Politics and Culture
Full video here.
A look at the BBC’s anti-Israel bias at the Times of Israel, with former governor Ruth Deech:
British parliamentarian Ruth Deech had a bird’s-eye view of the BBC’s attitude towards Israel when she served on its governing body 20 years ago during the Second Intifada and the 2006 Second Lebanon War.
Then, as now, since conflict erupted following the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led onslaught on Israel, a furor roiled the UK’s public broadcaster over its coverage, which many see as unfairly biased against the Jewish state.
“It hasn’t changed at all,” Deech, a prominent academic who sits as an independent in the House of Lords, told The Times of Israel in an interview.
“There is a sort of ‘group think’ — an elite, well-educated, sophisticated, southern British mindset — which is very well meaning, adopts liberal causes, but is very easily influenced to believe that there is just one liberal cause and only one side to it,” she said.
“When I was a BBC governor, you walked through the studios, and there were piles and piles of Guardian newspapers and hardly anything else,” she said, referring to Britain’s leading left-wing publication.
That mindset, Deech believes, includes “an absolute obsession over Israel” prevalent within, but by no means confined to, the BBC.
Like all journalists, staff at the corporation dislike their reporting being challenged, but this is exacerbated at the BBC by what Deech terms “an inflated notion of their trustworthiness.”
“They believe in what they’re doing, and they think they must be right,” she said. They don’t want to be challenged. I used to say to them, ‘Yes, the public trusts you, but being trusted is not the same as being accurate.’”…
Last year, Deech and Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television, published a report examining the corporation’s reporting of Israel’s war in Gaza. The report — which was endorsed by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, the Community Security Trust and UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis — alleged that whenever it is “faced with the choice of whose account or narrative to believe, it seldom points in Israel’s direction. For Hamas in this war, proof is rarely necessary. For the IDF and Israel, proof is rarely enough.”…
Deech accuses the BBC of “utterly distorted” coverage, noting the manner in which headlines often cite assertions made by Hamas. By contrast, Israel’s response is frequently relegated to “much lower down,” with caveats that Jerusalem’s claims have not been verified by the BBC.
“People look at the headline, and that’s what impresses itself on them,” Deech said. “They mislead all the time on that.”
And when they do belatedly correct themselves, as with the Al-Ahli Hospital blast, they don’t care. Jeremy Bowen said he had “no regrets” over blaming Israel, wrongly, for the explosion. It’s not about the truth – it’s about taking a stand against Israel at every opportunity.
Deech is not too complimentary about the universities either, where antisemitism is allowed to flourish with little or no pushback from timid vice chancellors.
Brendan O’Neill at Spiked:
Jews are once again bearing the brunt of the West’s abandonment of its civilisational values. Just as they were the prime victims of the Nazis’ ruthless destruction of European civilisation, so they are now the collateral damage of the modern West’s craven cowardice in the face of the Islamo-left threat. The elites’ fashionable loathing for the Jewish State has crashed together with the Islamist hatred for the Jewish people…
2025 has made it clear – we have failed our Jewish brothers and sisters. Europe’s porous borders allowed anti-Semites from regressive cultures to arrive on our shores. The cultural establishment’s frothing obsession with the ‘evil’ Jewish State reanimated the latent anti-Semitism of the bourgeoisie. The media’s ceaseless defamation of Israel, the damning of it as a genocidal entity that relishes in the murder of children, resuscitated blood libels of old. And the left’s flagrant ignoring of Jewish pleas for protection sealed the deal. ‘Don’t listen to them’, they essentially said. ‘They’re exaggerating.’ Even after Bondi, even following a massacre of Jews the Nazis would have gushed over, they’re saying this.
The West’s infrastructure of censorship played a central role in this callous damning of the Jews to their presumed fate. The elites’ ruthless shutdown of discussion about the borders problem, the rise of Islamism and the true nature of Israelophobia allowed regressive thinking and bigoted animus to fester and spread. It is always in the dark corners created by the cowardly creed of censorship that foul ideologies take root.
That ends right now. From Cable Street to the liberation of Auschwitz, goodness has frequently reasserted itself against the pox of Jew hatred and the contempt for human civilisation it always embodies. In 2026, we can do that again. Our best weapons? Liberty, truth and courage. And maybe some street-fighting where necessary
Jonathan Sacerdoti in the Spectator on Iran’s ceaseless obsession with Israel:
Iran’s conduct strips away any illusion about priorities. Even amid water shortages, electricity failures and economic contraction, the regime has channelled vast resources into instruments of attack. Mohammad Javad Zarif’s recent acknowledgement on Al Jazeera that roughly $500 billion was spent on the nuclear programme was striking precisely because it carried no regret. The expenditure was framed as ideological defiance. The moral judgement, drawn by others, contrasts that figure with empty reservoirs and decaying infrastructure. The choice was deliberate.
In Tehran’s Palestine Square, a digital clock counts down to the envisioned destruction of the State of Israel. The symbol is grotesque, yet clarifying. While Israel has invested relentlessly in shelters, early warning systems and civilian resilience, Iran has provided its population with little protection from the wars it seeks. Iranian friends of mine abroad speak quietly of families without shelters, without warning systems, without any sense of personal safety.
Israel harbours no reciprocal obsession. During the war, it possessed the capacity to push further, to pursue regime change directly. It chose restraint. Its focus remains survival and protection rather than ideological conquest. Even under fire, its economy functioned. Its society absorbed shock without collapse. That resilience frustrates Tehran, which speaks openly of breaking morale and dismantling prosperity. The effort has failed, so far.
The wider world should observe this regime with the same clarity Israel is forced to apply. Iran’s leadership is so consumed by the project of destroying Israel that it accepts, even embraces, the sacrifice of its own people as collateral. Chronic water shortages, failing infrastructure, economic exhaustion and the absence of basic civilian protection are not unintended consequences but tolerated costs. The clock in Palestine Square, counting down to 2040, makes this plain. It is not a threat of imminence but a declaration of endurance, a statement that the campaign is generational rather than tactical.
That obsession does not stop at Israel’s borders. Across Europe, including in the United Kingdom, Iranian regime institutions, networks and operatives continue to function openly or semi-openly, engaged in intimidation, subversion and preparation. From European capitals to Latin America, including Venezuela, the Islamic Republic has built a lattice of influence dedicated to disruption, coercion and violence abroad. Israel stands on the front line of this project, but it is not its final destination.
The clock continues to tick. One can only hope that the regime which built its future around such a promise is gone long before it reaches zero.
Iran’s obsession with Israel echoes that of its proxy, Hamas. But whereas Iran’s influence in the West is largely limited to clandestine networks, for Hamas there’s a whole army of hard-left – and not so hard left – allies, inspired by the the cries of Free Palestine and the new-found joys of Jew-hatred.
From this Guardian article:
Both men envisaged being “martyred”, but neither reckoned with the prospect that a man they believed to be a crucial player in their plot could be a counter-terrorism undercover operative (UCO). Because of the courage of the UCO, known as “Farouk”, Saadaoui was captured in the final stages of preparation in a hotel car park, while Hussein was arrested at the shop where he worked.
A prosecution source said of Saadaoui, the prime mover: “This was a man who was quite prepared to go out and kill children and leave his own in the process.” They added: “At one point he says: ‘You know, if we have an AK-47 left over, I will leave it for my son – so he can do what I do when he grows up.’”
From the Times this morning:
A group of peers have urged Wes Streeting to halt an NHS-backed puberty blocker trial, saying that it will put children on a pathway of “lifelong medical support”….
They said: “Most children with concerns about gender grow out of it. But once placed on puberty blockers, the majority proceed to cross sex hormones — and then to the Wild West of our adult gender clinics. We know the resultant harms: reduced bone density, possible impact on brain development, loss of fertility, sexual dysfunction, a requirement for lifelong medical support, often serious pain and medical complications.
“How can anyone justify placing a further cohort of vulnerable children on a pathway to this future?”
They argue that the new trial of puberty blockers should not begin until existing NHS gender clinics for adults comply with a request to provide data that shows the outcomes of patients who have previously had puberty blockers.
They don’t normally test powerful drugs on young children to see if they work or not, do they? A touch of the Aztec approach to child care…
More on the puberty blocker trail, from the Mail:
Children who sign up to the controversial puberty blockers trial will be told to consider freezing their eggs or sperm because of the risk posed to their fertility.
Young people experiencing ‘gender incongruence’ who take part in the NHS-backed study will be offered expert advice on preserving their ability to become parents later in life – even though they will be as young as ten.
Girls among the cohort will also be warned not to get pregnant in case the powerful drugs damage unborn babies.
These are young children, being given adult advice. It’s a disgrace.
Shadow Equalities Minister Claire Coutinho told the Daily Mail: ‘No eight-year-old child can make decisions about their future fertility. Asking them to do so is completely unethical, and yet another reason why the Streeting Trial must be stopped.
‘This document shows that giving children these powerful drugs has clear, irreversible risks to their brain development and bone density. The NHS is choosing to expose children to lifelong harm.
‘These are physically healthy children being put on a medical pathway to permanent chemical castration whilst they are still in primary school. No child can consent to that, and no adult should ask or enable them to.’
Baroness Cash, a former commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, added: ‘These children need support not medicating. This is a medical scandal happening in plain sight and it must be stopped.’
Helen Joyce from charity Sex Matters said: ‘Of all the horrors hidden in the guide for participants in the puberty blockers trial, the approach to their future fertility is perhaps the worst.
‘Children who may be as young as ten are sold a fantasy that they can preserve their fertility, even as they embark on a treatment pathway that will block their normal development into adulthood and is likely to end up destroying their ability to have children naturally.
‘Some of the participants in this trial will be so young they still believe in Santa Claus. Some may not even be clear on the facts of life. This guide envisages conversations they will not be mature enough for, and which are totally inappropriate for their age group.’
We don’t hear much from the parents in all this. We can only assume they’re all fully on board with sacrificing their children’s health in the service of gender ideology. As for the doctors….
Mick Hartley 