radiofree.asia

Category: BBC

  • Mick Delap | BBC Radio 4 | 24 December 2024 | Just Stop Oil


    This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Back in Syria After Exile, BBC Reporter Lina Sinjab on “Joy” & Calls for Prosecution, Reconciliation

    Gustlinasinjab

    We go to Damascus for an update on the state of affairs in Syria after the surprise collapse of the long-reigning Assad regime, with BBC Middle East correspondent Lina Sinjab. She is reporting in Syria for the first time in over a decade, after she was forced to flee the country in 2013. She relays the “sense of freedom and joy” now present on the streets of Damascus, where ordinary Syrians, for the first time in generations, “feel that they are liberated and they are proud of where they are today.” Current estimates put the number of forced disappearances under the Assad government at 300,000 likely tortured in prisons and buried in mass graves. We discuss Syria’s new transitional government, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and whether it can fulfill its promises of inclusion and accountability for all Syrians. “There’s no way for peace and stability to happen in Syria without a prosecution, without a legal system that will hold those who have blood on their hands accountable, for the sake of reconciliation in the country,” says Sinjab.


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • BBC political editor drools over Nigel Farage, calling him a ‘master of political storytelling’

    BBC political editor Chris Mason eyes pretty much glazed over while he spoke about Nigel Farage on the broadcaster. It looks like the concerning way the BBC has boosted the far right demagogue over many years is only intensifying:

    Nigel Farage: a ‘master’ of prejudice, not politics

    Mason said:

    Nigel Farage is a man who is a master of political storytelling…  Little wonder Nigel Farage’s domestic political rivals are fretting frankly

    The BBC has relentlessly platformed Farage over the years, a peddler of xenophobic material. On Question Time, Farage is the highest frequency guest by some number – at 35 appearances. Recent polls showing Reform within a few percentage points of Labour and the Conservatives demonstrates that such media platforming coupled with Keir Starmer’s woeful performance so far has had a major impact.

    One of Farage’s key moments was the racist ‘Breaking Point’ poster during the Brexit referendum campaign in 2016. He stood before this just a few days before a far right terrorist murdered pro-refugee MP Jo Cox. The poster resembled Nazi propaganda:

    Former general secretary of Unison Dave Prentis said at the time:

    This is scaremongering in its most extreme and vile form. [Farage has] descended into the gutter with their latest attempt to frighten working people.

    To pretend that migration to the UK is only about people who are not white is to peddle the racism that has no place in a modern, caring society.

    Reform: no answers

    It’s not just scaremongering that characterises Farage and his party. In a clue that Reform would do nothing about the housing crisis, their new treasurer is billionaire property developer Nick Candy. This is a man who has made a fortune off the artificially and financially inflated housing market. Reform MP Richard Tice is also heavily invested in property and the commercialisation of the housing essential.

    From 1995 to 2020, the ‘value’ of UK housing wealth increased from £1 trillion to £5.7 trillion. What’s ridiculous is that banks create new money to fund large mortgages that, in turn, inflate the price of housing. The creation of new money is centred on debt to private institutions. Are people from Reform who are making large sums from such a set up the people to change it? That seems unlikely.

    It’s worth noting that the Labour chancellor and prime minister are both landlords, renting out their homes, which have dramatically increased in value over the years.

    What’s clear is that the BBC presenting Farage as some kind of alternative is not only void of fact, but as the dehumanising poster from the referendum shows, it’s dangerous.

    Featured image via implausibleblog – X

    By James Wright

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • A Laura Kuenssberg guest talked a surprising amount of sense on immigration

    The topic of immigration has become increasingly heated in the UK. While the right has dominated newspaper headlines with their constant migrant-bashing, the number of people legally coming to the UK only increased under the Tories. This might seem paradoxical at first, but it really isn’t; you just don’t hear why very often, because the corporate media go along with the narrative. As such, Susanna Reid’s appearance on this weeks Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg led to an interesting discussion:

    Reid’s analysis didn’t touch on everything, but it was refreshing to hear someone giving voice to these points in the hostile media environment.

    ‘Public confidence’

    Earlier in the BBC programme, Kuenssberg interviewed home secretary Yvette Cooper and shadow home secretary Chris Philp. A BBC recap summed up key points from each interview:

    • Home Secretary Yvette Cooper says the government aims to reduce small boat crossings but won’t commit to “gimmicky” targets
    • She says the focus is on working with other countries, boosting law enforcement, and “going after the criminal gangs” to tackle the backlog
    • Meanwhile, shadow home secretary Chris Philp says the Conservatives would introduce a hard cap on migration and argues that Labour’s decision to cancel the Rwanda plan is a mistake

    Following these interviews, Kuenssberg hosted a roundtable discussion with guests including ITV‘s Susanna Reid. In the discussion, Kuenssberg said:

    Well, um, Susanna, it’s obvious Yvette Cooper doesn’t want to repeat what she sees as the political mistakes of previous governments by making a promise and then spectacularly failing to keep it. But do you think that matters to public confidence when she sort of says, oh, I just can’t tell you.

    Susanna Reid: talking sense

    Susanna Reid responded with an answer that had a surprising amount of sense for a BBC discussion:

    Yes, I do. I think that successive governments have failed to tell a positive story on immigration. We rely on immigration to run our public services, to grow our economy.

    It’s like we said before – the Tories increased both legal migration and migrant bashing. Why did they do this? A few reasons:

    This explains why they increased migration, but why simultaneously increase migrant bashing?

    The chief reason is that it drew attention away from the horrible job the Tories were doing running the country. Eventually, it went further than that, and now many don’t just think migration is a problem; they think it’s the problem – the singular reason why everything in this country has gone to shit.

    ‘Huge concern’

    Susanna Reid’s next point gets into the “huge concern” many people have. Usually when you hear a mainstream journalist talking about ‘concern’, the implication is always that people are right to be worried. Reid, however, did a somewhat decent job of explaining that it’s the government causing the problem; not migrants.

    But there is huge concern about how we support the immigrants who come. And, you know, with all due respect to Chris Philp, how he can lecture the current government on immigration when it was under the previous government that… legal net migration went up to almost a million in the year to June 2023 is kind of remarkable. Because anybody is going to be worried that if you have that scale of legal migrants coming in, how are you going to support them in the NHS? How are you going to support them with housing?

    And I think what governments need to do is say ‘we need migrants; they are positive and valuable contributors to our society, but this is the number, roughly, we need’, because otherwise you get into this kind of binary position where you have the government saying, well, you know, I know it wasn’t one of the milestones, but it’s on page 18 of the plan for change, and we’re going to lower immigration.

    That sounds like immigration is a bad thing. We’re going to lower it because immigrants are bad, but they’re not bad. And then you hand over the political argument to reform and a sort of Farage-ist proposal of one in, one out.

    It’s true; if you bash migrants and your country is in shambles, of course people are going to wonder how massive influxes of people will impact public services.

    Really, the only thing wrong with what Reid is saying is that her framing is entirely centred on the value these human beings bring to the system – a system which we all know is failing to benefit anyone besides the 1%.

    Susanna Reid: honest conversations

    There’s another key reason why the government doesn’t want to have an honest discussion about migration; that reason is any such discussion would inevitably mean analysing how our economic system works. Under the neoliberal capitalist order that’s existed for several decades, you need to keep pumping more young people into the workforce to realise the system’s goal – infinite growth – a goal which cannot be achieved in a country with finite resources.

    There’s another point that we need to discuss, and that’s while we believe people should have the right to come here, they should also have the right to stay in their home countries. Many come not because they love British culture; they come because the unequal global system has vastly diminished life in their country of origin.

    Britain is rich because other countries are not. And again, having an honest conversation about migration would shine a light on this.

    And so, while you can definitely say Susanna Reid’s discussion didn’t go far enough, it certainly went much farther than host Kuenssberg ever would.

    Featured image via BBC

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Niger suspends BBC, announces a complaint against RFI

    Dakar, December 13, 2024 – Nigerien authorities have suspended the U.K. government-funded British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for three months and announced the Nigerien government would bring a complaint of “incitement to genocide and inter-community massacre” against the French government-owned Radio France Internationale (RFI).

    “The Nigerien authorities should reverse their suspension of the BBC and their intentions to take legal action against RFI,” said Angela Quintal, head of CPJ’s Africa program, in New York. “The Nigerien government should recognize that press freedom is an essential ingredient for development and peace, and cease its efforts to control information related to the region’s security situation.”

    On Thursday, December 12, 2024, Niger’s Minister of Communication Raliou Sidi Mohamed imposed the BBC suspension. BBC reported that its programs, which are broadcast across Niger via local radio partners, had been suspended, but its “website is not blocked and the radio can still be accessed on shortwave.”

    The suspension followed Nigerien authorities’ refutation of BBC’s coverage of jihadist attacks on Tuesday, December 10, which reportedly killed dozens of soldiers and civilians. BBC said that Niger’s military government, which took power in a July 2023 coup, called accounts of the attacks “baseless assertions” and a “campaign of intoxication orchestrated by adversaries of the Nigerien people aimed at undermining the morale of our troops and sowing division.”

    BBC Afrique denied the accusations and said, “We stand by our journalism.”

    Separately, also on December 12, Niger’s government announced its intention to file a complaint against RFI following its reporting on the same attacks. The announcement said that “a vast disinformation campaign was orchestrated by Radio France Internationale in a crude and shameful montage with genocidal overtones” but did not specify when or where the complaint would be filed.

    RFI Afrique described the complaint as “extravagant and defamatory, and not based on any evidence.”

    In 2023, Nigerien authorities suspended RFI and France 24, which are both subsidiaries of the French government-owned France Médias Monde, and earlier this year tightened legal control over the press by reinstating prison sentences for defamation and insult. 

    CPJ’s phone calls to Minister of Communication Mohamed went unanswered.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Syrian human rights defender Mazen al-Hamada found dead in Sednaya prison

    If the world knew about the extent of the brutality of Assad’s regime against its own people, it was in part because of Mazen, an activist who was an outspoken critic of the regime. On Sunday 8 December 2024, his body was found in the notorious “slaughterhouse”, Seydnaya prison in Damascus. It bore signs of horrific torture. A doctor who examined it told the BBC he had fractures, burn marks and contusions all over his body, allegations corroborated by Mazen’s family.

    “It’s impossible to count the wounds on his body. His face was smashed and his nose was broken,” his sister Lamyaa said.

    A protester when the uprising in Syria began in 2011, Mazen Al-Hamada was arrested and tortured. Released in 2013, he was given asylum in the Netherlands. He began to speak openly about what he was subjected to in prison. In the documentary Syria’s Disappeared by Afshar Films, Mazen describes how he was raped, his genitals clamped, and how his ribs were broken by a guard jumping on his chest over and over again.

    While in asylum, Mazen’s nephew Jad Al-Hamada says he began suffering from severe depression and other mental health issues. …In 2020, he decided to return to Syria.

    “The government told him he had a deal and that he would be safe. He was also told that his family would be arrested and killed if he didn’t return,” Lamyaa said. He was arrested as soon as he arrived in the country. And his family believes he was killed after rebels took Hama last week, shortly before the regime fell.

    Ruth Michaelson in the Guardian of 10 December 2024 adds

    Hamada was detained and tortured alongside tens of thousands of people after the 2011 uprising against Assad’s rule. “Mazen had endured torture so cruel, so unimaginable, that his retellings carried an almost otherworldly weight. When he spoke, it was as if he stared into the face of death itself, pleading with the angel of mortality for just a little more time,” wrote Hamada’s friend, the photographer and director Sakir Khader. He “became one of the most important witnesses against Assad’s regime”, he said.

    The Syrian network for human rights (SNHR) recorded 15,102 deaths caused by torture in prisons run by the regime between March 2011 and July this year. It said 100,000 more people were missing and thought to be detained, and some might be found now that prison populations have been set free.

    Fadel Abdulghany, the head of SNHR, which tracks people who have been “forcibly disappeared”, broke down on live television this week as he said that all 100,000 people had probably “died under torture” in prison.

    Hamada was released in 2013 and granted asylum in the Netherlands in 2014, after which he began touring western capitals, bringing audiences to tears as he showed them his scars and described what he had endured at the hands of the Syrian authorities. Then, in a decision that terrified and confused his friends and rippled through the community of dissident exiles, Hamada disappeared in early 2020 after seemingly deciding to return to Syria.

    That someone who had experienced the worst of Syria’s torture chambers would choose to return led many to believe he was enticed to do by elements of Assad’s regime to prevent him from speaking out.

    Rebel forces said they found 40 corpses piled in the morgue at Sednaya showing signs of torture, with an image circulating online showing Hamada among them.

    The discovery of his body indicated he was probably killed shortly before prison inmates were liberated by insurgents. Khader described his friend’s suffering as “the unimaginable agony of a man who had risen from the dead to fight again, only to be condemned to a slow death in the west”.

    https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/dec/10/syrian-activist-who-symbolised-assad-brutality-found-dead-in-sednaya-prison

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89xgke2x7lo

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • BBC News shames itself with silence about Amnesty’s Israel genocide report

    Amnesty International released a “landmark new report” on Thursday 5 December. It concluded that Israel “has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip”. But nine hours later, BBC News was still nowhere to be found. The UK’s state broadcaster apparently had nothing to say about “the world’s best known human rights organisation” judging a close British ally to be guilty of genocide.

    In Amnesty’s press release, the group said:

    Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now.

    And it added:

    Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel’s violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel’s allies.

    https://twitter.com/amnesty/status/1864550636877976045

    Where the hell is the BBC on the Amnesty report?

    Nine hours after the release of the report (more than enough time for an outlet with the immense resources of the BBC to publish at least a simple recognition of its existence), online searches revealed no English-language news on the matter.

    Amnesty report

    However, the BBC Hausa team was putting their English-language counterparts to shame by actually doing their job:

    So it’s not that BBC News was incapable of reporting the story. Someone just decided it was not something they wanted to be a key story on this morning’s BBC News in English.

    To be fair, there was apparently a mention on BBC Radio 4. But even then, the focus was on Israel’s attempts to smear Amnesty rather than on the report itself.

    Elsewhere, ‘newspaper of record‘ the Times was also eerily silent on the matter. Fellow newspaper of record the Telegraph, however, surprisingly had enough respect for their profession to cover the report.

    Amnesty: “we could find only one reasonable conclusion”

    The Amnesty International press release confirmed what the world has been witnessing for the last fourteen months, stating that:

    Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.

    Secretary general Agnès Callamard added that:

    for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza

    And she insisted that:

    Taking into account the pre-existing context of dispossession, apartheid and unlawful military occupation in which these acts have been committed, we could find only one reasonable conclusion: Israel’s intent is the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza

    She clarified that, even if Israel argues it has other aims in Gaza, “genocidal intent can co-exist alongside military goals”. And she stressed that any atrocities that happened on 7 October 2023 “can never justify Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza”.

    She also slammed the West indirectly, highlighting that:

    The international community’s seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience

    Unfortunately, it seems that BBC News isn’t yet ready to do its part to correct that “seismic, shameful failure” or erase that stain.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Daily Mail excusing away Gregg Wallace’s predatory behaviour is the tip of the iceberg

    Thirteen people have accused Gregg Wallace of sexually inappropriate behaviour, spanning the last 17 years. Meanwhile, the corporate media’s attempts to excuse abusive men are becoming even more ridiculous, with the Mail Online quoting Wallace’s friends claiming his behaviour was due to undiagnosed autism.

    Gregg Wallace: a disgusting sexual predator

    An investigation by the BBC revealed that they were investigating Gregg Wallace after 13 allegations of ‘inappropriate sexual comments’ by 13 people who worked with him on various shows over 17 years.

    Other allegations include:

    • Talking openly about his sex life.
    • Taking his top off in front of a female worker saying he wanted to “give her a fashion show”.
    • Telling a junior female colleague he wasn’t wearing any boxer shorts under his jeans.
    • Showing topless pictures of himself.
    • Asking for massages.
    • Saying he was fascinated by a female colleague dating women and asking for logistics of how it worked.
    • Staring at a woman’s chest.
    • Saying sexually explicit things on set.

    The BBC concluded that:

    many aspects of [Wallace’s] behaviour were both unacceptable and unprofessional.

    Protecting the powerful

    According to Mail Online, Wallace’s friends claim he has a “secret autism condition” but has never been diagnosed. His close friends say he has an inability to judge social situations and that he has a light filter when it comes to sex:

    Gregg Wallace

    Firsly, Mail Online, it’s called autism.

    Secondly, it speaks volumes when your article, about a man who 13 different people have accused of sexual harassment, starts with an excuse for his shitty behaviour. Let’s make one thing clear, there are NO excuses for this type of behaviour.

    How much longer are we going continue allowing the media to find every excuse under the sun for predatory men?

    Thirdly, using autism as an excuse is quite frankly insulting to the millions of Autistic people across the world. Autistic people are actually far more likely to be on the receiving end of sexual offences than the general population.

    Yet again, we are seeing the right-wing media continuing to excuse the actions of men – because what, they’re powerful?

    Not everyone can speak up

    Over the weekend, Wallace claimed the accusers were a “handful of middle-class women of certain age”.

    Like everything else coming out of his mouth, this is problematic in several ways:

    But what about the women who can’t afford to speak up?

    Older, middle-class women can literally afford to speak out. Some of the accusers are fellow TV presenters and celebrities which means that they have the platforms, followings, and support to be able to speak out and not face as much backlash for doing so.

    But what about the younger, working-class women who may just be starting out their careers and are too afraid of the repercussions from speaking up?

    Speaking up costs women

    This speaks to a much larger issue within society.

    Speaking up often costs women.

    Whether its financially from risking a job, to losing friends or colleagues, women often have to put everything on the line in order to speak up about abusive or predatory behaviour. Not only that, their characters and reputations are brought into question.

    Meanwhile, we watch the right-wing media find any excuse necessary – in this instance, bringing up the possibility of Gregg Wallace being Autistic in the first paragraph of their article – to excuse men’s shitty behaviour.

    Middle class women of a certain age? More like powerful men thinking, and knowing, for years that they can get away with disgusting behaviour. Abusive men don’t like women who see what’s going on.

    Gregg Wallace: the top of the iceberg

    Unsurprisingly, Wallace’s futile attempts to explain himself have only created more backlash. At least he’s digging his own grave though:

    It’s quickly becoming clear that for years, the BBC has been the perfect hideout for abusive men. From coverups of Jimmy Saville and Stuart Hall, to Huw Edwards and now Gregg Wallace. This is yet another clusterfuck for the BBC.

    As usual, men all over social media have jumped to defend him.

    The Canary is taking bets on Reform announcing him as their next candidate. Or perhaps there’s a role for him in Trump’s team? Whatever the case, it is clear than men like him belong nowhere near TV, power, or women.

    Feature image via 

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Diane Abbott forensically demolishing Keir Starmer is just delicious

    When Keir Starmer first became Labour Party leader, we were told over and over by fawning columnists that he would bring a ‘forensic’ approach to the job. Since becoming PM, of course, Starmer has shown he has the political intelligence of Mr Bean – not an ideal situation, as he also has the charisma and common sense of Mr Bean. To the delight of Starmer’s many detractors, MP Diane Abbott spoke out about his many failings on the 1 December edition of Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg (hosted this week by Victoria Derbyshire):

    Diane Abbott: Keith Forensic

    In the clip above, Diane Abbott says:

    There’s been issues where I think Keir Starmer has shown poor judgement. He didn’t seem to understand that a man on a £150,000 a year – as leader of the opposition – it would look bad if he was getting a millionaire to pay for his glasses and his suits.

    This ended up being obvious to everyone besides the Labour front bench, who defended Starmer on the grounds that he doesn’t receive a ‘clothes budget’:

    Would you believe that many freaks in the media also agreed that politicians deserve an extra allowance?

    We don’t need to tell you this because you already know, but buying your own clothes is a very normal thing to do. We also don’t need to tell you that if a millionaire offered to buy you clothing that would be a very un-normal thing to happen, and that you’d immediately realise this person wanted something unsavoury in return.

    Diane Abbott connected Starmer’s sugar daddy scandal to Labour cancelling the Winter Fuel Allowance, saying:

    Maybe if he’d done more door knocking for the Labour Party, then he’d understand of all the people to take money off, not pensioners. Pensioners don’t forgive and forget. And they’re one of the blocks of voters who actually do vote. He didn’t seem to get it – that that will be a problem. And people are still coming up to my colleagues in other parts of the country on the street to complain about what he did about Winter Fuel.

    It’s a good point.

    Like Abbott, we’re in favour of universal benefits and disagree with removing the Winter Fuel Allowance on principle. Beyond that, even the most cynical political operator should have understood that Labour was starting the long race to re-election by shooting itself in the foot.

    Making Haigh

    On 29 November, transport secretary Louise Haigh resigned after it came out that she’d plead guilty to fraud in 2014. Al Jazeera summarised her run in with the law as follows:

    Haigh’s friends say that in 2013, after a “terrifying” mugging, she could not find her work phone in her bag and reported it as stolen to police. Haigh’s employer, Aviva, a private insurance company, provided her with a new mobile.

    Haigh later discovered the missing phone in a drawer and switched it on to check messages, her friends say. However, she failed to notify authorities that she found the phone. When the mobile’s signal was picked up by the phone company, they alerted the police, who then asked Haigh to come in and make a statement.

    The exact timeline of these events is unclear, but Haigh pleaded guilty to fraud by misrepresentation in 2014. She received a discharge without any further action against her.

    Meanwhile, Aviva reportedly investigated at least one other missing phone, suspecting that Haigh was seeking newer models — a claim her allies deny. Haigh eventually resigned from Aviva, feeling the investigation was unfair.

    The issue wasn’t so much what she did or didn’t do as what she did or didn’t declare.

    The problem for Starmer is that Haigh claims she informed him before taking the position, and that she only didn’t inform the government’s propriety and ethics team because they asked about “unspent convictions”. Starmer has yet to confirm this version of events. Presumably he’s still contemplating to the most incompetent way to admit or deny it.

    This is what Diane Abbott had to say, anyway:

    He knew that she had this problem with her claim for her mobile phone. He knew it from the beginning. And now, to throw her under the bus like this; I don’t get it. She was one of our more effective cabinet ministers, and why do this to her? And again, he doesn’t seem to understand, it makes him look bad.

    It’s a good point.

    Was Starmer being incompetent when he (allegedly) appointed Haigh despite her past, or is he being incompetent now for allowing her to resign over an issue he (allegedly) knew about?

    He’s got Reform

    Abbott is correct; Starmer is completely and utterly inept. Just look at the video below:

    In the video, a smiling Starmer initiates what he seems to think will be a cosy chat with Nigel Farage – patting his rival on the arm. If we had to guess, we’d speculate Starmer thought this would show Reform voters he takes them seriously. This doesn’t work because Farage is a much smarter operator than him. Farage doesn’t smile back; he instead makes it clear in his manner that he doesn’t respect Starmer at all. In fact, he literally talks down to the man.

    As we said, Starmer is completely inept – which Diane Abbott knows, too.

    And because of his monumental incompetence, we’ve no doubt that he’ll pass from being Mr Bean to Mr Has Been without winning a second election.

    Featured image – Evening Standard and Sky News

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Jeremy Clarkson rattled after Victoria Derbyshire exposes his cynical manipulation of farmers

    The BBC‘s Victoria Derbyshire left former Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson rattled at the farmers’ protest in Westminster. She suggested he was attending because he bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax:

    Labour’s changes for farmers

    In the budget, Labour effectively introduced inheritance tax of 20% on farm estates worth more than £1m. But tax relief for married couples means most will only pay the tax on those worth more than £2m.

    And it’s actually the case that for more than half of the estates impacted (56%), the individual hadn’t received any trading income from agriculture in the five years before their death, as the Canary previously reported. And only 10% received an average of more than £10,000 per year in agricultural income.

    Jeremy Clarkson said:

    I’m here to support farmers

    But Derbyshire queried:

    So it’s not about you and the fact that you bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax?

    And Clarkson laughably said:

    Classic BBC!

    No ‘classic BBC’ is successive studies that show it’s Conservative-leaning and anti-left. One major content analysis found Tory cabinet members have double the BBC appearances of their Labour counterparts, while accounting for who’s in power. That’s despite Tory figures as senior as David Cameron shielding offshore trusts from transparency laws and benefiting from his father’s own offshore trust.

    Then, Clarkson admitted he would further avoid the inheritance tax changes:

    People like me will simply put it in a trust

    So Derbyshire pointed out:

    One of the reasons Rachel Reeves said she brought this in was to stop wealthy people using it as a way to [avoid tax]

    Jeremy Clarkson isn’t representative of farmers, but when you get to the dukes its astonishing

    Guy Shrubsole is author of the book the Lie of the Land, where he notes that less than 1% of the population owns more than half of England’s land. Speaking on LBC, he pointed out:

    You’ve got your Jeremy Clarksons, who own 1,000 acres. That’s bigger than 90% of English farms… then… you’ve got 20 dukes who own a million acres of Britain. A million acres.

    Additionally, 355 wealthy landowners including such aristocrats are benefiting from a different, obscure tax loophole that Labour hasn’t closed. The “tax-exempt heritage assets scheme” enables these landowners to avoid inheritance tax through registering property and land as so-called ‘heritage assets’.

    The qualification for this status is loose: you must ‘look after the land’ and make it ‘available for the public to view’. Freedom of information requests from Shrubsole revealed that rich landowners avoid at least £68m from the scheme.

    So, Derbyshire was right to skewer Jeremy Clarkson. His protestations aren’t about farmers. They’re about him and his tax-avoiding rich mates.

    Featured image via BBC Newsnight – X

    By James Wright

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • BBC ignores account of Israel’s torture and murder of leading doctor from Gaza

    CONTENT WARNING: this article includes accounts of torture and sexual violence that readers may find distressing

    Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was among the best-trained medical professionals in occupied Gaza. He was well-known and well-loved. But Israel’s occupation forces (IOF) detained him, without charging him for any crimes. And within months, they had tortured him to death.

    A new Sky News report has shared accounts revealing details of his brutal murder. But the BBC (along with other mainstream media outlets) seems to think they are not worth sharing.

    Israel’s murder of Adnan Al-Bursh

    As Israel was destroying Gaza in December 2023, Adnan Al-Bursh was working in Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza. As fellow doctor Mohammad Obeid recounted to Sky News, the hospital’s director informed “all males aged between 14 and 65” that they would have to leave. The IOF had “told him that if all men do not come down… they will destroy the Awda Hospital with all the women and children in it”. They duly left the building.

    Without any charges, the IOF abducted him. They took him to the notorious Sde Teiman military base in Israel, where video footage of IOF soldiers gang-raping a prisoner caused uproar in August 2024. A fellow inmate at Sde Teiman, Dr Khalid Hamouda, told Sky News that “at least a quarter” of the people in the torture camp at the time were probably medical professionals. The IOF had already beaten Al-Bursh badly by the time he arrived, Hamouda said. “He was unable to even go to the toilet alone.”

    The IOF claims to have passed “responsibility” for Adnan Al-Bursh over to the Israeli Prison Service just a week later. His captors would take him to Ofer Prison near Jerusalem in April. And that’s where he died.

    In a deposition, a fellow prisoner explained:

    In mid-April 2024, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison. The prison guards brought Dr Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body…

    The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up.

    Israel has systematically attacked Gaza’s healthcare system, and systematically tortured prisoners

    In October, the BBC reported on a UN ‘commission of inquiry’ that had criticised Israel for its “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system”. The IOF had “deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel”, according to the report. And it was children who had “borne the brunt” of this callous campaign. Human Rights Watch has also documented the arbitrary detention of healthcare workers from Gaza, having interviewed eight professionals whom the IOF had abducted without charge. Allegations of mistreatment in captivity include “rape and sexual abuse“.

    In August, meanwhile, Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem had released a report documenting systematic “sexual abuse, starvation and assault” at prisons across Israel. It had interviewed 55 Palestinian prisoners whom Israel had held since 7 October. B’Tselem spokesperson Shai Parnes explained:

    As we gathered the testimonies, we realised that every witness account was almost identical, no matter what their age, gender or location was. There’s no doubt. This kind of abuse is systematic.

    Almost all of those B’Tselem interviewed were released without charges.

    The report reveals:

    a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy. Facilities in which every inmate is deliberately subjected to harsh, relentless pain and suffering operate as de-facto torture camps.

    And it seems that Adnan Al-Bursh was one of the people who lost his life as a result of this systematic torture machine.

    After 7 October 2023, Israeli propaganda highlighted allegations of sexual violence on that day. But as numerous sources have highlighted since, there is little to no evidence of such violence, any such actions were unlikely to have been ‘part of the plan’, and we can’t justify calling any such actions ‘widespread’ or ‘systematic’.

    Where is the BBC‘s report?

    Sky News has faced criticism recently for its pro-Israel editorial decisions, along with other corporate media outlets. There is clearly a lot of pressure on journalists to minimise, underplay, or ignore the brutality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Indeed, it often seems like mainstream outlets are competing among themselves to be the least worst. And with its important report about Adnan Al-Bursh, Sky News showed that it probably isn’t the worst right now.

    The BBC, meanwhile, often shows its priorities via omission. Because it shared the initial news in May about Al-Bursh’s death in captivity. But at the time of writing, it seems to have remained silent on the Sky News revelations about the details of his murder. And this simply adds more evidence to allegations of clear pro-Israel bias in its coverage.

    UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese called Western media outlets failing to report on this ‘racist’. She said:

    The racism of Western media who are not covering this, and Western politicians who are not denouncing this, together with the thousand other testimonies and allegations of rape and other forms of mistreatment and torture that Palestinians have suffered in Israeli jails, is absolutely sickening.

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Prof Emily Shuckburgh, Fiona Atkinson & Alex De Koning with Nicky Campbell | BBC Radio | 7 Nov 2024


    This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Alex De Koning talks with Nicky Campbell | BBC Radio 5 | 7 November 2024 | Just Stop Oil


    This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Deliberate Israeli Targeting of Palestinian Children Becomes “Local News” on the BBC

    Imagine an experienced Ukrainian surgeon breaking down in front of a committee of British MPs as he related how Russian forces had been deliberately targeting Ukrainian children.

    Imagine the surgeon had had to operate in desperate conditions on young children who had been lying injured after a Russian bombing attack and who were then ‘picked off’ by Russian drones. The atrocity claims would be headline news all across Western media.

    Here, in the real world, the horrific testimony of a British surgeon who had operated on children in Gaza targeted by Israeli drones after Israeli bombing attacks– something that happened ‘day after day after day’ – has been largely blanked.

    Professor Nizam Mamode, a retired NHS surgeon who recently returned after working at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, said he had ‘never seen anything on this scale, ever’. He has worked in a number of conflicts around the world, including the genocide in Rwanda.

    Prof Mamode worked for a month between August and September as a volunteer for the charity, Medical Aid for Palestinians. In a hearing on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, he told members of the UK parliamentary International Development Committee :

    ‘Drones would come down and pick off civilians, children. This is not an occasional thing. This was day after day after day operating on children who would say, “I was lying on the ground after a bomb dropped and this quadcopter [a small, remotely-piloted helicopter drone] came down and hovered over me and shot me”.’

    Prof Mamode told MPs he saw children with sniper injuries to the head. He also noted that the pellets fired by most drones were more destructive than bullets which would go straight through a victim’s body. Instead, the pellets would bounce around inside bodies, creating much more extensive damage.

    A seven-year-old boy, who had been caught up in an Israeli bombing and then deliberately hit by an Israeli drone, came into the hospital with his stomach hanging out of his chest. He had further injuries to his liver, spleen, bowel and arteries.

    ‘He survived that and went out a week later. Whether he is still alive, I don’t know.’

    The surgeon broke down three times during his testimony. He described one case of an 8-year-old girl who was bleeding to death during surgery: ‘I asked for a swab and they said, “No more swabs”’.

    As he spoke to the MPs, he was momentarily overcome with emotion.

    Simple medical items, such as sterile gloves and painkillers, are in short supply because of Israel’s blocking of aid into Gaza, said Prof Mamode. This also applies to basic items like soap and shampoo, leading to unhygienic conditions.

    He added:

    ‘I saw I don’t know how many wounds with maggots in [them]. One of my colleagues took maggots out of a child’s throat in intensive care. There were flies in operating theatre landing in wounds.’

    He told MPs that he had spent the entire month in the hospital, partly because it was not safe to travel around. But also because, in January 2024, Israel had bombed the guest house used by Medical Aid for Palestinians.

    The surgeon believes that this was done deliberately by Israeli forces:

    ‘All of those guest houses are in the Israeli army’s computers and are designated safe houses, so my assumption is that it was a deliberate attack and the aim behind it is to discourage aid workers from coming.’

    He said the same applied to five Israeli attacks on UN convoys, including one while he was in Gaza.

    Labour MP and committee chair Sarah Champion asked Prof Mamode if he meant that rogue snipers were shooting at the armoured vehicles.

    ‘No, no. This is the Israeli army coming up as a unit and deliberately shooting.’

    Prof Mamode’s Palestinian colleagues told him that when Israeli forces attacked the hospital in February, they killed members of staff and deposited them in a mass grave with dead patients. Many other colleagues were taken away. The surgeon related one such case:

    ‘They [Israeli soldiers] just took him away and killed him. That’s what’s going on. As far as I can see, it doesn’t matter who you are in Gaza. If you are a Palestinian in Gaza, you are a target.’

    Champion said in her parliamentary summary:

    ‘The Committee will do all we can to act on Professor Mamode’s extraordinary testimony and ensure his experiences are heard loud and clear. If leaders are not yet listening, they should be by now.’

    This should have generated massive coverage across national news media, with the Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Minister David Lammy being bombarded by questions from journalists on what action the UK government would now take. Instead, there has been virtual silence. As far as we can tell, there was no broadcast coverage on BBC News, Sky News or ITV, although Channel 4 News did include an item on Prof Mamode’s testimony, at least on its X feed (we could not find a broadcast item, however, on the Channel 4 News programme catch-up page). We do not have the resources to monitor all television and radio programmes, so we cannot rule out that there was a passing mention on the BBC World Service or elsewhere.

    Nor were there any editorials or significant coverage in major news reports in UK national newspapers. Prof Mamode’s appearance before the parliamentary committee was reported in a live Guardian blog about Gaza on 12 November, but his most compelling and harrowing evidence was omitted or glossed over. To his credit, Owen Jones mentioned the surgeon’s account in a Guardian opinion piece.

    The appalling lack of serious coverage is actually highlighted by the fact that there was one article on the BBC News website about Prof Mamode’s testimony to the committee (we were alerted to it by a post on X by one of our followers). The article was titled, ‘Gaza surgeon describes drones targeting children’. As is often the case, the word ‘Israel’ or ‘Israeli’ – as in ‘Israeli drones’ – was missing from the headline. In other words, the perpetrator of violence was missing. Moreover, rather than refer to Prof Mamode as a British surgeon, he was labelled as a ‘Gaza surgeon’, perhaps implying that he was employed by the ‘Hamas-run health ministry’, the phrase that is routinely deployed in BBC News reports.

    But here was the most glaring feature of the piece: rather than being placed on the front page or even somewhere in the section marked, ‘Israel-Gaza war’, a glaring misnomer for an ongoing genocide, it appeared deep inside the BBC’s ‘Local News’ category on the page for ‘Hampshire & Isle of Wight’. (As far as we know, it never appeared in a more prominent place on the BBC News website. But the fact that the bottom of the article contains the line, ‘Get in touch: Do you have a story BBC Hampshire & Isle of Wight should cover?’, suggests that it was immediately placed in that section). The same treatment was afforded to an earlier BBC News article in October, shortly after the surgeon had returned from Gaza, but with the most disturbing details about the deliberate targeting of children omitted.

    Why place such an important story in the ‘Hampshire & Isle Of Wight’ local news section of the BBC website? The ostensible reason is that Prof Mamode comes from Brockenhurst, a New Forest village in Hampshire. But surely the real reason was to minimise public attention and thus evade pressure from the powerful Israel lobby. After all, as we have mentioned before, senior BBC News staff have admitted to ‘waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis’. The Israel lobby’s weaponising of antisemitism, which was deployed to prevent Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister, is being used to suppress or silence criticism of Israel. This has had a crippling effect on journalism and free speech.

    Regular readers will recall the dearth of media coverage given to the harrowing testimony provided by Professor Nick Maynard, a UK surgeon who works as a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital, when he returned from Gaza earlier this year. He had described the clear, deliberate targeting of hospital and healthcare facilities; but also the actual execution of Palestinian surgeons and other medical staff.

    In April, Prof Maynard said that Israeli forces are: ‘systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system.’

    He described what had happened to Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza where he had previously worked, and where around 400 Palestinians had reportedly been killed in a brutal two-week attack by Israeli forces:

    ‘Every single part of the hospital has been destroyed. The whole infrastructure of the hospital has been destroyed. When I spoke to Marwan [a Palestinian colleague] yesterday, he told me there were 107 patients, 60 medical staff. God only knows what has happened to them. I think we’ve seen some of the pictures. Surgeons I know have been executed in the last 48 hours there. Bodies have been discovered in the last 12-24 hours who had been handcuffed, with their hands behind their back. [Our added emphasis].’

    He added: ‘And so, there is no doubt at all, that multiple healthcare workers have been executed there in the last few days.’

    All of the above, taken together with the media’s recent gaslighting about a supposed ‘pogrom’ against rampaging Israeli football fans chanting genocidal, anti-Arab slogans in Amsterdam last week – disinformation expertly dissected by Richard Sanders for Double Down News – reveals like never before the monstrous, genocide-enabling reality of ‘mainstream’ news media.

    Meanwhile, Israel appears able to continue unimpeded in its brutal drive towards a ‘Greater Israel’, openly espoused by Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians, which would require the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians ‘from the Jordan to the sea’.

    The post Deliberate Israeli Targeting of Palestinian Children Becomes “Local News” on the BBC first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The BBC just laid cover for Israel over shocking war crimes claims in parliament

    British surgeon Nizam Mamode spent some time working at Nasser Hospital in Gaza. And testifying in parliament this week, he explained how Israel’s drones would come and shoot at children and other civilians after airstrikes. The BBC, however, ran with the title “Gaza surgeon describes drones targeting children”. It could have simply added the word “Israeli” before the word “drones”, but it chose not to.

    This is just the latest example of the BBC‘s clear pro-Israel bias during the apartheid state’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

    The BBC has consistently echoed Israeli propaganda, seeking to minimise or undermine the veracity of statistics relating to the number of deaths in Gaza, by emphasising regularly that the occupied territory’s health ministry is “Hamas-run“. Calling Mamode a “Gaza surgeon” in the headline rather than a ‘British surgeon’ or ‘former NHS surgeon’, meanwhile, has a similar impact. Because in the end, most people never read beyond headlines.

    “The drones would come down and pick off civilians, children”

    Mamode told the International Development Committee that:

    a bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area, and then the drones would come down

    Then, he continued:

    The drones would come down and pick off civilians, children

    He also stressed that:

    This is not an occasional thing. This was day after day after day operating on children who would say, ‘I was lying on the ground after a bomb dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me’.

    BBC complicity in genocide

    Many establishment journalists over time have been complicit in manufacturing consent for genocide and other crimes. And some have even faced convictions for their roles. It’s unfortunately uncommon. But it happens, and should happen more often.

    The BBC knows how to be clear. For example, this week another headline from the state broadcaster read “Ukrainian girl killed by Russian drone as attacks surge”. When it’s an official cause the British state is supportive of, there’s no problem. When it’s an cause the British state opposes, like holding the war criminals in apartheid Israel to account, the BBC treads timidly.

    So when it wants to, or is allowed to, the BBC can clearly name the perpetrator. In fact, even in the article in question about Nizam Mamode’s testimony, the broadcaster was clear in the article itself. It said “A retired surgeon who volunteered at a hospital in Gaza has told MPs that Israeli drones would target children who were lying injured after bombings”. It simply chose not to attribute blame to Israel in its headline.

    These choices make a difference. And all licence-fee payers in Britain should demand better.

    Featured image via screengrab

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Badenoch names every other reason for the Tories’ wipeout – except the right one

    On Saturday 2 November, Kemi Badenoch became the latest leader of the Conservative Party – the sixth in the past decade. A day later on 3 November, she appeared in a notably less-than-hostile interview with the BBC‘s Laura Kuenssberg. A telling moment was when Kuenssberg asked Badenoch to identify the failures which led to the Tories’ historic loss in July. Badenoch’s response shows that the Tories are still in denial about where it all went wrong for them – namely the cost of living crisis.

    It’s the economy, stupid

    In one exchange, Kuenssberg lightly badgered Badenoch about what had gone wrong for the Tories. Badenoch tried to wriggle out of answering, but eventually identified two issues which led to their downfall:

    • Immigration.
    • Taxes.

    We’re going to argue that she failed to mention the actual reason the Tories lost, and that’s the cost of living crisis. Just look at this polling from YouGov on the key issues for the public:

    That red line at the top is the economy; the pink line below it is health; the purple line below that is immigration. And tax? The green line right at the bottom.

    As of the most recent polling, you can see that the economy, health, and immigration have become essentially joint-first issues in public discourse. It’s clear, though, that since the cost of living crisis began in 2021, ‘the economy’ has been the key issue for people. And that makes sense. Because when ordinary people talk about ‘the economy’, they’re not taking about the FTSE 100; they’re talking about the economy as it effects them. This means the cost of shopping, the cost of a mortgage, the costs of day care, etc.

    If you live in the UK, and you’re not a top 5% earner like Laura Kuenssberg, you know cost-of-living is the key issue, because that’s all anyone has talked about for the past three years. It also tracks directly to voting intention, with the Tories hitting 46% in May 2021 and that percentage steadily declining as people felt the pinch

    We further think it’s the case that immigration is only such a big issue for the public because the Tories made it that way. They had no good answers to the cost of living crisis, so they needed something to distract from their failures.

    While the number of people moving between countries has increased, the UK is far from facing collapse, as Southampton & Winchester Vistors Group highlights:

    Is the UK under more pressure from asylum seekers and refugees than other countries?

    No it is not, in spite of the picture painted by some of our politicians and media.

    Out of 28 member states in the EU, the UK ranks ninth in terms of numbers of applications. In 2015, the UK received just fewer than 40 thousand asylum applications. Germany had over 400 thousand, ten times as many.

    Today, for all sorts of reasons, refugee numbers are climbing. At the end of 2016, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide had risen to 65.6 million, up 6.1 million from 2014. But the vast majority of refugees (88%) live in developing countries, not wealthy industrialized ones.

    And because the UK gets relatively few asylum applicants, we host fewer refugees – less than 1% of the global total. Turkey by contrast hosts the largest number of refugees of any country: it is currently giving sanctuary to 2.5 million Syrian refugees, while Jordan and Lebanon host 1.7 million between them. By the end of 2016 the UK had resettled 5,706 Syrian refugees.

    And as an island off the north of Europe, we are under much less pressure from migrants than, for example, Greece. In addition, under EU (but not UN) rules, asylum seekers should claim asylum in the first safe country they come to, and can be sent back to where they first entered.

    If the Tories were serious about addressing the number of refugees, they’d focus on root causes such as endless wars in the Middle East (spurned by the UK and its allies) and climate change. Instead, they scream and shout at helpless people in tiny boats. It’s a move which backfired, galvanising the Reform Party, who accepted the Tory lie that immigration is ruining the country and promised to actually do something about it.

    In that sense, immigration is a key reason why the Tories lost, but not for the reason Badenoch claims.

    Badenoch: endless culture wars

    Of course, there was more to criticise than just one response, with both Badenoch and Kuenssberg taking flack:

     

    Many have said that Badenoch is likely to deliver endless culture wars and little else. One advocate of Badenoch is writer J.K. Rowling who has similarly become embroiled in the culture wars (this tweet references David Tennant’s recent criticisms of the new Tory leader’s stance on transgender people):

    As people have pointed out, however, Badenoch’s rampant culture wars will target more than just transgender people:

    People have also rightly pointed out that Badenoch’s endless culture wars likely aren’t going to resonate with people who have actual problems:

     

    This is clear in the polling, with Badenoch even more unpopular than the historically unpopular Keir Starmer:

    While far from the most pressing issue, some noted Badenoch’s terrible posture:

    Her posture could be a case of the chair being too big for her; she could also have a severe case of ‘nerd neck‘ from all that hacking:

    Bleak cost of living crisis Britain

    The sad truth is that if the Tories could have maintained lethargic growth and low inflation they could have clung to power for five more years. With our billionaire-owned media and a middle class who care only about their house price, a great deal could have been swept under the rug.

    Unfortunately for the Tories, the cost of living crisis affected everyone outside the wealthiest 5%, and kicked off a chain of events which made the Tories’ ousting inevitable. A fact they’re still painfully denying.

    Featured image via the BBC

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Kuenssberg begs ‘WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE LANDLORDS’ as ‘working person’ debate rages on

    Labour has found itself in a bit of a mess over the concept of what constitutes a ‘working person’. While this may seem pretty straightforward to you, it’s far from the case for the media. In their election campaign, the Labour Party vowed not to tax ‘working people’. This has led to lots of confusion; in part because journalists are pretending not to understand what ‘work’ is. And while we’re of the opinion that Labour has made this mess for itself by not  calling for clear taxes on the mega-rich, that doesn’t excuse the feigned stupidity of journalists like the BBC‘s Laura Kuenssberg:

    Kuenssberg: it’s hard work, being a parasitic landlord

    Kuenssberg asked if buy-to-let landlords count – specifically buy-to-let landlords who had to work to purchase their mini rental empire. This is something most people could answer quite clearly:

    • Working to save up to buy the houses = work.
    • Reaping rental money each month from your asset portfolio = not-work.

    So we could imagine a situation in which these petit land barons are taxed more on their rental income but not taxed more on any actual work they still engage in. You don’t need to understand rocket science to see this. You don’t even need to understand rocket salad:

    Some landlords would likely disagree, of course. ‘I have to call a plumber sometimes’, they might say, or ‘I have to fill out forms’, or ‘I have to meet the agent I pay to call plumbers and fills out forms’. What it comes do is the amount of ‘work’ compared to the amount of ‘profit’. The aim of every landlord is to basically do nothing for months at a time while still receiving rent, and as you’ve likely rented yourself, you’ll know that most of them achieve this. Some landlords probably do spend more time maintaining their properties, but these aren’t the norm, and you probably wouldn’t want to spare landlords in their entirety because of a minority of exceptional buy-to-letters.

    The landlord situation is interesting because there is a massive difference between an artistocrat who owns half of Cambridge and Brian from Dudley who rents his old house. The good news for those who think low-rung buy-to-letters should be spared is that you can make taxes progressive – i.e. the more you earn, the more tax you pay. Again, this isn’t rocket salad.

    Do we think that this is what Labour should do?

    Well, it’s a poor option compared to “ending landlordism” entirely, but that’s besides the point here.

    The point is that the media is pretending not to understand what work is. But have Labour brought this problem on themselves?

    Tax who exactly?

    Sky News made a good point this week when it wrote:

    Labour actually mentioned the term working people 21 times in their manifesto, so you’d think they would have a pretty concrete idea of who they have in their mind’s eye when pushed on their definition.

    But yesterday when asked by Sky News whether anyone whose income derived from assets, such as shares or property, could be considered a working person, Sir Keir Starmer said: “Well, they wouldn’t come within my definition.”

    The point is that Labour seemingly didn’t put any thought into this at all.

    Which is staggering.

    Keir Starmer has been the Labour leader since 2019. Five years is enough time to make a plan, and yet the impression we’re getting is that Labour didn’t start seriously thinking about this until after the “loveless landslide” in July.

    The vagueness isn’t even the biggest problem, either; the real issue is that there was an obvious means of raising money right there, and Starmer’s Labour did everything they could not to call for it.

    Wealth taxes

    As Tax Justice UK notes:

    Wealth inequality in the UK is surging, while millions don’t have enough to get by. All the while our underfunded NHS and public services continue to struggle. We need to tax the very rich more to save our society.

    They add:

    The UK is home to an extraordinary number of billionaires – their wealth has increased twelvefold in thirty years. While the world’s ten richest men recently doubled their fortunes in the space of two years.

    It’s an idea with a proven track record of success:

    Just look what’s happened to the wealth of these people without appropriate wealth taxes (at the same time that actual working people have seen their quality of life steadily decline):

    Tax Justice UK has plenty of ideas on how to tax wealth, as they explain:

    • New taxes on wealth: We’re campaigning for a new wealth tax: a 2% levy on individuals who own assets worth more than £10 million. It would affect 0.04% of the UK population. And we’re campaigning to apply national insurance to investment income, raising up to £24 billion a year.
    • Reform existing taxes on wealth: Those who get their income from stocks, shares and other assets often pay far less tax than those who work. We campaign for the tax rates on these forms of income to be equalised with income tax. So we all pay the same rates. It could raise £16.7 billion a year. Additionally we campaign for National Insurance to be applied to all forms of income, not just work. This would raise an additional £10.2 billion a year.
    • Clamp down on tax havens: Hundreds of billions of pounds are lost every single year to tax avoidance via tax havens. We campaign for global action against tax havens. We’re demanding more transparency – and global minimum rates of tax, so countries aren’t undercutting each other.

    Some people like economist Grace Blakeley are promoting a petition calling for Rachel Reeves to implement wealth taxes in the upcoming budget:

    Given that Labour seem to be coming up with policy on the fly, there may still be time for them to take notice. It seems clear where their loyalties lie at this point, but it’s good to make clear that Labour’s loyalties are not those of the public they supposedly serve.

    Kuenssberg: a wealth of bad opinions

    Kuenssberg herself is clearly a working person. It takes hard work to consistently have opinions this bad, and we can’t take that away from her. If we implemented wealth taxes, however, we could claw back the undeserved wealth of her Tory mates.

    Featured image via BBC

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • No, Laura Kuenssberg’s interview with Wes Streeting was not ‘BBC bias’

    On Sunday 20 October, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg interviewed health secretary Wes Streeting. To many, it was a textbook example of ‘BBC bias’ in which Kuenssberg asked Streeting the hard questions she never asked the Tories:

    We’ve reported on BBC bias more than most, and we agree that Kuenssberg treats Labour Party politicians very differently than Tory ones. However, the key bias isn’t her preference for one party over the other; it’s the normalisation of some ideas in tandem with the wilful exclusion of others:

    “Cheaper. Safer. More effective”

    Bylines Scotland describes Goyal as follows:

    Dr Daniel Goyal works as medical consultant in the NHS. He is also a senior lecturer and researcher in health systems at the University of Gibraltar, and a health equality activist.

    He’s a host of The Debrief, which is a “podcast for frontline healthcare workers”. In an article published by Bylines Scotland on 18 October titled “Labour’s vision for the NHS is getting grim“, Goyal wrote:

    It’s odd. I mean it really does stand out. On the one hand, we have a Labour Government that seems to understand – in broad terms – the major issues at the heart of the NHS crisis. Indeed, its own commissioned report highlighted quite clearly that the NHS is too small and is grossly under-resourced. Despite this, Labour continues to focus on “reform” and on pushing more NHS resources into the private sector.

    Explaining his issues with this and Wes Streeting, he explains:

    The issue is that the private sector exists in the UK simultaneously in two forms. One form is what you would expect: a private enterprise trying to build a customer base by offering a quicker and better service than the public service. Fine. The other is more peculiar: funding directly from the public purse. Not fine. I have some questions and comments.

    The vast majority of private healthcare profit comes directly from the NHS budget. That is, we are paying private healthcare services directly from the public services budget. This is not the same as a private company securing government contracts to provide a public good. No, these are private companies generating profit from the budget assigned for our public national health service. Odder still, the NHS is paying private companies to undertake procedures and services the NHS itself provides. The obvious question remains unanswered: why not just use that money to expand the capacity of the NHS?

    Noting that Labour is expanding private funding under the guise of bringing down record waiting lists, he further notes:

    So the prevailing political logic is – and stay with me here – because the NHS doesn’t have the resources to stay on top of demands; NHS resources are being taken to provide these services privately, leaving the NHS with even fewer resources to get on top of the waiting lists.

    Goyal wasn’t the only person reacting to the Streeting interview with the same question:

    Wes Streeting: the other big question

    Wes Streeting also appeared on Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips. For many, the interview highlighted another question that journalists seem unwilling to ask:

    Why not implement a wealth tax indeed? As Tax Justice UK notes:

    Wealth inequality in the UK is surging, while millions don’t have enough to get by. All the while our underfunded NHS and public services continue to struggle. We need to tax the very rich more to save our society.

    They add:

    The UK is home to an extraordinary number of billionaires – their wealth has increased twelvefold in thirty years. While the world’s ten richest men recently doubled their fortunes in the space of two years.

    This has an obvious knock-on effect for society, as Tax Justice UK explains:

    The NHS, our schools, emergency services and local councils are all crying out for more funding to keep their essential services running. These things aren’t ‘nice to haves’, they’re necessary. We need more tax revenue to keep them running.

    There’s speculation that Labour will raise capital gains tax in its budget, which already has some multi-millionaires complaining they’ll leave the country. What’s important to remember, though, is that if trade or economic activity takes place within our borders, we can tax it, so it really doesn’t matter where these people live.

    Tax Justice UK has plenty of ideas that go much further than a slight bump to capital gains tax, as they explain:

    • New taxes on wealth: We’re campaigning for a new wealth tax: a 2% levy on individuals who own assets worth more than £10 million. It would affect 0.04% of the UK population. And we’re campaigning to apply national insurance to investment income, raising up to £24 billion a year.
    • Reform existing taxes on wealth: Those who get their income from stocks, shares and other assets often pay far less tax than those who work. We campaign for the tax rates on these forms of income to be equalised with income tax. So we all pay the same rates. It could raise £16.7 billion a year. Additionally we campaign for National Insurance to be applied to all forms of income, not just work. This would raise an additional £10.2 billion a year.
    • Clamp down on tax havens: Hundreds of billions of pounds are lost every single year to tax avoidance via tax havens. We campaign for global action against tax havens. We’re demanding more transparency – and global minimum rates of tax, so countries aren’t undercutting each other.

    Private in public

    For context, Phillips is a former Labour politician who was previously suspended for “alleged Islamophobia”. None of these points are specifically relevant to the Streeting interview, but it does highlight the revolving door between politics and media – a revolving door which also opens on to the private sector.

    Speaking of that, in September there was much coverage of Labour getting into bed with politician-to-private-sector-bigwig Alan Milburn. As we reported at the time:

    This is what GB News host Camilla Tominey asked health secretary Wes Streeting:

    Why have you been inviting Alan Milburn to meetings in the Department for Health, and apparently – according to the Sunday Times – sharing official sensitive documents with him, when he’s completely unelected; he’s unappointed; he’s unaccountable to the electorate, and yet he’s got a multi-million pound stake in a consultancy firm which advises on health matters?

    Oh shit, that sounds bad – let’s see how Streeting answered:

    Alan Milburn has an outstanding record as health secretary under the last Labour government.

    Oh, okay – so he’s not just some random multi-millionaire with a vested interest in privatising healthcare; he’s a multi-millionaire with a vested interest in privatising healthcare who leveraged his political connections to get where he is today.

    So that’s fine.

    That’s not an extra level of corruption.

    It’s not NHS revolving-door cronyism, or some other phrase we just made up.

    No one’s fooled by Wes Streeting and Labour

    People aren’t fooled by Labour’s rhetoric on public services; especially as Labour in opposition attacked the Tories for their stance on privatisation and austerity. The result of Labour trying to pull the wool over voters’ eyes?

    It’s hard to see Labour performing better come the next election. We know their plans for the NHS and other services won’t make improve things, because they already failed under the Tories. In other words, things can only get worse.

    Maybe the real question journalists like Laura Kuenssberg should ask Streeting is which private health company he plans on working for after he gets booted out of office.

    Featured image via embedded BBC video

    By John Shafthauer

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The BBC just unquestioningly published new data on antisemitism – direct from the Zionist lobby

    On 6 October, the BBC published new data from the Anti-Defamation League Center for Extremism (ADL). This suggested that antisemitism reached record highs in the US. But in true BBC fashion, its headline is misleading.

    BBC antisemitism article: muddying the waters

    Towards the end of the article it stated that the figures also include anti-Zionism – which we all know is not the same as antisemitism. Similarly, data the BBC published back in August which related to antisemitism in the UK also used the same qualifier – but it completely failed to mention this then too:

    The ADL data suggests that there were more than 10,000 incidents of antisemitism in the year up to 24 September. This was more than a 200% increase compared to the previous year.

    Importantly though, over halfway through the article the BBC stated:

    Part of the overall increase comes from a change in methodology to include “expressions of opposition to Zionism, as well as support for resistance against Israel or Zionists that could be perceived as supporting terrorism”, the ADL said.

    Whilst we could argue it should have led with that, the important thing is that the BBC just repeated this ADL line. At no point did it question it, or let the readers know that anti-Zionism is not the same as antisemitism. As we have seen in other reports this week, the BBC is afraid of stepping out of line.

    So much for ‘impartiality’.

    On a deeper dive into the ADL report, it concluded:

    ADL’s preliminary data also found that over 3,000 of all incidents took place during anti-Israel rallies, which featured regular explicit expressions of support for terrorist groups including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), one of the most concerning antisemitic trends ADL captured since Oct. 7, 2023.

    Over the last year, we have seen countless media reports of antisemitism at pro-Palestine rallies:

    1,350 of these incidents (15% of the total) were included as a result of a methodology update that ADL implemented after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, when we saw an explosion of anti-Israel activism that incorporated expressions of opposition to Zionism, as well as support for resistance against Israel or Zionists that could be perceived as supporting terrorism or attacks on Jews, Israelis or Zionists.

    When they occur during public activism (such as at protests), in confrontations between individuals or in the form of vandalism (such as graffiti), these expressions constitute an implicit attack on the great majority of American Jews who view a relationship with Israel to be an important part of their religious, cultural and/or social identities.

    Such rhetoric can be traumatizing to many American Jews and has led to their exclusion from some spaces simply because of that element of how they define and express their Jewishness.

    However, this quote from ADL clearly conflates ‘anti-Israel’ with ‘antisemitism’. Obviously, if any country starts a genocide there will be an explosion of anti-whatever country started it. In this case, it’s Israel.

    Anti-Zionism, not antisemitism

    In August of this year, the BBC published an article titled:

    Big rise in antisemitic incidents in UK – charity

    The article stated that the Community Security Trust(CST) recorded 1,978 ‘anti-Jewish hate incidents’ from January to June 2024.

    It goes without saying, we should not tolerate antisemitism in any shape or form. The important thing here though, is that the BBC article made zero mention of the CST conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Upon reading the full report, it is clear they have.

    Anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not the same. Criticising the state of Israel or Zionism is legitimate – especially when Israel has murdered, at medical professionals’ best guesses, over 118,000 Palestinians. If we can’t criticise a genocidal regime, then what really is the point in anything?

    Earlier this year, the World Socialist Web site (WSWS) commented that:

    The CST’s “Antisemitic Incidents Report 2023” was targeted at the movement against Israel’s genocide, at Muslims and left-wing opponents, as the main source of antisemitism. This reinforces the campaign by the Conservative government, backed by the Labour opposition, to criminalise opposition to the genocidal actions of the Israeli state by equating antizionism with antisemitism.

    The Canary also previously reported on the glaringly obvious bias from the Western corporate media and right-wing politicians, branding pro-Palestine protest demonstrations as antisemitic on multiple occasions.

    What do the figures really say?

    During the reporting period, CST noted that 1,026 (52%) of the antisemitic incidents referenced or were related to Israel, Palestine and the situation in the Middle East. Of these, 836 had ‘anti-Zionist political motivation’ and the terms ‘Zionist’ or ‘Zionism’ were used in 208 incidents. In which case, this article will be included in the next figures.

    This number is an increase of 547% from the first six months of 2023 – which was before 7 October and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Who would have guessed that when you start carpet bombing an entire country, you might face a bit of criticism?

    The CST report also stated:

    In at least 210 instances, the phrase “Free Palestine” was employed, either in speech or writing. CST does not regard this in itself as an antisemitic slogan but, in each of these cases, it was targeted at Jewish people or institutions – who had not solicited discussion about the Middle East – simply for being Jewish, or comprised part of a larger tirade that did include blatantly anti-Jewish hate.

    The report did not specify which institutions or people were targeted. However, it does mention ‘members of parliament’ and ‘public figures’. The important question has to be, whether people targeted these MP’s for being Jewish or for their support of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. If the latter is true, then we also know it’s true that people have also targeted plenty of non-Jewish MP’s for their unwavering support of Israel.

    Evidently, the ADL’s latest data is another instance where a pro-Israel lobby organisation is seeking to suppress Palestinian voices. The BBC’s reporting on this amounts to little more than shameless propaganda for Israel, and those in the US trying to shut down opposition to its horrific ongoing genocide.

    Feature image via the Canary

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • BBC Panorama whitewashed what Zionist father REALLY said about his hostage daughter

    On the year anniversary of 7 October, BBC put out a Panorama episode to mark it, talking to four families in Israel and Gaza.

    One of these was Israeli Thomas Hand, whose daughter Hamas held captive for fifty days in Gaza. However, the BBC conveniently omitted something notable about Hand. Specifically, the Zionist resident from Kibbutz Be’eri on the border, had previously given a chilling interview to Israeli state broadcaster Kan.

    And in this, he revealed how in his zeal for the destruction of Hamas, he would have been willing to sacrifice his nine-year-old daughter.

    In other words, the BBC whitewashed the part where Hand is a raging genocidal Zionist – who’d go to any length to eradicate Hamas.

    BBC Panorama omitting information on Israeli interviewee

    BBC Panorama aired on the one year anniversary of 7 October. The broadcaster’s description of the episode is already dripping in bias. It read:

    When Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, it led to a war that threatens to engulf the entire region 12 months later. Jane Corbin has been following four families, two in Israel and two in Gaza, whose lives have been changed forever by the conflict.

    Tens of thousands of Gazans are reported to have been killed and much of the territory has been reduced to rubble. With many Israeli hostages having died in captivity, dozens more still being held by Hamas and violence now spreading to Lebanon, a deal to bring peace looks as far away as ever.

    Obviously, it’s hard to know where to begin with this. For one, the BBC is both-siding the violence through false equivalence. In other words, it’s giving equal weight to Israeli and Gazan voices – when Israel has murdered over 40,000 Palestinians in its genocidal assault on the strip. The BBC should be giving Gazans still in the grip of Israel’s genocide a bigger platform all round.

    Of course, the BBC would not do this – after all, it’s still framing Israel’s genocide and annexation of Gaza as a ‘conflict’ between two sides at war. The Canary doesn’t need to tell you why this is clearly not the case.

    Again, it liberally applies passive voice to avoid pointing the finger at the perpetrator. To add insult to injury, it doesn’t even name Israel in connection to the “tens of thousands of Gazans reported to have been killed”. Nor does it acknowledge Israel as the culprits of murderous terrorism in Lebanon.

    None of this is remotely surprising from the blatantly Israel-biased BBC that masquerades as impartial, but has repeatedly shown it’s anything but. Just add it to the pile of steaming shit propaganda the broadcaster has passed off as news since Israel began its brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Not that it is anything new – it has been doing this long before 7 October – much as Israel’s apartheid occupation and violence against Palestinians extends back many decades.

    No mention of the Hannibal Directive

    While the programme does acknowledge how Israel killed its own civilians in friendly fire on 7 October, it doesn’t explain to what extent this was the case.

    Specifically, it mentioned how Israel killed 14 of its own people on the day.

    One viewer noted on X that the Panorama reaffirmed the previous reports that the IDF helicopters shot at Israeli civilians:

    However, as the Canary’s Ed Sykes detailed, Israel forces likely killed many more of the people it later reported in the death toll. Predictably, the BBC made no mention of Israel’s ‘Hannibal Directive’ either. This directs forces to murder Israeli soldiers, rather than let them be taken captive.

    Daughters death a ‘price’ Zionist father willing to pay

    So, it was amidst all this that the BBC interviewed two Gazan, and two Israeli families. Hamas took Thomas Hand’s nine-year-old daughter Emily captive and held her for 50 days. It released Emily in a hostage exchange. BBC Panorama presenter Jane Corbin said this was “the day after a ceasefire”. In reality, this was just a four-day pause in Israel’s brutal bombardment, back in November 2023.

    Hand described the moment his daughter returned:

    I can’t remember what I said. I honestly don’t know what was said. Just too overjoyed.

    However, a few months later, Hand was on Israeli state media channel Kan talking about her captivity. On this he said how he would have been prepared to sacrifice her, if it meant ending Hamas. As Electronic Intifada reported in May:

    As she watched on, her father told Israeli interviewer Tali Moreno he had been willing to sacrifice her, in order to further Israel’s genocidal war effort against the Palestinians in Gaza.

    Speaking of her short time in Palestinian captivity, he said that the Israeli military “had to do everything in its powers to destroy Hamas,” even if that meant killing his own daughter.

    “I realized that she could be bombed, could be shot by friendly fire,” he said. And yet: “That was a price that in my head, I could say: ‘Yeah okay.’ So long as we destroy Hamas.”

    The outlet explained how this is part of a broader Zionist phenomenon whereby:

    Many Israelis seem willing to sacrifice their own civilians on the altar of Zionism – and sometimes even themselves too.

    Naturally, the BBC Panorama didn’t bring up this interview with Hand. To do so would have illustrated the zeal for the Zionist occupation in Palestine. It would have shown how this has fueled Israel’s dehumanisation of Palestinians more broadly. Moreover, it would demonstrate how this has driven the resulting ongoing genocide it is still committing nearly a year on.

    Thinly veiled genocide-mongering

    Of course, the BBC couldn’t entirely conceal the Zionist’s thinly veiled genocide-mongering vitriol either. Hand told Corbin that:

    I keep going back to the 6th – when we were living as neighbours. But on the 7th, they ruined whatever future they had. They’ve ruined the future of what we’ve had.

    Gazans have “ruined whatever future they had” – a Freudian slip? Obviously, he doesn’t outright express his support for Israel’s genocide, but the meaning is pretty clear. He doesn’t see a future for the people of Gaza as his neighbours – in other words, it suggests he absolutely supports ethnically cleansing the strip.

    In another moment, Hand later said:

    We can’t let Hamas just rebuild again. They’ll do the same thing – they promised they will do it again and again and again – come to our communities and kill us. We can’t let that happen again.

    The BBC cut off his interview there, leaving viewers to only surmise what this could mean. We already know Hand would put up his daughter’s life if it meant destroying Hamas. His vehemence for them is apparent. Does he support the murder of over 40,000 Palestinians? That seems likely.

    In June, Hand criticised Ireland, where he is a dual citizen, for recognising the Palestinian statehood. He argued this was ‘rewarding’ Palestine after Hamas’s attacks. However, Ireland emphasised how it did so as a step towards a peaceful resolution.

    And notably, in response, Hand said that:

    We’re praying for it to happen and for all of this to end. All they (Hamas) have to do is hand over the hostages, and the war is over.

    In other words, Hand is wholly behind Israel’s continued genocide in Gaza until Hamas hands over the remaining hostages.

    BBC Panorama: thinly-veiled propaganda

    In the BBC programme, Hand also left out the part where it was IDF bombs that put his daughter’s life at risk, saying:

    They were moved from house to house, above ground, presumably one step ahead of the IDF, going South. There was about three or four houses, continually moving, under heavy fire. A bomb fell so close that they were sprayed with the window – the window shattered and covered them in glass.

    Clearly, the BBC has no qualms platforming Israeli supporters of genocide. Giving a voice to genocidal Zionists is nothing out of character for the BBC though. This was just one more instance of the public broadcaster omitting key facts that would further dent Israel’s victim narrative.

    Despite Israel’s litany of abhorrent war crimes, illegal occupation, invasions, and a literal genocide that has wiped whole Palestinian families off the map, forever, it put a Zionist citizen apologist front and centre, and left out the part where he’d sacrifice his own daughter to put an end to Hamas. For those at the back, (the BBC, evidently) Israel isn’t interested in negotiating an end to this – it won’t be content until it wipes Gaza – and Palestine – off the map.

    Feature image via BBC Panorama/ the Canary

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Laura Kuenssberg just ratcheted up the imperialist BBC propaganda for Israel

    The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg is infamous for her terrible insights into British politics. As such, you may be unsurprised to learn that she also has terrible insights into Israel and Middle Eastern politics.

    That or – you know – she’s actively presenting a warped view of world events for the benefit of our political overlords:

    Excuse me, Kuenssberg?

    This is somehow the title of her latest blog:

    I’m sorry, but is anyone under the impression that the UK isn’t heavily involved in the Middle East?

    We start wars there all the time. According to the website American Security Project, this is a list of all the US’s bases there (and let’s not pretend the UK is anything other than America’s poodle at this point):

    Imagine how we’d feel if the above was a map of Europe and the bases were owned by a country you think is our enemy?

    If you’ve never imagined the situation in reverse, that’s thanks to the hard work of dedicated propagandists like Kuenssberg. This is how her blog begins, by the way:

    “Let’s be real, the war has started,” a former minister tells me. “What happens in the Middle East never stays in the Middle East.”

    Oh really? Maybe we shouldn’t be causing trouble over there, then? Maybe we shouldn’t arming Israel while it’s literally invading its neighbours? Maybe we shouldn’t be tolerating the mass deaths of innocents because we’ve decided they’re on the side of ‘terrorists’, even though Israel is literally pursuing a campaign of terror – of ethnic cleansing – of genocide?

    Kuenssberg on Israel: ‘complications’

    The current situation is fairly straightforward in that Israel is on a rampage of murder that it can only sustain with the benefit of weapons and money from the West.

    Kuenssberg, however, disagrees:

    So what can the UK do about a hellishly complicated situation, especially with a new government that is still finding its feet?

    This is a tried-and-tested trick of the propagandist – to convince people that nothing positive can happen because the situation is too ‘complicated’.

    To be fair, there’s a chance that Kuenssberg actually believes this, as she does seem to have a mind so shallow that an ant could wade through it without getting its socks wet. The British media is full of such nitwits, and many politicians know how to take advantage of their lack of curiosity, as an infamous Nazi once said:

    On Israel, Kuenssberg also seems to believe the following:

    The UK is deeply involved in providing humanitarian help in the region

    We’re not sure how “deeply involved” Britain could be, given that aid organisations recently said “Israel’s siege now blocks 83% of food aid reaching Gaza”. The organisations include CARE International, Save the Children, and Oxfam, and they further note:

    • 83% of required food aid does not make it into Gaza, up from 34% in 2023.This reduction means people in Gaza have gone from having an average of two meals a day to just one meal every other day. An estimated 50,000 children aged between 6-59 months urgently require treatment for malnutrition by the end of the year.
    • 65% of the insulin required and half of the required blood supply are not available in Gaza.
    • Availability of hygiene items has dropped to 15% of the amount available in September 2023. One million women are now going without the hygiene supplies they need.
    • Only around 1,500 hospital beds in Gaza remain operational, compared to around 3,500 beds in 2023 which was already well below sufficient to meet the needs of a population of more than 2 million people. By comparison, cities of similar size, such as Chicago and Paris average 5 to 8 times more beds than in Gaza.
    • 1.87 million people are in need of shelter with at least 60% of homes destroyed or damaged (January 2024). Yet tents for around just 25,000 people have entered Gaza since May 2024.

    Given her interest in ‘complications’, you’d think that this was the sort of thing Kuenssberg would be interested in pointing out – the complications caused by Israel violating international law. Instead, her interests are as follows:

    Diplomatic opportunities
    Then when it comes to the diplomacy, a former senior official tells me the UK is “thinking about the off ramps,” – in other words, encouraging all the players, not just its allies, to think about how to bring the conflict to an end, and what a post-war settlement might look like.

    The UK has specific opportunities – there are things that it can do that the US can’t, with an embassy still in the Iranian capital Tehran, for example, whereas the Americans haven’t had any formal diplomatic relations with Iran since 1980.

    Iran has launched missiles at Israel twice in this conflict; once in retaliation for Israel striking their consulate, and once in retaliation for Israel assassinating the leader of their allies Hezbollah. Neither of the strikes were targeted at civilians, in stark contrast to the Israeli attacks on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. As such the idea that this all stops because the British ambassador to Tehran is just really good at diplomacy is a fantasy.

    Israel is on a rampage, and it only stops when we stop funding them.

    “Diplomacy matters”

    If you don’t believe that Kuenssberg and the BBC have the same biases as our imperial US taskmasters, just look at how they interview the two sides:

    Kuenssberg’s piece ends with what must be the most ridiculous point of all:

    Diplomacy matters, whether its impact is easy to measure or not. A government insider suggests without the UK, US and Western allies urging restraint on a daily basis, there is a parallel universe where the conflicts might already have boiled over into a war far worse than anything we have seen so far. “Everybody has been working incredibly hard to try and prevent a spillover,” a senior figure says.

    That’s right; as bad as things seem, just imagine how much worse things would be if we weren’t urging restraint? All those dead civilians would be twice as dead as they are now; all those blown up hospitals would be craters twice as deep.

    If nothing else, the point does reveal something; our government may call Israel its ally, but even they think its capable of even worse than what we’ve seen so far.

    And yet the weapons continue to flow on a river of blood and propaganda.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • NO ONE believes Kuenssberg’s excuse over Johnson interview – except her corporate media mates

    The UK’s best person doing a journalism, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, has found herself at the centre of her own press feeding frenzy. Of course, her stenographer pals in the corporate media have painted her as making a mistake. Meanwhile, the rest of us aren’t buying it for a second.

    CUE THE GIFS!

    Laura Kuenssberg: I’m doing a journalism!

    The Canary previously reported on the news that Laura Kuenssberg was interviewing former PM, and convicted criminal, Boris Johnson. As the Conservative’s barrel-scraping leadership rigamarole enters its final stretch, the one thing that no-one is thinking is “if only Boris Johnson were back”.

    Well, as Hannah Sharland previously wrote:

    Unless, you’re the lying charlatan’s nauseatingly fawning lickspittle Laura Kuenssberg that is. If you don’t currently have plans for Thursday 3 October at 7.30pm, now you do.

    Except you don’t. Because Kuenssberg allegedly made a boo-boo.

    As around three million people saw on their X timelines, Laura had something to fess up:

    That’s right. As the BBC News Press Office confirmed:

    Tomorrow’s interview with Boris Johnson won’t be going ahead. As Laura has explained, interview briefing notes meant for colleagues were inadvertently shared with him. This makes an interview tomorrow untenable. Under the circumstances, both the BBC and Mr Johnson’s team have agreed this is the best way forward.

    So, to cut the doublespeak: Laura Kuenssberg ‘accidently’ sent her questions and interview notes through to Boris Johnson.

    Get us our fainting couch, QUICK:

    Stenographers, assemble

    The corporate media dutifully picked up on Laura Kuenssberg’s alleged mistake. For example, the allegedly left-wing Guardian wrote:

    BBC cancels Boris Johnson interview after Laura Kuenssberg message gaffe

    A gafffe.

    A GAFFE?

    Yes, a “gaffe” if you’re the Guardian – and if you’re the Independent, too (except it failed to mention Kuenssberg in its headline):

    Boris Johnson interview axed in BBC gaffe

    Now, this gif would be appropriate if Kuenssberg had made a ‘gaffe’:

    Come on, though. Really? Does anyone outside of the stenographing profession really believe Kuenssberg accidently sent her ‘briefing notes’ (questions) to Johnson?

    Smelling the BS a mile off

    No one in the real world does:

    Millennials were having a giftastic field day on X:

    A few people pulled out this classic image in response:

    As predictable as night followed day:

    Of course, the problems here are several.

    Aside from the fact that NO ONE believes Laura Kuenssberg, people also pointed out the implications for past interviews:

    Also, all this may be a ruse:

    We doubt it though.

    What clearly happened was that Kuenssberg did send the ‘briefing notes’ to Johnson – except someone found out, and she then had to pull it before it was leaked.

    Laura Kuenssberg: Boris on speed dial

    Of course, none of the corporate media would dare say this. However, what’s odd in all this is actually why there’s such a fuss. Given Johnson is not a politician any more, and the interview was clearly about his nonsense book, it’s actually fairly standard for interviewees to be sent questions in advance when they’re plugging something.

    But the problem is, this is Laura Kuenssberg.

    Her bias towards the government, particularly the Tories, has been plain to see for many years. Who can forget ‘postal vote-gate’? So, this ‘gotcha’ moment (while actually fairly ordinary procedure) is the straw that broke the camel’s back.

    However, it also throws into question every other interview she has done. Has Kuenssberg been sending through info to interviewees in advance before this? Because if she did when Johnson was a politician, then that is a serious problem.

    Clearly, someone at the BBC has it in for her. But the real story is the detail of Laura’s claim:

    I sent our briefing notes to him in a message meant for my team

    The very fact Kuenssberg has his number (“message”, not “email”) right up the top of her messaging list says it all about the state of the corporate media in the UK and the zero degrees of separation from politicians. This was no mistake from Kuenssberg – but that’s not really the problem. It’s what it represents, that is.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Steve Topple

  • The BBC is now UP TO ITS NECK in Israel’s genocide – as one tweet shows

    One year into Israel’s genocide on Gaza, Netanyahu decided to launch a full on ground invasion in Lebanon. Iran finally retaliated against the mindless colonial power. Unsurprisingly, as usual, the BBC failed miserably in reporting on the realities of the situation.

    As the Canary previously reported, Israel’s colonial government has consistently rejected or undermined peace efforts (as it has historically), and has only escalated the conflict further afield. It has assassinated people in the Iranian consulate in Syria, in Iran, and in Lebanon.

    Iran has shown a lot of restraint, according to experts. But it has finally responded to Israel’s attempts to escalate hostilities in the region. Targeting military and intelligence facilities, it has reportedly killed one civilian – a Palestinian. And this is in spite of Israel placing some of those facilities in densely-populated civilian areas.

    Blowback into Israel, Iran style

    Israel’s own X account tweeted a video of Iran’s rockets with the caption

    every single one of these is meant to kill

    What the fuck do they think their carpet bombing in Gaza has been achieving? Wiping the memory of everyone who watches a child get blown to pieces?

    But as usual, the BBC has lapped it up.

    Government sponsored propaganda

    The BBC was shameless in its attempts to report on the escalation by Israel – if we can even call them attempts:

    Cognitive dissonance

    The racist double standards are clear for everyone to see. Blow up a majority Muslim country and you’re defending yourself. Blow up a military base that has been use as a command centre to commit genocide for a year, and it’s terrorism:

    What happened to the hostages? We’re presuming they have been secretly transferred to Lebanon via secret underground tunnels.

    As the Canary has previously reported, western media outlets have continuously published coverage dripping in bias – and by extension, complicity in Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Palestine.

    When Israeli soldiers killed six-year-old Hind Rajab and her family, the appalling Western establishment media spin was plain for all to see:

    Similarly, when the IDF brutally murdered an autistic man with Down’s syndrome – with a combat dog – the BBC, using all of their editorial wisdom, whitewashed it with the headline:

    The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome

    Turning tables on Israel

    Now that Iran have retaliated against a genocidal regime, the BBC appears to have rolled out training on how to use the active voice. Seeing as though it suddenly fits their corporate capitalist (and clearly Zionist) narrative:

    Oh wait, maybe not – why name names when you can give the abhorrent genocidal perpetrators a voice instead?

    Maybe, the same way the whole of the West suddenly remembers what international law is?

    Racist corporate media

    One person on X was baffled at the linguistic gymnastics the BBC had used to avoid pointing the finger at Israel:

    It’s not bizarre – it’s intentional in order to paint Black and brown people as the aggressors. Something which we have seen across the mainstream media for decades. It’s hard to see this as anything other than the BBC acting as a mouthpiece for Israel’s propaganda – because at this point, it quite literally is:

    For a year we have watched the west support, fund, and arm Israel. Finally, Iran took one for the team. It’s like watching the school bully finally gets what’s coming to him – without all the mass casualties.

    Or, if you want to speak in legalese, as the UN says of the Genocide Convention – signatories to it (of which Iran is) have an:

    Obligation to prevent genocide (Article I) which, according to the ICJ, has an extraterritorial scope

    Iran targeting Israeli military infrastructure being used to commit genocide was doing exactly this.

    Do BBC journalists have no shame? Do they realise that in years to come students will be studying these headlines in horror, wondering how it was allowed to happen? How obvious they are in their racism and how stupid they think the country must be is insulting.

    Feature image via 

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Green’s deputy Zack Polanski just rinsed the Board of Deputies – and the BBC

    The Green Party’s deputy leader Zack Polanski has been a fierce but righteous critic of Israel’s far-right government during its genocide in Gaza and now expanding assaults across the Middle East. However, he came out against several organisations, not least the UK Board of Deputies, over their stance on the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s atrocities.

    BBC: biased AGAINST Israel, apparently

    The Guardian posted that:

    It was regarding a report on BBC bias post-7 October. As the Guardian noted:

    The organisations were responding to a report authored by the former BBC executive Danny Cohen and the former governor of the BBC Ruth Deech.

    The report said: “Whenever the corporation is faced with the choice of whose account or narrative to believe, it seldom points in Israel’s direction. For Hamas in this war, proof is rarely necessary. For the IDF and Israel, proof is rarely enough.”

    The authors cited several cases where its authors said the BBC had erred in its reporting or used language that demonstrated an anti-Israel bias.

    They wrote: “We recognise that reporting complex stories in a war zone and verifying claims and counter-claims can be difficult, but it is clear there is systematic bias against Israel across all BBC platforms, with the vast majority of that bias pointing in the same direction.

    So, who were these Jewish organisations that were conflating the state of Israel with all Jewish people? (Something we thought was antisemitic, by the way). Moreover, just who were these organisations that agrees the BBC has been anti-Israel?

    Right-wing Israel lobbyists

    Predictably, they were right-wing Israel lobbyists The Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, and the Community Security Trust. They opined that:

    Inaccurate media reporting on the conflict contributes to the delegitimisation of Israel in the public sphere, which in turn fuels anti-Jewish hatred, and has made British Jews and Jews around the world less safe and secure in their communities. As a global media leader, the BBC carries extra responsibility in these regards.

    Of course, this is all a nonsense to anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game when it comes to Zionist Israel. As Byline Times wrote regarding another report claiming BBC bias against Israel:

    This ignores the many studies that have been carried out, such as the one produced by the Centre for Media Monitoring, that concluded that Palestinian deaths were reported using ‘passive language which omits the perpetrator (Israel)’.

    The CMM Report found that more than 70% of the use of terms like ‘atrocities’, ‘slaughter’ and ‘massacre’ referred to Israeli victims while ‘emotive language’ was deployed when speaking about Israeli, rather than Palestinian, victims.

    The Canary has repeatedly documented this, also.

    BBC bias – but for Israel

    Only in the past few days, the BBC opened itself up to another perfect example. Sorry, BBC – whose air strikes?

    But we sure know whose missiles they are, don’t we?

    So, as Polanski posted on X:

    He continued by saying:

    As a group of Jewish people they are of course entitled to represent views of *some* Jewish people.

    I may find those views sociopathic at this point – but that’s a legitimate transparent aim.

    They’re oft presented in media though as representing all Jews & that’s just not true.

    Meanwhile, the idea that the BBC is biased against Israel goes against, for example, the corporation’s own admission about its coverage of the International Court of Justice hearing. The BBC fessed up it coverage was biased towards Israel – but it wasn’t on purpose.

    In short, the report that the Board of Deputies et al have jumped onto is demonstrable nonsense. Yet, the Guardian didn’t have the bottle to call it out. So, it took Polanski to do it – risking a personal backlash himself in doing so. That says it all about the state of the corporate media – and not just the BBC.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Steve Topple

  • Badenoch’s BBC bomb: ‘horror show’ on Kuenssberg, Kemi desperately vies for attention

    The 2024 Tory leadership contest has been the biggest non-event in recent British politics. This is despite silver spoon MPs like Kemi Badenoch being so desperate for attention that they make ridiculous claims like ‘working at McDonald’s made me working class‘. On Sunday 29 September as the Conservative conference started, Badenoch once again did everything she could to attract attention, and fair play to her, she was all anyone could talk about for five minutes:

    Playing the Kemi Badenoch hits

    Kemi Badenoch is attempting to sell herself as the anti-Islam candidate. As most Tory MPs are anti-Islam, she’s going to extreme lengths to stand out:

    Others have pointed out that Badenoch’s path to power is well trodden at this point:

    In fairness, Badenoch is much more than a Black person who seeks to uphold white supremacy; she’s also a woman who seeks to uphold patriarchal corporate interests. As reported by PA and shared by other outlets, Badenoch said:

    Maternity pay is “excessive” and people should exercise “more personal responsibility”

    Post cost-of-living crisis, few Britons could afford to have children without maternity leave – the fact that Badenoch doesn’t understand this suggests she spends little time with anyone besides her wealthy donors. She is, after all, one of few politicians to defend MPs accepting ‘freebies’.

    Badenoch also suggested ‘Britons may change their mind on free access to healthcare‘. Has she met a British person? Because all the ones I meet are complaining about rising food costs, not free GP visits.

    Badenoch also tried to suggest that the real problem with migrants is that they’re not sufficiently supportive of Israel’s ongoing genocide / terror campaign:

    People are also highlighting her latest smug-fest in the Telegraph:

    To be fair, given that the UK and America are full-throatedly supporting ethnic cleansing and genocide, you probably could argue that we’re worse than… oh no, wait, she doesn’t mean it that way. She means that some countries are good because we have lots of missiles, and other countries are bad because we need somewhere to fire our missiles at.

    Labour MP and doctor Rosena Allin-Khan described Badenoch’s Sunday tour as a “horror show”:

    As others have pointed out, though, the Labour Party isn’t really opposing Badenoch’s rhetoric:

    Twitterfied

    Let us be clear, we’re not suggesting that Kemi Badenoch doesn’t have dangerous and disgusting political positions. The reason we don’t take her seriously is that you can smell the desperation coming off her.

    While you could argue that all Tory MPs are desperate for attention, they at least see it as a road to power rather than a path to more attention. Badenoch is instead part of a new breed of Tories who see politics as a game of owning random strangers on Twitter.com:

    In other words, she’s a chronically online weirdo whose only experience of normal people was the five minutes she spent flipping Big Macs.

    Featured image via the BBC

    By The Canary

  • Wes Streeting felt the wrath of Victoria Derbyshire over winter fuel payments cut

    Wes Streeting is no stranger to tying himself in knots during interviews. However, at the Labour conference he showed how little empathy he really has for pensioners. He effectively condoned his government trying to freeze them to death via the winter fuel payments cut:

    Wes weaseling out over winter fuel payments

    In a classic ‘Wes weaseling out of giving any sort of answer’ moment, he gave some scripted guff about the triple lock, and how pensioners will still be better off over successive winters.

    Victoria Derbyshire wouldn’t let Streeting’s slippery classic politician’s redirection gymnastics slide however. She called him out saying “that’s not advice”.

    After a painful period of Streeting rehashing this overused party line, there was still no advice. Because the fact is, Streeting and Starmer’s cabinet of cruel capitalist minions couldn’t give a shit what happens to pensioners THIS winter:

    Victoria Derbyshire also highlighted that Streeting’s argument was deceptive for two further reasons.

    One was that the majority of pensioners don’t get the New State Pension anyway – so won’t benefit from the triple lock. She then put Streeting in his place over the saving from slashing the winter fuel payment to millions of pensioners. Specifically, she highlighted that the £1.4bn was a drop in the ocean of the government’s overall £1tn budget.

    Yesterday, Streeting also defended rich people giving MP’s freebies. He stated:

    I’m really proud of people who want to contribute…their money to our politics. It is a noble pursuit, just like giving to charity.

    Streeting went onto say that if rich people and businesses DIDN’T give money to politicians, then the taxpayer would have to foot the bills. It’s a shame they don’t realise they can actually spend their own £91k a year pay check.

    Streeting chaos, not change

    Only yesterday, the party blocked a debate on the cuts to the winter fuel payments at this years Labour conference. Currently, they have delayed the vote until Wednesday. However, by this point most of the delegates, including PM Keir Starmer – will have already left.

    The Labour Party’s cut to winter fuel payments has already caused chaos. As the Canary has been documenting, Charity Age UK calculated that Labour’s move will impact 800,000 older people on very low incomes. Specifically, this is those living on less than £218.25 a week as single pensioners, or £332.95 as couples.

    And despite the government’s drive to increase uptake in Pension Credit – the benefit that automatically entitles pensioners to the winter fuel payments – the majority will still miss out this winter.

    According to a new equality analysis done by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) back in July, the cuts will hit disabled people especially hard.

    It also found:

    83% (2.7m) of those aged 80+ currently receiving winter fuel payments will lose out, compared to 90% (7.3m) of those aged 66 to 79.

    Additionally, Age UK estimate that around a million more pensioners less than £50 above the so-called poverty line will be “hit hard”. Meanwhile, in 2017 Labour itself did an impact assessment. This found around 4,000 older people could die as a result of means testing the winter fuel payment.

    So as always, they are going to hit women and disabled people the hardest.

    Tories in red ties

    Wes Streeting – along with many other Labour MP’s are showing the same lack of empathy that we saw from the Tories for 14 years:

    Labour politicians are receiving thousands in luxury gifts. Meanwhile, they are making pensioners suffer – and it’s only set to get worse:

    And it doesn’t even look like a difficult choice for him:

    Streeting’s rigid, disingenuous response showed the cold, cruel, barely beating heart of this Labour government at large.

    His inhuman complete and utter lack of empathy is Starmer’s Labour in a nutshell – wildly out of touch with living realities for marginalised communities across the UK. This is perfectly in step with the whims and interests of its wealthy band of corporate donors and backers.

    But hey: at least he’s thinking of the NHS savings when he’s frozen all the pensioners to death.

    Feature image via Sky News/Youtube

    By HG

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The more definitive the proof of Israeli atrocities, the less they get reported

    The coverage of Israeli soldiers pushing three Palestinians off a roof in the West Bank town of Qabatiya – it’s unclear whether the men are dead or near-dead – is being barely reported by the western media, even though it was videoed from two different angles and a reporter from the main US news agency Associated Press witnessed it.

    AP reported on this incident some nine hours ago. Its news feed is accessed by all western establishment media, so they all know.

    Yet again, the media has chosen to ignore Israeli war crimes, even when there is definitive proof that they occurred. (Or perhaps more accurately: even more so when there is definitive proof they occurred.)

    Remember, that same media never fails to highlight – or simply make up – any crime Palestinians are accused of, such as those non-existent “beheaded babies”.

    AP itself treats this latest atrocity in the West Bank as no big deal. It reports simply that it may be part of a “pattern of excessive force” by Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians.

    That comment, without quote marks and ascribed to a human rights group, is almost certainly AP’s preferred characterisation of the group’s reference to a pattern not of “excessive force” but of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

    AP makes sure to give Israel’s pretext for why it is committing war crimes: “Israel says the raids are necessary to stamp out militancy.”

    But it forgets yet again to mention why that “militancy” exists: because Israel has been violently enforcing an illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territories for many decades, in which it – once again illegally – has drafted in an army of settler militias to drive out the native Palestinian population.

    AP also forgets to mention that, under international law, the Palestinians have every right to resist Israel’s occupying soldiers, including “militantly”.

    Western governments might characterise Palestinians shooting at Israeli soldiers as “terrorism”, but that’s not how it is seen in the international law codes that western states drafted decades ago and that they claim to uphold.

    It’s also worth noting that the local Palestinian reporter who witnessed this crime had his report rewritten by “Julia Frankel, an Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem”.

    As is true with many other western outlets, AP copy is editorially overseen from Jerusalem, where its office is staffed mostly with Israeli Jews.

    Western news outlets doubtless privately rationalise this to themselves as a wise precaution, making sure copy is “sensitive” to Israel’s perspective and less likely to incur the wrath of the Israeli government and Israel lobby.

    Which is precisely the problem. The bias in western reporting is baked in. It is designed not to upset Israel – in the midst of a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court – which means it’s entirely skewed and completely untrustworthy.

    It makes our media utterly complicit in Israel’s war crimes, including when Israeli soldiers throw Palestinians off a roof.

    UPDATE:

    Very belatedly, the BBC has reported this on one of its news channels. Note, it adds an entirely unnecessary disclaimer that the footage hasn’t been “independently verified” – whatever that means. There are now at least three separate videos, all taken from different angles, showing the same war crime. Even the Israeli military has confirmed the incident happened.

    The BBC also assumes the three Palestinians are dead. There is absolutely no reason to make that assumption: it violates the most basic rules of reporting.

    And the anchor, clearly nervous about how she should refer to the men being pushed off a roof, ends by observing that the footage is “another example of the tensions and the many fronts on which we see Israel fighting”. No, it’s another example of Israeli soldiers committing war crimes, and the media trying to deflect attention from that fact.

    The post The more definitive the proof of Israeli atrocities, the less they get reported first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Laura Kuenssberg has a date for your diary. So, make sure you have something else to do.

    As the Conservative’s barrel-scraping leadership rigamarole enters its final stretch, the one thing that no-one is thinking is “if only Boris Johnson were back”. Unless, you’re the lying charlatan’s nauseatingly fawning lickspittle Laura Kuenssberg that is. If you don’t currently have plans for Thursday 3 October at 7.30pm, now you do. And it’s to be anywhere, doing literally anything other than turning on the TV to BBC One:

    The Kuenssberg Interview with… Boris Johnson

    Of course, it’s the type of ingratiating drivel we’ve all become used to from the shameless Tory mouthpiece. Nonetheless, the focus of this particular programme understandably had many rolling their eyes in utter incredulity. For one, Kuenssberg and the BBC has given over a whole slot to the former sleazebag prime minister. This being the disgraced PM even the Tories booted out after one too many scandals:

    Then, there’s the uncanny timing. Specifically, that it airs one week before Johnson’s memoir Unleashed hits the shelves. So, Kuenssberg’s interview is practically a promotional ad for his little self-aggrandising work of fiction (because from the serially lying Johnson, it can hardly count as non-fiction):

    One person on X highlighted that Johnson wasn’t too interested in giving an interview with an election impending:

    Evidently however, Kuenssberg is pretty pleased with herself for bagging herself a Boris Johnson one-on-one. Graciously, the good people of X well and truly ratioed her for this:

    Tight with the Tories all round

    Currently, details on what the programme will contain are sparse. The BBC’s website says only: “Laura Kuenssberg talks to Boris Johnson.” All it really tells us is that Johnson probably didn’t hide in a fridge for this interview.

    So, will Kuenssberg take Johnson to task over any number of his multifarious misdemeanours?

    Fat chance from the BBC’s sycophantic Tory stooge.

    Far from incisive, interrogative journalism, it’ll be a sickening slideshow of simpering stenography from its highfalutin hack. No-one asked for an hour (or however insufferably long this programme will be) of the sack of steaming shit talking his way out of his culpability for the deadly toll of the pandemic, Brexit, and countless other callous policies under his prime ministerial-ship. Invariably however, that’s what this will be. After all, Kuenssberg’s Johnson suck-up record speaks for itself.

    Almost literally anyone would do a better job as a journalist grilling the overinflated Bullingdon Club establishment grifter:

    Of course, Kuenssberg is just the tip of the iceberg of the BBC’s tight relationship with the Tories:

    If you had any lasting doubt that the BBC is a far-right Tory public relations outfit, then this should set that to rest. Putting out a puff piece for a disgraced former PM should be beyond embarrassing for any journalist. But playing her part in the Boris Johnson rehabilitation parade suits his probable next communications director down to ground.

    However, there was one other useful reminder from this. This date for the diary too: Thursday 10 October – watch Boris Johnson’s memoir stay stuck-fast to the shelves of your local bookshop. It’d be a damn sight better viewing than whatever paint-dryingly dull Johnson reputation-massaging ego-waffle Kuenssberg will be putting out the week before, that’s for sure.

    Feature image via Youtube – BBC News

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • How the war on Gaza exposed Israeli and western fascism

    Nearly a year into the world’s first live-streamed genocide – which began in Gaza, and is rapidly expanding into the occupied West Bank – the establishment western media still avoid using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s rampage of destruction.

    The worse the genocide gets, the longer Israel’s starvation-blockade of the enclave continues, the harder it gets to obscure the horrors – the less coverage Gaza receives.

    The worst offender has been the BBC, given that it is Britain’s only publicly funded broadcaster. Ultimately, it is supposed to be accountable to the British public, who are required by law to pay its licence fee.

    This is why it has been beyond ludicrous to witness the billionaire-owned media froth at the mouth in recent days about “BBC bias” – not against Palestinians, but against Israel. Yes, you heard that right.

    We are talking about the same “anti-Israel” BBC that just ran yet another headline – this time after an Israeli sniper shot an American citizen in the head – that managed somehow, once again, to fail to mention who killed her. Any casual reader risked inferring from the headline “American activist shot dead in occupied West Bank” that the culprit was a Palestinian gunman.

    https://x.com/BBCWorld/status/1832047105801683068?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1832047105801683068%7Ctwgr%5Eb7c9fe5da4bf390397c10bbf078320352b533c1c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.jonathan-cook.net%2F2024-09-13%2Fwar-gaza-israel-western-fascism%2F

    After all, Palestinians, not Israel, are represented by Hamas, a group “designated as a terrorist organisation” by the British government, as the BBC helpfully keeps reminding us.

    And it is the supposedly “anti-Israel” BBC that last week sought to stymie efforts by 15 aid agencies known as the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to run a major fundraiser through the nation’s broadcasters.

    No one is under any illusions about why the BBC is so unwilling to get involved. The DEC has chosen Gaza as the beneficiary of its latest aid drive.

    The committee faced the very same problem with the BBC back in 2009, when the corporation refused to take part in a Gaza fundraiser on the extraordinary pretext that doing so would compromise its rules on “impartiality”.

    Presumably, in the BBC’s eyes, saving the lives of Palestinian children reveals a prejudice that saving Ukrainian children’s lives does not.

    In its 2009 attack, Israel killed “only” 1,300 or so Palestinians in Gaza, not the many tens of thousands – or possibly hundreds of thousands, no one truly knows – it has this time around.

    Famously, the late, independent-minded Labour politician Tony Benn broke ranks and defied the BBC’s DEC ban by reading out details of how to donate money live on air, over the protests of the show’s presenter. As he pointed out then, and it is even truer today: “People will die because of the BBC’s decision.”

    According to sources within both the committee and the BBC, the corporation’s executives are terrified – as they were previously – of the “backlash” from Israel and its powerful lobbyists in the UK if it promotes the Gaza appeal.

    A spokesperson for the BBC told Middle East Eye that the fundraiser did not meet all the established criteria for a national appeal, despite the DEC’s expert opinion that it does, but noted the possibility of broadcasting an appeal was “under review”.

    Pulling punches

    The reason Israel is able to carry out a genocide, and western leaders are able to actively support it, is precisely because the establishment media constantly pulls its punches – very much in Israel’s favour.

    Readers and viewers are given no sense that Israel is carrying out systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, let alone a genocide.

    Journalists prefer to frame events as a “humanitarian crisis” because this strips away Israel’s responsibility for creating the crisis. It looks at the effects, the suffering, rather than the cause: Israel.

    Worse, these same journalists constantly throw sand in our eyes with nonsensical counter-claims to suggest that Israel is actually the victim, not the perpetrator.

    Take, for example, the new “study” into supposed BBC anti-Israel bias, led by a British lawyer based in Israel. A faux-horrified Daily Mail warned over the weekend that the “BBC is FOURTEEN times more likely to accuse Israel of genocide than Hamas … amid growing calls for inquiry”.

    But read the text, and what’s truly stunning is that over the selected four-month period, the BBC associated Israel with the term “genocide” only 283 times – in its massive output across many television and radio channels, its website, podcasts and various social media platforms, which serve myriad populations at home and abroad.

    What the Mail and other right-wing attack-dog media don’t mention is the fact that none of those references would have been the BBC’s own editorialising. Even Palestinian guests who try to use the word on its shows are quickly shut down.

    Many of the references would have been BBC News reporting on a case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, which is investigating Israel for what the world’s top court termed in January to be a “plausible” risk of genocide in Gaza.

    Regrettably for the BBC, it has been impossible to report that story without mentioning the word “genocide”, because it lies at the heart of the legal case.

    What should, in fact, astound us far more is that an active genocide, in which the West is fully complicit, was mentioned by the BBC’s globe-spanning media empire a total of only 283 times in the four months following 7 October.

    Campaign of intimidation

    The World Court’s preliminary ruling on Israel’s genocide is vital context that should be front and centre of every media story on Gaza. Instead, it is usually unmentioned, or hidden at the end of reports, where few will read about it.

    The BBC infamously gave barely any coverage to the genocide case presented in January to the World Court by South Africa, which the panel of judges found to be “plausible”. On the other hand, it broadcast the entirety of Israel’s defence to the same court.

    Now, after this latest campaign of intimidation by the billionaire-owned media, the BBC will likely be even less willing to mention the genocide – which is precisely the aim.

    What should have stunned the Mail and the rest of the establishment media far more is that the BBC broadcast 19 references to a Hamas “genocide” in the same four-month period.

    The idea that Hamas is capable of a “genocide” against Israel, or Jews, is as divorced from reality as the fiction that it “beheaded babies” on 7 October or the claims, still lacking any evidence, that it committed “mass rape” on that day.

    Hamas, an armed group numbering thousand of fighters, currently pinned down in Gaza by one of the strongest armies in the world, is quite incapable of committing a “genocide” of Israelis.

    This is, of course, why the World Court is not investigating Hamas for genocide, and why only Israel’s most fanatic apologists, including the western media, run with fake news either that Hamas is committing a genocide, or that it is conceivable it may try to do so.

    No one really takes seriously claims of a Hamas genocide. The tell was the world’s stunned reaction when the group managed to escape from the concentration camp that is Gaza for a single day on 7 October and wreak so much death and havoc.

    The idea that Hamas could do anything worse than that – or even repeat the attack – is simply delusional. The best Hamas can do is wage a guerrilla war of attrition against the Israeli military from its underground tunnels, which is precisely what it is doing.

    Here’s another statistic worth highlighting from the recent “study”: in the same four-month period, the BBC used the term “crimes against humanity” 22 times to describe the atrocities committed by Hamas on one day last October, compared with only 15 times to describe Israel’s even worse atrocities committed continuously over the past year.

    Allowable thought

    The ultimate effect of the latest media furore is to increase pressure on the BBC to make even larger concessions to the self-serving, right-wing political agenda of the billionaire-owned media and the corporate interests of the war machine it represents.

    The state broadcaster’s job is to set limits on allowable thought for the British public – not on the right, where that role falls to papers such as the Mail and the Telegraph, but on the other side of the political spectrum, on what is misleadingly referred to as “the left”.

    The BBC’s task is to define what is acceptable speech and action – meaning acceptable to the British establishment – by those seeking to challenge its domestic and foreign policy.

    Twice in living memory, progressive left-wing opposition leaders have emerged: Michael Foot in the early 1980s, and Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s. On both occasions, the media have united as one to vilify them.

    That should surprise no one. Making the BBC a whipping boy – denouncing it as “left-wing” – is a form of permanent gaslighting designed both to make Britain’s extreme right-wing media seem centrist, and to normalise the drive to push the BBC ever further rightwards.

    Over decades, the billionaire-owned media have crafted in the public’s mind the idea that the BBC defines the extreme end of supposedly “left-wing” thought. The more the corporation can be pushed to the right, the more the left faces an unwelcome choice: either follow the BBC rightwards, or become universally reviled as the loony left, the woke left, the Trot left, the militant left.

    Bolstering this self-fulfilling argument, any protests by BBC staff can be deduced by the journalist-servants of Rupert Murdoch and other press tycoons as further proof of the corporation’s left-wing or Marxist bias.

    The media system is rigged, and the BBC is the perfect vehicle for keeping it this way.

    Pressing the button

    What the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media are downplaying are not just the facts of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but also the obvious genocidal intent of Israeli leaders, the country’s wider society, and its apologists in the UK and elsewhere.

    It should not be up for debate that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, when everyone from its prime minister down has told us that this is very much their intent.

    The examples of such genocidal statements by Israeli leaders filled pages of South Africa’s case to the World Court.

    Just one example: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the Palestinians as “Amalek” – a reference to a biblical story well known to every Israeli schoolchild, in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people, including their children and livestock, off the face of the earth.

    Anyone engaged on social media will have faced a battery of similarly genocidal statements from mostly anonymous supporters of Israel.

    Those genocide cheerleaders recently gained a face – two, in fact. Video clips of two Israelis, podcasting in English under the name “Two Nice Jewish Boys”, have gone viral, showing the pair calling for the extermination of every last Palestinian man, woman and child.

    One of the podcasters said that “zero people in Israel” care whether a polio outbreak caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water, sewage and heath facilities ends up killing babies, noting that Israel’s agreement to a vaccination campaign is driven purely by public relations needs.

    In another clip, the podcasters agree that Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons deserve to be “executed by shoving too large of an object up their butts”.

    They also make clear that they would not hesitate to press a genocide button to wipe out the Palestinian people: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza – every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow – I would press it in a second … And I think most Israelis would. They wouldn’t talk about it like I am, they wouldn’t say ‘I pressed it’, but they would press it.”

    Relentless depravity

    It is easy to get alarmed over such inhuman comments, but the furore generated by this pair is likely to deflect from a more important point: that they are utterly representative of where Israeli society is right now. They are not on some depraved fringe. They are not outliers. They are firmly in the mainstream.

    The evidence is not just in the fact that Israel’s citizen army is systematically beating and sodomising Palestinian prisoners, sniping Palestinian children in Gaza with shots to the head, cheering the detonation of universities and mosques, desecrating Palestinian bodies, and enforcing a starvation-blockade on Gaza.

    It is in the welcoming of all this relentless depravity by wider Israeli society.

    After a video emerged of a group of soldiers sodomising a Palestinian prisoner at Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp, Israelis rallied to their side. The extent of the prisoner’s internal injuries required him to be hospitalised.

    In the aftermath, Israeli pundits – educated “liberals” – sat in TV studios discussing whether soldiers should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether to rape Palestinians in detention, or whether such abuses should be organised by the state as part of an official torture programme.

    One of the soldiers accused in the gang rape case chose to cast off his anonymity after being championed by journalists who interviewed him. He’s now treated as a minor celebrity on Israeli TV shows.

    Polls show that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis either approve of the razing of Gaza, or want even more of it. Some 70 percent want to ban from social media platforms any expressions of sympathy for civilians in Gaza.

    None of this is really new. It all just got a lot more ostentatious after Hamas’s attack on 7 October.

    After all, some of the most shocking violence that day occurred when Hamas fighters stumbled onto a dance festival close to Gaza.

    The brutal imprisonment of 2.3 million Palestinians, and the 17-year blockade denying them the essentials of life and any meaningful freedoms, had become so normal to Israelis that hip, freedom-loving Israeli youngsters could happily hold a rave so close to that mass of human suffering.

    Or as one of the Two Nice Jewish Boys observed of his feelings about life in Israel: “It’s nice to know that you’re dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless, sitting in a tent.” His partner interrupted: “Makes it even better … People enjoy knowing they [Palestinians in Gaza] are suffering.”

    ‘Heroic soldiers’

    This monstrous indifference to, or even pleasure in, the torture of others isn’t restricted to Israelis. There’s a whole army of prominent supporters of Israel in the West who confidently act as apologists for Israel’s genocidal actions.

    What unites them all is the Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism.

    In Britain, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not spoken out against the mass slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza, nor has he kept quiet about it. Instead, he has given Israel’s war crimes his blessing.

    Back in mid-January, as South Africa began making public its case against Israel for genocide that the World Court found “plausible”, Mirvis spoke at a public meeting, where he referred to Israel’s operations in Gaza as “the most outstanding possible thing”.

    He described the troops clearly documented committing war crimes as “our heroic soldiers” – inexplicably conflating the actions of a foreign, Israeli army with the British army.

    Even if we imagine he was truly ignorant of the war crimes in Gaza eight months ago, there can be no excuses now.

    Yet, last week, Mirvis spoke out again, this time to berate the British government for imposing a very partial limit on arms sales to Israel after it received legal advice that such weapons were likely being used by Israel to commit war crimes.

    In other words, Mirvis openly called for his own government to ignore international law and arm a state committing war crimes, according to UK government lawyers, and a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court.

    There are apologists like Mirvis in influential posts across the West.

    Appearing on TV late last month, his counterpart in France, Haim Korsia, urged Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza, and backed Netanyahu, who the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor is pursuing for war crimes.

    Korsia refused to condemn Israel’s killing of at least 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, arguingthat those deaths were “not of the same order” as the 1,150 deaths of Israelis on 7 October.

    He clearly meant Palestinian lives were not as important as Israeli lives.

    Inner fascist

    Nearly 30 years ago, Israeli sociologist Dan Rabinowitz published a book, Overlooking Nazareth, that argued Israel was a far more profoundly racist society than was widely understood.

    His work has taken on a new relevance – and not just for Israelis – since 7 October.

    Back in the 1990s, as now, outsiders assumed that Israel was divided between the religious and secular, the traditional and modern; between vulgar recent immigrants and more enlightened “veterans”.

    Israelis often see their society split geographically too: between peripheral communities where popular racism flourishes, and a metropolitan centre around Tel Aviv where a sensitive, cultured liberalism predominates.

    Rabinowitz tore this thesis to shreds. He took as his case study the small Jewish city of Nazareth Illit in northern Israel, renowned for its extreme right-wing politics, including support for the fascist movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.

    Rabinowitz ascribed the city’s politics chiefly to the fact that it had been built by the state on top of Nazareth, the largest community of Palestinians in Israel, specifically to contain, control and oppress its historic neighbour.

    His argument was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were not more racist than the Jews of Tel Aviv. They were simply far more exposed to an “Arab” presence. In fact, given the fact that few Jews chose to live there, they were heavily outnumbered by their “Arab” neighbours. The state had placed them in a direct, confrontational competition with Nazareth for land and resources.

    The Jews of Tel Aviv, by contrast, almost never came across an “Arab” unless it was in a servant’s role: as a waiter or a worker on a building site.

    The difference, noted Rabinowitz, was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were confronted with their own racism on a daily basis. They had rationalised and become easy with it. Jews in Tel Aviv, meanwhile, could pretend they were open-minded because their bigotry was never meaningfully tested.

    Well, 7 October changed all that. The “liberals” of Tel Aviv were suddenly confronted by an unwelcome, avenging Palestinian presence inside their state. The “Arab” was no longer the oppressed, tame, servile one they were used to.

    Unexpectedly, the Jews of Tel Aviv felt a space they believed to be theirs exclusively being invaded, just as the Jews of Nazareth Illit had felt for decades. And they responded in exactly the same way. They rationalised their inner fascist. Overnight, they became comfortable with genocide.

    The genocide party

    That sense of invasion extends beyond Israel, of course.

    On 7 October, Hamas’s surprise assault wasn’t just an attack on Israel. The breakout by a small group of armed fighters from one of the largest and most heavily fortified prisons ever built was also a shocking assault on western elites’ complacency – their belief that the world order they had built by force to enrich themselves was permanent and inviolable.

    7 October severely shook their confidence that the non-western world could be contained forever; that it must continue to do the West’s bidding, and that it would remain enslaved indefinitely.

    Just as it has with Israelis, the Hamas attack quickly exposed the little fascist within the West’s political, media and religious elite, who had spent a lifetime pretending to be the guardians of a western civilising mission – one that was enlightened, humanitarian and liberal.

    The act worked, because the world was ordered in such a way that they could easily pretend to themselves and others that they stood against the barbarism of the Other.

    The West’s colonialism was largely out of sight, devolved to globe-spanning, exploitative, environmentally destructive western corporations and a network of some 800 US overseas military bases, which were there to kick ass if this new arms-length economic imperialism encountered difficulties.

    Whether intentionally or not, Hamas tore off the mask of that deception on 7 October. The pretence of an ideological rift between western leaders on the right and a supposed “left” evaporated overnight. They all belonged to the same war party; they all became devotees of the genocide party.

    All have clamoured for Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself” – in truth, its right to continue decades of oppression of the Palestinian people – by imposing a blockade on food, water and power to Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.

    All actively approve arming Israel’s slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All have done nothing to impose a ceasefire apart from paying lip service to the notion.

    All seem readier to tear up international law and its supporting institutions than to enforce it against Israel. All denounce as antisemitism the mass protests against genocide, rather than denouncing the genocide itself.

    7 October was a defining moment. It exposed a monstrous barbarity with which it is hard to come to terms. And we won’t, until we face a difficult truth: that the source of such depravity is far closer to home than we ever imagined.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post How the war on Gaza exposed Israeli and western fascism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ghoulish Starmer LAUGHS about ‘tough decisions’ live on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg

    Keir Starmer’s Labour Party got into power on a platform of ‘change’. Now he’s in power, Starmer is implementing Tory-style austerity measures. The ‘change’ in question? Namely to rebrand ‘austerity’ as ‘tough decisions’ – tough decisions like cutting off winter fuel payments for more than 10 million pensioners.

    The result of all this is that Labour and Starmer’s popularity have tanked, with everyone understanding these so-called tough decisions are simply more of the same. Given that, some suspected Starmer might use his interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg to U-turn on his war on pensioners.

    He did not do this.

    And to add insult to injury, he couldn’t help but laugh as he repeated the phrase ‘tough decisions’ – a phrase now synonymous with freezing pensioners.

    See for yourself, it’s six seconds into the video below:

    Winter fuel payments: the more things change…

    In the clip above, Kuenssberg asks Starmer if he’s “willing to be unpopular?” He answers with the banal word salad we’ve become accustomed to – word salad we’ll deconstruct as we go:

    We’re going to have to be unpopular.

    This idea that ‘smart, grownup politics’ must by definition be unpopular is straight up propaganda. Starmer’s chancellor Rachel Reeves claimed that Labour had ‘inherited the worst set of circumstances since second world war’. It’s an interesting thing to say, because the post-war Labour government founded the NHS – the most popular institution in the UK – demonstrating that politics can improve people’s lives where there’s a will.

    What Starmer says next is the ghoulish part, because he can’t stop laughing as he says it:

    Tough decisions are tough decisions.

    Famously, when people make a tough decision they didn’t want to make, they can’t stop laughing when they think about it.

    Starmer continued:

    Popular decisions aren’t tough, they’re easy.

    This is a repetition of the same thinkspeak propaganda as before: ‘war is peace: freedom is slavery: ignorance is strength: the unpopular decisions are actually in your best interests, plebs’.

    Following this, he issues a clarification:

    When we talk about tough decisions, I’m talking about tough decisions.

    Ah, okay, thank god he cleared that up. He’s still smirking as he says this by the way!

    The thinkspeak intensifies from this point onwards:

    The things that last government ran away from – that government’s traditionally run away from – I’m convinced that because they’ve run away from difficult decisions, we haven’t got the change that we need for the country.

    Is that clear now?

    The Tories ran away from tough choices by inflicting years of austerity and keeping taxes low for the rich.

    Starmer, meanwhile, is going to face tough choices head on by inflicting years of austerity and keeping taxes low for the rich. Oh, and cutting winter fuel payments.

    He’s doing it for the country.

    Tough choices.

    It’s funny.

    Get it?

    Why aren’t you laughing?

    The emperor’s new choices

    Austerity was bullshit when David Cameron and George Osbourne tried it; it was bullshit before, and it’s bullshit now, as Raoul Martinez explained for Novara Media:

    When the [2010 Conservative-Liberal Democrat] Coalition came to power, neither history nor mainstream economic theory provided any support for the claim that cuts were the only way to reduce the deficit. Cutting spending in a recession has been tried many times and – without exception – failed. For instance, in the aftermath of the First World War, the US, Britain, Sweden, Germany, Japan and France all adopted austerity policies with devastating impacts on their economies. President Herbert Hoover’s austerity response to the 1929 economic crash was followed by the Great Depression.

    The historical failure of austerity as a response to economic crises resulted in a widespread consensus among academic economists that, since recessions are caused by a reduction in demand (and when there is no room to offset cuts by reducing interest rates), cutting spending only makes the situation worse. The textbook response to economic downturns, as any student of the subject knows, is to increase spending. By spending more in the short term, a government can reduce public debt faster because smart spending creates jobs, increases tax revenues and releases more people more quickly from dependency on the state.

    However, as governments began to embrace austerity, a handful of economists produced research telling them exactly what they wanted to hear.

    Cameron and Osbourne had economists and media types willing to back them; Starmer has no one. What he does have are many people willing to point out that his ‘tough choices’ like winter fuel payment cuts are actually just ‘Tory choices’:

    There are also people like Gary Stevenson and Richard Murphy who are explaining why taxing the rich more isn’t just a popular decision; it’s a vital one:

    Murphy further explained how Labour could have made choices other than cutting winter fuel payments without even being radical. This suggests that either Starmer and Reeves are entirely incompetent, or that the suffering is the point:

     

    Smirking class hero

    Starmer and Reeves have made it very clear where their loyalties lie, and it’s not with ordinary people. With no support from the mainstream media, they’re going to struggle to last longer than a single term in office without support from the masses.

    We’ll see who’s laughing at the next election.

    Featured image via BBC

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.