The BBC's Prostitute 'Journalists’ Led by Radio 2’s Harvey Cook LAUGHED AT BABIES BEING BLOWN UP at the NUJ Conference

BBC Delegates Did All They Could to Undermine Solidarity With the Palestinian Victims of Israel’s Genocide

Sky News investigates slaughter of Palestinian family fleeing fighting | Israel-Hamas War

The BBC has historically been pro-imperialist and pro-Zionist. I can remember in 1967 during the 6 Day War, the BBC’s correspondent in Israel, Michael Elkins could hardly contain his enthusiasm for Israel’s victory.

Throughout the troubles in Northern Ireland, which began because the Catholic population demanded civil rights after years of gerrymandering, the BBC made it clear it was on the side of the British army and the Unionists.

During the current genocide in Gaza the BBC has bent over backwards to whitewash and exonerate Israel’s military. When the BBC showed Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone it immediately ran into a campaign by the Israel lobby over the fact that the father of its narrator, Abdullah 14, was the Deputy Minister for Agriculture in Gaza’s administration.

Harvey Cook lobbying i.e. threatening the NUJ Executive

Even if this were true, then so what? Even if his father had been a member of Hamas why should that have had any bearing his son fronting the program? The BBC thought differently and quickly bent the knee to the Zionists and their lackies in the British government like the despicable Lisa Nandy.

If this was not bad enough, the BBC then used the censorship of this film as an excuse not to broadcast another film, Gaza: Medics Under Fire. The fact that all of Gaza’s hospitals have been bombed and attacked and most of them destroyed hasn’t bothered the genocide supporters at the BBC at all.

Harvey Cook lobbying i.e. threatening the NUJ Executive

Anything that is seen as sympathetic to the Palestinians gets censored by the BBC management, led by its Tory Director General Tim Davie.

Harvey Cook and the rest of the BBC Delegation Found the Plight of This Child Highly Amusing

Contrast this with Sky TV’s coverage. It did an excellent expose of Israel’s  calculated murder of 6 year old Hind Rajab who was murdered by a tank along with the two Red Crescent paramedics sent to rescue her.

When Israel executed 15 Red Crescent medics and then lied about it, claiming that they had approached Israel’s military ‘suspiciously’ with their lights off, the BBC went out of its way to whitewash this appalling war crime. Even when the footage that was later discovered on one of the bodies proved that the ambulances had their lights on and that they had been murdered in cold blood. 

The BBC Delegation to the NUJ Conference

The idea of the BBC labelling what happened for what it was, clear and calculated murder is unimaginable. Instead its headline was 'Professional failures' led to killing of Gaza medics, IDF inquiry says. giving prominence to yet more Israeli lies. One wonders if Russia had executed 15 Red Cross workers whether they would have carried Russia’s explanation without comment?

‘Professional failures’ might be used about a doctor who made mistakes resulting in the death of a patient. It implies that the death was accidental, not the cold-blooded killing of Red Crescent workers.

When the Israeli version of events was shown to be a lie, did the BBC come out and say so? Not a bit of it. Its headline was ‘Israel admits mistakes over medic killings in Gaza’.

Presumably the Nazi massacres at Lidice and Oradour-sur-Glane were also mistakes and the result of ‘professional failures’. How can an ambush in which firing could be heard for 5 minutes and when the ambulances were crushed and buried in a shallow grave, rather than being handed over to the Red Crescent, be termed a ‘mistake’? 

Omar and Omar - the BBC found their murder highly amusing

This is Goebbels style propaganda but it is consistent with the bias of the BBC over decades of reporting the war crimes of the Apartheid State.

Or take the title of its video ‘Israel admits wrongly killing 15 emergency workers in Gaza due to “professional failures” This was not an accidental death but deliberate, cold blooded murder. An ambush. Imagine the BBC saying ‘Israel murders 15 emergency workers in Gaza.’ It is not something that the BBC and its Zionist Gatekeeper Raffi Burg could even contemplate.

Israel admits wrongly killing 15 emergency workers in Gaza due to “professional failures” 

Owen Jones asked whether the BBC ‘journalists’ were on crack. The sad truth is that the ‘prostitute journalists’ responsible for the BBC’s coverage were not under the influence of drugs. They have no such excuse. The BBC sees its prime duty as being loyalty to British foreign office policy.

These premature babies were taken out of the incubators at Al Shifa hospital and left to die by the IDF - their bodies eaten by wild animals - highly amusing to Harvey Cook

It’s a good job that the BBC weren’t on the German side during the war otherwise they would have described Auschwitz as a ‘professional mistake’. 

It is no accident that when the National Union of Journalists held its conference in Blackpool from April 25-27 the BBC’s delegates, led by Harvey Cook and Stefan Cholewka, the Manchester delegate, did their best to block all resolutions supporting the Palestinians.

I was approached by a delegate to the conference, who asked to remain anonymous who wrote the following piece:

Kafka meets Orwell at the national union of journalists

The NUJ delegates at their conference in Blackpool laughed at the thought of babies being blown up in Gaza. When challenged if he thought it funny one said "the more the better."

These delegates included senior BBC presenters such as: Harvey Cook, who describes himself as a news reader at BBC radio two and radio  Kent.

These delegates who represented several sections, but were mostly based in London, had spent the entire conference voting down every resolution that in anyway supported Palestine.

Whenever they lost a vote they would bring it back with a point of order or vote clause by clause to neuter it. The NUJ is a small union of under 20,000 and is haemorrhaging members. It is well known in union circles that those in the BBC sections have threatened to leave in block if the union supports Palestine in any way. Obviously some BBC workers value their jobs more than opposing Genocide!

Manchester delegate, Stefan Cholewka, said:

" it was like something out of Kafka's, the trial."

When the NUJ executive ruled out of order yet another attempt to block discussion on Gaza, Harvey Cook approached them, whispered something to them, and magically, they changed their minds.

Many times, pro Palestinian delegates were not allowed to speak by time being called on debate. When one delegate from Manchester spoke to tell the conference what the pro Israel lobby had said, he was ruled out of order.

This delegate was then intimidated  by a member of the BBC world service, and later by an NUJ executive member called, Nick McGowan - Lowe. (this is one person not Manchester United's new midfield.)

Worse was to follow. The delegate was then called into a room by the then union assistant General Secretary, Seamus Dooley. No prior notice was given. No legal representation allowed. The unions legal officer took notes but the delegate was given no such luxury. Charges were then brought against the delegate by (the executive) rather than any named accusers.) The executive are therefore acting as judge and jury.

One of the charges is that the delegate may in the future write an article about the conference. Think for a moment.. : a journalist is charged with, at some time in the future, writing an article about journalists, at a conference for... journalists...

Opening the conference, union President, Natasha Hirst, had said:

" healthy debate is crucial to strengthening the unions work."

The BBC's Delegation to the NUJ Conference

An article in The Socialist, Heated debates on Gaza reporting in journalists’ union confirms the above account:

Tony Greenstein

Motion 102 from the London Magazine branch noted a November 2024 letter from over 230 members of the media, including 101 BBC journalists, that criticised the BBC, Sky and ITV reporting of the Gaza horrors.

Some BBC delegates, with backing from the right wing of the National Executive Council (NEC), successfully moved to bring the motion back to standing orders, claiming the motion broke NUJ rules. London Magazine members agreed to remove the contentious paragraph but BBC London branch still opposed the motion. They falsely claimed that the London Magazine motion was an attack on the integrity and work of BBC journalists.

Moving the motion, London Magazine branch chair and Socialist Party member Niall Mulholland emphasised that in fact the motion was an act of solidarity with BBC journalists trying to do their job and follow the NUJ’s Code of Conduct, in the context of senior management pressure and editorial decisions. Niall quoted from the open letter: “The BBC did not make clear when Israel is a perpetrator or relay the historical context of events before 7 October 2023.” An oppositional amendment was passed but a significant minority supported 102.

See also:

Fact or Fiction: Israel needs fake nurses to justify killing Gaza babies

Israeli killings of Palestinian children 'an extremely dark place in history', says UN

‘They killed her twice’: Hind Rajab’s mother mourns girl, 6, found killed days after being trapped under Israeli fire

Open Letter to Chris Ward, MP for Brighton Kemptown

You Say You Share My Anger Over Gaza – If That’s True Then You Will Resign as Starmer’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, Bag Carrier & Fixer

UN says it still hasn't been able to distribute any aid in Gaza

Chris Ward is the Labour MP for Brighton Kemptown, which was a Tory seat from 1950 until it went Labour in 1964 when Dennis Hobden won by a margin of 7 votes after 7 recounts.

This was the first time any Sussex seat had been won by Labour and it owed a great deal to the personality of the Labour candidate, Dennis Hobden who was a son of the working class. Hobden was the son of a train driver and worked most of his life in the Post Office.

In 1966 when Harold Wilson won a landslide victory by 98 seats Dennis only held on to Kemptown by 831 votes. In 1970 he was defeated by Andrew Bowden, the self-styled pensioners' champion. Bowden held the seat till 1997 when he disgraced himself after well founded allegations of having received a £5,000 cash bribe from Mohamed al-Fayed.

I knew Dennis when I was in the Labour Party in the 80s when he was considered on the left though it was hard to pigeonhole him. When a row blew up over a statement of the then councillor Richard Stanton who defended the IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel as a legitimate target, it caused a storm amongst the Labour Right. Hobden was staunch in Richard’s support when others on the left, including Militant, were found wanting. Hobden was also a freemason!

In 2010 Simon Kirby won the seat for the Tories by 1,328 votes and in 2015 by 690 votes. In 2017 he was overwhelmed by the Corbyn surge when Lloyd Russell-Moyle overturned a small majority to win by nearly 10,000. The Labour Party in Brighton was the largest in the country.

An Israeli soldier in the world's most moral army looking for a baby to kill

Brighton was at the centre of the Corbyn movement. When the local District Labour Party held its AGM in July 2016, Momentum held a pre-meeting in Brighthelm Community Centre. It was the largest meeting I had ever seen at the Centre. People then moved on to the AGM at City College where the Left won all the officer posts by a margin of 2-1.

Unfortunately Corbyn had done nothing about Labour’s right-wing civil service. John Stolliday, the head of the Compliance Unit and Council leader Warren Morgan immediately moved to have the results cancelled on the basis of fabricated allegations of spitting.

Although Russell-Moyle was elected in 2017 and re-elected by over 8,000 in 2019 he proved a great disappointment, shifting from left to right as the political winds changed direction. As Bob Dylan noted, you don’t need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and Moyle was nothing if not a political weatherman.  An opportunist who was ultimately defeated by his own opportunism.

Gaza's landscape could be that of Nagasaki

The removal of Moyle in 2024 and the imposition of Chris Ward, the ex-Starmer aide and political lobbyist who worked for Hanbury Strategy, who had no discernible support in the local Labour Party, was an example of the dishonesty of the current Labour leadership. Hanbury Strategy specialised in lobbying for the gambling and fossil fuels industry.

Lewis Aaron on Rejecting Starmer Labour's Request for Social Media Help

As Andy Winter wrote,  ‘can you imagine a less appropriate candidate for a seat in Brighton and Hove?’

Allegations from eight years ago have been made (against Moyle), from before he was an MP. The timing that these allegations have surfaced go well beyond suspicion. While ... they may be serious or they might have no substance whatsoever, it shows control-freakery of the worst kind by Starmer and his henchmen and women.

Ancient allegations against Moyle were cynically resurrected, having originally been rejected, thus enabling the leadership to have a pretext for suspending him. Similar behaviour by Jennie Formby, Corbyn’s General Secretarym in suspending Chris Williamson in 2019 met with Moyle’s approval. Literally Moyle was hoist by his own petard.

Chris Ward experenced a 7% swing against him and the Tory had a 14% swing against her as the Green candidate Elaine Hills came within a whisker of the Tories. As befits a former crony Ward was appointed Starmer’s PPS.

Victoria Derbyshire Demolishes Gilad Erdan, Israel's UN Ambassador

I recently signed a petition to MPs including Chris Ward. Some weeks later I got an email from him telling me ‘how angry’ he was ‘at the frankly intolerable humanitarian situation in Gaza’.

The strange thing about his email is that not once did the word ‘genocide’ cross his lips. So I thought I would send him an email!

Dear Chris Ward,

You wrote (16 May) that

I share your anger and outrage at the frankly intolerable humanitarian situation in Gaza and much of the occupied territories’.

I am pleased to hear that we agree on so much because we didn’t last October when I wrote to you. You say that

Israel's decision to block aid into Gaza - and to effectively starve a civilian population that is already suffering terribly – is both cruel and completely indefensible.

                                    

Aamer Anwar Crushes Sky TV Presenter

I agree. However I note that you avoid using the word ‘genocide’. Perhaps you can tell me what else is starvation other than an intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, which is the Geneva Convention definition of Genocide?

Words are cheap. What counts is what you don't say not what you do say.

Israel has been imposing a starvation blockade on Gaza since 2 March. Since 7 October it has waged a war on the Palestinians in Gaza whilst doing its best to prevent aid whilst lying to the contrary.

Moshe Feiglin, an ex-Likud MK's genocidal comments

At the start of Israel’s attack on Gaza Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared that

‘I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed’ adding that ‘We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.’

It was not as if Israel’s leaders hid what their intentions were. Genocidal statements were made from Netanyahu down. Throughout this whole period you, Lammy and Starmer remained silent.

Law for Palestine has documented over 500 examples of genocidal statements. Israel's Ministers made explicit their desire to ethnically  cleanse and settle Gaza. For example Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi said, on 28 January 2024 at a conference calling for the resettlement of Gaza:

We must establish settlements. We need security forces. We need to settle this land because it’s our land.

This despite the decision of the International Court of Justice that Israel’s occupation of Gaza was illegal. Gaza belongs to the Palestinians not Israel. When Russia made far more convincing claims to parts of Ukraine, with the agreement of the people of Crimea and the Donbass, Britain and Europe immediately slapped sanctions on Russia. Why the double standards?

‘Massacre’: Dozens killed by Israeli fire in Gaza while collecting food aid

Even when aid was allowed in Israel did its best to stop it being distributed and we had the flour massacres when starving people, queuing for food, were murdered by Israel in cold blood. Even today, Israel is still blocking aid and the entry of aid lorries.

Bursting Netanyahu's 'Lies'; Point-By-Point Fact Check Of Israeli PM's U.S. Congress Speech

Nothing Israel’s government says can be trusted. They are proven liars. They murdered 5 year old Hind Rajab after falsely assuring Red Crescent paramedics that they would be safe if they rescued her from her parent’s car where the rest of her family lay dead. When the paramedics reached Hind a tank opened fire killing them all.

Israel Deliberately Kills Kids - Hind Rajab's Murder Exposed As DELIBERATE

Sky News investigates slaughter of Palestinian family fleeing fighting

Israel’s lies about the murder of 15 Red Crescent workers are well known. Israel first claimed that the ambulances had approached ‘suspiciously’ without their lights on. When this was disproved by footage from a mobile phone found on one of the dead aid workers they switched to their usual lie -  they were members of Hamas. Yet this government has continued to take the word of Israel’s genocidal leaders and army on trust.

Lammy greeting Israel's No. 1 War Criminal

On Tuesday David Lammy criticised the ‘intolerable’ and ‘extremist’ Israeli blockade and offensive. Indeed he employed almost every adjective except the one that was most appropriate. Israel’s starvation blockade of Gaza is genocidal. Are you prepared to call Israel’s policy, which is the same as the policy of the Nazis in the Polish Jewish ghettos, a Genocide?

New video contradicts Israeli account of Gaza aid convoy attack

I am not interested in how angry you are. I am more interested in what you intend to do. Lammy’s measures were pathetically inadequate – suspension of trade talks not trade. Nothing about halting arms supplies to continue the genocide. Token sanctions on settlers in the West Bank. All mouth and no trousers. Are  you prepared to speak out and demonstrate that your anger is more than a form of words?

I want to ask you a few questions, bearing in mind you are in a unique position to make a difference being the PPS to Starmer.

i.              Will you call for the immediate halt of all RAF flights overflying Gaza which provide intelligence to Israel’s killers? Will you call for the end of any military co-operation with the IDF?

ii.           Will you support and call for the prosecution of any British citizen who is found to have fought in Israel’s genocidal army?

iii.        Will you call for a complete end to the arms trade with Israel?

iv.        Will you make it a criminal offence to trade with the settlements? You say that ‘There also needs to be an end to Israeli settlement building.’ Good. Let’s impose sanctions on trade with them.

v.           Will you demand that the UK enforce the arrest warrants of the International Criminal Court  against Netanyahu and Gallant

          The MORONS who control Youtube removed this video because they said it breached their 'hate' policy.   It seems a video exposing the racism of Israeli school children's singing songs about how they hate and want to kill Arabs is the same as encouraging it.

vi.        Will you call for an end to the attacks on the Palestine solidarity movement and the libel that opposition to Zionism equals anti-Semitism?

vii.     Will you call for the Government to jettison the IHRA which equates opposition to genocide with anti-Semitism?

viii.  Will you call for sanctions on Israel as and until it becomes a state of its own citizens rather than an apartheid, Jewish Supremacist state where Arabs are subjects not citizens?

ix.        Will you also call for the removal of Hamas from the list of proscribed ‘terrorist’ organisations? It is clear that it is Israel not Hamas who are the terrorists. 

What is happening in Gaza is a continuation of the Nakba in 1948 when 750,000 Palestinian  refugees were driven from their homes to create a ‘Jewish’ state. Israel has recently invaded Syria and Lebanon in order to capture more territory without justification following the fall of Assad.

What is happening in Gaza is not a consequence of October 7 but a continuation of the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing and genocide that began in 1948. October 7 was no different from the slave rebellions and anti-colonial resistance of the past. As Omar Bartov, the Israeli holocaust scholar wrote in Infinite License:

'On January 12, 1904, the Herero people of German Southwest Africa—today’s Namibia—launched a series of attacks on scattered German farms in the territory... the German settlers who had begun to arrive in the late nineteenth century increasingly encroached on their grazing lands.

The rebels destroyed many of the farms and killed more than a hundred settlers, mostly sparing women and children. For the settlers the rebellion served as a final proof of the need to eradicate the Herero, whom they described as “baboons.” ...  the German governor appealed to Berlin, which sent some 10,000 soldiers. By August they had crushed the Herero fighters. In October the German commander, Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, issued what has come to be known as his Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order) to those who remained:

.... Any Herero found inside the German frontier,... will be executed. I shall spare neither women nor children. Most of the Herero were shot or died of thirst and hunger in the desert to which they had been expelled. Several thousand were taken to forced labor camps....

Germany’s famous Vergangenheitsbewältigung  (coming to terms with or overcoming the past) was about the Holocaust, not long-forgotten colonial crimes. Only in 2021 did the German government officially apologize....

That remote genocide at the dawn of the twentieth century shares some remarkable similarities with the campaign of ethnic cleansing and annihilation prosecuted by Israel in Gaza. Israel saw the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, in much the same way that the Germans saw the Herero attack 119 years earlier: as confirmation that the militant group was utterly savage and barbaric, that resistance to Israeli occupation would always incline toward murder, and that Gaza’s Palestinian population as a whole should be removed from the moral universe of civilization.'

“GAS CHAMBERS” In Gaza: Prominent Israeli Demands “HOLOCAUST”

Those who define Israel’s genocide, as Lammy did, in terms of fighting terrorism or Israel’s ‘right of self-defence’ are justifying what Israel has done. It is futile to ask Israel not to complete the Endlosung (Final Solution) of the Palestinians. Lammy and Starmer, by making October 7, rather than the Nakba, the reference point are justifying Netanyahu’s extermination of the Palestinians in exactly the same way as those who supported the genocide of the Herero.

There is no difference, apart from 120 years, between the German genocide of 1904 and the Zionist genocide of 2024. When Nissim Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, says that there are ‘no innocents' and that Gaza should be ‘burned now’ or when MK Galit Distel Atbaryan calls for ‘Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the earth.’ they are following in the footsteps of Von Trotha and Himmler.

When Israeli Channel 14 producer, Elad Barashi, posted on X:

‘Good morning, let there be a Shoa (Holocaust) in Gaza.’ and writes ‘I can't understand the people here in the State of Israel who don't want to fill Gaza with gas showers... or train cars... and finish this story! Let there be a Holocaust in Gaza.’

he is not an outlier. He is reflecting majority opinion among Israeli Jews.

When Israeli Jews were asked whether they supported or opposed the idea that Israel should allow the transfer of humanitarian aid, food and medicines, to Gaza residents, 68% of them said they were opposed to allowing in aid, even if Hamas and UNWRA were excluded from its distribution. 

The exterminationist mentality of Israel’s Jewish citizens is crystal clear. Israel is now echoing Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews. Israel is a settler colonial state with the facade of democracy. It is an ethnocracy and far from supporting its ‘right to exist’ we should be calling for its dismantlement in order that the Palestinians can live.

If your anger is genuine Chris Ward, given that Starmer is a ‘Zionist without qualification’ you have no choice but to resign as his PPS. It may be the one good thing you have done in your political life.

Yours sincerely,

Tony Greenstein