts, no logic, no answers to uncomfortable questions.
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I'm not sure who owen jones is or why this is relevant. Are you saying the letter is fake?
Owen Jones is a UK political commentator and activist who reaches a large audience via Youtube etc. He has covered the latest Israel Palestinian war extensively and continuously from the start. is that a fair summary?
The original URL was https://www.owenjones.news/p/bbc-staff-were-forced-to-do-pro...
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Jones
> Owen Jones (born 8 August 1984)[2] is a left-wing British newspaper columnist, commentator, journalist, author and political activist.[3][4][5][6]
> He writes a column for The Guardian and contributes to the New Statesman, Tribune, and The National[7] and was previously a columnist for The Independent. He has two weekly web series, The Owen Jones Show and The Owen Jones Podcast.
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You can't comment like this on HN, no matter what it's about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The parent submission is off-topic and spreads Jew hatred (attack on a person because Robbie Gibb is Jew and should be removed from board, similar to Columbia University president Claire Shipman comments). As someone who's grandparents experienced similar attacks during Stalinism because they were Jewish aka "zionists", this is extremely scary and totalitarian.
I just don't understand how this is allowed.
experienced similar attacks
That's a very good reason not to reach for dehumanizing tropes like 'vile scum' on HN or really anywhere else.
Joanne Rowling, better known by her pseudonym J. K. Rowling. No letter s in either version.
Tab completion, your majesty. Talk to Apple and Google.
This is a non exhaustive list of news where the BBC started by blaming Israel of some war crime since the October 7th massacre occurred, and then had to remove, recant or apologize about after overwhelming evidence against it came to light:
- Al-Ahli hospital explosion (Oct 2023)
- Al-Shifa hospital “medical teams targeted” (Nov 2023)
- Summary executions claim (Dec 24)
- Aid‑centre shooting attribution (Jun 2025)
- Al‑Shifa “raid on medical teams” redux (Jun 2025)
Imagine if the journalists weren’t “forced to do pro Israel PR”.
BBC needs a proper external investigation on the levels of anti semitism that clearly permeate the ranks of their so called journalists.
>after overwhelming evidence against it came to light
Or maybe they removed articles because of political pressure? Post overwhelming evidence against the fact that the Al-Ahli hospital explosion was caused by an Israel airstrike, for example.
Sure, here you go:
Not only every expert consulted by every journal agreed that the explosion was not even caused by an airstrike, but they also agreed it was caused by a projectile launched from Palestinian territory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosio...
You are posting, with a straight face, a link that repeats in all its entirety how nothing conclusive can be stated, how no expert has ever given a definitive answer, and you are saying the article affirms the opposite.
Are you an LLM?
All the consulted experts on the source agree that this wasn't an airstrike.
Most of the consulted experts agree that it was fired from inside Palestinian territory.
No consulted experts agree this was an airstrike.
No consulted experts agree this was fired from outside Palestinian territory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosio...
You keep posting this link while saying it states what it does not.
Maybe you are, in fact, an LLM.
Please point where in the article it states the contrary then.
When some of my more privileged Jewish friends are feeling glee, they proudly say their people do control the news
Feels kind of gaslighty when we can all perceive that there is a disproportionate overrepresentation of exactly that, but if us gentiles say it is called an “antisemitic trope”
not every observation is based on wanting a hurtful outcome against jewish people, but every reaction to that observation seems like thats the assumption. doesnt seem productive though, counterproductive and self fulfilling is what it seems like
Mandatory sketch of BBC interviews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHTNuBKtzHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYUL1R4pupU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gut1jyzwFV8
There was a report commissioned into alleged bias at the BBC called the Balen Report. Some people report that it found no bias, but it hasn't been published to this day.
The PR only works on very old people and very low IQ people. It's just brute force at this point. Everyone knows what they're doing.
Everyone here can identify the fake comments. They think they're slick but it's just the Streisand effect at this point.
"Everyone".
Basically, you're suggesting that propaganda only works on the feeble-minded and dumb, and "All True Scotsmen" know better than to fall for it.
Wow.
Like for example, your comment makes no sense. It reads like you got paid to write it. You're not contributing anything at all - just expressing that you feel something that most people would call "exaggerated" and "performative" and "embarrassing"
or very badly educated.
What is pro-Israel pull request ?
PR - public relations or propaganda - sometimes hard to tell the difference.
rewriting history
since key players realized decades ago how much sway news outlets hold over public opinion, a vast amount of them have been co-opted to spread propaganda [0]. at least a dozen countries and probably more (including Israel) are tapped directly into the five/fourteen eyes [1][2] intelligence network, countries which share "raw sigint" [3] with each other and strategically disseminate international propaganda to the alliance's benefit.
watching or reading publications from any of these nation's news outlets is intended and virtually guaranteed to paint them all as the "good guys", and any other countries as "bad guys". just like BBC is doing here. this is not a conspiracy, it's all fairly well documented.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement#9_Eyes,_14_Eye...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-...
murdoch empire, from zero to hero. also broligarchs are falling over themselves to own media companies. it doesnt take an einstein to see whats going on.
When the strong attack the weak, is your neutrality really still "neutral"?
The BBC recently showed a documentary that was pro-Palestinian and factually wrong. They also paid Hamas affiliates and relations to star in it. I have no idea where the "BBC are pro-Israel" thoughts come from but as a brit - I don't see it.
Cite much?