Who will champion Gaza's bombed and starved children in the UK elections?
Britain’s political and media class have turned their complicity in the mass slaughter of Gaza’s children into a non-issue on the election trail
[First published by Middle East Eye]
No one should wish to live in a society where the systematic murder of children elicits no more than a shrug of the shoulders. It's even worse when elected leaders assist in such a murderous campaign.
And yet, as Britain races towards a general election next week, and with the United States not far behind with its own presidential ballot, this is the reality faced by western electorates.
Politicians battling for our votes are fully on board with the months-long murder of Gaza’s children by Israel. The western media has failed to subject these candidates to even the most cursory scrutiny for their role in perpetuating that slaughter.
The current barbarism at the heart of western politics has been turned into a non-issue.
Nonetheless, the figures from Gaza should shake us to our core.
In the past nine months, Israeli bombs have officially killed at least 15,500 Palestinian children, as well as another 22,000 adults.
The actual death toll is certainly much higher. Bombed back to the Stone Age by an Israeli political and military leadership that has long vowed such destruction as its goal, Gaza lost the ability to properly count its dead months ago.
But that is only part of the known picture. Save the Children revealed this week that a further 21,000 children are missing, including at least 4,000 estimated to be buried under collapsed buildings. No one knows their fate.
Many doubtless died horrible, lonely deaths, suffocating under rubble. Some children were so disfigured in death they could not be identified. Others have been orphaned, lost in the chaos of Gaza’s wreckage. Yet more have been grabbed off the streets by Israeli soldiers and taken to one of Israel’s black sites, where torture is rife.
This week, children were once again the primary victims as Israel targeted a school, burning alive many of those seeking shelter there.
Starved to death
Meanwhile, many hundreds of thousands of additional children – not included in these figures – are gradually being starved to death, out of view, after many months of an Israeli aid blockade backed by western powers.
Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC) are seeking to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for using starvation as a weapon of war.
Both Britain and the US are fully complicit. They have halted funding to the United Nations refugee agency Unrwa, the only serious lifeline in the fight to feed Gaza. They have done so based on entirely unsubstantiated and self-serving claims from Israel that the UN agency is complicit in Hamas “terrorism”.
A report by the UN earlier this month found nine out of 10 children lacked sufficient nutrition to either grow or survive. If they manage to emerge from this engineered famine alive, these children may never recover developmentally.
If hunger doesn’t finish them off, thirst and disease may do so, as Gaza’s population swelters in makeshift tents under plastic sheeting in the scorching summer heat.
Israel has destroyed two-thirds of Gaza’s water and sewerage infrastructure, leaving most of the available water contaminated. Sickness is spreading among children at an alarming rate.
Last week, an independent commission set up by the UN concluded that since 7 October 2023, Israel had implemented in Gaza “an intentional strategy to cause maximum damage”, including “an intentional and direct attack on the civilian population” that amounted to a policy of “extermination”.
Chris Sidoti, an investigator for the UN, said his research had shown the Israeli military to be “one of the most criminal armies in the world”.
One can begin to understand why Israel is so keen to smear the UN as a terror supporter.
With Israel barring foreign journalists from Gaza, it has been left to the UN – and the few Palestinian reporters on the ground Israel has not killed – to convey a little of the truth about Israel’s wanton atrocities.
Falsified report
Way back in January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled it “plausible” that Israel’s actions met the definition of genocide, a crime against humanity clearly outlined in international law.
These laws were established in the wake of the Second World War to prevent a repeat of the industrialised murder of civilians seen in the Holocaust.
Though you would hardly know it from western politicians and media, the World Court has put Israel on trial for genocide in a legal process that could take years to play out.
And yet, rather than uphold international law, western governments have backed Israel’s efforts to bulldoze existing safeguards against harming children and other civilians.
One US State Department whistleblower recently admitted that her superiors had altered a report to exonerate Israel by falsely concluding that it had not blocked aid.
Faced with their own officials’ warnings that they risk being complicit in war crimes and crimes against humanity, US and British politicians are either concealing the advice or falsifying it.
What they are not doing is taking action to halt the slaughter.
Whether we call what is happening in Gaza a genocide or not, it is undoubtedly a horror show – one that, because it is being livestreamed, we cannot turn away from except through an active choice.
This month, Israel was added to a UN blacklist of countries that commit systematic abuses of children during armed conflicts.
Israel’s war crimes against children are unparalleled in modern times, outstripping those committed last year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Somalia, Nigeria and Sudan combined.
Back in March, the UN reported that Israel had killed more children in Gaza – those whose deaths were recorded – than all other armed conflicts around the globe in the three years to 2022.
But the term “armed conflict” itself obscures Israel’s culpability and the West’s complicity. These children aren’t simply “collateral damage”, caught in the crossfire between two warring parties.
Israel has been occupying Gaza for decades and blockading the enclave for 17 years, denying children there the essentials of life, freedom and a childhood. Israel had left them, along with their families, to rot in what has amounted to a giant concentration camp
Now, Israel is collectively starving them inside their cage after Hamas rose up in a brutal one-day revolt on 7 October. Gaza’s children are being punished for Hamas’s refusal to continue serving indefinitely as concentration camp guards.
That counts as an “armed conflict” only in the self-serving rationalisations of western politicians and the establishment media.
Cheerleading murder
But the horror doesn’t just exist thousands of miles away in the rubble of Gaza. It is increasingly embedded in our souls.
Support for the murder of children has not only become routine over the past nine months but it’s also being treated as normal.
Israel will be competing in the Paris Olympics this summer as if nothing significant, nothing untoward, is happening in Gaza, as if the lives of many tens of thousands of dead and missing Palestinian children count for nothing.
What a contrast to the overnight pariah status of Russia and its sportspeople and artists the moment Moscow invaded Ukraine two years ago.
The hypocrisy is so entrenched that the West is now entirely blind to it. While Israeli athletes will proudly compete under their national flag in France as the butchery in Gaza continues, Russian athletes will be allowed entry only on condition they first disown their country.
When confronted by student protesters incensed at the slaughter in Gaza, the response of western universities is not to divest from the arms manufacturers supplying Israel with the weapons used to kill children.
No, the response is to set up task forces to police the protesters’ language more tightly to avoid upsetting the small number of Israel’s supporters who cheerlead the slaughter.
The Gaza genocide has so quickly become background noise that no one on the UK’s election campaign trail, including the supposedly fearless “watchdog” media, feels the need to mention it.
The Guardian’s fawning “big interview” with Keir Starmer over the weekend did not ask the soon-to-be prime minister about Gaza or whether he planned to end Britain’s assistance in turning it into a death camp.
The Labour leader was allowed, unchallenged, to criticise the ruling Conservative Party for acting as if “it doesn’t matter what you do on the international stage any more”.
But Starmer wasn’t referring to Gaza or the plausible genocide there. He was scoring an easy political point against his opponent, Rishi Sunak, for leaving this month’s D-Day commemorations early.
The only reference to Gaza was the interviewer offering concern for the wellbeing of Starmer’s family after protesters left children’s shoes outside his home, symbolising his support of the slaughter there.
In three separate interviews, Starmer had responded that he was fine with Israel’s declared policy of denying Palestinians in Gaza fuel, food and water – what the UN and legal experts have determined as Israel’s use of “starvation as a weapon of war”.
In international law, such actions are understood as collective punishment and are treated as a crime against humanity.
By contrast, Starmer, a renowned human rights lawyer, sought to redefine the starvation of children as Israel’s “right to defend herself”.
The Guardian failed to challenge him over this episode or any others concerning Gaza.
Would he stop sending weapons to Israel? Would a Labour government restore funding to Unrwa? Would Starmer defy Washington and publicly demand a meaningful ceasefire? Would he impose sanctions on Israel?
And would he join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel?
In the middle of a plausible genocide in which Britain has been actively complicit, those questions seem highly pertinent as voters decide which party leader deserves their support. Opposition to the slaughter of children ought to be a bare minimum test of political character and moral authority.
Political insurrection
There is a good reason why journalists aren’t asking such questions of Starmer: few natural Labour voters would approve of his answers.
Faced with a ruling Tory party that is imploding, the billionaires who own the media have anointed him as a safe pair of hands, the best candidate to keep the electorate docile while continued austerity ensures the transfer of wealth upwards to big business.
Media organisations don't want to drag Starmer back onto the terrain of international law, where his sycophancy to the establishment, his utter subservience to Washington’s goal of global dominance and his complicity with war crimes would be fully exposed.
If Starmer or the rest of the British political class are to be held accountable for their cheerleading of Israel’s murderous rampage, it will not come via the corporate media.
In Starmer’s London constituency, a lonely voice is trying to remind voters of what matters: that the Labour leader is unfit to lead the British government.
Andrew Feinstein, a Jewish human rights activist who fought alongside Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) against South Africa’s apartheid regime, is contesting Starmer’s seat of Holborn and St Pancras.
The slaughter in Gaza and the Labour leader’s complicity in it are at the forefront of his campaign.
Other candidates from small parties, such as the George Galloway-led Worker’s Party and former British ambassador Craig Murray in Blackburn, are trying to do the same against Labour candidates who support normalising the mass slaughter of Gaza’s children.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, a longtime supporter of Palestinian rights pushed out of the party by Starmer, is another of a growing number of independents determined to keep the spotlight fixed on Gaza.
They represent the beginnings of a political insurrection, a refusal to submit to a two-party system rigged to allow only candidates willing to prostrate themselves before the interests of a western wealth elite invested in war-waging and resource-stealing.
Our political class may have sold their souls in a Faustian pact, where the deaths of children are the price of winning power. The rest of us must not consent to this ghoulish trade-off.
We must not allow ourselves to become morally hollow shells like our leaders.
The children of Gaza, bombed for months and gradually being starved to death, need a champion. Who will step up?
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article. Matthew is standing as the Workers Party’s candidate in Bath. He has made the Gaza genocide a central plank of his platform.]
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Below is a complaint that I sent to the Australian ABC (Government broadcaster) complaining about what appears to be bias when using the word "massacre" in news stories.
They do not make it easy to extract the information so I only went back 9 years. The fact there are only 2 stories on massacres against Palestinians reported on in the last 9 years that use the actual term massacre blew my mind and just seems like a clear cut example of bias especially when the 2 articles in question are the only articles that have quotes surrounding the word "massacre"
Here is the link to the spreadsheet if anyone wants it for their own purposes.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GaGBUAys-91LFOcHBNGEJ-ee_M2b-3r6/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=107983999910327932790&rtpof=true&sd=true
My goal with this complaint is an attempt to get the government owned ABC in Australia (that is supposed to represent all of us) to treat all human beings exactly the same. News stories should be written the same way regardless as to the country/religion/culture of the people the story is about.
The word massacre has an actual definition and if that definition is or is not used based off the background of either the victims or the perpetrators then it is a practice that needs to be eliminated.
*******************************
Hello
My complaint is regarding systemic damaging bias based on the race of the people in the reported stories where the word “massacre” has been used in the heading/subheading and or content.
For many years I have trusted the ABC however in the last 12 months, I just had this suspicion that your news stories have been heavily manipulated (Mainly by omission) so I decided to do a little research on information readily available on your website.
I have enclosed a copy of my spreadsheet on the last 500+ times you ran a news story with the term "massacre" in it.
The other reason I am sending this is to see if there is a reasonable explanation for the issues found and failing that, the time will come when people in civilized societies will have to answer for what is happening right now and I want to ensure there is a paper trail so that you cannot do what the Germans did in the early 40s and pretend you did not know what was going on.
I was concerned at your lack of coverage of the numerous massacres that are occurring in Gaza right now, specifically because our government has provided material support to the organization carrying out the massacres.
Our government has deployed non combat personnel as well as aircraft in support of the Israel government which is indirectly helping them to carry out these massacres so that is one reason I am particularly interested in news regarding these massacres.
On top of that, Australian companies earn over 4 billion dollars in the form of maintaining the F-35 fighter jets that are tasked with eradicating the usually underaged, sandal wearing, water and food deprived enemy that are dangerously hiding in tents.
While I have no doubt they are a grave danger to both our way of life and the 5th generation fighters that unload on them at regular intervals, I am very concerned that as Australians, we are not getting the credit we deserve.
This is where you come in. I have enclosed a spreadsheet after researching your online database of news stories going back 9 years for the word "Massacre" because I know that there have been many massacres in Gaza recently, there were 4 in a single night over the weekend and yet nowhere on your site have you correctly headlined these news stories as massacres. Even the one where nearly 300 people were massacred, you do not use the word massacre.
I thought maybe you guys use a specific definition that is much more advanced so I have enclosed my definition which is the standard definition of a massacre so there is no confusion. I left the third definition in there so that if the ABC considers them animals, you can see that it should still be defined as a massacre.
1: the act or an instance of killing a number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty
2: a cruel or wanton murder
3: a wholesale slaughter of animals
4: an act of complete destruction
Questions
Of the 500+ articles I have found written by the ABC over the last 9 years, only two articles mention massacre and Gaza in the same article. While the number of articles is disturbing enough, the fact both articles have the word "massacre" in quotes is a disgrace.
Almost no other articles use a quote around words and I was confused as to why this would be done because on the surface, whenever I see that, I automatically think the story is not to be trusted and the reporter is intentionally conveying to me, the audience, that the information should not be trusted.
Turns out that is why you do it seems, quotes around words like massacre are used as a tool for media bias.
Is there another reason that you put the word massacre in quotes when you do a news story about Gaza?
https://www.batesline.com/archives/000478.html
When 4 hostages were rescued several weeks ago that ended in the massacre of nearly 300 innocent people, mainly children, why didn't you put massacre in the headline or anywhere in the story?
Why are you limiting the number of stories regarding the massacres and human catastrophe happening in Gaza as I have demonstrated especially where Australian companies are so heavily involved in the massacres in that they maintain critical systems directly related to the killing such as the bomb bay doors on the F-35 fighter jets?
Summary Of 10 Years Of ABC Massacre stories
These are every story that appears using the search term 'Massacre" in the last 9 years. Once I get a spare minute, I am going to create some really pretty graphs that will really drive home the ABCs lack of reporting on a news story that is current, ongoing and involves funding from both Australian private and public sectors.
At this point I have left out smaller massacres in the attached image, a full list can be found in the attached spreadsheet, but this should give you an idea of the bias the ABC is undertaking.
From my point of view it appears like the ABC is actively misrepresenting stories so that they appear unimportant and yet putting heavy emphasis on relatively small massacres that occurred sometimes hundreds of years ago.
What is the deal with the fetishism of Tiananmen square? There are even more articles on that than Port Arthur that use the word massacre somewhere in either the heading/sub heading and or content and yet it is ancient history, you must really care a lot for the Chinese.....
There is one unavoidable fact from this information apart from the obvious extreme bias and manipulation going on and that is you love to talk about historical massacres, it seems anything that we cannot do anything about or a normal person would not feel shame for because they were not born is headline news while atrocities that are occurring right now are ignored. It really is a disgrace.
I have never felt shame for anything that happened before I was alive or had the inability to do something about. I feel shame now though along with disgust and revulsion at a good portion of our society.
Perhaps if the ABC did its job and reported on the news without hiding information then our society would care a lot more about the industrial slaughter happening with weapons such as the F-35 that without Australian assistance would be unable to function.
They will read about this period in the history books and people will study the contemporary reporters asking the same question we asked as we grew up about the Nazis every time a documentary on the Holocaust is shown "How could they know what was going on and do nothing"
In the defense of 1940s Germans, even if they watched a trainload of prisoners dismount in the morning and got a whiff of something unpleasant from suspicious looking chimneys in the afternoon, they did not have almost real time HD video of the slaughter day in day out.....
In summary
I would like an answer as to:
1) why in the 2 times in 9 years that Gaza and massacre were used in the same news article, quotes were used around the word “massacre” when no other news articles exhibit this pattern?
2) Why are there only 2 articles in 9 years where Gaza and massacre are used when there have been dozens of serious massacres that have very high death tolls of unarmed and innocent people?
3) Why are there almost no articles on Gaza massacres when the people carrying out the massacres are our allies and both private and government sectors in Australia are heavily involved in providing material support to the large scale slaughter of innocent people made up of a significant number of children?
4) Do stories that involve Australian companies and government support generally have a higher level of interest compared to something like The Tiananmen square massacre in which we were not involved at all? If so then why are there almost no stories on these events using suitable language and with which you commonly use for other stories?
It’s not true that all the candidates E shrugging their shoulders. Within all of the parties there are candidates ailing to speak up for Gaza, especially in Scotland. People should not be looking at parties as a whole but at their local candidates. Vote for Gaza supporters and they will form the next parliament. No government can rule without parliamentary approval in the UK so the more pro Pals in Labour, the less power Starmer has.