Blood on whose hands?

“PENNIE, we last met,” Peter Oborne remembered to the May Branch meeting, “at Shireen’s memorial service a St Bride’s, which you laid on. Don McIntyre was there and Duncan Campbell, the [late] Guardian crime reporter. They were the only two representatives of the mainstream press: I did a careful head-count. There was nobody from the BBC. Nobody from CNN, nobody from Sky. This failure of the mainstream media to bother about the case of Shireen, not even to the extent of going to Saint Bride’s one morning, was a real harbinger of what we’re discussing today.

Peter Oborne

Peter Oborne addresses the meeting

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“That is the terrible performance of the mainstream British media on the destruction of Gaza and the systemic misreporting. And this is why I was very keen to come tonight.

“The complete lack of [media] interest in the fact that this has been the biggest slaughter of journalists since World War 2, or probably before – with plenty of evidence that many have been deliberately targeted by the IDF. My next book will have a long section on the media.

“Over the last few days something’s clearly happened. Certainly, the Economist came up with that 109,000 figure [for deaths in Gaza] challenging [arguments] that 50,000 was an exaggeration. The Financial Times has now editorialised on 'The west’s shameful silence on Gaza' and said that the world’s got to act. Suddenly some mainstream papers are starting to use different language.

“But the Murdoch press is really shocking – and to give you one example: when the ICJ [International Court of Justice] came up with its genocide ruling in January last year, in the Times, if you hunted there were three paragraphs on page 42, lost in a story about something else. One of the most momentous stories of the year: the ICJ, the highest court in the world, issued a provisional order to Israel and it barely got reported in the mainstream, nor that Israel has ignored it.”

In the Sunday Times, eventually you find a piece by “my old friend Ivan Fallon, who used to be a business editor denouncing South African apartheid. His coverage is mirrored by the attacks on the ICJ ruling by the British governments and Cameron and Sunak calling it reckless and irresponsible.”

Previously, Peter recalled, “the Economist called it a show trial, mimicking the words of the Daily Mail.”

Peter then told us of interviewing survivors of Israeli torture, which has been “shattering”. The accounts by Palestinian political prisoners “are unspeakable. I interviewed one of the prisoners in Bethlehem hospital. He’d never been charged with anything. He’d been beaten every day for nine months. He cowered from me – when I went into his hospital room he thought I was an Israeli come to beat him up. But he wasn’t nearly as badly affected, as some others.

“Somebody was murdered in the next cell. Now you have very authoritative reports from human rights organisations, from the UN: it’s basically ignored by the mainstream British media. Sometimes the Guardian has improved a bit in its coverage. So, you just didn’t get any idea of what was actually happening if you were an ordinary customer: and the Palestinians were sort of dehumanised.

“There’s a brilliant report by the Centre for Media Monitoring which highlights in the most devastating way that everywhere, on the television channels, on the mainstream media, if you were Israeli, and you were killed, you were given a name and an age and the circumstances.

“Palestinians just didn’t matter. All reports about them were headlined sceptically: ‘200 Palestinians killed yesterday, according to the Hamas-run health authority in Gaza’. Statements by the IDF are run as news, though [the UK media] has been reporting for years on their fabrications. You cannot pay any attention to the IDF – but in an extraordinary way the mainstream British media do... Compare the Times of Israel – a very Zionist, pro-Israeli-state paper. It does actually report stories and facts. If you wanted to know about the fate of the hostages in a reasonable way, you’d better pick it up.

“The Telegraph has almost given up reporting. It goes on about a ‘clash of civilisations’ between the ‘civilised’ Israelis and the barbaric Hamas and Palestinians and it’s Sturm und Drang nonsense. It’s not as though we have no intelligent sources in this world. Read the Forensic Architecture report about the first month of the Gaza devastation.

“If you had an objection to the slaughter of Palestinians; if you thought that the state of Israel was committing war crimes; if you were annoyed or upset or ashamed that Britain was supplying arms – then you really had no choice but to go on the street, at which point you would be demonised by the political parties in alliance with the media.

“The police gave evidence to a Select Committee about the early marches [in support of Palestine] – and they basically said the protestors ‘were as good as gold’. In November, on Armistice Day, you read the Daily Telegraph or the Times or Melanie Phillips saying that there were these protestors who were going to attack the Cenotaph. The Palestine protestors don’t do anything of the sort. The far right did, and that’s, of course, terribly embarrassing.

“It’s all out with the British media. I feel it’s dawning on the people, that actually they’ve been part of the complicity, and they’ve got blood on their hands.”

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  • 30 May 2025: now we have Ivan Fallon's name right.