So, I have a friend who works at the BBC.
Yesterday, they told me the Tony Blair Institute basically selected the entire panel for @bbcquestiontime — hence why there was no balance and it was essentially dangerous big tech propaganda. Loads of staff pissed off, but silenced.
Pep Guardiola is much more than just an unbelievable manager.
He spoke up for the people of Palestine, Sudan and Congo while others looked away.
Pep used his platform to defend our shared humanity. That will never be forgotten. Thank you, Pep.
NEW ARTICLE:
Restorative justice- it doesn’t restore and it isn’t just. Apart from that, I like it.
My article in @Education_NI latest quarterly. Link below.
One of the greatest games in recent memory. Positivity in motion. Total football, total entertainment. Some of the best players in the world on view. Kvaratskhelia, Dembele, Doue, Kane, Olise, Luis Diaz, and others.
A lot of talk about how fresh PSG and Bayern Munich players look. Dominate their leagues so can rest and rotate. Also helps they have a winter break. Two weeks in France. Three weeks in Germany. The English plough on through winter, of course. Food for thought for the Premier League after this feast of football.
But football of this exceptional calibre and pace is also a mindset and philosophy. Encouraged by enlightened coaches. Good players told to go out there and express themselves. Little diving or dissent, just elite competitors getting on with the game. A great game. Encore 🙌 #PSGBAY
#FatimaHousina was a photo journalist in Gaza. A documentary was made about her. It got accepted into the Cannes film festival. Israel found out. 24 hrs later, she & 10 members of her family including her pregnant sister were murdered by the IDF.
This is #Israël
One might have imagined that the BBC was quietly pressuring its online Middle East editor Raffi Berg to withdraw his libel case against journalist Owen Jones from the outset.
Why? Because it is drawing even more attention both to the scandalous failings by the BBC to properly cover Israeli war crimes in Gaza and give voice to the experiences of Palestinians facing genocide, and to the corporation’s refusal to listen to large-scale unrest among staff at those failings.
Berg may be fighting the court case but it is really the BBC in the dock – for employing someone like Berg as their online Middle East editor when the BBC claims that not only does it strive to be objective, but it strives to be seen to be objective.
The Middle East is probably the most sensitive region the BBC covers. And yet, as Jones and BBC staff make clear in the article, Berg – at a personal and ideological level – has done little to hide his own sympathies. He has utterly failed to present himself as objective.
The furore Berg has provoked among staff, and the reputational damage Jones’ article has caused the BBC, should have ensured that, at a minimum, the online editor was moved to another position. More properly, an internal inquiry should have been set up to investigate staff complaints.
But in fact, quite the opposite has happened. BBC executives have not only rallied to Berg’s side, suggesting that critics are being antisemitic. They also appear to be fine with him further airing the corporation’s dirty linen in a very public trial.
Extraordinarily, the BBC appears to have been so hands-off regarding Berg’s libel case that he felt emboldened to hire a contentious firm like Patron Law, prominently led by a strong advocate for Israel, to act as his legal representative.
All of which is making Jones’ case for him. Berg appears to have been protected from any repercussions at the BBC because his publicly partisan views on Israel and Palestine were exactly what BBC executives were looking for.
We can speculate why. In their 2009 book More Bad News From Israel, academics Greg Philo and Mike Berry report a senior BBC news editor telling them: “We wait in fear for the phone call from the Israelis.”
A 2012 article in the London Evening Standard described BBC executives – the people who appointed Berg to the post of online Middle East editor a few months later – as in a state of permanent terror about potential complaints from Israel.
A BBC insider told the paper: “To describe them as like headless chickens running all over the place would be to convey an impression of too much order and cohesion. They are cowering in corners. The fear is palpable.”
Most likely Berg was hired for the job because BBC executives were confident that his own take on events in the Middle East would largely keep “the Israelis” happy. The extent to which, in the process, he would infuriate journalists around him was considered of much less significance.
This is an extract from my latest article BBC editor's libel case against Owen Jones falls at the first hurdle. Here's why. Find a link to the rest in the reply post ⬇️
The Voice of Hind Rajab is up for an Oscar tomorrow night in Best International Feature Film category. I challenge any supporter of Israel to watch that film and still say you're in favor of what Israel has done in Gaza and elsewhere.
Listen to that six year old girl plead for her life and see if you can still stomach backing Israel's war crimes.
They have the actual audio tape of her stuck in a car full of dead relatives, begging for someone to help her. The Israelis finally let an ambulance through, and then just as she's going to be rescued, they kill her and everyone in the ambulance.
This is what we're funding. This horror show in the Middle East. They're about to do the same thing to Lebanon, let alone Iran. Until we end the funding, they'll keep going and going. We're enabling their abuses.
A new study has found that almost half of children in Gaza wish to die, as a result of the trauma they have been forced to endure.
Every single supplier of arms to Israel has blood on its hands — and the world will never forgive them.
Peter Kyle, minister in charge of arms export licences to Israel, broke the ministerial code by failing to declare that he belongs to Labour Friends of Israel.
Starmer says ministers who break the code must resign.
Watch Kyle refuse to answer questions on his rule-breaking.
A horrific massacre just took place on the Beirut beach and there isn’t a single headline about it in Western media.
There was wall-to-wall coverage of the Bondi Beach attacks.
But Arabs are so dehumanized that Israel can slaughter displaced Lebanese people living in tents on the beach and it doesn’t even make the news.
Why should we want a woman who supports mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity to take away our right to trial by jury?
Why should we want a woman who puts the Israel lobby before her constituents to be in any position of power?