Media Lens Read Aloud

I was born in the south-east of England 17 years after the end of the Second World War, the most destructive conflict in human history. As a child, the 17-year gap seemed a lifetime; as a 64-year-old, it seems like the immediate aftermath. Everyone had fought in the war: your teacher, newsagent, headmaster, dentist, doctor. I met stereotypically moustachioed friends of my dad who had fought in Spitfires in the skies directly overhead. Or they had flown Lancaster bombers over Berlin: ‘I was just a taxi driver running a night-time service, there and back.’Relentlessly propagandised to celebrate the great victory by films, TV series, documentaries, comic books and toys, I became an avid builder of model tanks. When I was thirteen, a middle-aged German businessman with a partially melted right hand visited our house. He had been a tank commander in the war. Knowing I would be fascinated, my dad ushered him into my room and showed him the tanks I had built. Clearly dismayed, the visitor shook his head and pointed to an electric guitar I had been playing:‘Metal is better used for making those than for tanks. War is terrible, really terrible. Forget about all of that!’Decades later, bemused by my youthful enthusiasm for war, I took a train from Bournemouth a few stops down the track to the tank museum at Bovington. I climbed inside one of the early Second World War German tanks that had invaded France and the Soviet Union. The inside of any tank is so brutal that to make contact with any part of it is to risk injury. Momentarily losing that awareness, I banged my head against a cluster of metal spikes poking down from the turret. It hurt. Even as a stationary museum exhibit, a tank can harm you. I struggled to imagine how anyone could be inside such a thing when it was moving or under fire.I rapped my knuckles against the front of a Soviet T-34: Donald Trump’s claims notwithstanding, the tank, 57,300 of them, that defeated Hitler. If you rap your knuckles against the wall of a building, there’s a response - the energy resonates in the brick or concrete; you have some effect. When you rap your knuckles against a tank, there’s no reverberation, nothing; you have no effect at all. And you can’t lift the tracks of a large tank even an inch, they are like slabs of rock.Rolling gently around the T-34 was an elderly man in a wheelchair. Old school, he was chatting to everyone, making friends at every turn. He was the right age, and I wondered if he had lost the use of his legs while fighting these metal monsters.As I walked on, I had a growing sense that war was the quintessence of all that is anti-human, anti-life. The tank is perfectly symbolic of the ego, of its hostility, aggression, rejection, hatred. What I found staggering was just how much time, energy and resources had been devoted to the development of these weapons – the investment of engineering and other technical expertise defies belief. The power was impressive, but where, as a teenager, I had felt excitement, I now felt a queasy revulsion. And a deep weariness – there was nothing inspiring or enlivening in all of this; the whole focus of the museum led down a cul de sac of killing and death, which made it, in the deepest sense of the word, boring.Why is it that wars are a perennial feature of human experience? The towering walls surrounding so many of the world’s cities are testament to that grim reality. Just this year, after the ruthless blitz on Venezuela, the US and Israel have waged a war of aggression on Iran, with Cuba also in the crosshairs.Is war genetically hardwired, an inevitable product of nature ‘red in tooth and claw’? Is it something we could somehow choose to renounce, if enough of us chose to do so? Of course, I know the arguments: Perpetual War is the result of economic and political momentum that has built up over decades and centuries. If you don’t fire the missiles, the factories close. If you don’t have an enemy, you can’t fire the missiles. If the ‘Bad Guy’ doesn’t exist, you have to invent him. As the historian Howard Zinn said so well:‘It seems to me that it only takes a little bit of thought to realise that if wars came out of human nature, out of some spontaneous urge to kill, then why is it that governments have to go to such tremendous lengths to mobilise populations to go to war? It seems too obvious, doesn’t it? They really have to work at it.... Most humans don’t respond to appeals to go to war on the basis of Let’s go and kill. No, Let’s go and free somebody. Let’s go and establish democracy. Let’s go and topple this tyrant. Let’s do this so that wars will finally come to an end.’ (Howard Zinn, ‘Power, History and Warfare’, Open Magazine Pamphlet Series, No. 8, 1991, pp.4-5)But this reminds me of the ‘infinite regress’ problem of religion: Who created the universe? God. But then who created God? If wars don’t come out of human nature, what about the fact that so many people consistently fall for the propaganda manufacturing consent for war? Does that gullibility and indifference come out of human nature? And why are people willing to work for militaries operating at the whim of obviously barbaric, greed-driven governments and defence industries that kill for profit? And why do people work for fossil fuel companies in an age of catastrophic climate change? Why do they continue to participate, ignoring the evidence of their own eyes – literally, the obvious facts of their day-to-day experience, of existential catastrophe? Why are we so easily seduced by fake dreams of Star Trek to the Moon and Mars when the journey that really matters is ‘Earth Trek’? Are we somehow destined, designed, doomed to sleepwalk to disaster? But why? The questions echo across the universe… Sometimes, we receive a kind of answer.Monte Cassino – ‘That Were Rough’Because the previous service back to Bournemouth has been cancelled, the train is crowded, so I drop into the only seat available. To my surprise, I see that the person sitting next to me in a seat reserved for the disabled is the guy in the wheelchair I saw in the museum. Within seconds, I learn that he is called Billy. We have more room than people in the other seats because we are facing the curved wall of the toilet. Parked against this wall is his wheelchair. His legs are outstretched and he is holding a pair of crutches.It slowly dawns on me that Billy, in fact, has two artificial legs. And it again becomes clear that he is one of those chatty types who knows that everyone is basically the same: everyone is friendly, likes a good chinwag. We are soon nattering, and Billy is 81 years-old and has had a ‘grand time’ in the museum.He mentions something about Africa and the war. I take up the obvious prompt and ask him if he saw action. He looks me in the eye, ‘Oh yes,’ he saw action alright. ‘Apparently,’ I offer, ‘Spielberg’s film “Saving Private Ryan”’ gives a pretty good idea of what war is actually like.’‘No, no’, he says dismissively, exactly echoing the German tank commander I met in my youth, ‘they never show it like it is, they make it look glamorous, exciting. It isn’t glamorous. War is terrible, really terrible.’Words are such small containers, and something is missing from this: ‘terrible’ doesn’t seem to capture the extent of the awfulness. I want him to tell me how war is terrible, why it is terrible. I want to know just how terrible this life we are living is capable of being. I try again:‘So, you were in the thick of it…’‘I were in North Africa at Tobruk. They had us under siege.’‘Must’ve been dreadful in that heat.’He laughs and points at the carriage floor.‘We used to dig holes in the sand at night and bury the beers, then dig ‘em up the next day, and we had freezing cold lager. Bloody marvellous!’He laughs:‘That kept us cool!’This isn’t quite what I’m after, either – the refrigeration of beers! - but that’s what I get. Billy isn’t interested in communicating the terribleness of war; he’s interested in the scams, tricks, fiddles. ‘We landed at Sicily, and then, when we’d got them out of there, it was mainland Italy. We moved up to Monte Cassino - that were rough.’Monte Cassino was one of the fiercest battles of the war – the Allies suffered 55,000 casualties battling up a mountain to eject German troops from a bombed-out monastery at the top. It was utter carnage. Billy says:‘We were crossing this river, and we were just slaughtered. Out of a thousand men, 300 were killed crossing that river. It were so bad that people who’d got hit were getting hit again coming out on stretchers. It were that bad!’I have to ask, feeling as if I already know the answer:‘Is that where you lost your legs?’‘Oh no!’ he says. ‘I got through the war without a scratch. They never touched me.’I’m too surprised to be polite:‘Then what happened to your legs?’‘I was a smoker. I had circulation problems, and I went to a doctor when I were in Canada, and he said: “Forget about cutting down, if you have so much as one cigarette a day, I guarantee you’ll be back here for amputation.”’‘So, what happened?’‘I kept on smoking!’‘You kept on smoking?’Around us, silence falls as a dozen fellow travellers start paying attention.‘My wife smoked. And my brother-in-law, who was living with us then, smoked, and it was so tempting.’He points to his artificial legs:‘I had this one off in ‘67, and this one in ‘68.’‘My God, and do you still smoke?’‘Oh no! I gave up in ’78. It were New Year’s Eve and I said to my wife, “That’s my last fag! That’s it!’” And that were it. I’ve never had a fag since.’He pats a leg and looks out of the window:‘It’s no problem, I’m used to them now. It’s no problem getting around.’With that, he puts his hands into his crutches, struggles to his feet, positions his legs and does a near-perfect Tin Man impression in the direction of the toilet.See also ‘A Lefty Progressive Goes To The Seaside’, part of the ‘Lefty Progressive Daytrip’ series. David Edwards is co-editor of Media Lens and author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 2025, available here. He is also author of the forthcoming politico-mystical science fiction novel, ‘The Man With No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in 2026. Get full access to Media Lens at medialens.substack.com/subscribe

Given the ‘mainstream’ structural filters that reflexively whitewash the crimes of ‘The Good Guys’ - ‘us’, by doctrinal fiat - we have often wondered how the great and the good of corporate politics and media would react if the US or Israel ever decided to use nuclear weapons. Could they, even then, break out of their lock-step deference to power, reclaim their souls and say something humanly honest about that ultimate moral abomination? This week, it looked like we might find out.On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted a message on social media threatening to destroy Iran’s civilian infrastructure:‘Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F****n’ Strait, you crazy b******s, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP’Afterwards, Trump told Fox News there was a ‘good chance’ a deal would be reached on Monday, but he was considering ‘blowing everything up and taking over the oil’ if a deal to end the war was not reached quickly. The threat followed Trump’s April 2 bombing of Iran’s unfinished B1 bridge (40 km west of Tehran, designed to be the highest bridge in the Middle East) and his associated threat to ‘bring [Iran] back to the Stone Ages where it belongs’. For Britons going to bed on Tuesday evening, there seemed to be a real prospect that we might wake up to news that nuclear weapons had been used for the first time since the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Trump had, after all, posted this apocalyptic prediction on Truth Social:‘A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.’Of course, nothing Trump says can be taken at face value. His clear devotion to the ‘madman theory’ of international relations means he has to wildly threaten with the biggest stick possible in one hand while offering carrots in the other to achieve a ‘deal’. But many of us felt deeply anxious for the fate of Iranians being terrorised this way, facing the ultimate horror of a nuclear holocaust. Even if Trump’s threats had been a sham, Iran might have preemptively struck at Israel’s nuclear and desalination plants triggering a nuclear response.Iran has anyway suffered grievously. According to the Iranian authorities, around 81,000 civilian sites have so far been damaged by US-Israeli bombing, including 61,000 homes, 19,000 commercial sites, 275 medical centres, and nearly 500 schools. Sarah Smith of the BBC described Trump’s threat that ‘a whole civilisation will die tonight’ as merely ‘brutal’. Smith’s breathtakingly bland conclusion:‘But this latest post does not indicate that he is optimistic about reaching an agreement before his deadline tonight.’ Much worse appeared elsewhere on the BBC website. Ghoncheh Habibiazad, a ‘senior reporter’ at BBC Persian at just 27 years of age, published this comment allegedly supplied by a twenty-something Iranian called ‘Radin’:‘About them hitting energy infrastructure, using an atomic bomb, or leveling Iran – my honest reaction is that I’m okay with all of these.’The first thing to say is that a comparable obscenity from a crazed British or US citizen eager to see the ‘leveling’ of their country would of course never be published by any BBC journalist. Des Freedman, professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, commented:‘Iran has 90 million citizens and yet the BBC manages to find one who claims to be “OK” with using nuclear weapons against his own country. There isn’t a single reference in the entire story to the fact that the attacks are illegal and seen by many as war crimes.’ Some seven hours after being published, following much public outrage, ‘Radin’s’ quote mysteriously disappeared from the BBC’s article, replaced by a different comment from the same source:‘If attacking targets brings down the Islamic Republic, I’m fine with that.’ No correction or edit notice was attached at the time highlighting the change. So, what did ‘Radin’ actually say: the first comment, the second, both, neither? Grayzone discussed the background of the BBC journalist responsible casting serious doubt on her impartiality. BBC Persian has long been a notorious conduit for regime change propaganda. On 7 April, the BBC finally added an ‘Update’ to explain its vanishing quote:‘However, after further review, this part of the quote was removed from the article due to concerns over the way in which the speaker expressed his views and the extent to which they reflected wider Iranian viewpoints.’ This was meaningless verbiage that explained nothing.Health secretary Wes Streeting was asked whether destroying Iran’s power stations and bridges would be a war crime. Reaching deep into his soul, Streeting replied:‘Not my judgement to make.’We like to feel that we give people a chance, that we are tolerant, open-minded. But we also think it’s important to recognise the truth of Oscar Wilde’s observation:‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ Voters need to be clear that plastic politicians like Streeting can be judged by the sociopathic, blank look on their faces – our felt awareness that they are lacking humanity, compassion and empathy is not mere imagination. We can all see and feel the soullessness of much of the Labour hierarchy, notably the ‘empty raincoat’, Sir Keir Starmer.To his credit, ITV News political editor Robert Peston expressed his deep exasperation and astonishment at Trump’s ‘appalling remarks’ on ending Iranian civilisation, asking Starmer:‘How did you feel about that? And how do you sustain a relationship with an American president who can say those things?’Starmer replied with his usual emotional vacuity:‘Well, let me be really clear and blunt about this - they’re not words that I would use, or would ever use.’ NATO secretary general Mark Rutte replied in similar fashion to Trump’s genocidal threats:‘When it comes to what leaders are saying, I’m not commenting on everything.’ Consider, also, the US senator and leading warmonger Lindsey Graham. Glenn Greenwald has often commented on Graham’s ‘ghoulish’ delight in death and destruction:‘Look at the glee on Lindsey Graham’s face as he talks about people dying. It is the only thing that seems to animate him, the only thing that makes him truly happy: the idea of more war and more people being killed.’ (Greenwald, Systems Update, ‘The Sociopathy of Lindsey Graham & the Neocons’, 30 May 2023)Graham likes to make comments of this kind on Iran:‘You either do a deal where you get out of the business you were in, or we’re going to blow your stuff up that will allow you to function as a nation. That is your choice.’In his classic book, ‘The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness’, psychotherapist Erich Fromm wrote:‘Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion “to tear apart living structures.”’ (Fromm, Penguin Books, 1982, p.441, our emphasis)Fromm noted a coldness and deadness in the eyes of such people. Incapable of smiling authentically, their faces are rigid, unresponsive, limited to smirking. Fromm pointed to a specific type of ‘hard’ or ‘cruel’ mouth set in a permanent expression of distaste or contempt. All of these traits are clearly visible in Graham’s appearance. A real problem is that these monsters can slip through to the highest echelons of politics where they are mistaken for cool, emotionless, tough defenders of the national interest. In reality, they bring the death and destruction they crave even on their own nations.‘Operation Eternal Darkness’ And The CeasefireWith a nuclear holocaust apparently averted, on April 8, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announced a two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran:‘With the greatest humility, I am pleased to announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America, along with their allies, have agreed to an immediate ceasefire everywhere including Lebanon and elsewhere, EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.’ (Our emphasis) As this clearly stated, the ceasefire included Lebanon. Nevertheless, just hours later, Israel launched its most violent bombardment of Lebanon yet, killing at least 303 and wounding 1100 people by targeting, without warning, apartment blocks in residential areas of Beirut that had not previously been attacked, and also by attacking a funeral, cafes, emergency workers and ambulances. Israel’s name for the attack was ‘Operation Eternal Darkness’. Tucker Carlson, a devoted Christian, noted that ‘eternal darkness’ appears numerous times in the New Testament as a reference to hell. The BBC’s whitewashing response to this attempt to derail the ceasefire:‘Well, more now from Lebanon, where Israel says it’s hit more than a hundred [Hezbollah] command centres and military sites in ten minutes.’ As we have commented before, ‘Israel says’ is not journalism. Unusually, BBC Middle East correspondent Hugo Bachega posted a defence in response to criticism:‘There is a clip circulating that misrepresents the way the Israeli attacks on Lebanon were covered by the BBC last night.‘This is the full segment. I’m out in Beirut interviewing people so unable to do it by myself - but here’s the introduction, my live and my report.’His report was sympathetic to the plight of Lebanese civilians, and it did quote the president of Lebanon describing the attacks as ‘a massacre’, but Bachega missed the point: the BBC would never introduce a report on a comparable atrocity by Russia, Iran or any other Official Enemy with those countries’ crude propaganda take on events.How to explain the extraordinary servility of the BBC in reporting on the crimes of a tiny foreign country of just nine million people? Aaron Bastani of Novara Media comments:‘If they relay the facts, accurately and objectively, there is a deluge of pressure from the Israel lobby. Phone calls, emails - it’s extraordinary. And organised.‘This is the “electric fence” approach to media monitoring and management, as [former Guardian reporter] Nick Davies calls it. You disincentivise accuracy, or even just covering stories. Even the smallest thing gets a response (like a small shock from a fence). Producers know there are costs for covering Israel, so they calculate “let’s leave it this time”.‘It’s not excusable, but it’s explicable. For the BBC, however, which is public service journalism, and which we all pay for, it’s unacceptable.’ The destructive impacts of Israeli influence on British democracy go far beyond media flak. Israel and its supporters played a lead role in promoting the fake antisemitism smears that derailed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. This was a serious attack on British democracy that slammed the door on a more compassionate, people-centred politics, opening the way for Tory-lite Keir Starmer and, consequently, the disastrous threat of a hard-right Reform Party government. Gideon Levy, who writes a weekly column for Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, commented on the Corbyn smears in 2019:‘The Jewish establishment in Britain and the Israeli propaganda machine have taken out a contract on the leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn. The contract was taken out a long time ago, and it was clear that the closer Corbyn came to being elected prime minister, the harsher the conflict would get.’ Political analyst Norman Finkelstein, whose mother survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek concentration camp, and whose father was a survivor of both the Warsaw Ghetto and the Auschwitz concentration camp, said:‘The British elites could not have gotten away with calling Corbyn an anti-semite unless they had the support, the visible support, of all the leading Jewish organisations. You have to remember that during the summer [25 July 2018], all three major British publications, for the first time in British Jewish history, they all took out a common editorial denouncing Corbyn as an anti-semite and saying that we’re now standing on the verge of another Holocaust. They are the enablers of this concerted conspiracy by the whole of British elite society to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.’ Humanising IranWhile sociopaths had their say in response to Trump’s threat that Iran would shortly ‘die’ as a civilisation, something wonderful also happened: there was a global tsunami of revulsion and rejection. The threat stirred the humanity even in voices on the hard-right. The Mirror described Trump as a ‘maniac’ and the Daily Mail described his threats as ‘unhinged’, and they were joined by all kinds of voices from across the political spectrum. That is positive. If Trump repeats the threat, the response will be louder still. Additionally, we saw and reposted numerous videos on X humanising Iranians. Notably, this video of ordinary people in Tehran – people who look exactly like the rest of us – challenged decades of Western propaganda depicting grim-faced Iranian women in black burkas walking past skull-packed propaganda murals demonising America. The video has had 5.3 million views and 52,000 ‘likes’.Posting a beautiful image of Iranian architecture, Dr Rhonda Garad wrote on X:‘Trump’s done what no tourism campaign could-sparked huge interest in Persian culture. Posts on history, architecture, food, music, Lego videos-going viral. The hatred we’ve been fed about Iran for decades-rapidly transformed into support and respect.’ Victims of Capitalism Memorial Foundation posted:‘Iranian Tar player Ali Ghamsari is currently camped at Damavand Power Plant, which provides a significant amount of electricity to Tehran. Ghamsari says he’ll remain there for a while in the hopes that his presence will protect it from bombing.’ And from Gaza, Maha Hussaini posted a beautiful, all but silent, 34-second video that somehow said so much:‘Here, I have stood at the peak of fear and felt the deepest peace..‘Good night from Gaza🪴’Despite all the madness, horror and killing, Trump’s genocidal threat provoked a display of deep-seated solidarity and compassion that defied decades of propaganda demonising the Iranian people as ‘animals’, ‘savages’ and ‘primitives’. Clearly, very few of us are willing to tolerate the threat of nuclear genocide. In these grim times, when it sometimes feels like humanity has completely lost its way, that is something to celebrate.DEDavid Edwards is the author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, available here. He is also the author of the science fiction novel, ‘The Man With No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in 2026. 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On 8 March, on the BBC politics programme, ‘Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg’, the former BBC political editor put these impassioned words to Seyed Ali Mousavi, the Iranian ambassador to the UK:‘Since we last spoke, your government has killed thousands of its own people in the streets who had the courage to stand up to protest against the suffering that they have been experiencing at the hands of the regime. Thousands of people were killed. How on earth do you justify that, Ambassador?’Clearly feeling deep emotion, Kuenssberg continued:‘Just this morning, I looked at many of the images and watched some of the videos from what happened to protesters in your country in January. I looked at images and videos, verified independently [sic] by our colleagues at BBC Verify, that show body bags littered over the courtyard of a mortuary, the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Centre in Iran. I saw images of young, old, teenagers, people killed by your government, beaten faces, bloodied bodies, gunshot wounds.’In a strongly accusatory tone, she confronted him:‘How on earth do you justify that and sit there today saying, “Our people have some complaints”? Your government killed thousands of their own people and the world saw that’.When has Kuenssberg ever expressed such heartfelt revulsion at the genocide being committed by Israel in Gaza, with likely in excess of 100,000 Palestinians slaughtered?Has she expressed similar horror for 175 schoolgirls, staff and parents killed by the US in a ‘double-tap’ attack on a primary school in Minab in Iran? It seems some victims matter more.On the same politics programme last year, Kuenssberg said this about the genocide in Gaza:‘Often when it comes to the debate about Gaza, it gets very binary and very aggressive very, very quickly and there’s no room for nuance.’What possible nuance could there be about genocide?Her tone then was light, devoid of outrage for the tens of thousands dead Palestinians, the mangled and bloodied corpses, many of them babies and children, ripped apart by brutal Israeli firepower.Kuenssberg also aggressively challenged Mousavi about Iran’s supposed drive towards a nuclear weapon and how Iran could not be trusted to stick to international agreements.Mousavi pointed out that, on the contrary, Iran is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, whereas Israel is not. Moreover, as we noted in our previous alert, in 2015, Iran signed up to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an agreement to limit the Iranian nuclear programme in return for lifted sanctions. Trump tore up this agreement when the US unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018.It should be obvious that to state such salient facts is not to side with the Iranian regime, nor to excuse its crimes.Journalist Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph’s former chief political commentator, reports that Iran stuck completely to the JCPOA agreement until the US withdrew in 2018. Until the US and Israel began their attacks, Iran was negotiating in good faith in order to avoid any war. The Omani foreign minister, who was involved in the negotiations, stated that Iran had agreed that they would never have the material needed to make a nuclear bomb, adding:‘There would be zero accumulation, zero stockpiling. And full verification. Even United States inspectors will have access.’Oborne spelled out what happened next:‘Iranians were negotiating really hard to avoid a war. They’d actually offered a better deal than they’d signed off on in 2015. That was on the table and that, of course, is when America and Israel struck.’Note, also, that in the very same programme on Sunday when Kuenssberg asked propagandistic, emotion-laden questions of the Iranian ambassador she had nothing to say about the Gaza genocide when interviewing Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog. She did not say to him:‘Since we last spoke, your government has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians in what human rights organisation and genocide scholars have said is a genocide. How on earth do you justify that, Mr President?’What does it say about the state of politics and news that the president of a genocidal and apartheid state was given carte blanche to proclaim that in attacking Iran and Lebanon, ‘we are doing this for the entire free world’?Empathy by a prominent BBC journalist for one set of victims – Iranian – is permitted, even required. Permitted, that is, when the finger of blame points the right way. But as the Minab school bombing shows, not when it points the other way; in this case, conclusively towards the US.‘Unpeople’ And ‘Unworthy’ VictimsBritish historian Mark Curtis, co-founder and co-director of Declassified UK, has applied the concept of ‘Unpeople’ as a framework for understanding Western foreign policy. In his 2004 book, Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses, and in his earlier work, Web of Deceit, Curtis argued that the political system separates victims into two categories: those whose deaths matter (‘People’) and those whose lives are considered expendable (‘Unpeople’).The concept of ‘People’ and ‘Unpeople’ has its roots in the work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their classic 1988 book, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, where they discuss examples of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims.Worthy victims are people who are killed or oppressed by Official Enemies of the West, such as the Soviet Union (and now Russia), North Korea or China. These victims garner considerable media attention in the propaganda system, marked by sympathy, indignation and fury. Their suffering is humanised, described in detail, and used to generate moral outrage directed at the offending regimes or governments, often as part of a concerted attempt to topple them for the benefit of Western geostrategic interests.‘Unworthy’ victims, by contrast, are people who are killed or whose democratic aspirations are crushed by the West or ‘our allies’; such as Suharto’s Indonesia in the 1960s, Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, the US-backed Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975, and Israel in the present day. These victims are less prominent, even absent, in western media coverage or are often discounted as ‘collateral damage’: a lesser kind of human, robbed of their individuality, their life stories; even their names and faces.Herman and Chomsky’s analysis focused on the treatment of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ victims in the propaganda system. Curtis has expanded the discussion by examining declassified UK government files, released under the ‘Thirty-Year Rule’, showing how the British state structurally ignores or downplays the importance of those it regards as ‘Unpeople’.Curtis highlights a prominent example occurring right now:‘In the case of Gaza, Palestinians are seen as unpeople since supporting them holds little merit or gain for British planners. What does Palestine have to offer Whitehall in comparison with Israel?’Curtis continues:‘In supporting Israel, Whitehall can demonstrate British subservience and usefulness to its major ally, the US. Israel is a buyer of British arms, a strategic ally to police the region and an increasing, albeit still fairly small, trade partner.‘And a quarter of the UK’s entire parliament of MPs has received funding from the Israel lobby, buying an influence over UK policy-making that is way beyond anything the Palestinians can induce.’The fact that there is a well-funded Israel lobby in the UK parliament is beyond the pale for the ‘mainstream’ media to discuss and analyse. To do so would almost inevitably lead to the insidious and often fake charge of ‘antisemitism’. Is it really antisemitic to point out, as Declassified UK did in 2024, that fully half of Keir Starmer’s Cabinet were funded by the Israel lobby? It is highly doubtful that an in-depth investigation into the Israel lobby in the UK, such as the 2009 Channel 4 Dispatches programme by Oborne, would ever be aired today.And so there remain approved sets of victims that the ‘mainstream’ media will systematically highlight; and there are other groups of victims that are to be regarded as dispensable.Laura Kuenssberg’s paired interviews with the Israeli president and the Iranian ambassador, on the same BBC programme, no less, are a case study in the selective empathy required by high-profile corporate journalists.DCNote to our readersMedia Lens is 25 years old in July 2026. Thank you to everyone who supports us, whether you donate financially, read our work or share it with others.Although you may receive this email as having been sent to an ‘unpaid’ Substack subscriber, we are aware that you may support us via another method; namely PayPal or a bank standing order. 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Commenting last week on the build-up of US military forces targeting Iran, Robert A. Pape, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, got it right:‘This represents 40-50% of the deployable US air power in the world. Think air power on the order of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war. And growing. Never has the US deployed this much force against a potential enemy and not launched strikes.’Just prior to the US and Israeli launch of ‘Operation Epic Fury’, Trump’s name for the onslaught that began last Saturday, Professor Pape commented again:‘250+ combat US aircraft poised to strike Iran. Trump is cocking the gun— not for 1 day of strikes, but weeks long air campaign to grind down the regime.’In fact, we know the goal is regime change. In announcing the war, Trump declared:‘Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.’Of course, a central theme of Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign was his supposed determination to end Forever Wars. In 2016, he said:‘We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.’As recently as November 2024, the big slogan was:‘Vote the pro-peace ticket. Vote Trump-Vance’In the Guardian, Julian Borger described this latest war as ‘an unprovoked attempt at regime change in collaboration with Israel, with no legal foundation, launched in the midst of diplomatic efforts to avert conflict, and with minimal consultation with Congress or the American public’.Borger’s use of the adjective ‘unprovoked’ is interesting. Endlessly repeated in describing Russia’s supposedly ‘unprovoked’ war of aggression on Ukraine, there are scarce mentions in current media coverage of ‘Operation Epic Fury’. Borger added:‘The attack on Iran is a clear violation of the UN charter, in any absence of any credible, imminent Iranian threat to the US.’Again, the word ‘illegal’ is absent from almost all media coverage. By contrast, Jeremy Diamond, CNN Jerusalem Correspondent, commented:‘BREAKING: Israel has launched pre-emptive strikes against Iran and a state of emergency has been declared across Israel in anticipation of Iranian retaliation.’There were no quote marks around ‘pre-emptive’, even though there is no evidence that Iran was about to attack. Reuters pushed the same propaganda:‘Israel has launched a preventative attack against Iran, defence minister says.’Even the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen perceived the mendacity:‘The word preemptive has been used. Now that’s a word that suggests there was an imminent threat, that is an imminent attack before these strikes started. There’s no evidence of that. It looks very much as if this is a war of choice that Israel and the US have done.’The US has since tragicomically claimed the war was ‘preemptive’ in the sense that they knew Israel was going to attack, so had to become involved.Hours before the war began, Oman’s foreign minister - the chief mediator in US-Iran negotiations - told CBS a deal could be reached ‘tomorrow’ and warned that it would be derailed by military action. Patrick Wintour, the Guardian’s diplomatic editor, reported:‘The Iranian delegation believes that if American negotiators convey the current reality in the negotiation room to the White House and Washington trusts the IAEA as a specialized arbiter in non-proliferation matters, Tehran’s proposed initiatives address Trump’s claimed concern about the necessity of the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program.’Which would have left us pretty much where we were in 2018, before Trump wrecked the highly successful Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement (see below).Filmmaker and journalist Richard Sanders described coverage of a major massacre of civilians by three US-Israeli missiles:‘The killing of dozens of girls at a primary school in Iran is not on the front page of a single British newspaper.‘A simple test - imagine the reaction if they were Israelis.’Later that day, the BBC devoted a leading headline to nine people killed in Israel, while the 148 children then estimated to have been killed remained what they had been the previous day, a second-order story lower down the page. After the school death toll was revised to 165 killed, the BBC shamefully dropped the story from its ‘Summary’. The BBC subsequently posted two articles on the same morning. In one report, four US troops killed in an Iranian attack were pictured, named, ages given, backgrounds described. They were fully humanised, as they should have been. In a separate report on the school massacre, none of the Iranian schoolgirls or staff were pictured, named or humanised. As usual, they were lumped together as an anonymous mass.As in Venezuela, the BBC claims a significant portion of the target population is actually relieved to be subject to one of the most intense bombing campaigns in modern history:‘But, says BBC Persian, at the same time there appears to be a sense of relief - even celebration - among those who believe the regime’s downfall can only come through military intervention.’Considering the state of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the future must look bright indeed.As expected, only two British political leaders responded with integrity and humanity. Jeremy Corbyn, who will soon be made leader of Your Party, said:‘The attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States are illegal, unprovoked and unjustifiable. Peace and diplomacy was possible. Instead, Israel and the United States chose war. This is the behaviour of rogue states — and they have jeopardised the safety of humankind around the world with this catastrophic act of aggression.’Green Party leader Zack Polanski – currently being subjected to the same campaign of defamation and dehumanisation directed at Corbyn - said:‘This is an illegal, unprovoked and brutal attack that shows once again that the USA and Israel are rogue states.’Piers Morgan found Polanski’s comments appalling:‘Now watching @ZackPolanski spewing shockingly naive and delusional nonsense about Iran. God help us if he and his extreme left-wing Green Party ever win real power. He makes Corbyn look mainstream.’On X, Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo News skewered Morgan with great precision:‘Zack is taking an antiwar position that you took in 2003, Piers. You were attacked in the same way you are now attacking Zack.’In 2004, Morgan had said:‘History will judge the Mirror’s campaign on the Iraq war as one of the strongest, bravest and best campaigns that any newspaper ever waged against anything ever, and I believe that passionately.’‘Shockingly naïve,’ Morgan was so convinced that conditions in Iraq had become so appalling that he argued in all seriousness that Saddam should be put back in power:‘Armed fighters are swarming all over Iraq. We have devastated the region beyond any repair in the short term at all. None of this was going on while Saddam was in charge of things…’.Presumably, Morgan can perceive no prospect of a similar catastrophe occurring now.Trump-level hypocrisy abounds elsewhere. In 2015, Reform Party leader Nigel Farage boldly opined:‘We don’t need to take foreign policy advice from the American President. The last time we did that it was called the Iraq War.’Last week, Farage posted on X:‘The Prime Minister needs to change his mind on the use of our military bases and back the Americans in this vital fight against Iran!’At the far-distant extreme of ethical ‘mainstream’ commentary, Peter Hitchens of the Mail on Sunday wrote:‘It is interesting that dissent on foreign policy is almost invariably slandered as support for the foreign state to which we are being urged to be hostile. When it is in fact a desire to keep my own country out of needless danger.’Does concern for our own safety really represent the limit of our moral vision? Dissent is also driven by respect for international law, by concern for the horrendous consequences for civilians under our bombs, and by the keen awareness that, for decades, ‘our’ foreign policy has been controlled by greed-driven interests lacking any moral compass. Ultimately, by standing against wars of aggression we are standing up for our own humanity. We are not monsters.Journalist Glenn Greenwald commented on the notion that Trump is concerned about the welfare of Iranian people:‘Trump - whose favorite regimes on the planet are the most savagely and viciously tyrannical: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, etc., and whose 2025 National Security Strategy said we don’t care if other governments offer freedom - says his main goal is that Iranians be free.’Iran - ‘Transparently, Verifiably, And Fully Implementing The JCPOA’But why attack at all? And why now? Two weeks ago, a post from the Jerusalem Post reported ominously:‘Iran is about a week away from having the ability to make industrial-grade bombs, US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff told Fox News on Saturday, while offering a rare glimpse into Trump’s decision-making process on the issue.’That seemed clear – Iran was a week away from possessing an atomic bomb. Readers had to click the link to find the truth:‘The US envoy left out that Iran currently has no access to its material, no machines to enrich it, and no weapons program to use it for any operational purpose.’Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University supplied some background:‘The fact of the matter is that the claim that Iran wants a nuclear weapon and is just about to get a nuclear weapon has been the false propaganda literally for 30 years. Netanyahu, who is a war criminal, has been saying for 30 years since 1996.’In 2019, the US Defense Intelligence Agency reported:‘Iran’s military strategy is basically defensive and is designed to deter an adversary, survive an initial strike, and retaliate against an aggressor to force a diplomatic solution.’ We can be confident that the case for war is as bogus as ever because, in 2015, Iran signed up to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an agreement to limit the Iranian nuclear programme in return for lifted sanctions. For reasons best known to Trump and (no doubt) Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Trump described the deal as ‘disastrous’, saying, ‘The Iran Deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.’As Trump would say, this was ‘fake news’. Between 2016 and early 2019, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the official ‘watchdog’ tasked with monitoring Iranian compliance, issued eleven consecutive reports confirming ‘that Iran is implementing its nuclear-related commitments’. The EU High Representative repeatedly stated that the JCPOA was ‘working and delivering on its goal, namely, to ensure that the Iranian programme remains exclusively peaceful, as confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 11 consecutive reports’.The UN Secretary-General issued biannual reports to the Security Council that consistently reflected the IAEA’s findings, confirming that Iran was meeting its nuclear-related obligations. In 2017, the US State Department twice certified to Congress that Iran was compliant with the deal:‘Iran is transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the JCPOA; it has not committed a material breach with respect to the JCPOA; and Iran has not taken any action during the reporting period, including covert activities, that could significantly advance an Iranian nuclear weapons program.’Ignoring all of the above as non-existent, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg commented on the difficulty of dealing with Iran in an interview with Zack Polanski:‘They have shown for years to be [sic] completely disinterested in negotiation or respecting international rules and regulations.’Pure, mendacious propaganda on prime-time BBC TV.The Protests And Death TollsEstimates on the number of people killed in protests in Iran from December 2025 to January 2026 range from 3,000 to 36,000. The Iranian government claims some 200 security personnel were killed. Journalist Alan MacLeod reports that ‘… the source of many of the most inflammatory claims and shockingly high casualty figures reported in the press’ are ‘bankrolled by the Central Intelligence Agency, through its cutout organization, the National Endowment for Democracy’. As with false claims made before the 2003 Iraq war, politicians have used extreme claims sponsored by the US government to sell their war of aggression as humanitarian intervention. Thus, UK foreign secretary Yvette Cooper, who said Iran’s government is ‘… a regime which we know has brutally killed tens of thousands of its own people’.In fact, nobody has a clear idea of how many people were killed during the protests or by whom. But then nobody in the ‘mainstream’ cares about the methodology or evidence behind the high death toll estimates - concerns that arise only when claims reflect badly on the West, as in the case of Iraqi and Palestinian civilian casualties.Similarly, press coverage blithely ignores the clear involvement of Israeli agents provocateurs. On December 29, The Jerusalem Post reported:‘On Monday, the Mossad [Israeli secret service] used its Twitter account in Farsi to encourage Iranians to protest against the Iranian regime, telling them that it will join them during the demonstrations.‘“Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” the Mossad wrote.‘It continued, “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”’Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA and former Secretary of State, posted on X:‘Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them…’It would hardly be a surprise if, as in Syria, Western forces worked hard to make the protests as violent as possible, presumably as part of their preparation for ‘Operation Epic Fury’. The BBC reported:‘The protests began as a reaction to the spiralling cost of living and soon focused on the whole regime, whose policies people blamed for their difficulties.’The key point:‘Since May 2018, when Donald Trump pulled the United States out of a nuclear deal with Iran and reinstated wide-ranging sanctions on the country, the Iranian currency has lost more than 95% of its value against the US dollar on the open market... The rapid fall in the value of the rial sparked the protests in Tehran’s bazaar in late December, which soon spread across the country.’In fact, the US has been destroying Iran’s economy in an attempt to destabilise the country and achieve regime change. This is conscious policy. In February, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent openly stated that the ‘Maximum Pressure’ sanctions campaign was specifically ‘designed to collapse [Iran’s] already buckling economy’ by driving oil exports to zero and denying the regime access to hard currency. Many other US politicians have made the same point. This lethal policy would certainly have been the key focus, if the BBC had been reporting on Russian attempts to economically destabilise a Western ally. In the event, the word ‘sanctions’ was mentioned just twice, both buried in the middle of the piece.A BBC headline described Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last Shah, as being ‘at centre of protest chants’. In 2018, journalist Nafeez Ahmed reported:‘Altogether, since 2006, successive US administrations have invested tens of millions of dollars a year on “democracy promotion” efforts in Iran, serving as cover for longstanding ‘regime change’ aspirations.‘Much of the media programming funded by the State Department has focused on glorifying the reign of the Shah of Iran, the brutal US-UK backed dictator who was deposed by the 1979 revolution. The propaganda appears to have worked, with many participants in the latest protests calling for the Shah’s exiled son, Reza Pahlavi, to return to power in Iran.’Naturally, this ‘democracy promotion’ of the Shah’s son requires the omission of some embarrassing historical facts.In 1953, US-supplied armoured cars took to the streets of Iran deposing the democratically elected nationalist Mohammad Mosaddegh and replacing him with the Shah. According to then CIA agent Richard Cottam, ‘...that mob that came into north Teheran and was decisive in the overthrow was a mercenary mob. It had no ideology. That mob was paid for by American dollars and the amount of money that was used has to have been very large’. (Quoted, Mark Curtis, ‘The Ambiguities of Power’, Zed Books, 1995, p.93)As in Iraq 2003, Libya 2011 and Venezuela 2026, the motive was oil.The BBC made vague mention of ‘human rights abuses’ under the Shah. In fact, according to Amnesty International, Iran had the ‘highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture’, which was ‘beyond belief’, in a society in which ‘the entire population was subjected to a constant, all-pervasive terror’. (Martin Ennals, Secretary General of Amnesty International, cited in an Amnesty Publication, Matchbox, Autumn 1976)None of this troubles our ‘free press’, who are busy following the line adopted by journalist John Sweeney in 1999:‘Life will only get better for ordinary Iraqis once the West finally stops dithering and commits to a clear, unambiguous policy of snuffing out Saddam. And when he falls the people of Iraq will say: “What kept you? Why did it take you so long?”’ (Sweeney, ‘The West created a monster. Now it’s time to destroy him. As a good liberal, I personally vote for obliterating Saddam’, The Observer, 10 January 1999)One would be hard-pressed to find a ‘mainstream’ commentator currently concerned about human rights in Iraq. Last week, Antiwar’s Jason Ditz reported:‘Once and possibly future Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s candidacy is increasingly in doubt this weekend, with reports that President Trump’s demand he not be allowed to return to office increasing the possibility that the Coordination Framework bloc may withdraw him as their choice for premier…‘Late last month, Trump demanded that Maliki step down from the nomination, but he refused at the time, saying that the US should stay out of Iraq’s internal affairs. Maliki was already Iraq’s PM from 2006 through 2014.’Ditz explains how the US controls Iraq’s ‘democracy’:‘Underpinning this whole thing is that after the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the country was restructured such that all of Iraq’s oil revenue was paid in US dollars through the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Since that revenue is almost the entirety of Iraq’s government budget, that means the US can virtually seize Iraq’s treasury at any time and bankrupt the country on a moment’s notice.’This is the kind of ‘freedom’ that awaits Iranians in the event of US-Israel ‘regime change’, which would actually mean conquest and colonisation.Oil remains a key goal, of course. In 2015, Noam Chomsky described the deeper motives:‘The answer is plain: the rogue states that rampage in the region… do not want to tolerate any impediment to their reliance on aggression and violence. In the lead in this regard are the U.S. and Israel, with Saudi Arabia trying its best to join the club….’DENote To ReadersIf any friendly academics or others are able to help us access the ProQuest or Nexis media database, please email us: [email protected] Edwards is the author of ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, available here. He is also the author of the science fiction novel, ‘The Man With No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in 2026. Get full access to Media Lens at medialens.substack.com/subscribe

These are exceptional times. The United States has been threatening to take over Greenland, an aggressive move against Europe. Now, and only now, are political leaders and compliant news media publicly acknowledging that the ‘international rules-based order’ is no more. Of course, it was only ever a convenient myth, blown wide open by the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.Trump managed to dismiss Greenland’s status as part of Denmark with typical chutzpah:‘I’m a big fan [of Denmark], but the fact that they had a boat land there five hundred years ago doesn’t mean that they own the land’.It was a tragicomic remark, displaying Trump’s apparent ignorance of his own country’s history. As many pointed out on social media, the indigenous peoples of North America made the same point about the White settlers from Europe who came by boat and who stole the natives’ land and committed genocide.Like a disgruntled toddler, Trump even linked his threat to seize control of Greenland to his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize which, ludicrously, had just been ‘gifted’ to him by the winner, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado (the Norwegian Nobel Committee later stated that the prize itself is non-transferable).On 18 January, Trump sent an infantile text message to the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre:‘Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace’.Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, responded to Trump’s threat to take Greenland:‘Territorial integrity and sovereignty are fundamental principles of international law.‘They are essential for Europe and for the international community as a whole.’Her ostensible concern for international law was absent when it came to the recent outrageous and illegal US kidnapping of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro. Even worse, her concern for international law has been conspicuously lacking during Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on the Palestinians in Gaza.In fact, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, strongly alluded to the fact that the supposed framework of international law, territorial law and sovereignty had been a sham all along. In a remarkable speech to the global elite at Davos, Switzerland, he began with an aphorism by the ancient Greek historian and general Thucydides that:‘the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.’It is notable that Noam Chomsky has often cited this quote to highlight the gap between the stated lofty aims of great power and the brutal reality for those on the receiving end of imperial force. We are not claiming that Carney has suddenly become an acolyte of Chomsky. But perhaps Canada’s leader has been emboldened to speak out by recent world events and feels honour-bound to give an impression of someone being at least minimally honest to his domestic Canadian audience and the wider public.Carney went on to say that:‘We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.’A glaring example, which he did not voice, is the Western condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while the West has refused to condemn or even acknowledge Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Indeed, the US and its allies, including the UK, have been complicit or even participants in the genocide, having armed Israel, provided military training, intelligence support and diplomatic cover.Carney continued to expand on the myth of the global ‘rules-based order’:‘This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.’No mention, however, of the appalling costs of that American hegemony to much of the world’s population.Carney then added:‘We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.‘This bargain no longer works.’A ‘bargain’ for the comfortable in privileged parts of the world, perhaps; but not for those who have suffered US-inflicted wars, regime changes, ‘humanitarian interventions’ and much else besides.The admission that ‘we’, a term which really means Western leaders and their media cheerleaders, have ‘largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality’ is significant. Obviously, any reasonably-well informed person has known this all along. But the media preferred to skip merrily past this crucial aspect of Carney’s speech, as we will see below.Unwelcome Truths About US ImperialismThe rise of US imperialism, especially since the end of the Second World War, has been accompanied and promoted by grandiose assertions about spreading democracy, peace and prosperity. The self-serving ideology has underpinned all of the following horrors and many more:· The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order ‘to bring about the surrender of Japan and end WW2’: a demonstrably false narrative. · The overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically-elected leader of Iran to be replaced by the dictatorial, US-compliant Shah in 1953.· The Indonesian coup in 1965, killing up to one million people, to install the brutal, Washington-friendly General Suharto.· The invasion and bombing of Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia) ‘to stop the spread of Communism’ in the 1960s and 1970s.· Extensive support in the 1980s for right-wing governments and paramilitary groups in Latin America, utilising death squads to suppress leftist movements.· The Persian Gulf war in 1990-91, with an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 Iraqi military deaths, and up to 5,000 civilian deaths.· Sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s which led to the deaths of as many as 1.5 million Iraqi civilians, including around 500,000 children under the age of five.· The 2001 invasion-occupation of Afghanistan: the first of the US post-9/11 wars which have led to an estimated total death toll of around five million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan.· The 2003 invasion-occupation of Iraq, leading to the deaths of over one million Iraqis.· The 2011 bombing of Libya and the destruction of much its infrastructure, acting as a catalyst for a massive surge in jihadist activity across north Africa and the Middle East.· The 2014 coup in Ukraine to impose US-backed regime change, fuelling dangerous tensions with Russia.· Crippling economic sanctions and military threats against Iran, including joint air strikes with Israel on Iranian nuclear facilities; together with the fomenting of violence inside Iran by CIA-backed NGOs and Mossad, Israel’s spy agency.· The strangling of the Venezuelan economy through sanctions, and the kidnapping of the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, on 3 January 2026.All of the above is but a fraction of the crimes committed by the US empire over many decades. For more information, read any number of books by Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, William Blum, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Naomi Klein, John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Media Lens and others.The British state-corporate media response was telling. The crucial segment of his speech about the longstanding ‘fiction’ of the ‘international rules-based order’ and ‘the gaps between rhetoric and reality’ was almost entirely buried. If we had responsible, public-service news media in this country they would have quoted that vital section, word-for-word, and provided relevant context and substantive analysis as to what it meant.Predictably, the BBC’s online report simply omitted that part of Carney’s speech. BBC News at Ten devoted all of twenty seconds to the speech. The short snippet showed Carney saying that ‘the rules-based order is fading’, followed by his citing of the Thucydides quote. But BBC North America editor Sarah Smith merely said in her voiceover that his speech ‘echoed Greenland’s right to sovereignty’. The rest of Carney’s comments disappeared down the proverbial BBC black hole.The Guardian had a live feed which quoted Carney saying that ‘the rules-based order is fading’ and that the world faces ‘“the end of a pleasant fiction and the dawn of a harsh reality of geopolitics” in which the great powers are unconstrained.’ But there was no elucidation to help readers understand the magnitude of Carney’s comments.Worse, a dedicated ‘analysis’ piece in the Guardian made no mention of Carney’s remarks about the ‘fiction’ of the rules-based order, or ‘the gaps between rhetoric and reality’. It did, however, cite his quoting of Thucydides that:‘the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.’The following day, Julian Borger, the Guardian’s senior international correspondent, had a comment piece focusing on ‘Trump’s rambling Davos speech’ that briefly quoted Carney’s observation about ‘the end of a pleasant fiction’, without exploring what that meant. Patrick Wintour, the paper’s diplomatic editor, took a similar approach in his comment piece, noting that Carney had ‘vowed he would no longer live in a state of nostalgia, waiting for an old world to return’. A deeper insight and explanation of the speech was almost comically absent.It was safe territory for journalists to refer to ‘nostalgia’ for ‘an old world’ that would never ‘return’. But it was verboten to point out that the nostalgia was misplaced; that there never was an old world that adhered to an international order upholding peace, stability and democracy. As ever, the Guardian’s ability to steer clear of dangerous waters is testament to its establishment credentials.The Independent had a short article briefly mentioning Carney’s observation that ‘the world order based on rules has become “fiction”’. The article also included the Canadian prime minister’s warning that:‘If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.’But the extensive brutal reality and sordid history behind the phrase, ‘the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests’, was left unmentioned and unexplored. To the Independent’s credit, however, the following day it published the full text of Carney’s speech. The Financial Times also published a transcript of the speech.From our Nexis newspaper database searches, the above was the sum total of media mentions in the UK national press of the most vital passages from Carney’s speech. Judging by other people’s observations on social media, such as the responses to our viral post on X about BBC reporting of the speech, this pattern was repeated in other western countries.US political analyst Glenn Greenwald made an important point:‘It’s amazing to watch mainstream western media outlets completely and brazenly distort what Mark Carney said.‘They’re pretending he was just attacking Trump: as if Carney was claiming we had a nice “rules-based international order” until Trump came along.‘No. Carney said that this “rules-based international order” has long been a fraud that western nations pretended was true because it was in their interests to maintain this lie.’Greenwald added:‘But establishment outlets like the NYT, CBC, The Atlantic, The Economist, etc. etc. can’t grapple with or even acknowledge Carney’s confession, because those outlets have been central to embracing and ratifying and spreading this precise fiction.’These are crucial observations about the media’s unwillingness or inability to honestly appraise and dissect Carney’s remarks. Although, to what extent Carney’s speech was really a ‘confession’, or whether there was an element of performative politics to assuage the public and maintain a semblance of credibility, is up for debate.But, as always, for the ‘mainstream’ media, crucial truths about imperial Western power are not deemed worthy of significant broadcast, far less explanation.DCUpdate, 24 January 2026The Guardian published a transcript of Mark Carney’s speech on their website.Note to our readersMedia Lens is 25 years old in July, 2026. Thank you to everyone who supports us, whether you donate financially, read our work or share it with others.Although you may receive this email as having been sent to an ‘unpaid’ Substack subscriber, we are aware that you may support us via another method; namely PayPal or a bank standing order. We are very grateful for your financial support.New alerts and cogitations are now available as podcasts on Substack, YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. These become available shortly after publication of the written version. Get full access to Media Lens at medialens.substack.com/subscribe

After declaring his second presidential victory on 6 November 2024, Donald Trump said of his first term:‘You know, we had no wars for four years. We had no wars. Except we defeated ISIS, we defeated ISIS in record time. But we had no wars. They said, “He will start a war.” I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.’On New Year’s Eve, 2025, with Gaza in ruins, Trump’s anti-war fervour still burned bright. A journalist asked him:‘Mr. President, do you have a New Year’s resolution?’Trump replied:‘Peace. Peace on Earth.’Three days later, Trump launched 150 bombers, fighter bombers and attack helicopters in an illegal and unprovoked war of aggression, ‘the supreme international crime’, on Venezuela, killing around 100 people, including two civilians. Protected by intense bombing of the capital, Caracas, US troops kidnapped the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.In classic totalitarian style, JD Vance, the US vice-president, clarified that the US was, in fact, the victim and had acted in self-defence:‘I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing? Great powers don’t act like that.’ The stolen ‘stuff’ being Venezuelan oil. Part of Vance’s claim to victimhood rests on the assertion that Maduro refused to negotiate and take ‘the off ramp’. Standing beside Trump, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said:‘Nicolas Maduro had multiple opportunities to avoid this. He was provided multiple very, very, very generous offers, and chose instead to act like a wild man.’Earlier that same day, Trump had told Fox News:‘You know, he [Maduro] wanted to negotiate at the end and I didn’t want to negotiate. I said, nope.’The 100-death toll may come as a surprise to consumers of ‘mainstream’ media, which have shown zero interest in the people killed and maimed. If US soldiers had died, we would know their names, faces, army units, back stories, with spouses and parents expressing their grief in heart-rending interviews.For ‘mainstream’ politics and media, the latest killing spree is just another Groundhog Day. Maduro is not perceived as a particular individual; he is perceived as the latest incarnation of the generic ‘Bad Guy’: Milosevic, bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Assad, Nasrallah and Sinwar. The Venezuelans are another anonymous crowd of (mostly) brown-skinned people indistinguishable from Iraqis, Iranians, Libyans, Syrians and Palestinians.How did the BBC respond to this clear example of Great Power criminality? One front-page news report was illustrated by an image of a smiling woman waving both the Venezuelan and US flags. Another headline featured a woman draped in a Venezuelan flag holding a sign that read:‘Thank you TRUMP!’ The consistent focus on women in pro-regime change propaganda is no accident, but a cynical attempt to co-opt #MeToo movement sympathies.‘Mainstream’ outlets were happy to republish humiliating pictures originally posted by Trump on social media of the abducted Maduro handcuffed and blindfolded. Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention (1949) states:‘… prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity’. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross and other human rights organisations, posting and broadcasting identifiable images of prisoners of war on social media violates this article. A ‘Brilliantly Executed Operation’While opinion pieces were sometimes more honest, virtually all ‘mainstream’ news reports used the word ‘captured’, ‘seized’, ‘taken’, or even ‘arrested’, with Maduro said to be ‘held in custody’, as if subject to an international law enforcement operation. In the Guardian, Aditya Chakrabortty, did at least use ‘kidnap’ and ‘abduction’ to describe the event. He added:‘Any other country that did this wouldn’t receive indulgent op-eds about its “gunboat diplomacy” – it would rightly be condemned as a rogue state, and its oligarchs’ foreign assets impounded.’In fact, if that ‘other country’ had been an Official Enemy, the attack would have been denounced as terrorism. Instead, it was an ‘illegal military intervention’ for the Guardian. Elsewhere, the Guardian commented:‘Trump began his five-month campaign of military pressure in August.’ Again, a better term for a ‘campaign of military pressure’ is terrorism. Trump has quite obviously been using the threat and commission of violence to terrorise the Venezuelan government and people, and other countries, into submission. ABC News described the attack as ‘DARING’. The New York Times described it as ‘virtually flawless’. Former BBC journalist Jon Sopel, now hosting the podcast, The News Agents, wrote:‘There is no doubt that this has been an effective operation, brilliantly executed.‘But what comes next?’ What Sopel would not have said if a foreign power had bombed London and kidnapped Sir Keir Starmer, or if Russia had ‘captured’ Zelensky, and what he did not say in the aftermath of 11 September 2001:‘There is no doubt that this has been an effective operation, brilliantly executed.’Ione Wells’ piece for the BBC contained some darkly amusing cognitive dissonance:‘The US may want many of its foes gone from power. It doesn’t usually send in the military and physically remove them.’ True enough, if we can somehow ignore recent, salient examples like Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Wells then flatly contradicted herself:‘Even some who dislike Maduro and want to see him gone are wary of US intervention being the means – remembering decades of US-backed coups and regime change in Latin America in the 20th century.’These being ‘decades of US-backed coups’ targeting foes when the world’s superpower did ‘send in the military and physically remove them’.Ordinarily highly critical of Trump, The Washington Post editorial board praised the assault as a ‘major victory for American interests’ in an article with the Orwellian title ‘Justice in Venezuela’. The Post commented:‘Trump had telegraphed for months that Maduro could not remain in power, yet Venezuela’s arrogantly illegitimate leader clung on. What are Iranian leaders thinking now as they consider how to respond to widespread anti-government protests? Are the communists in Cuba sleeping well?’It is ‘arrogant’ for a leader of a foreign minnow to cling to power in the face of US disapproval, on the understanding that might makes right (‘justice’). It is also fine to celebrate an extension of the US terror campaign to Cuba.At the far margins of US dissent, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said he was ‘grateful for the wisdom of [Trump] not taking out the entire government. Not because I support the government, but because we have clear models in Iraq and Libya and a lot of Syria: it can be very hard to put those things back together again.’ Carlson said it ‘seems like a much wiser approach’ to keep the government structure in place but ‘making sure it’s pro-American’.A stirring defence of democracy-as-slavery. Carlson, a vocal Christian, added:‘To spend all your time worrying about Cuba? I love the Cubans here. Love them. But how much money do you want to spend out of your kid’s college fund on regime change in Cuba?’As ever, principled dissent stretches all the way to concern for the cost to ‘us’. Tolstoy, also a Christian, would have reviled this as cruel and unchristian.‘They Have All That Oil’Where once leaders like George Bush, Tony Blair and David Cameron span complex lies to camouflage their efforts to steal Iraqi and Libyan oil, Trump hardly bothers. On 3 January, he stated openly that the US would ‘run’ Venezuela and take control of its oil industry:‘We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies... go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure... and start making money for the country... and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us.’ On 17 December 2025, Trump said of Venezuela:‘They took our oil rights — we had a lot of oil there. As you know they threw our companies out, and we want it back.’ In June 2023, Trump lamented a missed opportunity:‘When I left, Venezuela was about to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have kept all that oil; it would have been right next door.’ Any doubt about the US motivation was removed by Trump’s brazen hosting of senior oil executives at the White House last week. The US would decide which companies could extract oil in Venezuela, Trump declared, with Venezuela ‘turning over’ up to 50 million barrels of oil to the US. It has been taboo for the likes of the BBC and Guardian to mention oil as a motivation for war on Iraq, Libya and Syria. With that wilful blindness made absurd by Trump’s sociopathic ‘honesty’, even the Guardian has mentioned the three-letter O-word:‘Operation Absolute Resolve was about exercising raw power to dominate a sovereign nation, and controlling Venezuela’s future oil production.’ Before his abduction, Maduro dismissed the alleged motives for invasion:‘Since they can’t accuse me or accuse Venezuela of having weapons of mass destruction … since they can’t accuse us of having nuclear missiles … or chemical weapons … they have invented a claim that the US knows is as false as the claim about weapons of mass destruction that led them into a forever war. I believe that we need to set all this aside and start serious talks.’ If Maduro cannot be targeted as a ‘new Hitler’ for these reasons, Western commentators can always condemn his economic and democratic failings from their imaginary moral high ground. A January 4 Guardian editorial made the point:‘Venezuelans have endured a repressive, kleptocratic and incompetent regime under Mr Maduro, widely believed to have stolen the last election.’ That might also be said of the US and UK governments, and certainly of their long list of tyrannical, indeed genocidal, allies. The concern for a stolen election might seem bitterly ironic given that, according to Trump, the whole country has now been stolen. Keeping Venezuela ‘pro-American’ naturally rules out any prospect of genuine democracy. Tragicomically, the Telegraph reported:‘The US ruled out immediate elections in Venezuela yesterday. Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said talk of a vote was “premature”, adding that America would run Venezuelan policy through the parts of the regime still in power.’ Rubio has been nicknamed the ‘viceroy of Venezuela’ after Trump appointed him and others to ‘run’ the country – as a ‘democracy’, of course. On January 12, Trump posted his image over the words:‘Acting President of Venezuela’Missing ContextMissing from the heartfelt lamentations on the state of Venezuela’s economy is the kind of context supplied in 2019 by economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University:‘Well, it’s not an economic standstill. It’s a complete economic collapse, a catastrophe, in Venezuela. There was a crisis, for sure, before Trump came to office, but the idea of the Trump administration, from the start, has been to overthrow Maduro. That’s not a hypothesis. Trump was very explicit in discussions with presidents of Latin America, where he asked them, “Why shouldn’t the U.S. just invade?” He said that already in 2017. So the idea of the Trump administration has been to overthrow Maduro from the start. Well, the Latin leaders said, “No, no, that’s not a good idea. We don’t want military action.” So the U.S. government has been trying to strangle the Venezuelan economy.‘It started with sanctions in 2017 that prevented, essentially, the country from accessing international capital markets and the oil company from restructuring its loans. That put Venezuela into a hyperinflation. That was the utter collapse. Oil earnings plummeted. The earnings that are used to buy food and medicine collapsed. That’s when the social, humanitarian crisis went spiraling out of control. And then, in this year, with this idea, very naive, very stupid, in my view, that there would be this self-proclaimed president [Juan Guaidó], which was all choreographed with the United States very, very closely, another round of even tighter sanctions, essentially confiscating the earnings and the assets of the Venezuelan government, took place…. What the U.S.—what Trump just doesn’t understand and what Bolton, of all, of course, never agrees to, is the idea of negotiations. This is an attempt at an overthrow. It’s very crude. It’s not working. And it’s very cruel, because it’s punishing 30 million people.’Political analyst James Schneider supplied some missing military context:‘But if you want the political base, you must look… to a long history of coercion dressed up as “freedom”: efforts to break Venezuelan resource sovereignty, dismantle Bolivarian socialism and roll back an explicitly anti-imperial project of regional integration. In 2002, Washington backed a coup that briefly removed Hugo Chávez before a mass popular mobilisation reversed it. In 2019, the United States supported the installation of Juan Guaidó as “interim president” in an international farce that collapsed under the weight of its own fiction. There have been mercenary incursions, paramilitary plots and repeated efforts to fracture Venezuela’s armed forces. Each failed…’On BBC Radio 5 Live, Nicky Campbell asked Schneider:‘Let’s just establish one thing: are you pleased - take away what’s happened - are you pleased that Maduro, a corrupt man, a brutal despot, are you pleased that he’s no longer the president?’This is the question asked of every critic of US-UK-Israeli foreign policy and is intended to present criticism of Western crimes as apologism for crimes, real and imagined, of whoever happens to be the latest Official Enemy. Maduro is consistently damned on the grounds that the presidential elections of 28 July 2024 were unfair. In July 2024, The Carter Centre commented on the election:‘Venezuela’s electoral process did not meet international standards of electoral integrity at any of its stages and violated numerous provisions of its own national laws. The election took place in an environment of restricted freedoms for political actors, civil society organizations, and the media. Throughout the electoral process, the CNE [the National Electoral Council] demonstrated a clear bias in favor of the incumbent.‘Voter registration was hurt by short deadlines, relatively few places of registration, and minimal public information… The registration of parties and candidates also did not meet international standards. Over the past few years, several opposition parties have had their registrations changed to leaders who favor the government. This influenced the nomination of some opposition candidates.’Such failings are deemed despotic, intolerable, defining Maduro as an ‘arrogantly illegitimate leader’. But how would Britain’s famed democracy respond to a 25-year campaign by an overwhelmingly superior foreign power to violently overthrow the government and steal its natural resources? In the 1930s and 1940s, Britain was menaced by Nazi Germany, a major threat to be sure, but one which constituted a far lesser threat than that offered by the nuclear-armed US global superpower attacking tiny Venezuela. In response, the UK Emergency Powers (Defence) Act of 1939 granted the government the authority to rule by decree through Defence Regulations. As a result, British democracy was simply suspended. The general election scheduled for 1940 was cancelled and there were no local or general elections at all held between 1935 and 1945. Habeas Corpus was also suspended, with Defence Regulation 18B allowing the Home Secretary to intern people indefinitely without trial. Under Regulation 2D, the government could suppress newspapers without warning if they published material ‘calculated to foment opposition to the prosecution of the war.’ The Daily Worker newspaper, for example, was banned. BBC broadcasts were also vetted, with thousands of people employed to read private letters and telegraph messages. Even the spreading of ‘alarm or despondency’ became a criminal offence. People making pessimistic remarks about the war’s outcome in pubs or on street corners were prosecuted. The ‘Silent Column’ campaign encouraged citizens to report neighbours who engaged in ‘defeatist talk.’ More recently, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have been variously imprisoned, tortured and persecuted for leaking or publishing state secrets. Imagine the grim fate that would await a high-profile US opposition leader, the equivalent of Venezuela’s Maria Corina Machado, who helped lead failed military coups and violent street riots, and who openly supported foreign military intervention.Whenever governments in Venezuela, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran face the existential threat of the Western war machine, ‘independent’, ‘objective’ Western journalists simply ignore the fact that normal democratic freedoms will be ruthlessly exploited by extremely violent Western interests bent on regime change.In 1953, US-supplied armoured cars took to the streets of Iran to help depose the democratically elected nationalist Mohammad Mosaddegh, replacing him with the tyrannical Shah. The motivation? Oil. According to then CIA agent Richard Cottam:‘... that mob that came into north Teheran and was decisive in the overthrow was a mercenary mob. It had no ideology. That mob was paid for by American dollars and the amount of money that was used has to have been very large’. (Quoted, Mark Curtis, ‘The Ambiguities of Power - British Foreign Policy Since 1945’, Zed Books, 1995, p.93)On December 29, as hundreds of people were being killed in Iran’s ongoing protests, The Jerusalem Post reported:‘On Monday, the Mossad [Israeli secret service] used its Twitter account in Farsi to encourage Iranians to protest against the Iranian regime, telling them that it will join them during the demonstrations.‘“Go out together into the streets. The time has come,” the Mossad wrote.‘It continued, “We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”’Mike Pompeo, former director of the CIA and former Secretary of State, posted on X:‘Happy New Year to every Iranian in the streets. Also to every Mossad agent walking beside them...’These brutal realities are omitted from virtually all ‘mainstream’ coverage. Targets of the Western Perpetual War machine do not have the luxury of pretending they do not exist.DEDavid Edwards is the author of the forthcoming political science fiction novel, ‘The Man with No Face’, to be published by Roundfire Books in 2026.Update, 23 January 2026We noted that The Carter Centre commented of Venezuela’s 28 July 2024 electoral process that it ‘did not meet international standards of electoral integrity’. However, a reader pointed out to us that Maduro, in fact, had a great deal of popular support and many observers without direct ties to US agencies said the elections were fair. Along with our reader, we recommend Alan MacLeod’s excellent piece for Consortium News, ‘Venezuela: As US Leaders Call Fraud, US Observers Endorse Results’.Note to our readersMedia Lens is 25 years old in 2026. Thank you to everyone who supports us, whether you donate financially, read our work or share it with others. Although you may receive this email as having been sent to an ‘unpaid’ Substack subscriber, we are aware that you may support us via another method; namely PayPal or a bank standing order. We are very grateful for your financial support. Get full access to Media Lens at medialens.substack.com/subscribe

A significant feature of the propaganda system is the suppression of clearly important, credible books which are nevertheless deemed unfit for review in the ‘respectable mainstream’.In 2025, two important – indeed, groundbreaking – bestselling books about British politics were published which were almost entirely ignored by the state-corporate media. These were ‘The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy’ by Paul Holden and ‘Complicit: Britain’s role in the destruction of Gaza’ by Peter Oborne, both published by OR Books.What follows is not a full-blown review of both books. But we will summarise crucial aspects of each, indicating why it suits the interests of established power, including the major national media, to ignore the forensic analysis and damning conclusions provided by the authors.‘The Fraud’Consider, first, ‘The Fraud’ by Paul Holden. Holden is a Network Fellow at the Safra Centre for Ethics at Harvard University with over a decade of experience in investigating cases of grand corruption and corporate malfeasance, focusing on the arms trade. He was a senior researcher on the book and feature documentary, ‘Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade’ by Andrew Feinstein. Holden has published six books, three of them bestsellers in his native South Africa. He has written for both the Guardian and the Independent.‘The Fraud’, published in November 2025, is a damning account of Sir Keir Starmer’s rise to power in the Labour Party, becoming leader in April 2020 and then Prime Minister in July 2024 after that month’s General Election. Holden’s analysis is based on access to a substantial, previously unseen leak of internal Labour Party documents.Much of Holden’s book focuses on Morgan McSweeney, currently Starmer’s chief of staff and instrumental in Starmer’s ascent to 10 Downing Street. In October 2023, The Times stated that:‘nobody without elected office wields as much power in British politics as McSweeney’.He is, said the Times, ‘the real power behind Starmer – who would rather stay in the shadows’.Holden has now exposed McSweeney’s role ‘in the shadows’. Between 2017 and 2020, McSweeney was head of the innocuous-sounding Labour Together, a think tank which ostensibly worked to unify the various factions of Labour – left, centre and right – to defeat the Conservatives and form a new government.In reality, Labour Together oversaw a secretive operation to destroy the left-wing Jeremy Corbyn and his allies, fuelling the moral panic of an ‘antisemitism crisis’ to do so. The aim was to replace Corbyn with Starmer. The operation was funded by donations totalling nearly £740,000. The two largest funders were hedge fund manager Martin Taylor and Sir Trevor Chinn, a former funder of Tony Blair as MP.Taylor’s hedge fund, Crake Asset Management, has held significant investments in major US private healthcare corporations, including HCA Healthcare and United Health. In November 2024, the Ferret, an investigative website based in Scotland, reported that:‘quarterly US filings, released this month, reveal that Crake Asset Management has bought shares worth more than £8m in HCA Healthcare since July.‘HCA Healthcare claims to be the largest private healthcare provider in the world and “one of the leading private healthcare providers in the UK”.’Since the 1980s, Chinn has funded both Labour Friends of Israel and Conservative Friends of Israel. He also sits on the executive committee of the Jewish Leadership Council and the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, both heavily-involved in pro-Israel advocacy. Chinn reportedly ‘had great concerns about the election of an outspoken opponent of the Jewish state as Labour leader.’Donations to Labour Together were not declared in a timely fashion by McSweeney to the Electoral Commission, as required by law. That only happened much later. The Commission then imposed a rather paltry fine of £14,250, seemingly accepting that McSweeney’s omission was accidental. Holden argues convincingly from the internal Labour record that that is unlikely and that McSweeney may well have ‘purposely broken the law’ to evade scrutiny of Labour Together’s operations. The journalist describes in some detail communications between McSweeney and the Commission in which the Labour campaigner argues that he is not required to report the donations and he is told, in no uncertain terms, that he is legally obliged to do so.Holden states that McSweeney:‘used those undisclosed funds to propel Sir Keir Starmer to the leadership of the Labour Party, transforming both the party and British politics’.He adds:‘In investigating how McSweeney and his allies have transformed the Labour Party, I have come across evidence pointing to serious wrongdoing over an extended period, some of which I believe requires further investigation by regulatory agencies and law enforcement. Indeed, I have come to the opinion that the political project that delivered us a Starmer government has been a reckless and arguably lawless endeavour whose misconduct threatens the health of British democracy.’(‘The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy’, Paul Holden, OR Books, 2025, p. xvi)Some of the undisclosed money was used to set up astroturf groups such as Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). Astroturfing means that a false impression is given of a grassroots campaign when, in fact, it has been created or run by undisclosed corporate or political backers. One of SFFN’s targets was The Canary, a left-wing, Corbyn-supporting website that regularly attracted 8.5 million hits a month.Holden notes in his book:‘Whereas most media outlets, and especially The Guardian, did not interrogate Starmer’s background, or else covered stories with a pro-Starmer slant, The Canary took the opposite approach. Indeed, during the period between January and April 2020, The Canary was the only media outlet in the country to interrogate Starmer’s professional history from a critical perspective and use this to contextualise his leadership pitch.’ (p. 158)Meanwhile, SFFN mounted a campaign against The Canary:‘to deprive it of advertising income and, perhaps even more importantly, create the impression that it was a fringe outpost of cranks and nutjobs.’One important method of attack was to portray The Canary as a purveyor of supposedly antisemitic content. The campaign worked. The loss of advertising revenue was so severe that it forced the website to fundamentally change its business model. It had to shift to rely almost entirely on reader-funded subscriptions to survive.The Canary was later cleared of ‘hate speech’ by the independent regulator Impress, but the outlet had already been badly damaged. The website ‘went down from 22 staff to one member of staff within a few months of us targeting it,’ boasted Imran Ahmed who ran SFFN, and who worked closely with McSweeney in Labour Together.McSweeney directed the campaign to elect Starmer as head of the Labour Party during the leadership campaign between January and April 2020. Holden refers to the ruthless McSweeney-led operation to shift Labour to the right under Starmer as ‘the Starmer Project’. Under the Starmer Project, Holden details how McSweeney and his allies were able to take control of Labour’s bureaucracy, ditching left-leaning policies, rigging the candidate selection process to install Starmer loyalists, and even purging the party of left-wing members for alleged antisemitism, many of them Jewish.Holden also examines Starmer’s stalwart support for Israel:‘Under Starmer’s leadership the party defended Israel’s criminal destruction of Gaza, despite overwhelming evidence that Israeli forces were targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure and notwithstanding a torrent of brazenly genocidal rhetoric from the most senior Israeli officials on down.’ (p. 14)He continues:‘To acquiesce in or enable so grave a breach of international law was bad enough. But Starmer also flouted British parliamentary convention to water down a Gaza ceasefire initiative in February 2024. This marked the first time that the Starmer Project’s undemocratic and opportunistic political mode – previously confined to purging internal party dissent – was applied to the country at large.’ (p. 14)Richard Sanders, the experienced journalist and filmmaker who made Al Jazeera’s landmark ‘Labour Files’ series three years ago, noted recently that the documentaries:‘laid bare the ruthlessness, racism and maniacal factionalism of the Labour right and its cynical exploitation of the antisemitism issue to destroy Jeremy Corbyn.’The ‘Labour Files’ series was ‘resolutely ignored by the British media’, Sanders correctly observed, as we also reported in a media alert at the time.In his review of Holden’s book, Sanders wrote that ‘The Fraud’ confirms and indeed amplifies the analysis and conclusions of the ‘Labour Files’. Sanders concluded that the book:‘offers the most damning portrayal yet of a political project at once proudly Machiavellian but entirely devoid of moral and intellectual substance.’It should come as no surprise, then, that not a single review of ‘The Fraud’ has appeared in a major UK newspaper; an issue to which we will return below.‘Complicit’Regular readers of our alerts will be familiar with Peter Oborne. He is an associate editor of Middle East Eye and a columnist for Byline Times and Declassified UK. He has worked as chief political commentator of The Daily Telegraph, political editor of The Spectator, a political commentator at the Daily Express, and as a journalist at the Evening Standard. He has also made nearly 30 documentaries for Channel 4, BBC World and BBC Radio 4. Oborne is the author of numerous books including Sunday Times bestsellers, ‘The Assault on Truth’ and ‘The Fate of Abraham: Why the West Is Wrong about Islam.’ His most recent book, ‘Complicit: Britain’s role in the destruction of Gaza’, may well be his bravest and most important work to date.Oborne summed up the powerful themes of his book early on:‘A full reckoning with Britain’s culpability for the destruction of Gaza requires an assessment of the failing institutions that misgovern British public life: the dishonesty of the media, the moral bankruptcy of the foreign policy establishment, growing domestic authoritarianism, the corruption of parliament, and the collapse of a party system increasingly manipulated by special interests and the super-rich.’(‘Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza’, Peter Oborne, OR Books, 2025, p. 10)Oborne reminded readers of Starmer’s notorious LBC radio interview on 11 October 2023 where the Labour leader declared that ‘Israel does have that right’ when questioned about Israel’s withholding of power and water from Gaza. Labour shadow ministers Emily Thornberry and David Lammy held Starmer’s line during subsequent TV appearances where they refused to say that the Israeli blockade was a violation of international law. Nine days later, Starmer then attempted to gaslight the British public by claiming he had never said what he had been recorded saying.In January 2024, South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice led to the ruling that there was a ‘plausible’ risk that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. The Tory government then in power, and the Labour government which followed, were thus legally obliged to take measures to prevent genocide from happening. To their eternal shame, and possible future prosecution given the Genocide Convention’s incorporation into domestic law, British ministers did not do so.Oborne was particularly damning about Starmer:‘As genocide raged, he had not made any meaningful attempt to stop it. He had not imposed any serious consequences on Israel. He had not put any pressure on the US. He had not committed to enforce international law. He had not condemned clear Israeli crimes and he had struggled to speak about Palestinians as if they were members of the human race.’ (p. 168)Oborne also skewered the state-corporate media:‘Large sections of the media repeated the lies promoted by Israeli and British politicians. Some produced fresh lies of their own. They twisted their reports in favour of the Israeli cause. For a long time, reports of Israeli atrocities appeared either in muted form or not at all. Hamas atrocities were exaggerated or fabricated. Dissident voices were suppressed. Across much of the media spectrum a general implicit consensus emerged: Israelis count and Palestinians don’t.’ (p. 35)He cited the important, detailed study of the BBC’s Gaza coverage during the first twelve months of the genocide by the Centre for Media Monitoring, published in July 2025 (see also our media alert here).The study showed that the corporation operated a form of apartheid with two sets of rules: one for Palestinians and another for Israelis. The BBC employed the word ‘massacre’ almost eighteen times more often in relation to Israeli than to Palestinian victims, and never used the term in headlines about Israeli atrocities. The term ‘butcher’ was used 220 times for actions against Israelis, but just once for actions against Palestinians.The average Israeli death received thirty-three times more coverage across BBC articles, and nineteen times more across TV and radio, than the average Palestinian death. ‘Israeli deaths were reported in more emotive terms’, Oborne observed, ‘with victims far more likely to be humanised by details about their names, family background, jobs, and lives.’Relevant history was routinely airbrushed out of BBC news coverage. There was barely any mention of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territory: in July 2024, the ICJ had ruled that Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip (despite the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli forces), is unlawful under international law.Nor was there significant attention given by the BBC to explaining that the majority of Gaza’s inhabitants are refugees from the 1948 expulsion, when the state of Israel was established, or their descendants: the Nakba (an Arabic term that means ‘catastrophe’ or ‘disaster’) was barely mentioned.In the BBC’s reporting of the events of 7 October 2023, they barely covered the Israeli military’s ‘Hannibal Directive’. Oborne wrote:‘The directive licenced the killing of Israeli citizens and soldiers, often by Apache helicopter fire, rather than allowing them to be captured. Its application has been documented by the United Nations and well reported in the Israeli press, including a major investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, but ignored by the BBC.’ (pp. 49-50)Oborne described this as ‘a shocking omission’ (see also our media alert here). He noted that, except for one passing mention, the BBC did not report on Israel’s notorious ‘Dahiya doctrine’ implemented by its military forces. He continued:‘This BBC failure is negligent because Israel’s destruction of Gaza cannot be understood without knowing that Israel’s established military doctrine licenses the indiscriminate obliteration of civilian infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, and universities. As with the Hannibal Directive, the subject has been covered seriously in the Israeli press. That the BBC did not explain the Dahiya doctrine to its audience was a consequential reporting failure. It is hard to believe that it was not deliberate.’ (p. 50)The list of BBC omissions, as well as those of the rest of the major news media, just kept piling up. There was virtually zero mention of the copious evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent presented by South Africa to the ICJ:‘Incredibly the BBC seems never to have reported Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s references to “Amalek”, seen by many as the invocation of a divine command to annihilate an enemy nation, until Jeremy Bowen briefly mentioned it in an article in June 2025.’Moreover, on more than a hundred occasions BBC presenters shut down any mention of genocide by BBC interviewees.Meanwhile state authoritarianism is on the rise, with peaceful protesters criminalised and demonised. At root, Oborne warns that the very foundations of democracy and the rule of law are being seriously eroded by a corrupt and morally depraved political and media system:‘British journalists and politicians, acting in a de facto alliance with the far right, have painted the marchers as supporters of terrorism and enemies of civilisation—for having the audacity to march against the livestreamed slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.’ (p. 246)He added:‘In support of Israel, British politicians, backed by mainstream media, have given the green light to mass murder, assassination, torture, law-breaking, and chaos. In the process they have repudiated the international legal order that Britain herself helped establish to prevent a repetition of the horrors of World War Two.’ (p. 246)In fact, argued Oborne, the marchers and protesters are ‘supporting a global moral order that is under attack’. They:‘profoundly represent British values as these have traditionally been understood: belief in fairness, tolerance, the rule of law. Standing up for the underdog. Compassion, kindness, a sense of civic responsibility and what George Orwell called decency. A belief in community, solidarity, and human rights, and a conviction that we owe a duty not just to ourselves and our own communities but to all human beings.’ (p. 246)Oborne ends his book with a long list of establishment figures that he damns for their complicity in the Gaza genocide, including: government ministers, not least Starmer and Rishi Sunak, his predecessor; arms manufacturers; the leaders of the British armed forces; ‘the moral cowards at the top of the BBC’; newspaper owners, editors and journalists; the Archbishop of Canterbury; the extreme right, including Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson; pro-Israel lobbyists; and more.‘Damn all who were complicit in this brazen, public, and protracted crime against humanity.‘I expect you all think you will get away with it. You have in the past. But the world may be starting to change.’Zero ‘MSM’ Reviews‘Complicit’ is compelling, detailed and written in clear, concise prose. It would be hard to conceive of a book this year, or any other year, that more deserves to be brought to the attention of the British public. Written by an experienced journalist and documentary-maker with a long career in the British media, ‘Complicit’ should have kickstarted a much-needed national debate about the extent of UK complicity in the Gaza genocide and, indeed, the state of British democracy. But to do so, of course, would require the state-corporate media and the political system itself to examine their own dishonourable roles in the destruction of Gaza, the degradation of British democracy and the erosion of international law. That was never going to happen.According to the AI tool Ask Gemini, ‘Complicit’ was one of the highest-selling books across the UK in its category, likely achieving a #1 rank in the ‘British Politics’ or related category on Amazon UK during its peak. Indeed, propelled to prominence by social media, ‘alternative’ outlets such as Declassified UK, and word of mouth, it appeared on the prestigious Sunday Times bestseller list. And yet, according to our database and online searches, it has never been reviewed in a major British newspaper; ironically, not even in the Sunday Times which printed its bestseller list every week.The small-circulation Morning Star, however, published an insightful and glowing review by Gavin O’Toole, who wrote:‘The most disturbing conclusion to be drawn from Peter Oborne’s forensic examination of Britain’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction is that its support for Israel has torn the very fabric of our democracy. This comes across on every page of what will surely become a go-to work of reference about the moral nadir to which our governing elite has sunk in a long history of British hypocrisy.’This conclusion is clearly too dangerous to be broached and disseminated by the state-corporate media, BBC News very much included. A rare exception was an interview with Oborne on BBC Radio Ulster and also on Channel 4 News where Oborne, along with Edmund Fitton-Brown, a former UK ambassador to Yemen, was interviewed by Krishnan Guru-Murthy. Iain Dale hosted an LBC radio programme last month on the future of Palestine with Oborne and former BBC reporter and presenter Jonathan Dimbleby.For such a vitally important book, that is a disgracefully low level of coverage in ‘the mainstream’. But par for the course, for the reasons given above.As for Paul Holden’s ‘The Fraud’, his investigation of Labour Together’s undisclosed donations was reported by right-wing, Conservative-supporting newspapers, the Telegraph and The Sunday Times. Clearly, it was done for self-serving, partisan reasons in an attempt to topple Starmer and aid the return to power of a Tory party in disarray.However, they did not cover the broader and deeper issues of how the money was used; namely, to depose Corbyn and install Starmer, deploying fake astroturf campaigns and the cynical exploitation of Labour’s ‘antisemitism crisis’ to move the party further to the right. Nor did those right-wing papers address the infamous ditching by Starmer of the ten ‘pledges’ in his Labour party leadership campaign which he - or, in other words, Morgan McSweeney - had made in a cynical attempt to portray himself as a kind of ‘Corbyn continuation’ candidate.Moreover, neither paper actually reviewed the book nor examined its wide-ranging analysis based on copious evidence about the McSweeney-led ditching of left-wing policies, candidates and members; Starmer’s unswerving support for Israel in its Gaza genocide; or the book’s damning conclusions about the state of British politics and indeed democracy. According to our searches, the only British newspaper to review ‘The Fraud’ was, once again, the Morning Star, which praised Holden’s comprehensive account of the Prime Minister’s ‘track record of duplicity and betrayal’.This effective media silence is remarkable, given the highly detailed investigative work outlined at length in the book and the major conclusions reached by Holden. Moreover, ‘The Fraud’ clearly had huge appeal for the public as it was a bestseller among books on UK politics and current events. Again, according to the AI tool Ask Gemini, the book attained ‘very high bestseller rank’ on the Amazon UK chart, reaching number 1 in the ‘British Politics’ and ‘Political Corruption’ categories. But, as with Oborne’s book ‘Complicity’, the contents are too hot for the ‘mainstream’ media to handle.PostscriptAlthough the Guardian has never published a review of ‘The Fraud’, the paper’s political editor, Pippa Crerar, did email Holden in February 2024 to say that the paper was about to publish an article about him. The piece, Holden discovered, would claim that he was under police investigation for receiving illegally hacked documents. The claim would, Holden feared:‘significantly damage, if not destroy, my professional reputation’.He was given a deadline of less than fourteen hours to respond. But the claim was false and Holden could prove it. After consulting his lawyer, he wrote to Crerar threatening legal action if the Guardian went ahead with its false story. They never did.Holden later discovered that Labour Together had raised ‘concerns’ about him to the British security services and had likely fed this information to the Guardian. This was around the same time that the Telegraph was asking questions about Labour Together’s undisclosed money, based on evidence Holden had provided.Labour Together had even hired a consultancy firm to dig for dirt on both Holden and Andrew Feinstein, who had set up Shadow World Investigations together in 2019. This is a London-based, non-governmental organisation that conducts research on the arms trade. Feinstein was also politically active in Starmer’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency, and would later run against the Labour leader in the 2024 General Election.One can only look on in awe at how this never became a national scandal, with no banner newspaper headlines or coverage on BBC News at Ten. The power of propaganda by omission is truly a wonder to behold.In early December, the Guardian published a piece titled, ‘The best history and politics books of 2025’. Needless to say, neither ‘Complicit’ nor ‘The Fraud’ were included. Credit to those Guardian readers, however, who managed to insert admiring mentions into the space for online comments below the article.DCNote to our readersMedia Lens is 25 years old in 2026. Thank you to everyone who supports us, whether you donate financially, read our work or share it with others. Although you may receive this email as having been sent to an ‘unpaid’ Substack subscriber, we are aware that you may support us via another method; namely PayPal or a bank standing order. We are very grateful for your financial support. Get full access to Media Lens at medialens.substack.com/subscribe