Disappearing Genocide: BBC ‘Balance’ Between Perpetrator Israel And Palestinian Victims After Damning Amnesty Report

BBC Middle East correspondent Yolande Knell, 5 December, 2024.

Imagine that the world’s largest and most respected human rights group issued a report detailing Russian war crimes in Ukraine and concluding that Russia was committing genocide. Western news media would devote massive coverage to the report. Newspaper and website headlines, together with television and radio broadcasts, would highlight Russia’s genocide and the bitter denunciations of Western leaders.

By contrast, last week’s devastating Amnesty International report stating that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, detailed in a carefully-documented 296-page report, received only token ‘mainstream’ media coverage.

Amnesty reached its conclusion after close examination of Israel’s violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024, interviewing 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, and healthcare and aid workers. The organisation conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, Amnesty shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response by the time of the report’s publication.

Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, stated:

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

In a warning to key Western allies of Israel, she noted:

‘States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end.’

Moreover:

‘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.’

Amnesty observed that:

‘Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid.’

Callamard added:

‘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.’

She continued:

‘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 [our emphasis]. 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.’

Amnesty’s Secretary General said that the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month:

‘offer real hope of long-overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court’s decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC.’

The BBC Goes To Work Protecting Israel

In a sane world, such a powerful indictment by the world’s most prestigious human rights organisation would receive intensive, widespread and continuing news coverage and commentary. In the UK, prime minister Keir Starmer and foreign secretary David Lammy would have been under intense pressure to immediately stop all arms sales to Israel, call the genocide what it is, demand an immediate ceasefire, and issue an unequivocal commitment to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they ever set foot on British soil.

In the real world, when they covered the report at all, ‘mainstream’ news reports gave ample room to Israel’s crazed denunciations of Amnesty as a ‘deplorable and fanatical organisation’ that had issued a report that was ‘entirely false and based on lies’.

The Daily Telegraph exhibited classic propaganda bias. Rather than focus on Amnesty’s evidence and conclusion that Israel ‘has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians’, the paper led with Israel’s absurd dismissal of the report. Amnesty’s key conclusions about genocide were sketched briefly and relegated towards the end of the piece.

A Nexis database search of UK-wide newspapers reveals that the Daily Mirror also carried the story (under 500 words) on page 8 or 10, depending on the edition. There was also an article by the Guardian (which only seems to have been published online and not in the print edition) and the Independent, which felt compelled to add the phrase ‘an accusation Israel rejects’ in its headline: ‘Amnesty International says genocide is occurring in Gaza, an accusation Israel rejects’. It was also covered by The National and The Herald in Scotland. However, the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Times and the Express all appear to have blanked the story.

The BBC, like other major news organisations, undoubtedly had an advance embargoed copy of Amnesty’s report giving them time to prepare their news coverage. And yet, it took fully 12 hours for the BBC to publish an article on its website. Within a mere 24 hours, the story had entirely disappeared from its front page.

Richard Sanders, an experienced filmmaker and journalist, noted that the day after Amnesty’s report came out, the story was not even one of the seven leading headlines on the BBC’s ‘Israel-Gaza war’ page. Instead, readers had to scroll down the page to ‘Latest News’ where, he observed, ‘it nestles among a bunch of reports about Israeli hostages.’

Even on the very day of the Amnesty report, BBC News bent over backwards to incorporate the Israeli perspective, typified by a short segment on the BBC News Channel at 12.19pm which went as follows:

• BBC presenter introduction: around 30 seconds.

• BBC Middle East correspondent Yolande Knell’s summary of the Amnesty report: around 45 seconds.

• Israel’s response attacking Amnesty as a ‘deplorable and fanatical organisation’: around 25 seconds.

• Knell pointing out that Israel had made similar comments about the ongoing genocide case brought before the International Court of Justice by South Africa. She then mentioned the origins of the 1948 Genocide Convention in the mass murder of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust: around 40 seconds.

• All this was then followed by testimony from the mother of a British hostage being held by Hamas in Gaza: around 1 minute, 30 seconds; by far the longest section.

To spell it out, BBC News devoted more time here to the narrative of the genocide perpetrator, Israel, than it did to the copious evidence and damning conclusions of Amnesty. This is BBC ‘balance’ and ‘impartiality’: a brazen attempt to protect Israel’s reputation from the truth during an ongoing genocide.

On the day of the Amnesty report, it did not make the headlines on BBC News at One, BBC News at Six or BBC News at Ten. The BBC News website gave a US murder story headline ‘LIVE’ coverage, while Amnesty accusing Israel of genocide was granted a small mention.

As we have previously noted, BBC News ‘impartiality’ has been increasingly exposed as a charade since 7 October last year. When journalists do ‘both sides’ reporting in the face of genocide, they have lost the right to call themselves ‘journalists’. Accusations of BBC complicity in genocide should be a very serious concern for senior BBC managers and editors.

The Israel Lobby Desperately Latches On To A Falsehood

Meanwhile, apologists for Israel’s genocide jumped on the false notion that Amnesty had somehow redefined the term ‘genocide’ by broadening its meaning in order to accuse Israel.

An early proponent of this Israeli talking point was Mark Goldfeder, the director of the US-based National Jewish Advocacy Center. In a post on X, he wrote:

‘@amnesty international literally redefined the legal term of genocide to suit their accusation, stripping the term of its actual meaning in the process. The craziest part? They admit this in their report, correctly assuming that most people won’t read all the way to p. 101:’

In the thread that followed, Goldfeder claimed that Amnesty committed ‘a willful misrepresentation of international law’. How did it do this? By supposedly lowering the bar from the International Court of Justice standard for declaring genocide.

But, as others have pointed out, this is emphatically not what Amnesty did. Alonso Gurmendi, a fellow in human rights and politics at the London School of Economics and editor of Journal on the Use of Force and International Law, noted via X:

‘Mark [Goldfeder] is trying to make it look like @Amnesty just rejected the ICJ’s standard and made one up that suited it more. But this is not what it did. How do I know? Well, I did not strategically cut out the part of the report that explains it. [our emphasis]’

He continued:

‘As Amnesty states, it simply is reading the ICJ’s standard *broadly* because reading it narrowly leads to no findings of genocide ever. This is exactly what the UK, Canada, Netherlands, Denmark and Germany said as recently as Nov 2023 *at the ICJ*’

Gurmendi added:

‘My twitter feed is now basically some of the most renowned scholars of international law in the world tweeting how Amnesty’s report is “not really innovative” regarding the definition of genocide and pro-Israel blue checks complaining that Amnesty “redefined genocide”…’

In other words, the Zionist charge that the ‘legal term of genocide’ was ‘redefined’ by Amnesty, repeated ad nauseum by Israel supporters across X and other social media, is false and a desperate attempt to evade the truth.

Israeli Holocaust Scholar Says This *IS* Genocide

Finally, consider the recent powerful statement by Amos Goldberg, an Israeli Professor of Holocaust Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem:

‘For nearly 30 years I have researched and taught the Holocaust, genocide and state violence.

‘And I want to tell whoever is willing to listen that what’s happening now in Gaza is a genocide.’

He continued:

‘If you read Raphael Lemkin – the Jewish-Polish legal scholar who coined the term “genocide” and was the major driving force behind the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention – what is happening in Gaza now is exactly what he had in mind when he spoke about genocide.

‘It does not need to look like the Holocaust to be a genocide. Each genocide looks different and not all involve killing of millions or the entire group. The United Nations Genocide Convention explicitly asserts that genocide is the act of deliberately destroying a group in whole or in part. Those are the words.

‘But there does need to be a clear intent.

‘And indeed, there are clear indications of intent to destroy Gaza: Israel’s leaders – including the prime minister and the minister of defence – and many high-ranking military officers, media personalities, rabbis, as well as ordinary soldiers were very open about what they wanted to achieve. There were countless documented incitements to turn the whole of Gaza into rubble and claims that there are no innocent people living there.’

Goldberg added that Lemkin:

‘described two phases of a genocide. The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called “imposition of the national pattern” of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements.

‘And therefore, I have come to the conclusion that this is exactly what a genocide looks like. We don’t teach about genocides in order to realize it retrospectively. We teach about it in order to prevent it and to stop it.

‘But like in every other case of genocide in history right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.

‘But reality cannot be denied.

‘So yes, it is a genocide.

‘And once you come to this conclusion you cannot remain silent.’

For all practical purposes, BBC News and the rest of the state-corporate media have indeed remained silent.

DC & DE