we do not live in a serious country. And no, that’s not a response to Thursday’s election results – which scarcely count as a shock when so much time and money has been spent building up Farage and his various projects over so many years – it’s more a reflection on what does and does not count as newsworthy here, how our media choose to report on the stories they cover, and how and why they don’t report on others.
For eighteen months, Israel has been engaged in a genocidal assault on Gaza, with the aim – clearly stated by leading Israeli political figures and leading figures in the Israeli military – of erasing the population there. They’ve committed war crime after war crime after war crime: destroying hospitals, murdering medics, crushing people under tanks, killing indiscriminately. Earlier this year, they reneged on a ceasefire agreement which had seen hostages on both sides released, and had brought in a fragile calm. Since the start of March, they’ve blocked all aid from entering Gaza, with the result that people there have run out of food, and are now dying from starvation and famine.
Our Prime Minister (who was once a human rights lawyer, but has clearly given up any interest in the subject for reasons only he knows) and our Foreign Secretary (who boasts that he opposes colonialism, but is blind to it here) have said next to nothing to condemn Israel – Starmer won’t even admit that what is happening is genocide, putting him at odds with just about every human rights organisation there is, which you’d have hoped might suggest to him he’s wrong. The Royal Air Force comtinue to fly spy flights over Gaza and pass the information to Israel. We still send Israel arms, and high-ranking members of the Israeli military visit London and have clandestine meetings with government officials here.
Watch the news or read the papers, and you probably wouldn’t know about the spy flights and the meetings. And if you’ve read about the murder of fifteen Palestinian medics, the chances are the report will have also been at pains to include the Israeli military’s version of events, taken at face value, even as one set of their lies follows another. Now contrast that with how our media frame things when Russia bombs a Ukrainian hospital, or the reporting from Bucha when it became clear Ukrainian civilians had been shot dead in the street. The BBC don’t include the lies of a Russian spokesperson then.
All of which is, for the purposes of this piece, the background. The setting which shows how far from serious this country is. Because this past week, politicians who’ve been conspicuously silent on the matter of genocide have been falling over themselves to condemn a rap band from West Belfast.
Kneecap (the band in question) have been vocal in their support for Palestinians, and their opposition to genocide. Two weeks ago, at Coachella festival in the US, they screened pro-Palestinian messages during their set. This led to an angry intervention from Sharon Osbourne who was unhappy about “aggressive political statements” (she’s not yet managed to condemn the aggressive political murder of thousands of Palestinians, but I’m sure that’s just an oversight on her part). Since then, footage of a previous Kneecap gig has appeared where one of the band appears to say “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.”
Let’s be clear. They shouldn’t have said that. And they’ve publicly apologised for doing so. But that hasn’t stopped the calls from politicians for them to be banned from appearing at music festivals. Gigs have been cancelled. A No.10 spokesperson has said Kneecap should not receive any public funding. Kemi Badenoch (who’ll grab onto any piece of passing flotsam in an attempt to remain afloat) has said they should be tried and jailed for incitement. And so on.
You may feel this is a case of ‘f**k around and find out’. After all, our media – who’ve run with this story for days – and our politicians are always implacably opposed to any call to violence, aren’t they? Look how they destroyed the career of Jess Phillips when she said she’d ‘stab Corbyn in the front’, and how Jeremy Clarkson became persona non grata after he said, on a TV show, that he felt striking workers should be shot dead in front of their families. And who could forget the calls from leading politicians of every hue for the Parachute Regiment – whose members were pictured shooting at images of then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – to be barred from any future public funding and jailed for incitement. Remember all that?
Oh, yeah. None of it happened. Because we’re not a serious country. And the Kneecap furore is not a serious story, propelled into the headlines by politicians who are not serious politicians, and kept there by a media which isn’t serious about reporting injustice, genocide, or our country’s complicity in it.
One last point. The number of deaths in that massacre in Bucha? Somewhere between 73-178, according to the UN. The story – rightly – dominated the news cycle for weeks.
The number of deaths in Gaza, since Israel abandoned the ceasefire? Well over 2000.
And it doesn’t even make the news. Because we’re not a serious country.