Letters

From Ray Goodspeed (Leyton and Wanstead CLP member)

On 19 January, the BBC website carried an article on the theme of “who are the hostages” who were taken by Hamas on Oct 7th 2023. Each one gets a paragraph, most a photo or a little interview with their loved ones [see here].

I opposed their kidnap and I am pleased, of course, that those still alive will now be released. In fact, they could have been released months earlier had the war-criminal Netanyahu and his fascist allies not deliberately kept the genocide going for their own political and ideological purposes.

Interestingly, the BBC still uses the formula that “around 1200” were killed in tne 7 Oct attack. What – they don’t know how many? The Israeli government have not listed or identified the bodies? That is a very curious omission – I put it no stronger than that…..

Victims in Gaza

But where were the stories on the victims in Gaza, not just hostages but those murdered or maimed forever by this monstrous genocidal onslaught? They get no little pen portraits. They do not even get named in a list.

A baby that was taken by Hamas, we are told, has had two birthdays in captivity. What of the hundreds, possibly many more, Palestinian babies that never got to celebrate their first birthday before they were murdered by the Israeli military? What of the dead men, women and children of Gaza (and the West Bank) – 46,000 at a minimum and probably tens of thousands more. Do those people have names? They have been listed by the authorities. Is the BBC not interested in them?

It could not be clearer that for the UK government, and the BBC, Palestinian lives mean almost nothing compared the lives of Jewish Israelis or other westerners who were caught up in the attack.

Racist bias

It is to shield such despicable, and frankly racist bias, that the demonstration planned to assemble outside the BBC was banned by police. Yes, they hooked it on complaints from the Rabbi of a synagogue 500m away from that site, even though the marches have been remarkably peaceful and free of trouble and hundred or thousands of Jewish people have attended every last one of them. The police even rejected a suggestion to finish the march at the BBC, by which time the service at the synagogue would be long over.

There is no need to even answer such transparent nonsense, especially from a Rabbi who is fond of his own scurrilous and bigoted social media posts.

So the police finally, after 15 months of trouble-free protests, got the number of arrests that they and their political masters wanted – arrests not for violence, mind you, but in the vast majority of cases for the crime of walking or standing in a place that the police had told them not to, including Trafalgar Square, the home of countless previous demonstrations of all possible kinds.

This is a scandalous episode in an ongoing vile crime , one in which the UK government and the BBC, and the overwhelming bulk of the media are at least complicit, if not actively cheering it on.

Shameful.

[Featured photo from – News 9]