Earlier this month we documented the deliberate promotion of disinformation concerning casualty figures in the Gaza Strip by a contributor to BBC Two’s ‘Newsnight’ who claimed that “186,000…lives have been lost”.
BBC TWO’S ‘NEWSNIGHT’ PROVIDES A PLATFORM FOR DISINFORMATION
CAMERA UK submitted a complaint to the BBC on that matter on July 10th. While we have yet to receive a response, we were informed on July 18th that it would take BBC Complaints more time to address that very straightforward issue.
On July 15th the BBC News website published a report by BBC London headlined “Two women arrested over Gaza protest at Cenotaph”. Readers are told that:
“Two women have been arrested after staging a protest against the government’s Gaza policy at the Cenotaph in central London.
A video showed the women, from the protest group Youth Demand, laying flowers and a Palestinian flag in front of the Cenotaph in Whitehall.
They then spray painted “180,000 killed” on the pavement in front of the memorial.”
The report is illustrated with photographs showing that graffiti.
None of the remaining 182 words of that report bother to inform BBC audiences that the claim that 180,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip is deliberately inaccurate disinformation.
One of the people who could benefit from some accurate and impartial reporting on this topic by Britain’s national broadcaster is the spokesperson for the student group which carried out the agitprop that is the subject of BBC London’s report. As reported by the Jewish Chronicle:
“Daniel Knorris, a spokesman for the group – whose recent actions have included blockading Oxford Circus and daubing both the Labour Party headquarters and the Ministry of Defence with red paint – warned the JC there would now be an “escalation”. […]
Citing a recent article letter from three academics – Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf — published in The Lancet, Knorris he claimed the true number of dead caused by “the IDF’s assault on Palestine” during the ongoing war in Gaza was 186,000, not the 38,000 claimed by the Hamas-controlled Gaza ministry of health. […]
Knorris confirmed that Youth Demand was formed several months ago from what had been the student wing of the anti-climate change campaign Just Stop Oil (JSO), a cause he also had supported.”
It is of course bad enough that for the past nine months the BBC has been uncritically quoting and promoting unverified casualty figures provided by the terrorist organisation which began the current war. Now the BBC – which, ironically, employs a dedicated ‘disinformation correspondent’ – apparently also thinks it appropriate to mainstream entirely fictional numbers touted by political activists, without alerting its audiences to that disinformation.
It is interesting to speculate as to the real strategy behind UK Imams and Mullahs recruiting thousands of “useful idiots” to run around spouting “From The River To The Sea” ? They absolutely know that Israel is there to stay – yet they demonise Israel with lies and exaggerations – in the hope that the impossible might happen..