12/19 Compendium of Propaganda Analysis

Glenn Diesen

How the Strategy of Fighting to the Last Ukrainian Was Sold to the Public as Morally Righteous

(See: Diesen)

Please visit the original site (above) for references

or almost three years, NATO countries have boycotted diplomatic contacts with Russia, even as hundreds of thousands of men have died on the battlefield. The decision by diplomats to reject diplomacy is morally repugnant as diplomacy could have reduced the excess of violence, prevented escalation, and even resulted in a path to peace. However, the political-media elites skilfully sold the rejection of diplomacy to the public as evidence of their moral righteousness.

This article will first outline how NATO planned for a long war to exhaust Russia and knock it out from the ranks of great powers. Second, this article will demonstrate how the political-media elites communicated that diplomacy is treasonous and war is virtuous.

NATO’s Long War

To exhaust Russia in a long war, the goal was to ensure that the Russians and Ukrainians kill each other for as long as possible. The US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin outlined the US objective in the Ukraine War as weakening its strategic adversary: “We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine”.[1] In late March 2022, Zelensky revealed in an interview with the Economist: “There are those in the West who don’t mind a long war because it would mean exhausting Russia, even if this means the demise of Ukraine and comes at the cost of Ukrainian lives”.[2]

The Israeli and Turkish mediators confirmed that Russia and Ukraine agreed to the terms of a peaceful settlement in Istanbul, in which Russia would withdraw its forces and Ukraine would restore its neutrality. However, why would the US and its allies accept that Ukraine return to neutrality, when the alternative was to use the powerful proxy army they had built in Ukraine to bleed and weaken Russia?[3]

The Turkish Foreign Minister acknowledged that there are “NATO member states that want the war to continue—let the war continue and Russia gets weaker. They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine”.[4] The former Israeli Prime Minister also confirmed that the US and UK “blocked” the peace agreement as there was a “decision by the West to keep striking Putin” to destroy a strategic rival.[5] The retired German General, Harald Kujat, a former head of the German Bundeswehr and former chairman of the NATO Military Committee, also argued that this was a war deliberately provoked by NATO, while the US and UK sabotaged all paths to peace “to weaken Russia politically, economically and militarily”.[6] Interviews with American and British leaders in March 2022, revealed that a decision had been made for “the conflict to be extended and thereby bleed Putin” as “the only end game now is the end of Putin regime”.[7]

Chas Freeman, the former US Assistant Secretary of Defence for International Security Affairs and Director for Chinese Affairs at the US State Department criticised Washington for the objective to prolong the fighting to “fight to the last Ukrainian”.[8] Republican Senator Lindsey Graham argued that the US was in a favourable position as it could fight Russia to the last Ukrainian: “I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person”.[9] Republican leader Mitch McConnell was similarly explicit:

“the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests”.[10]

Senator Mitt Romney argued that financing the war was “the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done” as “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money” and “we’re losing no lives in Ukraine”. US Congressman Dan Crenshaw also celebrated the proxy war as “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea”.[11]

Retired US General Keith Kellogg similarly called for extending the war in Ukraine as knocking out Russia would allow the US to focus on China: “if you can defeat a strategic adversary not using any US troops, you are at the acme of professionalism”. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg shared this logic as he argued defeating Russia on the battlefield will make it easier for the US to focus on China. Stoltenberg also noted that “if Ukraine wins, then you will have the second biggest army in Europe, the Ukrainian army, battle-hardened, on our side, and we’ll have a weakened Russian army”.[12]

Diplomacy as Treason and War as Virtue

When the decision had been made for a long war, the politicians and media began to construct narratives and a moral case for a long war, which would convince the public that diplomacy is treasonous, and war is virtuous.

Presenting the world as a struggle of good versus evil lays the foundation for effective war propaganda, as perpetual peace can be achieved by defeating the evil opponent while negotiations entail sacrificing indispensable values and principles. To this end, the Hitler analogy is very effective as diplomacy becomes dangerous appeasement while peace requires military victory. Reminiscent of George Orwell’s “war is peace”, Stoltenberg argues that weapons are the path to peace.

The Western public was reassured that fuelling the war was required to push Putin to the negotiation table, however, during almost three years of war the West never proposed negotiations. Reading the Western media, one gets the impression that Russia would not negotiate. However, Russia never opposed diplomacy or negotiations, it was the West that shut the door. So-called “peace summits” were held to give the public the impression that governments pursued peace, although Russia was not invited and the stated purpose was to mobilise public opinion and resources against Russia.

In November 2022, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley argued for starting negotiations with Russia. Ukraine had just captured large swaths of territory in Kherson and Kharkov, and General Milley argued Ukraine would not be in a better position to negotiate a peace deal. General Milley was correct in this assessment, yet he neglected that the principal objective of the war was to keep it going to bleed Russia. General Milley had to walk back his statements that threatened to end the war.[13]

The EU almost always advocates for immediate diplomacy and negotiations in conflicts around the world. In Ukraine, the EU’s foreign policy chief at the beginning of the war, Josep Borrell, argued that the war would be won on the battlefield.[14] The incoming foreign policy chief of the EU, Kaja Kallas, rejected any need for diplomacy during the war: “Why talk to him [Putin], he is a war criminal”.[15] Diplomacy now entails sitting in a room with people who agree with you, and pat each other on the shoulder for having isolated the adversary. The EU has completed its transition from a peace project to a geopolitical project.

Anyone suggesting to restore diplomacy or start negotiations is immediately smeared as a far-left or far-right pro-Russian stooge. It is hardly original to present the opposition to war as taking the side of the adversary, yet the accusation of treason is a powerful instrument to crush dissent. The Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban travelled to Ukraine, Russia, China, and the US (to meet with Trump) to explore the possibility of charting a path to peace. The EU responded by punishing Hungary and the political-media elites sought to delegitimise him as a puppet of Putin. The same script is applied to anyone suggesting to end the war.

Arguing against the dangerous precedent of “rewarding” Putin’s aggression with territory has been another seemingly moral argument against peace negotiations. However, this argument is based on the false premise that the war began as a territorial dispute. As we learned from the Istanbul peace agreement, Russia agreed to pull back its troops in return for Ukraine restoring its neutrality. Furthermore, the proxy war has been lost and Ukraine will only lose more men and territory with each passing day.

NATO’s continued insistence that Ukraine will become a member state after the war is presented to the public as a moral sign of support for Ukraine, although in reality, it has the effect of obstructing a political settlement. Ending NATO expansionism must be the cornerstone of any lasting peace agreement as this was the source of the war.

The Coming Backlash

As the Ukrainian frontlines collapse and their causalities subsequently intensify, the Americans are pushing Ukraine to lower its conscription age as sacrificing the youth could keep the war going for a bit longer. The Ukrainian public no longer wants to fight, desertions increase drastically, and “recruitment” consists of grabbing civilians off the streets and throwing them into vans that take them almost directly to the front lines. A recent Gallup poll found that there is not a single oblast in Ukraine where the majority support continuing the war.[16]

Oleksyi Arestovych, the former advisor to President Zelensky, predicted in 2019 that the threat of NATO expansion would “provoke Russia to launch a large-scale military operation against Ukraine”. NATO would then use the Ukrainian army to defeat Russia: “In this conflict, we will be very actively supported by the West—with weapons, equipment, assistance, new sanctions against Russia and the quite possible introduction of a NATO contingent, a no-fly zone etc. We won’t lose, and that’s good’.[17]

The war did not go as planned and Ukraine is being destroyed, and Arestovych recognises the folly of continuing the war. There is a growing realisation in Ukrainian society that NATO sabotaged the peace to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. Ukrainians will resent Russia for decades to come, although there will also be hatred against the West. The war propagandists in the Western media will then surely act bewildered and blame Russian propaganda.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

From Drop Site News (see Drop Site News)

The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza

Owen Jones

(I am reposting an article by Owen Jones for Drop Site News, as it offers highly significant insight into the ways in which the BBC operates as a tool for the British establishment’s embrace of Neocon whitewashing of Zionist genocide).

The BBC’s Civil War Over Gaza

Story by Owen Jones

The BBC is facing an internal revolt over its reporting on Israel’s war on Gaza.

Their primary battlefield has become the online news operation. Drop Site News spoke to 13 current and former staffers who mapped out the extensive bias in the BBC’s coverage and how their demands for change have been largely met with silence from management. At times, these journalists point out, the coverage has been more credulous about Israeli claims than the UK’s own Conservative leaders and the Israeli media, while devaluing Palestinian life, ignoring atrocities, and creating a false equivalence in an entirely unbalanced conflict.

The BBC journalists who spoke to Drop Site News believe the imbalance is structural, and has been enforced by the top brass for many years; all of them requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution. The journalists also overwhelmingly point to the role of one person in particular: Raffi Berg, BBC News online’s Middle East editor. Berg sets the tone for the BBC’s digital output on Israel and Palestine, they say. They also allege that internal complaints about how the BBC covers Gaza have been repeatedly brushed aside. “This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” one former BBC journalist said.

In November, the journalists’ outrage at the Corporation’s overall coverage spilled out into the open after more than 100 BBC employees signed a letter accusing the organization, along with other broadcasters, of failing to adhere to its own editorial standards. The BBC lacked “consistently fair and accurate evidence-based journalism in its coverage of Gaza” across its platforms, they wrote. The employees also requested that the BBC make a series of specific changes:

reiterating that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza, making it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims, highlighting the extent to which Israeli sources are reliable, making clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines, providing proportionate representation of experts in war crimes and crimes against humanity, including regular historical context predating October 2023, use of consistent language when discussing both Israeli and Palestinian deaths, and robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews.

One BBC journalist told me that the letter was “a last resort after several tried to engage using the usual channels with management and were just ignored.” Another journalist tells me they hadn’t signed the letter because they weren’t aware of it, stating the strength of feeling went “way beyond” the signatories.

BBC management has rejected claims that such dissent has been ignored. In the reply sent by Deborah Turness, CEO of BBC News, which Drop Site News obtained, Turness told them to “please note we would not normally reply to unsigned, anonymous correspondence,” adding that “BBC News is proud of its journalism and always open to discussion about it, but this is made more difficult when parties are not willing to do so openly and transparently.” She claimed the BBC engaged with internal BBC staff and “external stakeholders” on coverage of Israel and Palestine, and argued “the BBC does not and cannot reflect any single world view, and reports without fear of [sic] favour.” One BBC journalist told me this reflected the BBC’s desire to “frame this as an identity politics issue, when it’s not. It’s about not blindly accepting the Israeli line.” Another called it “very patronizing.”

Email from Deborah Turness

The internal critique peaked again in December, after journalists say the BBC failed to highlight Amnesty International’s report concluding that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Senior correspondents expressed their dismay at the angle chosen for the limited broadcast coverage. In a WhatsApp group of senior Middle East correspondents, editors, and producers—referred to as ‘the big dogs’ by BBC management—one posted the chyron during coverage on the BBC news channel: “Israel rejects ‘fabricated’ claims of genocide.” Another commented: ‘FFS!!—It’s an open goal for those who say we’re frit [afraid] of upsetting the Israelis and keep on couching our stories in an ‘Israel says’ narrative’. As one BBC journalist puts it to me: “These are established senior correspondents—and it’s even bothering them.”

In response to this criticism by their own senior journalists, a BBC spokesperson said: “We take feedback on our coverage seriously, but criticism of BBC output based on a single screenshot taken during a few seconds of coverage, or on false assertions that topics ‘haven’t been covered’ when they have is invalid and disingenuous.”

Another strapline was also used that day: “Amnesty International accuses Israel of genocide.” While it was discussed on BBC radio stations, journalists note that the report was not covered at all on the BBC’s flagship news programmes—BBC One’s News At One, News At Six or News At Ten or its flagship current affairs programme, BBC Two’s Newsnight. According to broadcast regulator Ofcom, BBC One is the most frequented news source in Britain. On December 5, the day the Amnesty report was released, 3.7 million viewers tuned into the BBC News At Six alone. The News Channel attracts only a small fraction of that audience.

The Amnesty International report was also not afforded proper attention by BBC online, the staffers say. It appeared on the BBC front page, but long after the embargo on reporting ended, leading award-winning TV producer Richard Sanders to ask “Why on earth did it take them 12 hours?” Even then, it appeared as the seventh item in order of importance. And for a week after it was reported, the story about the world’s most famous human rights organization concluding that Israel was committing genocide did not appear in the ‘Israel-Gaza war’ index tab which remains fixed at the top of the BBC news front page. The BBC told Drop Site News that this was a mistake. The Amnesty story was added to the index several days after the report was released, meaning traffic to the story was suppressed.

According to data seen by BBC journalists, in the first few days the story received around 120,000 hits. One BBC journalist suggests that—if it had been on the Israel-Gaza index featured on the BBC news front page—it would have attracted far more traffic. They note a story which appeared on the Israel-Gaza index and was just one day older, concerning the recovery of the body of an Israeli hostage from Gaza, garnered around 370,000 hits.

In addition to what they see as a collective management failure, journalists expressed concerns over bias in the shaping of the Middle East index of the BBC news website. Several allege that Berg “micromanages” this section, ensuring that it fails to uphold impartiality. “Many of us have raised concerns that Raffi has the power to reframe every story, and we are ignored,” one told me.

The BBC journalists also point to Tim Davie, the director general of the BBC, and Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC’s news division, as standing in the way of change. Both are aware of the outrage against Berg, the journalists said. “Almost every correspondent you know has an issue with him,” one said. “He has been named in multiple meetings, but they just ignore it.”

It is difficult to overstate the influence of the BBC’s online operation. According to media watchdog Press Gazette, the BBC news website, which includes both news and non-news content, is the most-visited news site on the internet. In May alone, it had 1.1 billion visits, dwarfing second-place finisher msn.com, which had 686 million visits.

Berg’s influence has a ripple effect, the journalists say. While BBC broadcasters write and produce their own reports, editors and reporters across the organization frequently draw on web articles such as those edited by Berg to flesh out their stories. “Part of the problem is that the staff on Today [the BBC’s flagship radio current affairs programme] and domestic outlets in general are pretty ignorant about Israel/Gaza,” says one BBC journalist, “as anyone who goes to work there from World Service realizes very quickly.” BBC news broadcasts are centered on coverage by veteran journalists with on-the-ground experience like Jeremy Bowen who are regarded as more balanced.

In response to a request for comment, the BBC said it unequivocally stood by Berg’s work and that Drop Site News's descriptions of Berg “fundamentally misdescribe this person’s role, and misunderstand the way the BBC works.” The organization rejected “any suggestion of a ‘lenient stance’” towards Israel or Palestine, and asserted that the BBC was “the world’s most trusted international news source” and that its “coverage should be judged on its own merits and in its entirety.”

“If we make mistakes we correct them,” the BBC said. More on that later.

“This is about editorial standards”

In November 2023, BBC senior management attended a morning meeting with at least 100 staffers to discuss coverage of Gaza. It soon descended into a fiery debate. “We’ve got to all remember that this all started on 7 October,” Deborah Turness, the CEO of the news division, called out, in an attempt to assert control of the meeting, two attendees told me. Liliane Landour, the former head of the BBC World Service, disagreed, pointing to the decades of Israeli occupation before October 7: “No, I’m going to have to say that’s not the case, and I’m sure that’s not how you meant to phrase it.” People were “livid” about Turness’s remarks, one journalist said. When asked for comment, the BBC pointed to a blog post Turness authored in October 2023 detailing the organization’s approach to the conflict.

Internal tensions over the BBC’s coverage of Gaza had been rising for weeks. On October 24, Rami Ruhayem, a Beirut-based BBC Arabic correspondent, sent an email to Tim Davie, BBC’s director general, laying out the concerns he and his fellow journalists had shared about the organization’s lack of impartiality in its Gaza coverage. While stories “prominently” used words like “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “atrocities” to refer to Hamas, they “hardly, if at all,” used them “in reference to actions by Israel,” he wrote.

Ruhayem singled out the use of the word “massacre,” in particular, which the BBC had not used to describe mass slaughters perpetrated by Israeli forces. By contrast, on October 10, 2023, the organization published a story with the headline “Supernova festival: How massacre unfolded from verified video and social media.”

Ruhayem also noted the organization-wide failure to frame reporting and analysis around Israeli statements signifying war crimes and genocidal intent. He pointed out the lack of “historical context,” emphasizing that “apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler-colonialism” were “terms used by many experts and highly respected organizations to which the BBC usually defers.”

On October 31, 2023, for example, the BBC published a story with a headline that excised Israel’s role: “Israel Gaza: Father loses 11 family members in one blast.” When the BBC does mention Israel as a perpetrator, including when large numbers of civilians are killed by its missiles, the organization’s headlines use the caveat “reportedly.” The BBC repeats the Israeli authorities’ use of “evacuate” to describe the forcible transfer of civilians—effectively using a euphemism for a war crime. Instead of describing Israel’s total siege on Gaza for what it is, an all-encompassing blockade on aid was framed in an October 20, 2023 headline as “Israel aims to cut Gaza ties after war with Hamas.”

In November, around the same time as the meeting with Turness, eight BBC journalists sent a 2,300-word letter to Al Jazeera outlining how their employer had failed to accurately depict the Israel-Palestine story “through omission and lack of critical engagement with Israel’s claims” and a “double standard in how civilians are seen.” In the preceding weeks, the BBC had either buried or failed to report on a number of official statements announcing Israel’s intent to perpetrate war crimes. Defense minister Yoav Gallant’s commitment to impose a “full siege” on Gaza and its “human animals” received just one mention in BBC online content, towards the end of an article headlined “Israel's military says it fully controls communities on Gaza border.” No context about the illegality of the statement was offered. A statement by Israeli General Ghassan Alian addressed to both Hamas and “the residents of Gaza”—which unambiguously denounced the Palestinians of Gaza as “human beasts” and promised a total blockade on life’s essentials and the unleashing of “damage” and “hell”—was not covered at all.

By comparison, weeks after the start of the war in Ukraine, the BBC’s online coverage clearly identified war crimes committed by Russia, even without official rulings from international courts. “Gruesome evidence points to war crimes on road outside Kyiv,” read one headline 36 days into the invasion. After October 7, war crimes committed by Hamas were treated as objective fact requiring no legal verdict: “Israeli community frozen as Hamas atrocities continue emerge.” When strong evidence similarly shows Israel committing atrocities, the same editorial guidance does not apply.

“They wanted to turn it into a ‘Muslim thing,’ that ‘we’re worried about your community.’ We said, ‘We appreciate your concern about our mental health, but this is about editorial standards.’”

In the weeks after October 7, a number of BBC journalists began venting their intense frustrations in forums like WhatsApp groups, where they collected the “bullshit reasons given for not commissioning stories.” They singled out Berg, one of whom says plays a key role in a wider BBC culture of “systematic Israeli propaganda.” After staffers were told by the BBC’s top brass to come forward with any concerns about coverage, in meetings with senior management, journalists have flagged numerous examples of problematic editing by Berg. Again, having been invited to do so by BBC management, journalists have sent large numbers of emails identifying problems with such news stories. Staff members report rarely receiving responses to such emails.

Instead, the BBC’s approach has been to pathologize the problem. In early November 2023, management convened several roundtables, described as “listening sessions,” where, as one attendee told me, it became clear that management sought to recast factual objections and bias concerns raised by staff as emotional struggles. “They said they were concerned about mental health [and] offered the telephone number of the BBC support group,” one journalist who attended said.

“They wanted to turn it into a ‘Muslim thing,’ that ‘we’re worried about your community.’ We said, ‘We appreciate your concern about our mental health, but this is about editorial standards. It’s about being a public service broadcaster and impartiality not being abided by. They realized they’d let the genie out of the bottle. We said: ‘What’s the next session? We want a progress report, collating the evidence.’” Another attendee said management told staff to “be as frank as possible” and that it sought “honest thoughts on coverage.” Despite management efforts to pigeonhole the objections to BBC's coverage, the internal dissent extended far beyond Muslim staff.

“It was quite bad, staff were not treated well,” says one BBC journalist. “They were speaking their mind, then being shut down. They were told to be honest, but managers didn’t want that and snapped.” Since the meeting with Turness in November, staffers have asked, on three occasions, for updates on whether there had been any progress on responding to and acting on claims about biased coverage. “Three times there has been nothing back,” one staffer said.

In March 2024, the Centre for Media Monitoring, a watchdog group established by the Muslim Council of Britain, released “Media Bias: Gaza 2023-24,” a 150-page document detailing numerous allegations against the BBC’s reporting on Israel and Gaza. That included stripping away context such as Israel’s occupation of Palestine and siege of Gaza, far greater use of emotive language to describe Israeli suffering or deaths than that used when the victims are Palestinians and a pattern that BBC's position "has often been to push the Israeli line whilst casting doubt on Pro-Palestinian voices."

The BBC journalists said they presented the document to Richard Burgess, the BBC‘s director of news content who oversees content across BBC platforms. His response: He did not “recognize the bias.”

The BBC's headquarters was splashed with red paint by pro-Palestinian activists from Palestine Action on October 14, 2023 in London, United Kingdom. Photo by Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images.

Without Fear or Favor

Between November 2023 and July 2024, BBC management held five listening sessions on Israel-Gaza. In a group meeting with Davie in May 2024, staffers at the meeting acknowledged the pressure the BBC faced from pro-Israel lobbyists. They also emphasized that their sole objective was to uphold the BBC’s values of fairness and impartiality and to produce content “without fear or favor”—principles staffers told me had been cast aside in deference to Israeli narratives. They also noted examples of individual senior journalists who had sent dozens of complaints about coverage of Israel and Gaza, only to be consistently brushed off.

The staffers also identified the website, headed by Berg, as the BBC’s most egregious violator of editorial standards on impartiality on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Davie, BBC’s director-general, was already aware that many BBC journalists had specific concerns about Berg. “He did very little to hide his objective of watering down anything critical of Israel,” said a former BBC journalist.

Berg wasn’t the only senior figure discussed at the meeting in May. The role of another powerful individual raised Robbie Gibb—one of five people who serve on the BBC’s editorial guidelines and standards committee along with Director-General Tim Davie, BBC News CEO Deborah Turness, the Chairman of the Arts Council Nicholas Serota, and BBC Chair Samir Shah. In September 2024, when discussing “the Israel-Gaza story,” Shah told British parliamentarians that the committee was “part of the process where complaints are discussed, talked about and addressed.” He added that the BBC’s next “thematic review” should focus on Israel and Palestine.

Gibb is charged with helping to define the BBC’s commitment to impartiality, and to respond to complaints about the BBC’s coverage on Israel and Palestine—but his ultra-partisan record speaks for itself. The brother of a former Conservative minister, he is a veteran of the revolving door between Britain’s worlds of media and politics. In his thirties, Gibb was the chief of staff for Conservative MP Francis Maude before becoming deputy political editor of Newsnight, the BBC’s flagship current affairs show, and, later, editor of BBC politics programs. Between 2017 and 2019, he served as director of communications for Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, and was knighted by her upon her resignation. In 2020, Gibb also led a consortium to rescue the Jewish Chronicle from bankruptcy. In 2021, Gibb returned to the BBC, joining its board as a non-executive director. In 2022, former senior BBC journalist Emily Maitlis described Gibb as an “active agent of the Conservative party” who shaped the broadcaster’s coverage by acting “as the arbiter of BBC impartiality.” Similarly, Lewis Goodall, her colleague, said editors told him to “be careful: Robbie is watching you.”

Gibb’s deep involvement with the Jewish Chronicle continued after he took up his BBC role. In the November 2023 BBC Declaration of Personal Interests, he declared he was the 100% owner of the newspaper, before being replaced by a venture capitalist in August 2024. One former Jewish Chronicle journalist declared that, “since the change in ownership, the paper has read more like a propaganda sheet for Benjamin Netanyahu,” and that Gibb regularly appeared in the office “to check up on what stories were topping the news list and offering a view.” Since the acquisition, Jake Wallis Simons, its editor since 2021, has focused on zealously supporting Israel’s onslaught since October 2023. In one example, he tweeted a video of a 2,000-pound bomb exploding in Gaza City with the caption “Onwards to victory!,” before deleting with no apology.

In September 2024, four Jewish Chronicle columnists resigned in protest after the paper published a story that included fabricated quotes from Israeli officials, with one declaring that “too often the JC reads like a partisan, ideological instrument, its judgements political rather than journalistic.” Four Israelis, including an aide to Netanyahu, were subsequently arrested on charges of falsifying and distributing fabricated documents to the Jewish Chronicle and Germany’s largest newspaper Bild.

In September, the Muslim Council of Britain wrote a letter expressing concern with Gibb’s position on the editorial standards committee, noting his involvement with the Jewish Chronicle, its political orientation, the fact that it had been repeatedly reported to the Independent Press Standards Organisation. At that May meeting, BBC journalists had emphasized that Gibbs’s agenda was widely understood in British media circles, referring to his links to the Jewish Chronicle and noting its right-wing partisan orientation and slavish pro-Israel stance.

But it was Berg’s key role in shaping online coverage of the Middle East that the staffers emphasized the most at the “listening session” meeting with the BBC director general, Tim Davie, in May. They noted Berg’s history and associations as indicative of bias, pointing to instances where journalists’ copy had been changed prior to publication. They made specific requests: that stories should, as a rule, emphasize that Israel had not granted the BBC access to Gaza, that the network should end the practice of presenting the official Israeli versions of events as fact, and that the BBC should do more to offer context about Israeli occupation and the fact that Gaza is overwhelmingly populated by descendants of refugees forcibly driven from their homes beginning in 1948. While Davie told staff that management would “look into” staff objections, to date no response ever came back.

A crucial part of the BBC news website is its curation department, which selects the stories that are displayed on each section’s “front page,” as well as the overall BBC news homepage. If a story appears on the front page, it often receives hundreds of thousands or even millions of views, BBC staffers said, adding that stories published on regional index pages tend to attract only a fraction of that number. BBC staffers allege that Berg plays a powerful role in deciding which Middle East stories appear on the BBC News front page. The BBC denies that he has a veto, and claims staffers are assigning “outsize importance" to Berg's influence. Given that only a handful of stories are published to the Middle East index each day, it is relatively easy for a single editor to have an effect while also influencing coverage outside of the index. “If it’s Israel/Palestine, it has to go through Raffi before curation even OK it,” one journalist said. “Anyone who writes on Gaza or Israel is asked: ‘Has it gone to edpol [editorial policy], lawyers, and has it gone to Raffi?’” another said.

In response to BBC management claims that Berg’s power is being exaggerated by staff, a former journalist at the BBC World Service says: “I was working for a World Service department, producing content for language services. ‘We have to run this past Raffi’ was the reflex answer to any producer pitching anything on Israel.” The journalist said that other editors were reluctant to sign off content, treating Berg’s verdict as “their safety step” in the editorial process. “There was an extreme fear at the BBC, that if you ever wanted to do anything about Israel or Palestine, editors would say: ‘If you want to pitch something, you have to go through Raffi and get his signoff.”

This dynamic was corroborated by a third journalist, who said that even if a story which touched on Israel and Palestine appeared on another news index, it would still be flagged for Berg’s attention and approval. “How much power he has is wild,” said the journalist. “His reach goes beyond just the Middle East index, but to adjacent subject matters.”

Raffi Berg on Netanyahu’s Bookshelf

Raffi Berg began his career in local radio, later spending nearly a year as a news editor for the U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, an outlet he later discovered was run by the CIA—a fact he was “absolutely thrilled” to learn.

Berg’s first job at the BBC was as a reporter. His bylined work included “Israel’s teenage recruits,” a story published in 2002 that presented young IDF soldiers as courageous defenders of their country while failing to mention the occupation and settlement of Palestinian land or the widespread allegations of crimes documented by human rights organizations, including in Israel, and even the U.S. State Department. One BBC journalist described the article as an “IDF puff piece.”

Berg’s reported work also included a three-part series on Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. The series presented them as victims seeking “a better quality of life” and did not mention the fact that the settlements have been repeatedly deemed illegal. Instead, the series included a boxed sidebar, outside the text of the actual story, to relay that the settlements are “widely regarded by international community as illegal under international law,” but Israel maintains that “international conventions do not apply in the West Bank and Gaza because they were not under the legitimate sovereignty of any state in the first place.”

On January 11, 2009, demonstrators held a rally in London’s Trafalgar Square in support of Operation Cast Lead, an Israeli military onslaught against Gaza in which up to 1,400 Palestinians were killed, most of them believed to be civilians. Demonstrators held Israeli flags and placards emblazoned with the words: “END HAMAS TERROR! PEACE FOR THE PEOPLE OF ISRAEL AND GAZA.” While the event was billed as supporting “Peace in Israel, Peace in Gaza,” speakers at the rally voiced support for Israel’s military offensive. “In this case, I think there is no such thing as disproportion. If you have got a war to fight, then you fight,” one speaker said.

The BBC coverage of the event proclaimed: “Thousands call for Mid-East peace.” Its story opened with several paragraphs that described the rally as showcasing speeches that characterized the Israeli military offensive as pro-peace and repeated without skepticism the claims of the organizers:

Thousands of pro-Israel supporters have gathered in London's Trafalgar Square to call for an end to the violence in the Middle East.

Organizers said they wanted people in Gaza and Israel to live in peace, but argued that Hamas must accept responsibility for the conflict.

Berg did not write the unbylined piece. But he attended the event “in a personal capacity” prior to becoming the BBC’s “Middle East online editor, or indeed acting editor,” the BBC said. Yet Berg was still a BBC staffer at the time, working on the website’s Middle East desk. In an article in which the BBC omitted key details about the nature of the rally, the organization interviewed Berg, a member of its own staff, as a participant in the pro-Israel protest. Berg even went to the trouble of writing a letter to Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post to take issue with its suggestion that only 5,000 people had attended what he called the “Israel solidarity rally at Trafalgar Square on Sunday.” “This is actually well short of the actual number,” he wrote. “The organizers, the Board of Deputies, said it was 15,000, and in my opinion (I was there) that is probably accurate.”

A decade later, the BBC amended its editorial guidelines to clarify that “people working in news and current affairs and factual journalism… should not participate in public demonstrations or gatherings about controversial issues.” By then, the BBC had concluded that the mere act of attending a protest in a personal capacity was a threat to perceptions of impartiality.

In 2013, Berg became Middle East editor for BBC news online. It was in this role where he encountered material that would form the basis for his book, “Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort,” an account of the Israeli spy services’ efforts to evacuate Jews from Ethiopia between 1979 and 1983. In the book, Berg describes Mossad in glowing terms, calling the agency “much vaunted.” Berg received extensive cooperation from Mossad for the book, including “over 100 hours of interviews” of “past and present agents and Navy and Air Force personnel.” It was published in 2020. In an interview to promote the book, Berg said he collaborated on the project with “Dani,” a former senior Mossad commander he described as a “legend” who later became “a very close friend.”

An expert on Mossad who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal from within their professional circles told Drop Site News that the book failed to present crucial context surrounding Israel’s intelligence services, including their record of human rights violations, assassinations, and extraordinary renditions. Berg’s close relationship with Dani “raises the risk of adopting the viewpoints and value judgements of intelligence agencies,” the expert said, raising questions about Berg’s interest in the book’s subject. Books that romanticize the operations of spy agencies are “a powerful legitimizing device for intelligence services,” the expert said. “Authors who don’t even bother to raise tough questions about intelligence services are the best spokesperson these services could have hoped for. At the beginning of February 2020, Ohad Zemet, the spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy in London, attended a launch event for Berg’s book, where he posed for a photo with the author and Mark Regev, then Israel’s ambassador to the UK. Zemet posted the photo in a tweet in which he called the book “wonderful.” A year later, Berg retweeted Zemet’s post, with the words: “big honour for me on a very special night.”

On August 23, 2020, Berg posted an image of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu taking a phone call at his desk. In his post, Berg has zoomed in on and circled a copy of Red Sea Spies visible on a bookshelf behind the prime minister. “First time I’ve been on a prime minister's bookshelf!” he wrote. “I know I’ve got one of #Israel PM @netanyahu’s books on mine—but wow!” He tweeted a similar image in January 2021.

Source: Twitter/X

Source: Twitter/X

The BBC’s editorial guidelines concerning personal views and bias are clear. They state that “views or opinions expressed elsewhere, on social media or in articles or in books, can … give the impression of bias or prejudice and must also be avoided.” BBC journalists far more junior than Berg have been reprimanded or even disciplined for social media output seen as biased in favor of the Palestinian cause.

BBC journalists emphasize this context when they point to how Berg reshapes everything from headlines, to story text, to images, arguing he repeatedly seeks to foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity, with one journalist characterizing his approach as “death by a thousand cuts.”

In response to a request for comment from Berg, Drop Site News was informed that Berg had hired British-Israeli lawyer Mark Lewis, who is described as “the UK’s foremost media, libel and privacy lawyer.” The former director of UK Lawyers for Israel, Lewis attended the 2018 launch of Likud-Herut UK, a right-wing Zionist organisation, whose national director is his wife, Mandy Blumenthal. At the launch, Lewis emphasized the importance of “unapologetic Zionism.” Citing rising antisemitism, he announced that he and Blumenthal had immigrated to Israel in December 2018. “Europe in my view is finished,” he declared. His Twitter profile cites his current location as “Israel (legal work England).”

The BBC then informed Drop Site that its responses to our questions covered both Berg and the BBC. The BBC disputed the journalists’ characterization of Berg’s role and alleged bias, though the network declined to answer specific questions about claims made by current and former staffers.

Muhammed Bhar’s “Lonely Death”

In July, the BBC published a story on its website about Muhammed Bhar, a 24-year-old Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome and autism. He lived in Gaza with his family, who provided him with around-the-clock care. Since Israel began its assault on Gaza, he had been terrified of the shells exploding around him, caused by violence he was unable to understand. On July 3, the Israeli military raided Bhar’s home. The family begged for mercy for their disabled son, but the unit’s dog savaged him. He begged the dog to stop, using the only language he could access in that moment: “Khalas ya habibi” (“that’s enough, my dear”). The soldiers then put the injured man in a separate room, locked the door, and forced the family to leave at gunpoint. A week later, the family returned home to find Bhar’s decomposing body.

Bhar’s story was originally documented by Middle East Eye on July 12, with the headline: “Gaza: Palestinian with Down syndrome ‘left to die’ by Israeli soldiers after combat dog attack.” British newspaper The Independent covered it with the headline: “Gaza man with Down’s syndrome mauled by Israeli attack dog and left to die, family says.” Four days later after the first reports, the BBC published its own version of the story. Its headline: “The lonely death of Gaza man with Down’s syndrome.”

“There has to be a moral line drawn in the sand. And if this story isn’t it, then what?”

The headline did not reflect the hideous circumstances of Bhar’s death and omitted the specifics of who did what to whom—a recurring theme in complaints made by BBC reporters and presenters to management regarding the Corporation’s online coverage. In the original version of the story, it took 500 words to learn that an Israeli army dog had attacked Bhar, and a further 339 to discover how he had died.

Berg was the one to hit publish on the story, according to the edit history obtained by Drop Site. Optimo, the BBC’s content management system, shows that Berg made a series of pre-publication edits, before publishing the story, meaning that Berg himself must have signed off on its framing and deemed that the headline erasing Israeli responsibility satisfied the BBC’s editorial standards.

The article about Bhar sparked an outpouring of fury both internally at the BBC and on social media. In a post liked by 14,000 users, Husam Zomlot, Palestine’s ambassador to the UK, tweeted: “I don’t think there could be a worst murder in human history, still @BBCWorld headlines this as ‘death of a Gaza man’ to abdicate Israel of responsibility. Abhorrent!” Palestinian-American writer Tariq Kenney-Shawa mocked the absurdity of the framing. “A ‘lonely death,’ as if he died after a long battle with cancer or was perhaps swept away by the sea or lost under the rubble of an earthquake,” he tweeted.

Eventually, the BBC decided to rewrite the story. It changed the headline to “Gaza man with Down’s syndrome attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC.” It also inserted two new paragraphs at the top of the piece informing readers that the Israeli military had admitted “that a Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome who was attacked by an army dog in Gaza was left on his own by soldiers, after his family had been ordered to leave,” and that he was “found dead by his family a week later.” Even with the new phrasing, the story implied that the dog had attacked Bhar of its own volition, not that it was under the control of IDF personnel.

In its updated post, the BBC did not acknowledge that its previous version of the story omitted or downplayed key facts or explain to readers why it changed the headline. It did add a note at the bottom of the story: “This story was updated on 19 July with an IDF response.” The BBC also tweeted the article under its new headline, writing: “This post replaces an earlier version in order to update a headline that more accurately represents the article.”

The Bhar story symbolizes what the BBC staffers who spoke to Drop Site News say they want: Stronger assurances that BBC’s Israel and Gaza coverage upholds the organization’s policies around impartiality. As one BBC journalist told me: “There has to be a moral line drawn in the sand. And if this story isn’t it, then what?”

The objections over Berg’s role extend to his own writing. One BBC staffer highlighted Berg’s December 2022 article “Israel says likely killed Palestinian girl in error,” about Jana Zakarneh, a 16-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli snipers. The first two paragraphs read:

Israel says its forces appear to have unintentionally killed a 16-year-old Palestinian girl amid a gun battle with militants in the occupied West Bank.

The body of Jana Zakarneh was found on the roof of her house in Jenin after the firefight on Sunday night.

The story foregrounds the Israeli narrative—that Zakameh had been near gunmen who’d opened fire at Israeli troops, and that the Israeli military had been conducting near nightly raids in the West Bank as part of an operation against militants whose attacks on Israel had left the country “in shock.” Only in the third paragraph does the story quote the Palestinian prime minister’s accusation that Israel had killed the teenager “in cold blood.”

Wafa, the Palestine News Agency, released an image of Zakarneh, which CNN published with its story on her killing. By contrast, the BBC, in its story on the killing, used a photo depicting three members of Zakarneh’s family on the roof of their home.

In stories reporting attacks against young Israelis, the BBC often adopts a different approach to photos. A story about Emily Hand, an Israeli child who had been presumed killed on October 7 but was later released, features her image. A story about a 14-year-old Israeli boy who was killed in the West Bank earlier this year also included a picture of him. Late last year, a story about a 19-year-old British-Israeli IDF soldier—not a civilian—who was killed in combat was accompanied by his photo.

In other cases, facts unfavorable to Israel have been stripped out of Berg’s reports. In a May 2022 story about an annual march of far-right Israeli extremists through Palestinian areas celebrating the capture and occupation of East Jerusalem, Berg’s original copy described the marchers as singing “patriotic songs,” which traditionally included inflammatory, racist anti-Arab lyrics that went unmentioned by Berg. Indeed, when the march took place, the BBC initially reported chants of “death to Arabs!” and “may your village burn.” A BBC crew came under attack during the march; Israeli forces stopped the attack but took no further action. But these details did not appear in a later version of the story. The headline refers euphemistically to “Israeli nationalists stream through Muslim Quarter.” All of this caused a huge outcry on social media and among some BBC staff. These details were later reinstated, with an update noting they had been restored “to give a fuller picture of events.”

On one occasion, the BBC was forced to change Berg’s copy following external and internal backlash, BBC journalists said. In May 2022, an Israeli sniper killed Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Israel has diligently tried to cover up her murder.

Berg’s original text about her funeral read:

Violence broke out at the funeral in East Jerusalem of reporter Shireen Abu Aqla, killed during an Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank.

Her coffin was jostled as Israeli police and Palestinians clashed as it left a hospital in East Jerusalem.

The editorial decision not to ascribe responsibility triggered widespread outrage, including from Chris Doyle, the director of the Council for Arab British Understanding and a prominent commentator who has repeatedly appeared on the BBC news channel. He tweeted: “how…Raffi Berg @bbcnews thinks ‘violence broke out’, ‘jostled’ and ‘clashes’ were appropriate terms I cannot fathom.” After widespread anger, the BBC updated the text to correctly open with “Israeli police have hit mourners at the funeral of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Aqla,” adding “Her coffin almost fell as police, some using batons, waded into a crowd of Palestinians gathered around it.” Nonetheless, the headline still lacked a sense of causality: “Shireen Abu Aqla: Violence at Al Jazeera reporter’s funeral in Jerusalem.”

Despite significant evidence of bias and internal protest, BBC journalists allege that the network has refused to investigate Berg’s crucial role in what they see as conduct that imperils the integrity of the BBC. “We have provided a pretty watertight account about what he’s said and done,” one journalist told me. The response from management has been limited to “Tim Davie saying: ‘It’s good you’ve raised this. We’ll look into it.’”

A Systematic Look at Coverage

Despite the grave concerns over bias and manipulation present in its coverage of Israel and Palestine, the fact is that the BBC is a juggernaut in world journalism. It employs a range of skilled journalists who have done principled and groundbreaking work, including on the Gaza war.

The site has run articles about British Palestinians grieving loved ones killed by the Israeli military, Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in the West Bank, and Israel being accused of a “possible war crime” in the killing of children in the West Bank. Berg himself has written articles on South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice and the court’s recent ruling, with accurate headlines: “UN top court says Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal.” In addition, the BBC’s seasoned broadcast journalists have produced damning stories about Israel. In such cases, Berg is less likely to push for sweeping edits in such cases, some staff have suggested.

But an unprecedented analysis of more than 2,900 stories and links on the BBC news website in the year following October 7, 2023 reveals a profound imbalance in how the organization has reported Palestinian and Israeli deaths.

The total number of Israelis killed on and since October 7 is around 1,410, while the official Palestinian death toll is conservatively estimated at 45,000 people, a vast undercount. Yet according to new research by data journalists Dana Najjar and Jan Lietava, which builds on their previous work, the BBC is less likely to use humanizing language to refer to Palestinians than to Israelis. Najjar and Lietava also found that the organization refers to Palestinian deaths only slightly more often than Israeli deaths, despite the fact the Palestinian death toll is now the higher of the two by a factor of at least 28.

There is one exception to this latter trend. On April 1, Israeli drones targeted a three-car convoy belonging to the NGO World Central Kitchen, which was transferring food to a warehouse in northern Gaza after coordinating its movements with Israeli military authorities. Because six of the seven slain aid workers were westerners, their killings received widespread western media attention. The seventh worker killed in the attack was a Palestinian driver named Saifeddin Abu Taha. In each of the numerous BBC articles about the killing of the group, he is referred to as “their Palestinian colleague” or “the Palestinian driver.”

Because of this, mentions of Palestinian deaths surged. “It is the single-largest spike in the whole period in terms of the mentions of the deaths of Palestinians,” Lietava told me. “Even then, Saifeddin Abu Taha is very rarely mentioned directly, often only in association with the Western, majority white, group.”

This analysis is an expansion of Holly Jackson's work analyzing bias in media coverage of Israel and Palestine. Mentions are grouped by week. Death counts for Gaza are from Tech for Palestine and likely vastly undercounted. Death counts for Israel are from the IDF official website. See Github for complete methodology.

Najjar and Lietava also looked at causal versus non-causal headlines that mentioned death, dying, killing, suffering, starvation, or hunger—that is, headlines explicitly describing who killed who (e.g. “A was killed by B” or even “B killed A”), compared to those that did not (e.g. “A was found dead”). In the first nine months after October 7, just 27% of BBC news story headlines about Palestinian deaths explicitly mentioned who killed them. In the case of Israeli deaths, 43% identified the perpetrator. By contrast, when covering the Russian war against Ukraine, the BBC identified the killer in 74% of its reports of Ukrainian deaths.

A similar disparity emerged when analyzing the use of humanizing and emotive words to describe the deaths of Palestinians versus those of Israelis as the researchers found they were used proportionately far less for Palestinians. It was also present when examining terms such as “massacre,” “assault,” “slaughter,” “atrocity” and other terms—these were all applied disproportionately to Palestinian actions when compared to those committed by Israel. Only Israeli strikes were described as “retaliatory”—210 times—compared to 0 for Palestinians’ use of weapons during the period covered by the report.

“Look at the sheer number of stories about October 7 and the hell individuals went through—but not Palestinians, despite the disparity of scale,” one BBC journalist said. “It took until babies started starving to death [in Gaza] before we stopped focusing on the hostages.” Another is even more damning. “We’ve never known the racism to be so overt,” the journalist said.

In response to the overall findings of the study, the BBC said: “The algorithm does not provide insight into the context of the usage of particular words, either in relation to the attacks of 7 October or the Israeli offensive in Gaza. We do not think coverage can be assessed solely by counting particular words used and do not believe this analysis demonstrates bias.”

In response to the BBC’s statement, the researchers told me “We are not ascribing bias based on some perfunctory analysis of word frequency devoid of any other context,” emphasizing the abundance of evidence pointing towards the same conclusions. “Every word is a choice,” they said, “and words chosen or omitted repeatedly over the course of a full year of coverage are very strong indicators of editorial policy and/or prejudice. Likewise, disproportionately highlighting Israeli suffering and death when Palestinians are dying in far greater numbers tells us a great deal about whose lives matter and whose lives don't.”

Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images.

Deference to Israeli Claims

Since Israel’s onslaught against Gaza began in October 2023, BBC online’s deference to Israeli narratives has been apparent. BBC journalists pointed to specific examples—beginning with the fate of Nasser hospital in Gaza.

In February, the Israeli army laid siege to the hospital. “The evidence at our disposal points to deliberate and repeated attacks by the Israeli forces against Nasser hospital, its patients and its medical staff,” reads a report by NGO Médecins Sans Frontières that detailed the incident. That evidence includes repeated sniper attacks causing multiple deaths and injuries, fatal shell attacks, and the storming of the hospital in February, with the Israeli military detaining an MSF staff member and refusing to offer details on his condition until his release two months later.

The original BBC news headline for an article co-authored by Berg had been updated from “Israel special forces enter besieged Nasser hospital” to “Nasser hospital in catastrophic condition as Israeli troops raid.” The article’s framing aligns with Israeli narratives. The first two paragraphs read:

Israel’s military claims it has captured “dozens” of terror suspects during a raid on southern Gaza’s main hospital, as staff and patients were forced to flee under gunfire.

Israel said it launched a “precise and limited mission” at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, adding it had intelligence that Hamas had held hostages there.

No hostages were ever found in Nasser hospital.

Deference to Israel also surfaced in the BBC’s first story on the Israeli army massacre of hungry Palestinians waiting for food in February, an article accompanied with the headline “Israel-Gaza war: More than 100 reported killed in crowd near Gaza aid convoy.” The next day, the headline for a second story was “Large number of bullet wounds among those injured in Gaza aid convoy rush—UN.” The language is puzzling: as the article notes, there were multiple eyewitness accounts of the massacre, along with “the presence of Israeli tanks.” As one BBC journalist said, “‘Israel accused of firing on civilians’ would be more accurate.”

On March 8, the BBC published a subsequent piece by Berg with the headline: “Gaza convoy: IDF says it fired at 'suspects' but not at aid trucks.” The article foregrounds Israeli denials and claims, noting only fleetingly that a UN team had visited the injured and found “a large number of people with bullet wounds” (as per the BBC’s own headline from a few days before). Nowhere in the article is it mentioned that Israeli accounts were contradictory: Mark Regev, now a special advisor to Netanyahu, originally claimed Israeli troops were not involved at all. What makes this even harder to defend on editorial grounds is that BBC Verify—launched in May 2023 as the BBC’s fact checking and anti-disinformation department—published a separate piece on March 1 challenging Israeli claims about the massacre. That work was not woven into Berg’s article.

Source: Twitter/X.

Two days before the publication of the report, the NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor had released detailed evidence of Israeli responsibility, including the apparent use of bullets that matched those in Israeli army weapons. A month later, CNN published a detailed piece based on video and eyewitness accounts discrediting Israeli claims, making it clear that the IDF had fired on crowds without warning, as survivors had said from the start.

In May 2024, far-right Israeli extremists blocked aid from getting into Gaza, in part by attacking and destroying the aid; the BBC headlined its story on the incident: “Israeli activists battle over Gaza-bound aid convoys.” As one BBC journalist said, an accurate headline would have been: “Far-right Israeli activists block aid convoys.” “Aid convoy denied entry to northern Gaza, UN says,” reads another headline from June 2024, neglecting to mention that Israel had been the responsible party.

One staffer believes the BBC has largely sought to align its journalism with the UK government’s foreign policy. As far as top brass is concerned, “Israel is treated like Ukraine, Palestinians like Russia,” the staffer said. If a journalist tries to challenge the double standards applied to Russia and Ukraine, managers are baffled, treating both Ukraine and Israel as British allies. “Look at headlines on what Russia does in Ukraine. But the headlines around Gaza are generally entirely unclear, and are never clear that Israel has been the perpetrator.”

Yet even in cases where the UK government has allowed for dissent, the BBC has largely clung to the Israeli narrative.

In January, the ICJ issued provisional orders to Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide.” But not only do the BBC online articles about famine fail to mention this—they also repeatedly fail to detail the actions being taken by Israel to block aid.

This is despite the fact that Lord David Cameron, the then-foreign secretary, wrote a letter in March to Alicia Kearns, the chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, outlining multiple ways in which the Israeli state was preventing aid from entering Gaza. Even the emphatically pro-Israel Jewish Chronicle ran the damning headline: “David Cameron condemns Israel for arbitrarily blocking Gaza aid.” The BBC website did not report on Cameron’s letter.

Earlier that month, the BBC ran an interview with Cameron on the same subject, with the headline, “David Cameron urges Israel to fix Gaza aid shortages.” Some, though not all, of the points Cameron raised in the letter were covered in the interview, but as one journalist pointed out, examples of Israeli obstructions to aid should be cited in every article on the subject. “Articles on famine in Gaza won’t mention the International Court of Justice rulings, or relevant stuff. The full context is lacking,” another journalist said.

This is consistent with the BBC news website’s coverage under Berg’s editorship. “Palestinian sources need to be verified, but Israeli sources do not,” one journalist said. “There’s red flags if linked to Hamas, but you can quote the IDF freely.”

The BBC’s Response

In response to this story’s allegations surrounding BBC’s coverage of Israel and Palestine and Berg’s role and background, a spokesperson for the network told Drop Site News: “We reject your attack on an individual member of staff. Like every journalist at the BBC, they must adhere to the BBC’s editorial guidelines which ensure that we report impartially and without fear or favor.” The statement continued:

The allegations you’ve made fundamentally misdescribe this person’s role, and misunderstand the way the BBC works.

More broadly, we reject any suggestion of a ‘lenient stance’ towards either side in this conflict. The Israel/Gaza conflict is a challenging and polarising subject to cover, but when asked to choose the one provider they would turn to for impartial reporting on this story, three times as many pick the BBC as choose our closest competitor. The BBC remains the world’s most trusted international news source.

We have transparently set out our approach to reporting the conflict—for example in this blog from Deborah Turness—and if we make mistakes we correct them. Our coverage should be judged on its own merits and in its entirety.

The BBC’s defenders point to the fact that the organization is criticized from “both sides.” But even Turness dismissed this as a defense in a blog post titled “How the BBC is covering Israel-Gaza,” published on October 25, 2023. “We cannot afford to simply say that if both sides are criticizing us, we’re getting things right,” she wrote. “That isn’t good enough for the BBC or for our audiences. At the BBC we hold ourselves to a higher standard and rightly challenge ourselves to listen to our critics and consider what changes to make where we think that criticism is fair.”

The BBC told Drop Site News that it corrects mistakes in its stories. Yet one BBC journalist has pointed out that the organization has failed to correct claims in published stories about specific atrocities alleged to have been committed on October 7 that have since been proven false.

Hamas fighters and other armed Palestinian militants undoubtedly committed grave war crimes in the attacks of October 7. But the BBC website published a number of unverified claims about the attacks, a significant number of which originated from the accounts of the religious emergency response team Zaka; many of these claims have since been proven to be false and discredited, most prominently by Israeli media outlets. Yet BBC news stories still include these disproven claims, including those of multiple babies being killed or the bodies of 20 children being tied together and burned. Other media organizations, including the New York Times, have printed articles correcting some of the false claims they made about October 7, though, like the BBC, a staggering number of false reports remain on the websites of many major news organizations.

Even if BBC license payers complained about such false claims remaining in published stories, the organization would be unlikely to act on them: Their standard complaints process only deals with items broadcast or published in the last 30 days.

After 14 months of witnessing the BBC’s failures up close, these disenchanted journalists are divided between believing it is important to stay and try and make changes and wanting to abandon what feels like an irreparable systemic feature. But all agree that the gap between BBC coverage and the gravity of the atrocities committed is indefensible.

As one concludes: “Most people with a conscience here have found that the coverage is frankly despicable and certainly not up to our editorial standards.

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And on a related story of Western propaganda, this story from TeleSur:

Google and Youtube Are Parrt of the West’s Media War

On Thursday, President Vladimir Putin defended the restrictions imposed by Russia’s

communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, on YouTube and Google.

“YouTube and Google must respect our laws, distance themselves from online scams, and, in particular, must not exploit or abuse the network to serve the goals of their governments,” he stated.

Putin pointed out that people turn to search engines for information about Russian music and culture, but instead, “content appears that has no relation to culture or music and is propaganda for certain political platforms.” He also accused Western platforms of practically erasing the names of Russian artists, bloggers, and politicians.

“All of this is a violation of Russian laws. Therefore, they must choose: either they respect our laws, which might subject them to certain limitations in their own countries, or they operate exclusively there. But if they want to work here, they must comply with Russian laws,” he emphasized.

Due to Western sanctions, Google has effectively stopped funding its subsidiaries in Russia and providing them with the necessary equipment for proper operations. “In doing so, it created additional problems for itself,” Putin pointed out.

Russia periodically fines major Western tech companies for various violations of its laws, such as refusing to remove false information from their servers or disseminating prohibited content, including child pornography, instructions for making explosives, or calls for terrorism.

For these reasons, since 2022, Russian authorities have blocked the services of Twitter (now X) and Facebook, a company that has been designated as “extremist.” Since early December, YouTube traffic has dropped by 50%, marking the second-largest decline since the sharp 70% reduction in August.

Experts in geopolitics and mass media believe that the media aggression against Russia aims to cover up the aggressiveness of the U.S. and NATO and to spread misinformation about the goals of the special military operation in the Donbas, which is intended to combat Ukrainian Nazism.

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I have recently raised the issue of whether Brazil’s membership of Mercosur, in the context of the group’s recent agreement with the EU puts into question the value of Brazil’s membership of the BRICS. The same conundrum is addressed in this recent opinion piece by Eduardo Vasco published by TeleSur. I did not find the English translation. I have italicized some important sentences.

The article exposes not just how the agreement consolidates inequality between the so-called developed countries of Europe and the economies of the Global South in Latin America, but also how it provokes disagreements between the strongest agro-industrial economies and the more manufacturing or finacial industrial economies and, also between the more pro-Washington states and others.

Mercosur-UE: un acuerdo semicolonial

Es es un acuerdo típico entre metrópoli y colonia, mediante el cual la metrópoli recolecta los productos agrícolas y recursos naturales de la colonia y vende sus productos industriales a la colonia.

Es curioso que el acuerdo Mercosur-UE pueda irse al garete no por la oposición de los sudamericanos –los mayores perdedores en esta historia–, sino de los europeos –que serían los mayores beneficiarios.

Este es un acuerdo típico entre metrópoli y colonia, mediante el cual la metrópoli recolecta los productos agrícolas y recursos naturales de la colonia y vende sus productos industriales a la colonia. Los países del Mercosur continuarían así la suerte de América del Sur, exportando materias primas, de bajo valor agregado, e importando bienes manufacturados, de alto valor agregado.

No sorprende que todos reconozcan que la principal parte interesada en el acuerdo, dentro de Brasil, es la agroindustria. Es decir, el latifundio (hoy en día ya capturado por el capital financiero transnacional). Como somos, hasta el día de hoy, un país de carácter semicolonial, los grandes latifundios siempre han tenido un poder abrumador sobre la política nacional. Y actualmente, combinado con el capital financiero, que controla incluso el otro sector económico importante del país –la industria–, puede fácilmente ejercer influencia en todas las esferas de la opinión pública.

Así, todos celebran el acuerdo firmado en la última cumbre del Mercosur: gobierno, congreso, agricultura, industria, bancos, prensa. Se dice que será un gran paso hacia el desarrollo económico de Brasil, como si mantener y profundizar el estatus semicolonial desarrollara al país de alguna manera.

El acuerdo, al ser de libre comercio, prevé la apertura recíproca a bienes de ambos mercados. ¿Este tipo de acuerdo es mutuamente beneficioso? Por supuesto que, al ser un tratado entre un bloque de países capitalistas plenamente desarrollados, que se encuentran incluso en la etapa imperialista (depredadora), y otro de países con desarrollo capitalista retrasado, es decir, con capitalismo subdesarrollado y pobre, significa que las empresas europeas –mucho más fuertes- competirán con las empresas sudamericanas, mucho más débiles. Es competencia desleal.

No puede haber ninguna duda al respecto. Las empresas europeas son competidoras desiguales de las sudamericanas, incluidas las brasileñas, en todos los ámbitos: tecnología, productividad, inversiones, etc. Al fin y al cabo, son empresas de países ricos, que acumulan riqueza precisamente mediante la explotación de los países pobres, y esta riqueza pasa a manos de esas mismas empresas.

¿No es eso lo que le pasó a Brasil después de la Operación Lava Jato? Orquestada desde fuera del país, desmanteló las principales empresas brasileñas, que competían internamente e incluso externamente con empresas europeas y norteamericanas. ¿Quién se benefició de esto? ¡Tcharaaam!

Por si fuera poco, los términos del acuerdo exacerban esta disparidad. Quizás el principal referente brasileño para el análisis crítico de este acuerdo sea el economista Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr., que trabajó en el FMI y el Banco BRICS. Recuerda que los impuestos a la importación de productos industrializados en Brasil son en promedio del 15%, mientras que en la Unión Europea son inferiores al 2%. Cuando estos impuestos se reduzcan a cero para más del 90% de este comercio de bienes, ¿quién renunciaría a más? Esta reducción no aumentará significativamente las exportaciones brasileñas, pero abrirá enormemente nuestra industria. La agricultura familiar también sufriría la competencia desleal de los productos agrícolas europeos.

El CNI afirma que el acuerdo de libre comercio impulsará las inversiones en Brasil. Batista Jr. piensa lo contrario: “¿para qué invertir aquí si pueden abastecer el mercado brasileño desde su sede, libre de barreras arancelarias?” ¿Alguien puede estar en desacuerdo con esta lógica?

El problema es que el CNI, como lo indica su posicionamiento, representa más los intereses extranjeros que los brasileños. Y más intereses financieros que industriales.

Los industriales europeos ya están babeando por la ejecución del acuerdo. Alemania está prácticamente en quiebra tras la reducción de las exportaciones a China (que se ha volcado al mercado interno en los últimos años) y la suspensión del suministro de gas ruso, del que depende su industria. Si a esto le sumamos una desindustrialización histórica, los fabricantes de automóviles ya están cerrando y los trabajadores se están declarando en huelga.

Alemania comanda la Unión Europea y presionará hasta el final para llegar al acuerdo. La cuestión es que Francia manda junto con Alemania y está en contra de ella. Francia, un país menos industrializado que su vecino, ha sufrido una enorme presión por parte de los agricultores contra el acuerdo, ya que se dan cuenta de que beneficiará al sector industrial mucho más que al sector agrícola.

Los agricultores han sido un factor clave en la creciente crisis de Europa. Son la principal base social de la extrema derecha, que cada día se fortalece más. Y están movilizados en los principales países del bloque. Según las normas de la UE, si cuatro países que representan el 35% de la población del bloque se niegan a firmar el acuerdo, este no llegará a buen término. Francia, Polonia, Italia y los Países Bajos (que demostraron su descontento con el acuerdo) representan el 41% de la población de la UE, y los agricultores ya han demostrado una gran fuerza en las calles de estos países (al igual que los partidos de extrema derecha, tanto en las calles y en instituciones).

Una alternativa sería un acuerdo mixto: quien no apruebe el acuerdo de libre comercio no participaría en primera instancia, y el acuerdo sería implementado por otros de manera provisional. Además, la UE, al darse cuenta del deseo del Mercosur de que se alcance el acuerdo, podría exigir más concesiones, obligando, por ejemplo, a los sudamericanos a aceptar un mayor proteccionismo en el sector agrícola europeo. O imponer más normas ambientales al Mercosur, endureciendo nuestros grilletes al desarrollo. Lo cual sería una humillación múltiple para nosotros.

Hay otro obstáculo potencial: Javier Milei. De manera contradictoria, defiende la apertura total de los mercados, pero podría dificultar el acuerdo al ser representante de Estados Unidos. Y ya ha dicho que utilizará la presidencia argentina del Mercosur para facilitar un acuerdo de libre comercio bilateral Argentina-Estados Unidos, lo que va en contra del entendimiento del bloque. Si los demás países no aceptan, ya amenazó con abandonar el Mercosur. Esto respondería a los intereses norteamericanos, ya que Estados Unidos quiere que el Cono Sur sea subyugado, pero por ellos y no por los europeos, que son sus competidores dentro de su zona de influencia –o más bien, su patio trasero–.

El presidente Lula ha adoptado medidas tímidas, como el nuevo PAC, y también algunos discursos nacionalistas e industrializadores. También es consciente de los peligros de una sumisión total a Estados Unidos, a pesar de su frágil acto de equilibrio. Así, el acuerdo con la UE podría ser un intento de acercarse a los europeos para contrarrestar la influencia de Estados Unidos en Brasil y América del Sur, pero es una geoestrategia débil y subordinada a los europeos –quienes, a su vez, también están avasallados por los EE.UU. Sería mejor aprovechar la construcción del Puerto de Chancay, en Perú, para dirigir esta producción a Asia (que no sólo está compuesta por China), con acuerdos mucho más ventajosos, que permitirían una inversión real en la reindustrialización de Brasil, tanto a través de negocios con los chinos como de la construcción de la ruta interoceánica que atravesará Brasil y Sudamérica.

Ciertamente también insiste en un acuerdo con la UE para complacer a la agroindustria (y a los bancos, a la prensa, etc.). Después de todo, Lula necesita su apoyo para ser reelegido en 2026. Pero estamos viendo que, haga lo que haga, la clase dominante no puede tragárselo. La mayoría de estos sectores (si no todos) apoyarán a cualquiera que se oponga a Lula, si no lo destituyen antes.

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Kit Klarenerg for Mint Press News on the pre-2011 strength of Syria, now destroyed by the West, and the pro-US imperialism credentials of the HTS (see Klarenberg):

Privatizing Syria: US Plans To Sell Off A Nation’s Wealth After Assad

In the immediate wake of the Syrian government’s abrupt collapse, much remains uncertain about the country’s future – including whether it can survive as a unitary state or will splinter into smaller states as did Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, a move that ultimately led to a bloody NATO intervention. Moreover, who or what may take power in Damascus remains an open question. For the time being at least, members of ultra-extremist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) appear highly likely to take key positions in whatever administrative structure sprouts from Bashar Assad’s ouster after a decade-and-a-half of grinding Western-sponsored regime change efforts.

As Reuters reported on December 12, HTS is already “stamping its authority on Syria’s state with the same lightning speed that it seized the country, deploying police, installing an interim government and meeting foreign envoys.” Meanwhile, its bureaucrats – “who until last week were running an Islamist administration in a remote corner of Syria’s northwest” – have moved en masse “into government headquarters in Damascus.” Mohammed Bashir, head of HTS’ “regional government” in extremist-occupied Idlib, has been appointed the country’s “caretaker prime minister.”

However, despite the chaos and precariousness of post-Assad Syria, one thing seems assured – the country will be broken open to Western economic exploitation, at long last.

Multiple reports show that HTS has informed local and international business leaders that when in office, it will “adopt a free-market model and integrate the country into the global economy, in a major shift from decades of corrupt state control.”

As Alexander McKay of the Marx Engels Lenin Institute tells MintPress News, state-controlled parts of Syria’s economy may have been under Assad, but corrupt it wasn’t. He believes a striking feature of the ongoing attacks on Syrian infrastructure from forces within and without the country is that economic and industrial sites are a recurrent target. Moreover, the would-be HTS-dominated government has done nothing to counter these broadsides when “securing key economic assets will be vital to societal reconstruction, and therefore a matter of priority”:

We can see clearly what kind of country these ‘moderate rebels’ plan to build. Forces like HTS are allied with U.S. imperialism, and their economic approach will reflect this. Prior to the proxy war, the government pursued an economic approach that mixed public ownership and market elements. State intervention enabled a degree of political independence [that] other nations in the region lack. Assad’s administration understood without an industrial base, being sovereign is impossible. The new ‘free market’ approach will see all of that utterly decimated.”

‘Reconstruction Project’

Syria’s economic independence and strength under Assad’s rule and the benefits reaped by average citizens, as a result, were never acknowledged in the mainstream before or during the decade-long proxy war. Yet, countless reports from major international institutions underline this reality – which has now been brutally vanquished, never to return. For example, an April 2015 World Health Organization document noted how Damascus “had one of the best-developed healthcare systems in the Arab world.”

Per a 2018 U.N. investigation, “universal, free healthcare” was extended to all Syrian citizens, who “enjoyed some of the highest levels of care in the region.” Education was likewise free, and before the conflict, “an estimated 97% of primary school-aged Syrian children were attending class, and Syria’s literacy rates were thought to be at over 90% for both men and women [emphasis added].” By 2016, millions were out of school.

A U.N. Human Rights Council report two years later noted pre-war Syria “was the only country in the Middle East region to be self-sufficient in food production,” its “thriving agricultural sector” contributing “about 21%” to GDP 2006 – 2011. Civilians’ daily caloric intake “was on par with many Western countries,” with prices kept affordable via state subsidy. Meanwhile, the country’s economy was “one of the best performing in the region, with a growth rate averaging 4.6%” annually.

At the time that report was written, Damascus had been reduced to heavy reliance on imports by Western sanctions in many sectors and, even then, was barely able to buy or sell much in the way of anything, as the measures amounted to an effective embargo. Simultaneously, the U.S. military occupation of a resource-rich third of Syria cut off the government’s access to its own oil reserves and wheat. The situation would only worsen with the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act’s passing in June 2020.

Under its auspices, a vast volume of goods and services in every conceivable field were and today remain banned from being sold to or traded with any Syrian citizen or entity. The legislation’s terms explicitly state preventing attempts to rebuild Syria was its chief objective. One passage openly outlines “a strategy to deter foreign persons from entering into contracts related to reconstruction.”

Immediately after coming into effect, the Syrian pound’s value collapsed further, sending living costs skyrocketing. In a blink, almost the entire country’s population was left barely able to afford even the bare essentials. Even mainstream sources typically approving of belligerence towards Damascus cautioned of an inevitably impending humanitarian crisis. However, Washington was neither concerned nor deterred by such warnings. James Jeffrey, State Department chief of Syria policy, actively cheered these developments.

Simultaneously, as Jeffrey subsequently admitted to PBS, the U.S. was engaged in frequent, secret communication with HTS and actively assisting the group – albeit “indirectly” due to the faction’s designation as a terrorist entity by the State Department. This followed direct approaches to Washington by its leaders, including Abu Mohammed Jolani, former leader of Al Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra. “We want to be your friend. We’re not terrorists. We’re just fighting Assad,” HTS reportedly said.

Given this contact, it may be no coincidence that in July 2022, Jolani issued a series of communications about HTS’ plans for future Syria, containing multiple passages in which finance and industry loomed large. Directly foreshadowing the group’s recent pledge to “adopt a free-market model,” the extremist mass murderer discussed his desire to “open up local markets to the global economy.” Many passages read as if they were authored by representatives of the International Monetary Fund.

Coincidentally, Syria, since 1984, has refused IMF loans, a key tool by which the U.S. Empire maintains the global capitalist system and dominates the Global South, ensuring ‘poor’ countries remain under its heel. The World Trade Organization, of which Damascus isn’t a member either, plays a similar role. Accession to both would go some way to cementing the “free-market model” advocated by HTS. After over a decade of deliberate, systematic economic ruin, geopolitical risk analyst Firas Modad tells MintPress News:

They have no choice. They need Turkish and Qatari backing, so [they] will need to liberalize. They have no capital whatsoever. The country is in ruins and they desperately need investment. Plus, they hope liberalizing may attract some Saudi, Emirati or Egyptian interest. It’s impossible for Syria to rebuild using its own resources. The civil war might resume. They are acting out of necessity.”

‘Shock Therapy’

In Syria’s protracted political and economic dismantling, there are eerie echoes of the U.S. Empire’s destruction of Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s. During that decade, the multiethnic socialist federation’s breakup produced bitter wars of independence in Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia – encouraged, financed, armed, and prolonged every step by Western powers. Belgrade’s perceived centrality to these brutal conflicts and purported complicity in and sponsorship of horrendous war crimes led the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions against what remained of the country in May 1992.

The measures were the harshest ever levied in U.N. history. At one point, producing inflation of 5.578 quintillion percent, drug abuse, alcoholism, preventable deaths and suicides skyrocketed, while shortages of goods – including water – were perpetual. Yugoslavia’s once thriving independent industry was crippled, its ability to manufacture even everyday medicines virtually non-existent. By February 1993, the CIA assessed that the average citizen had “become accustomed to periodical shortages, long lines in stores, cold homes in the winter and restrictions on electricity.”

Surveying the wreckage years later, Foreign Affairs noted that sanctions against Yugoslavia demonstrated how “in a matter of months or years whole economies can be devastated,” and such measures can serve as uniquely lethal “weapons of mass destruction” against civilian populations of target countries. Yet, despite such desolation and misery, throughout this period, Belgrade remained resistant to privatization and foreign ownership of its industry or to the pillaging of its vast resources. The overwhelming majority of Yugoslavia’s economy was state- or worker-owned.

Yugoslavia was not a member of the IMF, World Bank, or WTO, which went some way to insulate the country from economic predation. In 1998, though, authorities began waging a heavy-handed counterinsurgency against the Kosovo Liberation Army, a CIA and MI6-funded and armed al-Qaeda-linked extremist militia. This provided the U.S. Empire with a pretext to, at last, finish the job of neutralizing what remained of the country’s socialist system. As a Clinton administration official later admitted:

It was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform [in Eastern Europe] – not the plight of Kosovar Albanians – that best explains NATO’s war.”

From March – June 1999, the military alliance bombed Yugoslavia for 78 straight days. Yet, Belgrade’s army was barely in the firing line at any stage. In all, officially, just 14 Yugoslav tanks were destroyed by NATO, but 372 separate industrial facilities got smashed to smithereens, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Markedly, the alliance took guidance from U.S. corporations on which sites to target, and not a single foreign- or privately-owned factory was hit.

NATO’s bombing laid the foundations for Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic’s removal via a C.I.A.- and National Endowment for Democracy-sponsored color revolution in October of the following year. In his place, a doggedly pro-Western government advised by a collective of U.S.-sponsored economists took power. Their explicit mission was to “make an economic environment favorable for private and other investments” in Belgrade. Ravaging “shock therapy” measures were deployed the moment they assumed office, to the further detriment of an already immiserated and impoverished population.

In the decades since successive Western-backed governments across the former Yugoslavia have enforced an endless array of neoliberal “reforms” to ensure an “investor-friendly” environment locally for wealthy Western oligarchs and corporations. In lockstep, low wages and a lack of employment opportunities stubbornly endure or worsen while living costs rise, producing mass depopulation, among other destructive effects. All along, U.S. officials intimately implicated in the country’s breakup have brazenly sought to enrich themselves from the privatization of former state industries.

‘Internal Repression’

Does such a fate await Damascus? For Pawel Wargan, founder of the Green New Deal for Europe, the answer is a resounding “yes.” He believes the country’s story is familiar “to those who study the mechanisms of imperialist expansion.” Once its defenses are fully neutralized, he foresees the country’s industries being “bought-up at bargain sale prices as part of market ‘reforms,’ which transfer yet another chunk of humanity’s wealth to Western corporations”:

We’ve witnessed the well-rehearsed choreography of imperialist regime change: a ‘tyrant’ is overthrown; backers of national sovereignty are systematically and viciously repressed; with tremendous, but hidden, violence, the country’s assets are chopped and diced and sold to the lowest bidder; labor protections are discarded; human lives are cut short. The most predatory forms of capitalism take root in every crevice and pore that emerges in the collapse of the state. This is the agenda of structural adjustment policies enforced by the World Bank and IMF.”

Alexander McKay echoes Wargan’s analysis. Now “free,” Syria will be forcedly made “dependent upon imports from the West” evermore. This not only fattens the Empire’s bottom line but “also severely restricts the freedom of any Syrian government to act with any degree of independence.” He notes similar efforts have been undertaken throughout the post-1989 era of U.S. unipolarity. It was well underway in Russia during the 1990s “until the slow turn around in policy started in the early 2000s under Putin”:

The aim is to reduce Syria to the same status as Lebanon, with an economy controlled by imperial forces, an army used primarily for internal repression, and an economy no longer able to produce anything but merely serve as a market for commodities produced elsewhere, and site of resource extraction. The U.S. and its allies do not want independent development of any nation’s economy. We must hope the Syrian people can resist this latest act of neo-colonialism.”