‘How On Earth Do You Justify That?’ Laura Kuenssberg’s Selective Empathy

Seyed Ali Mousavi, the Iranian ambassador to the UK, with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg

On 8 March, on the BBC politics programme, ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’, the former BBC political editor put these impassioned words to Seyed Ali Mousavi, the Iranian ambassador to the UK:

‘Since we last spoke, your government has killed thousands of its own people in the streets who had the courage to stand up to protest against the suffering that they have been experiencing at the hands of the regime. Thousands of people were killed. How on earth do you justify that, Ambassador?’

Clearly feeling deep emotion, Kuenssberg continued:

‘Just this morning, I looked at many of the images and watched some of the videos from what happened to protesters in your country in January. I looked at images and videos, verified independently [sic] by our colleagues at BBC Verify, that show body bags littered over the courtyard of a mortuary, the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Centre in Iran. I saw images of young, old, teenagers, people killed by your government, beaten faces, bloodied bodies, gunshot wounds.’

In a strongly accusatory tone, she confronted him:

‘How on earth do you justify that and sit there today saying, “Our people have some complaints”? Your government killed thousands of their own people and the world saw that’.

When has Kuenssberg ever expressed such heartfelt revulsion at the genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza, with likely in excess of 100,000 Palestinians slaughtered?

Has she expressed similar horror for 175 schoolgirls, staff and parents killed by the US in a ‘double-tap’ attack on a primary school in Minab in Iran? It seems some victims matter more.

On the same politics programme last year, Kuenssberg said this about the genocide in Gaza:

‘Often when it comes to the debate about Gaza, it gets very binary and very aggressive very, very quickly and there’s no room for nuance.’

What possible nuance could there be about genocide?

Her tone then was light, devoid of outrage for the tens of thousands dead Palestinians, the mangled and bloodied corpses, many of them babies and children, ripped apart by brutal Israeli firepower.

Kuenssberg also aggressively challenged Mousavi about Iran’s supposed drive towards a nuclear weapon and how Iran could not be trusted to stick to international agreements.

Mousavi pointed out that, on the contrary, Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, whereas Israel is not. Moreover, as we noted in our previous alert, in 2015, Iran signed up to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an agreement to limit the Iranian nuclear programme in return for lifted sanctions. Trump tore up this agreement when the US unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018.

It should be obvious that to state such salient facts is not to side with the Iranian regime, nor to excuse its crimes.

Journalist Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph’s former chief political commentator, reports that Iran stuck completely to the JCPOA agreement until the US withdrew in 2018. Until the US and Israel began their attacks, Iran was negotiating in good faith in order to avoid any war. The Omani foreign minister, who was involved in the negotiations, stated that Iran had agreed that they would never have the material needed to make a nuclear bomb, adding:

‘There would be zero accumulation, zero stockpiling. And full verification. Even United States inspectors will have access.’

Oborne spelled out what happened next:

‘Iranians were negotiating really hard to avoid a war. They’d actually offered a better deal than they’d signed off on in 2015. That was on the table and that, of course, is when America and Israel struck.’

Note, also, that in the very same programme on Sunday when Kuenssberg asked propagandistic, emotion-laden questions of the Iranian ambassador she had nothing to say about the Gaza genocide when interviewing Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog. She did not say to him:

‘Since we last spoke, your government has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in what human rights organisation and genocide scholars have said is a genocide. How on earth do you justify that, Mr President?’

What does it say about the state of politics and news that the president of a genocidal and apartheid state was given carte blanche to proclaim that in attacking Iran and Lebanon, ‘we are doing this for the entire free world’?

Empathy by a prominent BBC journalist for one set of victims – Iranian – is permitted, even required. Permitted, that is, when the finger of blame points the right way. But as the Minab school bombing shows, not when it points the other way; in this case, conclusively towards the US.

‘Unpeople’ And ‘Unworthy’ Victims

British historian Mark Curtis, co-founder and co-director of Declassified UK, has applied the concept of ‘Unpeople’ as a framework for understanding Western foreign policy. In his 2004 book, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, and in his earlier work, Web of Deceit, Curtis argued that the political system separates victims into two categories: those whose deaths matter (‘People’) and those whose lives are considered expendable (‘Unpeople’).

The concept of ‘People’ and ‘Unpeople’ has its roots in the work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their classic 1988 book, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, where they discuss examples of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims.

Worthy victims are people who are killed or oppressed by Official Enemies of the West, such as the Soviet Union (and now Russia), North Korea or China. These victims garner considerable media attention in the propaganda system, marked by sympathy, indignation and fury. Their suffering is humanised, described in detail, and used to generate moral outrage directed at the offending regimes or governments, often as part of a concerted attempt to topple them for the benefit of Western geostrategic interests.

‘Unworthy’ victims, by contrast, are people who are killed or whose democratic aspirations are crushed by the West or ‘our allies’; such as Suharto’s Indonesia in the 1960s, Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, the US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, and Israel in the present day. These victims are less prominent, even absent, in western media coverage or are often discounted as ‘collateral damage’: a lesser kind of human, robbed of their individuality, their life stories; even their names and faces.

Herman and Chomsky’s analysis focused on the treatment of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims in the propaganda system. Curtis has expanded the discussion by examining declassified UK government files, released under the ‘Thirty-Year Rule’, showing how the British state structurally ignores or downplays the importance of those it regards as ‘Unpeople’.

Curtis highlights a prominent example occurring right now:

‘In the case of Gaza, Palestinians are seen as unpeople since supporting them holds little merit or gain for British planners. What does Palestine have to offer Whitehall in comparison with Israel?’

Curtis continues:

‘In supporting Israel, Whitehall can demonstrate British subservience and usefulness to its major ally, the US. Israel is a buyer of British arms, a strategic ally to police the region and an increasing, albeit still fairly small, trade partner.

‘And a quarter of the UK’s entire parliament of MPs has received funding from the Israel lobby, buying an influence over UK policy-making that is way beyond anything the Palestinians can induce.’

The fact that there is a well-funded Israel lobby in the UK parliament is beyond the pale for the ‘mainstream’ media to discuss and analyse. To do so would almost inevitably lead to the insidious and often fake charge of ‘antisemitism’. Is it really antisemitic to point out, as Declassified UK did in 2024, that fully half of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet were funded by the Israel lobby?

It is highly doubtful that an in-depth investigation into the Israel lobby in the UK, such as the 2009 Channel 4 Dispatches programme by Oborne, would ever be aired today.

And so there remain approved sets of victims that the ‘mainstream’ media will systematically highlight; and there are other groups of victims that are to be regarded as dispensable.

Laura Kuenssberg’s paired interviews with the Israeli president and the Iranian ambassador, on the same BBC programme, no less, are a case study in the selective empathy required by high-profile corporate journalists.

DC

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