Starmer’s government constantly sells us red herrings to throw us off the scent of the UK’s complicity in Israel’s genocide

The British government is being rocked by a growing public backlash to Israel’s 21-month slaughter in Gaza and the UK’s active collusion in it.

That fallout came to a head over the weekend, when punk group Bob Vylan led Glastonbury’s crowds in chanting: “Death, death to the IDF,” referencing the Israeli army – a performance aired live on the BBC, which later expressed regret for not cutting the feed.

The Irish band Kneecap then focused audience rage towards British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, leading the crowd in a chant cursing his name.

Other musicians used their sets to vent indignation at British complicity in what the International Court of Justice ruled in early 2024 to be a “plausible” genocide.

Their grievances are well-founded.

The UK government is still supplying parts for the F-35 fighter jets dropping bombs on Gaza’s people. It has massively increased UK arms exports to Israel, even while stating that it cut them, while shipping US and German weapons through RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus. It is operating spy missions over Gaza on Israel’s behalf.

And to top it all, Britain is still providing unstinting diplomatic cover for Israel, even as it has butchered tens of thousands of civilians and continues to enforce the starvation of more than two million people.

Starmer isn’t budging. In fact, he’s entrenching, labelling any criticism of Israel as “antisemitism” – and increasingly as “terrorism”.

Depraved values

This is such a glaringly inverted way of understanding the world that it has required impressive amounts of ingenuity and creativity to prevent levels of popular anger from spiralling out of control.

What Israel, Washington, the UK and others have been forced to do to sustain the genocide is to create theatre – in a series of deflection dramas – to distract from the central crime.

Hollywood’s master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, the film director who specialised in what he termed “MacGuffins” – narrative dead-ends to throw viewers off the scent – might have appreciated the skill with which this has been done.

The aim has been to get the western media to focus on, and therefore western audiences to think about, not the main drama – either the genocide itself, or the inherently violent, apartheid nature of the Israeli state carrying it out – but to invest instead in separate plot twists and turns. Ones, of course, that don’t make western capitals look so obviously complicit and depraved.

Even when the media reports on Gaza, it is rarely to address Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians. Rather, it is to debate dozens of other matters thrown up, like the rubble and dust from an Israeli bombing run, by the genocide.

The latest is the furore over Bob Vylan, in which the British public is being mobilised – quite preposterously – by politicians and the media to worry about the safety of Israeli soldiers from the supposed threat of angry music fans.

That should apparently concern us much more than the safety of Palestinians in Gaza, who are currently being slaughtered and starved by those very same Israeli soldiers.

Increasingly, our leaders sound like they want to make belonging to a genocidal army a protected characteristic – like being Black or gay – so that any criticism of the Israeli military can be classed as hate speech.

Imagine, if you can, police investigating a punk band – as they are doing with Bob Vylan – for being mean about the Nazi paramilitary Waffen-SS, or the Russian army in Ukraine.

Anyone like Starmer, or the British media, expressing greater concern for the welfare of Israeli soldiers engaged in mass killing than the victims of that slaughter is living in a world of utterly depraved values.

If Bob Vylan is to be held to account for making hollow threats towards a genocidal army, why are police not investigating and prosecuting Britons serving in that army, or indeed a British prime minister who declares that Israel has a right to “defend itself” by starving Gaza’s population of food, water and power?

Video Link

If the double standard is not obvious, it is because you are concentrating on the MacGuffin, not the evidence.

Deflection tactics

As Israel’s actions in Gaza become ever-more indefensible – not least, the starvation of the population by blocking aid – the deflection dramas have needed to grow more lavish.

The recent attacks by Israel and the US on Iran, and before them Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon, are the most egregious of these set-pieces.

Those illegal wars of aggression had their own logic, of course.

Israel’s usefulness to the West depends on it being the main attack dog in the oil-rich Middle East: terrorising others into submission, laying waste to those who refuse to submit, ring-fencing the West’s client Gulf states from other influences, and provoking the very “existential threat” the West then claims it needs to protect Israel and itself from.

These attacks served as MacGuffins too – of the deadliest kind.

Minimal coverage of Gaza was instantly shelved to focus on a non-existent Iranian bomb – ignoring, of course, Israel’s all-too-real nukes.

Western capitals and their media ramped up concerns of a supposed nuclear “threat” posed to Israel by Iran – even when serious analysts understand that it would be suicidal for Tehran to launch such an attack, even if it did develop a bomb.

Weeks were lost to feverish debate about, first, whether an Israeli or US strike could take out Iran’s legal nuclear programme; and then, after US President Donald Trump ordered an attack, whether he was right to claim the programme had indeed been “obliterated”.

Momentum evaporated

What all this achieved was to stop us from thinking about what Israel is really up to.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed predictable outrage at the weekend that the BBC had inadvertently broadcast punk band Bob Vylan leading crowds at Glastonbury in a chant of “Death to the IDF” – the “Israel Defence Forces” that have been responsible for slaughtering many tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza over the past 21 months.

He called the chant “appalling hate speech” — apparently unaware that there are far worse crimes than hating soldiers carrying out the mass slaughter of children. Those worse things, of course, include slaughtering children en masse.

The BBC apologised, calling the band’s comments “deeply offensive” – more offensive, apparently, than Israel bombing and starving the children of Gaza.

Glastonbury’s organisers condemned the chant, saying there was no space for “hate speech or antisemitism” — apparently assuming, wrongly, that all Jews identify not just with the state of Israel but with an Israeli military widely accused by genocide experts of committing genocidal violence in Gaza.

Police are investigating Bob Vylan, a musical duo, to see whether they have committed a criminal offence, or possibly a terrorist one. As far as we know, the same police are doing nothing to investigate some 10 British citizens known to have travelled abroad to join the Israeli military, the IDF, committing the Gaza genocide.

[On Monday, the U.S. State Department cancelled the group’s visas ahead of a U.S. tour scheduled to begin in the fall and United Talent Agency dropped the duo, according to The Hollywood Reporter.]

On Sunday, the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire grilled Starmer’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, on remarks from the Israeli embassy in London condemning what it termed “the normalisation of extremist language” and the “glorification of violence” at Glastonbury.

Unexpectedly, Streeting avoided jumping whole-heartedly on the media outrage band-wagon, led by the Mail on Sunday, whose front page demanded the arrest of the two band members for what the paper wrongly described as a chant demanding “Death to Israelis”.

The Mail, apparently, believes that all Israelis, presumably including the country’s children, are currently serving in the Israeli military.

There are four important points to make about the interview between Derbyshire and Streeting:

1. The Israeli embassy in London, like the Israeli government it represents, has precisely no concerns about the “glorification of violence” when Israel is doing either the glorifying or the violence.

Israel is currently celebrating its “success” in slaughtering and maiming hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, including huge numbers of children; attacks by its soldiers and state-backed Jewish settler militias on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank; its eradication of whole communities in Lebanon; and its bombing of residential tower blocks across Tehran, killing many hundreds.

Violence has been Israel’s signature policy for the past 21 months — and long before that. Israel has revelled in the carnage it has inflicted on populations across the region.

In a post on social media, the Israeli embassy additionally argued of Bob Vylan’s chant:

“When speech crosses into incitement, hatred, and advocacy of ethnic cleansing, it must be called out — especially when amplified by public figures on prominent platforms.”

And yet public figures from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Starmer have incited against the Palestinians, with Netanyahu comparing them to “Amalek”, a people the Israelites were commanded by God to exterminate, and Starmer terming the wholesale starvation of the people of Gaza an act by Israel of “self-defence”.

Israeli officials from Netanyahu down have advocated the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And, even more seriously, Israel has not just threatened but repeatedly carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under its belligerent rule.

2. It is beyond ridiculous for the BBC to echo the Israeli government in prioritising a harsh crackdown on words at Glastonbury “glorifying violence” towards Israeli soldiers ahead of the actual violence of genocide being committed by those Israel soldiers.

The BBC has avoided criticising the Israeli government for its actual violence — its bombing and active starvation of Palestinian civilians — and the Starmer government for colluding in that violence, or what the International Court of Justice termed more than a year ago a “plausible” genocide by Israel.

As a recent report by the Centre for Media Monitoring confirmed, the BBC has dramatically skewed its language to present Israel, the aggressor, in a more favourable light than the victim, the Palestinians of Gaza. The BBC’s own whistleblowing journalists have warned that the state broadcaster has all but banned the use of the word “genocide”, even by experts on the matter.

[See: Jonathan Cook: The BBC’s Complicity in Genocide]

By arming Israel, by organising spy flights over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus, and by providing diplomatic cover, Starmer has effectively glorified Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian children in the enclave.

Bob Vylan’s chants of “Death to the IDF” have a far more dangerous counterpart in Starmer’s recital of Israel’s “right to defend itself” when that “defence” involves Israel mercilessly starving Gaza’s population of food, water and power.

Bob Vylan are a punk band; Starmer is the British prime minister, the man who directs Britain’s foreign policy and directs its army.

Video Link

No one, least of all the BBC, has held Israeli or British officials accountable not just for glorifying violence but for actually carrying it out on an industrial scale for nearly two years.

But the BBC is suddenly interested in holding to account two punk musicians for leading a chant — one that made a symbolic, hypothetical threat of violence — against an Israeli military carrying out the ultimate form of violence, an actual genocide.

In a serious media, Israel’s supposed “concerns” about the glorification of violence and extremist language would be laughed off the stage rather than respectfully aired.

Israel, Starmer’s government and the media are fomenting a moral panic about words ‘glorifying violence’ towards the IDF, while glorifying the IDF’s all-too-real violence towards Palestinians

Keir Starmer expressed predictable outrage at the weekend that the BBC had inadvertently broadcast punk band Bob Vylan leading crowds at Glastonbury in a chant of “Death to the IDF” – the so-called “Israel Defence Forces” that have been responsible for slaughtering many tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza over the past 21 months.

He called the chant “appalling hate speech” – apparently unaware that there are far worse crimes than hating soldiers carrying out the mass slaughter of children. Those worse things, of course, include slaughtering children en masse.

The BBC apologised, calling the band’s comments “deeply offensive” – more offensive, apparently, than Israel bombing and starving the children of Gaza.

Glastonbury’s organisers condemned the chant, saying there was no space for “hate speech or antisemitism” – apparently assuming, wrongly, that all Jews identify not just with the state of Israel but with an Israeli military widely accused by genocide experts of committing genocidal violence in Gaza.

Police are investigating Bob Vylan, a musical duo, to see whether they have committed a criminal offence, or possibly a terrorist one. As far as we know, the same police are doing nothing to investigate some 10 British citizens known to have travelled abroad to join the Israeli military, the IDF, committing the Gaza genocide.

On Sunday, the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire grilled Starmer’s health secretary, Wes Streeting, on remarks from the Israeli embassy in London condemning what it termed “the normalisation of extremist language” and the “glorification of violence” at Glastonbury.

Unexpectedly, Streeting avoided jumping whole-heartedly on the media outrage band-wagon, led by the Mail on Sunday, whose front page demanded the arrest of the two band members for what the paper wrongly described as a chant demanding “Death to Israelis”. The Mail, apparently, believes that all Israelis, presumably including the country’s children, are currently serving in the Israeli military.

There are four important points to make about the interview between Derbyshire and Streeting:

1. The Israeli embassy in London, like the Israeli government it represents, has precisely no concerns about the “glorification of violence” when Israel is doing either the glorifying or the violence. Israel is currently celebrating its “success” in slaughtering and maiming hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, including huge numbers of children; attacks by its soldiers and state-backed Jewish settler militias on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank; its eradication of whole communities in Lebanon; and its bombing of residential tower blocks across Tehran, killing many hundreds.

Violence has been Israel’s signature policy for the past 21 months – and long before that. Israel has revelled in the carnage it has inflicted on populations across the region.

In a post on social media, the Israeli embassy additionally argued of Bob Vylan’s chant: “When speech crosses into incitement, hatred, and advocacy of ethnic cleansing, it must be called out – especially when amplified by public figures on prominent platforms.”

And yet public figures from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to British prime minister Keir Starmer have incited against the Palestinians, with Netanyahu comparing them to “Amalek”, a people the Israelites were commanded by God to exterminate, and Starmer terming the wholesale starvation of the people of Gaza “self-defence”.

Israeli officials from Netanyahu down have advocated the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. And, even more seriously, Israel has not just threatened but repeatedly carried out the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians under its belligerent rule.

2. It is beyond ridiculous for the BBC to echo the Israeli government in prioritising a harsh crackdown on words at Glastonbury “glorifying violence” towards Israeli soldiers ahead of the actual violence of genocide being committed by those Israel soldiers.

The BBC has avoided criticising the Israeli government for its actual violence – its bombing and active starvation of Palestinian civilians – and the Starmer government for colluding in that violence, or what the International Court of Justice termed more than a year ago a “plausible” genocide by Israel.

As a recent report by the Centre for Media Monitoring confirmed, the BBC has dramatically skewed its language to present Israel, the aggressor, in a more favourable light than the victim, the Palestinians of Gaza. The BBC’s own whistleblowing journalists have warned that the state broadcaster has all but banned the use of the word “genocide”, even by experts on the matter.

By arming Israel, by organising spy flights over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus, and by providing diplomatic cover, Starmer has effectively glorified Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian children in the enclave. Bob Vylan’s chants of “Death to the IDF” have a far more dangerous counterpart in Starmer’s recital of Israel’s “right to defend itself” when that “defence” involves Israel mercilessly starving Gaza’s population of food, water and power.

Bob Vylan are a punk band; Starmer is the British prime minister, the man who directs Britain’s foreign policy and directs its army.

Video Link

No one, least of all the BBC, has held Israeli or British officials accountable not just for glorifying violence but for actually carrying it out on an industrial scale for nearly two years.

But the BBC is suddenly interested in holding to account two punk musicians for leading a chant – one that made a symbolic, hypothetical threat of violence – against an Israeli military carrying out the ultimate form of violence, an actual genocide. In a serious media, Israel’s supposed “concerns” about the glorification of violence and extremist language would be laughed off the stage rather than respectfully aired.

3. Wes Streeting is being congratulated and condemned in equal measure on social media for refusing to be drawn into the Mail and BBC’s confected outrage. “I’d say to the Israeli embassy, get your own house in order,” he responded to Derbyshire. But hang on a minute. Streeting’s resistance to Derbyshire’s line of questioning was perhaps unexpected. But it also, let us not forget, serves the interests of both the Starmer and Israeli governments.

In a confrontation with BBC news chief Richard Burgess, journalist Peter Oborne sets out six ways the state broadcaster has wilfully misled audiences on Israel’s destruction of Gaza

Veteran journalist Peter Oborne eviscerated the BBC this week over its shameful reporting of Gaza – and unusually, he managed to do so face-to-face with the BBC’s executive news editor, Richard Burgess, during a parliamentary meeting.

Oborne’s remarks relate to a new and damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. The report found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices.” These aren’t editorial slip-ups. They reveal a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour.

Oborne was one of several journalists to confront Burgess. His comments, filmed by someone at the meeting, can be watched below.

Oborne makes a series of important points that illustrate why the BBC’s slanted, Israel-friendly news agenda amounts to genocide denial, and means executives like Burgess are directly complicit in Israeli war crimes:

1. The BBC has never mentioned the Hannibal directive, invoked by Israel on 7 October 2023, that green-lit the murder of Israeli soldiers and civilians, often by Apache helicopter fire, to prevent them being taken captive by Hamas. The Israeli media has extensively reported on the role of the Hannibal directive in the Israeli military’s response on 7 October, but that coverage has been completely ignored by the BBC and most UK media outlets.

Israel’s invocation of the Hannibal directive – essential context for understanding what happened on 7 October – explains much of the destruction that day in Israel usually attributed to Hamas “barbarism”, such as the graveyard of burnt-out, crumpled cars and the charred, crumbling remains of houses in communities near Gaza.

Hamas, with its light weapons, did not have the ability to inflict this kind of damage on Israel, and we know from Israeli witnesses, video footage and admissions from Israeli military officers that Israel was responsible for at least a share of the carnage that day. How much we will apparently never know because Israel is not willing to investigate itself, and media like the BBC are not doing any investigations themselves, or putting any pressure on Israel to do so.

2. The BBC has never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine, the basis of its “mowing the lawn” approach to Gaza over the past two decades, in which the Israeli military has intermittently destroyed large swaths of the tiny enclave. The official aim has been to push the population, in the words of Israeli generals, back to the “Stone Age”. The assumption is that, forced into survival mode, Palestinians will not have the energy or will to resist their brutal and illegal subjugation by Israel and that it will be easier for Israel to ethnically cleanse them from their homeland.

Because Israel has been implementing this military doctrine – a form of collective punishment and therefore indisputably a war crime – for at least 20 years, it is critically important in any analysis of the events that led up to 7 October, or of the genocidal campaign of destruction Israel launched subsequently.

The BBC’s refusal even to acknowledge the doctrine’s existence leaves audiences gravely misinformed about Israel’s historical abuses of Gaza, and deprived of context to interpret the campaign of destruction by Israel over the past 20 months.

3. The BBC has utterly failed to report the many dozens of genocidal statements from Israeli officials since 7 October – again vital context for audiences to understand Israel’s goals in Gaza.

Perhaps most egregiously, the BBC has not reported Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biblically-inspired comparison of the Palestinians to “Amalek” – a people the Jews were instructed by God to wipe from the face of the earth. Netanyahu knew this clearly genocidal statement would have especial resonance with what now amounts to a majority of the combat soldiers in Gaza who belong to extreme religious communities that view the Bible as the literal truth.

The hardest thing to prove in genocide is intent. And yet the reason Israel’s violence in Gaza is so clearly genocidal is that every senior official from the prime minister down has repeatedly told us that genocide is their intent. The decision not to inform audiences of these public statements is not journalism. It is pro-Israel disinformation and genocide denial.

4. By contrast, as Oborne notes, on more than 100 occasions when guests have tried to refer to what is happening in Gaza as a genocide, BBC staff have immediately shut them down on air. As other investigations have shown, the BBC has strictly enforced a policy not only of banning the use of the term “genocide” by its own journalists in reference to Gaza but of depriving others – from Palestinians to western medical volunteers and international law experts – of the right to use the term as well. Again, this is pure genocide denial.

5. Oborne also points to the fact that the BBC has largely ignored Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza. A greater number have been killed by Israel in its war on the tiny enclave than the total number of journalists killed in all other major conflicts of the past 160 years combined.

The BBC has reported just 6 per cent of the more than 225 journalists killed by Israel in Gaza, compared to 62 per cent of the far smaller number of journalists killed in Ukraine. This is once again vital context for understanding that Israel’s goals are genocidal. It hopes to exterminate the main witnesses to its crimes.

6. Oborne adds a point of his own. He notes that the distinguished Israeli historian Avi Shlaim lives in the UK and teaches at Oxford University. Unlike the Israeli spokespeople familiar to BBC audiences, who are paid to muddy the waters and deny Israel’s genocide, Shlaim is both knowledgeable about the history of Israeli colonisation of Palestine and truly independent. He is in a position to dispassionately provide the context BBC audiences need to make judgments about what is going on and who is responsible for it.

Twenty years ago, the US warned prematurely of the ‘birth pangs’ of a new Middle East. Now they have arrived in full force – and they will not end in Iran

Western politicians and media are tying themselves up in knots trying to spin the impossible: presenting Israel’s unmistakable war of aggression against Iran as some kind of “defensive” move.

This time there was no rationalising pretext, as there was for Israel to inflict a genocide in Gaza following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023.

There was not a serious attempt beforehand to concoct a bogus doomsday scenario – as there was in the months leading up to the US and UK’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Then we were lied to about Baghdad having “weapons of mass destruction” that could be launched at Europe in 45 minutes.

Rather, Iran was deep in negotiations with the United States on its nuclear enrichment programme when Israel launched its unprovoked attack last Friday.

The West has happily regurgitated claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel was forced to act because Iran was on the cusp of producing a nuclear bomb – an entirely evidence-free claim he has been making since 1992.

None of his dire warnings has ever been borne out by events.

In fact, Israel struck Iran shortly after President Donald Trump had expressed hope of reaching a nuclear agreement with Tehran, and two days before the two countries’ negotiators were due to meet again.

In late March Trump’s head of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, had expressly stated as part of the US intelligence community’s annual assessment: “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khameini has not authorised a nuclear weapons programme he suspended in 2003.”

This week four sources said to be familiar with that assessment told CNN that Iran was not trying to build a bomb but, if it changed tack, it would be “up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one [a nuclear warhead] to a target of its choosing”.

Nonetheless, by Tuesday this week Trump appeared to be readying to join Israel’s attack. He publicly rebuked his own intelligence chief’s verdict, sent US warplanes to the Middle East via the UK and Spain, demanded Iran’s “unconditional surrender”, and made barely veiled threats to kill Khameini.

‘Samson option’

Israel’s engineering of a pretext to attack Iran – defined by the Nuremberg tribunal in 1945 as the “supreme international crime” – has been many years in the making.

The current talks between the US and Iran were only needed because, under intense Israeli pressure during his first term as president, Trump tore up an existing agreement with Tehran.

That deal, negotiated by his predecessor, Barack Obama, had been intended to quieten Israel’s relentless calls for a strike on Iran. It tightly limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium to far below the level where it could “break out” from its civilian energy programme to build a bomb.

Israel, by contrast, has been allowed to maintain a nuclear arsenal of at least 100 warheads, while refusing – unlike Iran – to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and – again unlike Iran – denying access to monitors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The West’s collusion in the pretence that Israel’s nuclear weapons are secret – a policy formally known in Israel as “ambiguity” – has been necessary only because the US is not allowed to provide military aid to a state with undeclared nuclear weapons.

Israel is by far the largest recipient of such aid.

No one – apart from incorrigible racists – believes Iran would take the suicidal step of firing a nuclear missile at Israel, even if it had one. That is not the real grounds for Israeli or US concern.

Rather, the double standards are enforced to keep Israel as the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East so that it can project unrestrained military power across an oil-rich region the West is determined to control.

Israel’s bomb has left it untouchable and unaccountable, and ready to intimidate its neighbours with the “Samson option” – the threat that Israel will use its nuclear arsenal rather than risk an existential threat.

Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, appeared to imply just such a scenario against Iran this week in a reported comment: “There will be other difficult days ahead, but always remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Bear in mind that Israeli governments count as “existential” any threat to Israel’s current status as a settler-colonial state, one occupying and forcibly uprooting the Palestinian people from their homeland.

Israel’s nuclear weapons ensure it can do as it pleases in the region – including commit genocide in Gaza – without significant fear of reprisals.

War propaganda

The claim that Israel is “defending itself” in attacking Iran – promoted by France, Germany, Britain, the European Union, the G7 and the US – should be understood as a further assault on the foundational principles of international law.

The assertion is premised on the idea that Israel’s attack was “pre-emptive” – potentially justified if Israel could show there was an imminent, credible and severe threat of an attack or invasion by Iran that could not be averted by other means.

And yet, even assuming there is evidence to support Israel’s claim it was in imminent danger – there isn’t – the very fact that Iran was in the midst of talks with the US about its nuclear programme voided that justification.