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 - and 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.
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.
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.
The one thing that the Gaza genocide has revealed is the West's true colours: Cynical, racist and cruel.