The BBC is weaponising its Lebanon reporting to help disguise Israel's crimes

Western publics are being subjected to an unprecedented campaign of media propaganda to conceal Israel’s true goals as it expands the slaughter

[First published by Middle East Eye]

The more Israel expands its war across the Middle East, the more the western media intensifies its war on our minds. 

Establishment media outlets like the BBC are weaponising the language of their reporting against audiences no less effectively than Israel weaponised primitive pieces of technology against the people of Lebanon. 

Thousands of Lebanese were maimed by exploding pagers and walkie-talkies last week. Likewise, the media coverage is mangling the ability of western publics to understand how and why Israel is dangerously stoking fires across the region. 

Words like "audacious", "escalation" and "targets" have become tools to conceal meaning, not to illuminate – and for good reason. Because Israel’s actions are so obviously criminal, so obviously horrifying, so obviously genocidal. Language becomes a weapon to hide the truth.

The media chorus goes like this: Israel is attacking Lebanon to stop Hezbollah rocket fire and allow the residents of Israel’s most northerly communities to return home. Or in the blunter, Orwellian language of Israeli officials framing this horror show: Israel must "escalate to de-escalate". 

Lebanese civilians are paying the heaviest price: some 550 of them were killed in the first day of Israel’s bombing campaign alone. Many tens of thousands have been driven – ethnically cleansed – from the territory of south Lebanon. 

Why? Because, says Israel, Hezbollah has hidden its cache of rockets in their homes. Those homes must therefore be destroyed. Strangely, Hezbollah seems to have forgotten that it has extensive rocky terrain across south Lebanon where it could more safely and wisely hide its arsenal.

If this story sounds familiar, that’s because it is. It is the same script used to justify the slaughter in Gaza. Then, the media mindlessly reheated Israeli talking points about Israel destroying Gaza to "eliminate Hamas".

Some 2.3 million Palestinians needed to be forced out of their homes for their own safety, even as Israel killed them in those very "safe zones".

Then, as now, the media subjected us to Israeli CGI-generated propaganda videos of underground "control and command centres" supposedly under hospitals and other vital infrastructure Israel wanted destroyed.

This time the media are uncritically broadcasting no less ridiculous Israeli propaganda videos of Hezbollah rockets stashed in Lebanese living rooms.

Whose right to defend?

In fact, graphs showing "cross-border attacks" since 7 October last year – when Hamas broke out for one day from the concentration camp Israel had made of Gaza over decades – suggest how entirely bogus Israel’s narrative of its bombing Lebanon to "stop the Hezbollah rocket fire" really is. 

Of the 9,600 cross-border attacks, Israel committed 7,845 of them – or four-fifths – and began doing so on 7 October itself. Israel actually stepped up its attacks on Lebanon in early September, just as Hezbollah was dramatically reducing its rocket fire.

What the graphs cannot convey is the asymmetrical nature of those exchanges.

Hezbollah rockets caused far less damage to Israel than Israel’s far larger number of, and far more powerful, bombs and missiles.

By the third week of September, Israel had killed more than 750 Lebanese, compared to 33 Israelis. The differential is even starker now.

And yet the western media has not framed Hezbollah’s attacks as its "right to defend itself" – a right we are continuously reminded Israel has.

Why has the priority been Israel’s need to "stop" Hezbollah’s fewer and mostly non-lethal rockets, rather than Lebanon’s need to stop Israel’s more plentiful and far more lethal Israeli bombs?

But more importantly, Israel does not want western publics to be exposed to other, more plausible reasons why Hezbollah has been firing rockets for the past year – or what it would take to make it stop. And the western media are ably assisting Israel in keeping those reasons shielded from view.

Hezbollah has repeatedly noted that its rocket fire would stop if Israel withdraws from Gaza and ends the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians there, as it is required to do under international law.

In two separate decisions, the International Court of Justice (ICC) has ruled that Israel’s decades-long occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal and an act of aggression against the Palestinian people that must end, and that a "plausible" case has been made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Though no one at the BBC or elsewhere would ever admit it, Hezbollah is actually much closer to upholding international law than western states like the United States, Germany and Britain, all of whom are helping to arm and sustain Israel’s "plausible" genocide.

Filling the vacuum

With western media refusing to provide any meaningful context for Hezbollah’s actions, Israel’s self-serving narrative fills the vacuum: the assumption is that Hezbollah – and possibly all "Arabs" – are driven only by an irrational, antisemitic desire to murder Jews in Israel.

The implication is that Lebanon deserves whatever it gets from Israel.

The BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen helpfully oiled that particular wheel on Monday’s evening news this week by describing Hezbollah in the following terms: "Fighting Israel is in their DNA, why they exist."

Let’s ignore Bowen’s conflation of the military wing of Hezbollah and its political and welfare arms – precisely the Israel-centric view of Hezbollah imposed by the British government in designating the entire movement as "a terrorist organisation". 

Do Hezbollah’s politicians, and the civil servants, police officers, doctors, teachers and adminstrators it employs to run Lebanon’s institutions – the "state within a state", as media outlets call it – exist only to "fight Israel?" Is that really the sole reason they exist? 

But even if we ignore all the civilians involved with Hezbollah and focus exclusively on its military wing, is Bowen’s characterisation impartial, fair, or even accurate.

Hezbollah isn’t driven by a simple bloodlust to "fight Israel", as the BBC’s Middle East expert suggests. For many Lebanese citizens, it is there to protect their country from an Israeli military that has aggressively interfered in its affairs for decades, long before Hezbollah even existed.  

Israel has invaded Lebanon repeatedly, overseen horrifying massacres such as those at Sabra and Shatilla, occupied Lebanon’s southern lands for nearly two decades, bombed its infrastructure, meddled in its politics, littered its territory with cluster bombs, and carried out aggressive flights by fighter jets over its territory, violating Lebanese airspace, non-stop all that time. 

Hezbollah exists because Lebanon needed a credible military fighting force to push out Israel’s occupation army – as it eventually managed to do in 2000 – and prevent any reoccurence. 

It exists to deter Israel from continuing to meddle in Lebanon – just as Hamas exists to try to exact a price for Israel’s otherwise profitable brutalisation of Palestinians under occupation.

But if Bowen really imagines this kind of reductive reasoning about Hezbollah is fair, he should be consistent and describe Israel’s military similarly. Does the so-called Israel Defence Forces exist only to "fight its Arab neighbours?"

War of aggression

There are many probable reasons why Israel is attacking Lebanon that have nothing to do with "ending the rocket fire" – and yet they all go unmentioned by the BBC and other western outlets.

Israel has much to gain from expanding its genocidal war on Gaza to the wider region. 

The new war is usefully deflecting attention from Israel’s failure to realise its professed goal of "eliminating Hamas" in Gaza, and its war crimes, and at the very moment when the ICC is reported to be preparing to approve an arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for crimes against humanity. In the current climate of war fever, those warrants may barely register.

Gaza’s immense and ever-deepening suffering has entirely dropped off the news radar.

The regional war is usefully lifting the – admittedly minimal – pressure on Netanyahu from western allies to end the slaughter in Gaza.

Netanyahu cannot afford to ease up on his war-mongering, because any moves towards a ceasefire would put his coalition in danger of collapse, potentially oust him from power, and accelerate his corruption trial and the likelihood of his being jailed.

The widening war has already revived support for Netanyahu and his government at a time when it was coming under growing strain domestically, led by the families of the Israeli hostages in Gaza, to reach a ceasefire.

Now talk of a ceasefire in Gaza has been swamped by cheerleading for a second campaign of mass slaughter, this time in Lebanon.

And most importantly of all, a regional war provoked by Israel, one that drags in not just Hezbollah but also Iran, would force Washington to become even more actively involved in a region in which it was gradually trying to outsource its massive military footprint to other actors, especially in the Gulf.

The US would have to not just step up its arming of Israel’s slaughter but join the slaughter directly. 

Israel wants its war to become a US war, and hopes US muscle will force other regional players, not least the Gulf states, to join Israel’s fight too.

Unlike the pretext of "stopping the rockets" supplied by Israel and echoed by the western media, all of these other reasons are transparently not defensive. They suggest Israel is waging a war of aggression. Which is precisely why they are unmentioned and unmentionable by the western media.

'Audacious' terrorism

That was the context missing as Israel began raising the temperature dramatically in Lebanon by exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, killing dozens of people, including two children, and maiming thousands. 

As Alistair Crooke, a former British diplomat based in Beirut, has observed, those using these old-tech devices were not elite Hezbollah fighters, as the western media has followed Israel in suggesting.

Many of those who lost hands and eyes were likely to be civilians working in emergency and civil service roles for Hezbollah’s "state within a state": administrators, medical staff, teachers and police officers. 

Booby-trapping mobile devices is in clear breach of international law – that is, it is a war crime. That is so obvious that even a former director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, readily conceded of Israel’s pager attacks: "I don’t think there’s any question it’s a form of terrorism."

Which meant the media faced a tricky task in reporting on what amounted to an act of state terrorism – and one that set a terrifying precedent for the rest of us: that the electronic devices we spend much of the day holding or carrying can be transformed into bombs to harm us.

That is not some idle worry. Warning that Israel had let a terrifying genie out of the bottle, Panetta urged states to find a way to reverse course. Without curbs on the weaponisation of electronic devices, he noted: "It is the battlefield of the future."

Had any other state caused this much random, dystopian carnage – what if this had happened while a target was airborne in a plane? – the shock and revulsion would have been immediate and overwhelming.

But for the western media, Israel’s act of monstrous terrorism was uniformly greeted, not with abhorrence but with sneeking admiration. As if reading from a script, western outlets settled on exactly the same term to describe Israel’s move: it was "audacious".  

Like its right-wing counterparts, the supposedly liberal Guardian newspaper breathlessly recounted the details of what it called a "careful planned", "sophisticated" and "audacious" operation by Israel to maim thousands of Lebanese. 

The BBC followed suit. Bowen once again assisted Israel, celebrating its terrorism as a "tactical triumph" and "the sort of spectacular coup you would read about in a thriller".

Weaponised words

The BBC has been exemplifying the weaponisation of language to erase Israel’s crimes in Lebanon, just as it earlier did in Gaza.

On the BBC News at Ten on Monday, as Israel launched a massive bombing campaign days after it had blown up pagers across Lebanon, the anchor led with this assessment: "Nearly 500 people are killed after heavy Israeli bombardment of Hebollah targets."

The next day its website took the same tack. A BBC headline all but answered its own question: "Where did Israeli strikes on Hezbollah hit yesterday?" 

On Wednesday’s evening news, the BBC’s Anna Foster, based in Beirut, stated breezily that Israel had "hit more than 2,000 Hezbollah targets". She added that the waves of bombing had destroyed "rocket launchers, weapons storage sites and other infrastructure". All unverified Israeli claims treated as facts.

Meanwhile, she noted Hezbollah was striking "civilian and military sites". 

Similarly in the rest of its reporting, the BBC’s default assumption has been identical to Israel’s: that whatever Israel hits is a Hezbollah “target” by definition. Israel’s claim is proof enough.

But if that were really the case, why have so many Lebanese women and children been killed by Israeli bombs – a repeat of Israel’s slaughter over the past year of tens of thousands Palestinian women and children in Gaza?

Could it be that Israel is randomly attacking south Lebanon to terrorise its inhabitants into flight – to ethnically cleanse them – just as it earlier terrorised the population of Gaza out of their homes? Might that explain why at least 90,000 Lebanese are reported to have fled their communities so far?

Could it be that Israel’s assertion that Hezbollah is hiding weapons in south Lebanon’s homes is just as self-serving and deceitful as its earlier claim that every hospital, university and mosque in Gaza had a Hamas command and control centre underneath? 

Could it be Israel’s claim that Hezbollah, like Hamas, has turned its civilian population into “human shields” is a one-size-fits-all excuse, designed to obfuscate the very genocidal war crimes the World Court has put Israel on trial for. 

More to the point: why is it so inconceivable to western media outlets like the BBC that any of these possibilities are worthy of consideration?

Good guys 'escalate'

On Monday night’s news, Bowen appeared to weigh the wisdom of Israel’s actions while actually advancing its favourite talking point: "Israel effectively is gambling. What it is hoping is that by doing what it’s doing it will coerce Hezbollah to stop firing into Israel. I think that is probably unlikely. It means Israel will have to continue escalating."

But in his "analysis", Bowen, like the rest of the western media, was also weaponising the language of "conflict" in ways to help cloud Israel’s more likely goals. What exactly did the BBC editor mean by "escalating?"

The word is metamorphosing in disturbing ways.

Once, "escalation" was invariably invoked in negative ways against Israel’s regional foes. Israel would strike with overwhelming force.

Only when an Arab state or group struck back, usually in fairly limited ways, would western politicians and media suddenly worry about a "dangerous escalation". 

The logic was clear: Arabs being killed by Israeli firepower was the norm; it was the background noise of the Middle East. But if Israel suffered a response, or simply faced threats of blowback, then concerns about “escalation” were fully merited. Arabs escalated, Israel responded or retaliated.

But the BBC is now widening the use of "escalation" in novel ways to help disguise Israel’s crimes.

It is impossible for the media to ignore the fact that large numbers of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon are being slaughtered for no clear purpose. So a euphemism is needed to obscure those crimes. 

"Israeli escalation", in Bowen’s revised terminology, actually means "massacring civilians", or "terrorising civilians from their communities", or "destroying their homes" – or maybe all three. “Escalation” sounds more reasonable than the reality it obscures.

On Tuesday’s News at Ten, Orla Guerin, reporting from Tyre, reinforced this new usage, rooted in Israel’s preposterous claim that it must "escalate to de-escalate".

First, she too stressed Israel’s central talking point, intoning: "Hezbollah managed to fire 300 rockets across the border – the very thing that Israel wanted to stop."

Notice: not what Israel says or claims it wants to stop. Guerin allows no possibility that Israel’s professed war aim might conceal other, less wholesome agendas. 

Hezbollah’s DNA, remember, is "fighting Israel". Israel’s DNA, apparently, is trying to stop rockets, trying to protect its citizens from Lebanese violence. 

In the looking-glass world created by the BBC, the good guys are the ones committing a "plausible" genocide. The bad guys are the ones opposing a genocide.

Guerin continued that Hezbollah had chosen not to fire its larger, longer-range, precision-guided missiles, which are capable of hitting anywhere in Israel. 

She concluded: "It seems that still Hezbollah does not want an all-out war. Its sponsor Iran does not want an all-out war and has been saying so. The question is: can a way be found to avoid this escalation getting even worse?"

There was that word "escalation" again. And once again it meant, if one could clear away the intentional fog shrouding it, the danger that Israel would murder more Lebanese civilians, even as Hezbollah and Iran were showing great reticence to be drawn into Israel’s escalatory trap.  

Perplexed by restraint

Back in Beirut, Anna Foster again underlined the same point. She asked reporter Paul Adams in Jerusalem: "Israel has said that part of the idea behind this latest escalation is to enable people in the north to return to their homes. Is it likely to achieve that?"

Could she have been clearer? Israel’s "idea" was to escalate – kill and ethnically cleanse the Lebanese population in south Lebanon – so Israelis could return home. The only question worth considering was, would its "idea" work?

Adams’ response, like Guerin’s, was telling. He was perplexed by why Hezbollah was being so restrained – after all, "fighting Israel" is in its DNA. He suggested that there were only two possible answers: because Israel had destroyed most of Hezbollah arsenal, "or because they [Hezbollah] are holding back for some reason".

That "for some reason" was as far as BBC analysis dares go in trying to see things from Lebanon and Hezbollah’s perspective.

By Wednesday’s News at Ten, Adams was up at Israel’s border with Lebanon. 

Embedding with the Israeli military, the BBC began conditioning its audience to accept an imminent slaughter of Lebanese civilians in an Israeli ground invasion. Footage – supplied by the Israeli military? – showed a general, Herzi Halevi, tell his troops that they would soon be invading villages in Lebanon that “Hezbollah has prepared as large military outposts”. 

In other words, Halevi was warning that the Israeli army would soon be behaving, just as it did in Gaza, as if there are no civilians in Lebanon, just "large military outposts". Men, women and children would all be treated as legitimate military targets.

Adams didn’t interject a note of caution, or expand for his audience on what the general’s assessment would actually entail. Instead, Adams once again restated as objective fact Israel’s pretext for mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon. The threatened ground invasion’s “purpose is clear: to allow civilians to return to border communities evacuated a year ago”.

Next, Adams ventured to one of Israel’s near-empty border communities: Kiryat Shmona. There, Doron Spielman, an Israeli military spin doctor, told Adams: "The only way these people [residents of Kiryat Shmona] are ever going to come back home is if Hezbollah is nowhere even close to where they can shoot at them again."

What did he mean? Adams did not seek clarification or appear concerned. But the intent could not have been clearer: That the people of south Lebanon – hundreds of thousands of them – must be ethnically cleansed for good, made homeless and landless, and their homes destroyed to let the residents of Kiryat Shmona come home.

That was what Israel meant by “escalation”.

Fresh blood vs old story

There was no time on Wednesday’s News at Ten for reporting more on the fresh trails of blood in both south Lebanon and Gaza – the possible trigger for a regional conflagration – because the BBC had more urgent matters to address.

It dedicated nearly 10 minutes of its half-hour programme to revisiting yet again the events of 7 October last year, when Hamas violently invaded southern Israel for one day. 

In unprecedented fashion, it showed an extended clip from a new documentary on Hamas’ attack on the Nova rave next to the concentration camp of Gaza. Hundreds of Israeli partygoers were killed that day. 

It is a story we have heard and reheard endlessly over the past year. For months the one day of atrocities committed by Hamas – and some that were simply invented, such as its "beheading babies" and carrying out "mass rapes" – were reheated daily, presumably in the interests of supposed "balance" as Gaza endured days, then weeks, then months, and now almost a year of unmitigated death, pain and suffering.

On a day when Lebanese women and children were being killed in Israeli "escalations", BBC viewers were encouraged to forget all that misery and cast their minds back nearly a year to historical crimes in which Israelis were the victims, not the perpetrators. 

Doubtless, Israel could not have been more delighted had it been put in charge of setting the BBC’s news schedule itself. 

A BBC spokesperson responded to these criticisms in a short statement to MEE: "The BBC holds itself to the highest editorial standards and reports without fear or favour. This conflict is a challenging and polarising story to cover. We listen carefully to feedback and are committed to providing impartial reporting for audiences in the UK and across the world."

And yet I could have filled whole books deconstructing the BBC’s assault over the past few days on its viewers’ critical faculties – its constant oiling of the path to mass slaughter, ethnic cleansing and genocide. In a single article, it is possible only to scratch the surface of the media’s falsehoods, omissions, deceptions and misdirections. 

But one more should be noted.

On Tuesday, Sarah Smith was in New York reporting on the “international” dimension, meaning how the White House was handling matters as the world stands on the brink of a regional conflagration that could quickly turn into global or nuclear war. 

Remember, Israel is entirely a creature of western colonial interference in the Middle East, an outpost of the West there, and today Washington’s foremost client state. 

President Joe Biden, assuming this frail, confused figure is still capable of runnning the country, could stop Israel’s wars on Gaza and Lebanon at the drop of a hat. All he has to do is to refuse to send US weapons causing all the death and destruction and to signal to his European allies that they must do likewise.

But that is unmentionable too by the BBC, of course, for an all-too-obvious reason: it would remind viewers of who is really in charge of the genocide in Gaza and the wanton destruction of Lebanon.

Instead Smith’s job was to pretend to know Biden’s innermost thoughts, and reassure viewers that his intentions were entirely noble and kindly. 

She told us: “President Biden really dearly wanted to try and achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of the hostages before he left office.”

It is only because our minds have been so completely conditioned by this relentless battering of western propaganda that we neither laugh nor scream at our screens when this childish make-believe world of geopolitics – "really, dearly" – is presented as serious news reporting.

Israel is far from standing alone in waging a war on the region. And to gain the consent of western publics, or at least an absence of opposition, we must have our critical faculties pounded into submission just as aggressively as Israeli bombs are pounding the homes of Palestinians and Lebanese into rubble and tearing their bodies apart. 

For the killing to end, we have to stop believing this storybook world presented to us by our media – one that benefits only a tiny western elite invested in endless war and resource grabs. 

For the killing to end, we have to awaken from the dream world we have been lulled into over a lifetime.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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