Channel 4 under fire from Zionist lobby over documentary

Now the Zionist lobby is going after Channel 4. It’s all so predictable.

The BBC isn’t the only media outlet in the limelight at the moment over its coverage of Israel‘s genocide in Gaza. Because Channel 4 has also come under attack from campaigners who want to censor reporting that holds the journalist-murdering apartheid state to account for its war crimes.

Channel 4: attacked by the Zionist lobby

The BBC has faced a landslide of criticism for pulling a documentary under pressure from pro-Israel agitators, primarily as a result of its narration by 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazuri, whose father is “a deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s government”.

But now, just as Channel 4 has broadcast a powerful account of Israel’s ethnic cleansing in Palestine through the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, it too has faced the same charge. The UK establishment media has piled onto Channel 4, which also featured al-Yazuri in some of its coverage. Channel 4 News has insisted that it has reviewed and deleted some of this, but that its “award-winning coverage, including the International Emmy, RTS, Bafta, British Journalism Awards, or Broadcast Awards” does not feature the teenager.

Israeli occupiers spent many years turning Gaza into “the world’s largest open-air prison”. It is a place with a highly concentrated population which Israel has isolated from the outside world via a brutal blockade. In the context, it’s reasonable to assume that there are many people whose family members work in some way in or with the occupied territory’s government. Highlighting this is as relevant as highlighting that most Israelis serve in the Israeli occupation forces (IDF).

Why scrutiny of people with connections to one military organisation but not another?

UN human rights expert Francesca Albanese has emphasised the subjective nature of using the term ‘terrorism’, as opposed to recognised legal framework regarding genocide and war crimes. She said:

The discomfort I have in using the terrorism framework is that it doesn’t exist in international law. There is no definition of what constitutes terrorism under international law that is agreed among member states.

Because the UK classes Hamas as a terrorist organisation, but not Israel, this forces people in the UK to be a lot more careful when relating to people in occupied Palestine than with their Israeli occupiers. In this context, journalist Sangita Myska has insisted that the “over-scrutiny of some Palestinian sources vs under-scrutiny of some Israeli ones” has severely damaged “public trust” in the corporation. And Richard Sanders, director of the powerful and comprehensive Al Jazeera documentary Investigating war crimes in Gaza, has asserted that:

a media environment where the victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid are subjected constantly to the most intense scrutiny, while their tormentors and those who support them are all too often allowed a free pass is a distorted and frankly racist one.

Featured image via the Canary