Imagine being invited to debate disinformation on the BBC, after three and a half years of non-stop covid lies, and the best example of BBC fake news you can cite is one of the few cases of objective reporting.
I don’t really like ad feminam or ad hominem attacks. I sympathise instinctively with anyone who has put their head above the parapet and argued eloquently against the madness of covid-themed tyranny. In the end, the debate over covid restrictions boiled down to a battle between technocracy and natural humanity that transcends complex and emotionally charged geopolitical conflicts.
I began writing this blog over a week ago after I saw a clip of Laura Dodsworth discuss misinformation and censorship in the context of the UK’s new Online Safety Bill with BBC veteran Paul Mason. To her credit, Laura argued against the bill, but missed a golden opportunity to expose the BBC’s grotesque bias over covid. I held off publishing this post last week because Laura still comes across as an eminently likeable and honest person. Unlike many noteworthy covid dissidents such as Dr Peter McCullough or Prof Sucharit Bhakdi, Laura does not have a dedicated Wikipedia page. Her own website reveals little information about her past political affiliations and has yet to be subjected to a media smear campaign. Then I caught a glimpse of Baroness Claire Fox pushing almost the same line asking a Pro-Palestinian activist why he did not dissociate himself from extremists chanting ” From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” or waving Hamas flags. This is rich coming from an unrepentant IRA apologist. Then Scottish comedian and free speech advocate, Leo Kearse, toed the same line with his mildly amusing quip about Gays for Palestine not being thrown off buildings in Gaza because they've all razed to the ground. Lo and behold, Leo also has a column on Spiked.
Have you ever wondered why the pseudo-progressive intelligentsia has devoted so many resources to vilify some dissident thinkers, while they give others a free pass? As the former head of Pfizer’s research division specialising in respiratory diseases, Dr Mike Yeadon is certainly well-qualified to contribute to scientific debates over the efficacy of covid restrictions, but Wikipedia dismisses him as a conspiracy theorist who has made unfounded claims about vaccine harms. In trendy metropolitan elite circles, any mention of some outspoken covid critics, such as the late Nobel Laureate, Prof. Luc Montagnier, or investigative journalist Dr Naomi Wolf, is to invite ridicule. Yet some regular pundits on mainstream TV seem to get away with deceptively bold critiques of government policies. This leads us to the curious case of Laura Dodsworth and her association with Spiked Online.
The Spiked sect grew out of the tiny Revolutionary Communist Party, which disbanded in the early 1990s. When I briefly flirted with this grouplet as a naïve and disillusioned student in 1985, they positioned themselves to the left of the larger neo-Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party. While the SWP supported a United Ireland, but condemned all attacks against civilian targets, the RCP gave its unconditional support to the IRA in the struggle against British imperialism. Fast forward 40 years and the Spiked Gang now give their unconditional support to the State of Israel in the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the escalation of hostilities in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict has already poisoned community relations in many cosmopolitan cities. Whatever the truth about Israeli or Hamas war crimes may be, there is no justification for intimidating other civilians either for their religious affiliation or their stance on this conflict. There is no excuse for vandalising Jewish-owned shops, but who is stoking all this hatred and, more important, who will benefit most from the ensuing culture of fear and intimidation? That’s the common thread between the covid and Middle East crises. The mainstream media suppresses rational discussion over objective truth, while spreading fear of your neighbours by redefining hate speech as anything that runs against the mainstream narrative. Thus, it was hateful to oppose mask mandates as bare human faces may have exposed some vulnerable people to airborne pathogens, but it was not hateful to ridicule and ostracise anyone who refused to take government-injectables. As for British Muslims, they can quickly go from heroes to zeroes in the eyes of the bien-pensant establishment left. One minute they are victims of Islamophobia, racism, foreign wars or the legacy of British imperialism, the next they are reactionary homophobes and/or antisemites.
Now I do not claim to know the whole truth about the tragic explosion at the Al-Ahli Hospital that caused hundreds of deaths, but aerial footage shows vast swathes of the densely populated Northern Gaza Strip have been flattened. Both the IDF and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as well as Hamas itself have denied responsibility. Could a makeshift surface-to-surface missile hit a car park or could it only have been Israel’s more advanced Iron Dome System?
The question is why would the author of a State of Fear and Free Your Mind cite the Al Ahli hospital blast as an example of BBC fake news? Why would she be so certain that the IDF did not fire missiles into Northern Gaza with massive civilian casualties, but yet failed dismally to cite countless outright untruths spouted by BBC talking heads during the covid era? What about the endlessly repeated claims that the mRNA jabs prevent the spread of covid and saved millions of lives, based on wild exaggerations of the numbers who might have died of/with covid, or Devi Sridhar’s infamous claim on children’s TV that the mRNA shots were safe and effective for children, despite the fact that no healthy children had died with covid before 2021 and there has since been a marked rise in children and young adults with myocarditis and a disturbing number of unexplained sudden deaths.
Andrew Bridgen MP had the courage to raise these issues in the House of Commons and has been the target of a concerted smear campaign. Although Ms Dodsworth attended a few anti-lockdown protests and boycotted the 2021 Spectator’s Festival of Ideas over their covid pass policy, she’s steered clear of all scientific questions relating to the jabs that governments wanted to inject into us at all costs. Did Laura ever ask why governments would go to such extreme lengths to impose medical martial law or was it just the woke left latching onto the latest fad?
Future historians may well debate why the BBC suppressed dissident voices much more strictly on the covid fiasco than on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Leo Kearse may have a point in claiming that Palestinian Lives Matter, with Greta Thunberg’s full blessing, is the new Black Lives Matter. The only trouble with this analogy is that countless thousands of Palestinians have lost their lives in Gaza at the mercy of the IDF over the last ten days, while the US and the Israeli air forces bomb neighbouring Syria. On cue, Joe Biden reads a speech calling for another $106 billion to help Ukraine and Israel to defeat the enemies of freedom and democracy. Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese warships have quietly sailed to the Eastern Mediterranean as President Xi Jinping promises to defend Iran in the event of a US or Israeli attack. World War Three is sadly no laughing matter. We’re not talking about the sad case of a former drug addict, George Floyd or scenes of disaffected urban youngsters looting and burning down retail outlets. We’re talking about an escalation of the Middle East quagmire that could cost millions of lives. I fear many analysts fall into the trap of siding either with the Collective West, aligned with Israel, or with the new Collective East and South, aligned with the Palestinian cause. Neither side will win. The Chinese are still doing big business with the USA. President Xi Jinping was happy to welcome California Governor, Gavin Newsom to Beijing the other day. What we are witnessing is the demise of the American World Order and the rise of a global technocracy. The elites are quite happy to see much of the Middle East go up in flames and then to build their brave new network of smart cities modelled on Doha and Dubai. Affluent Israelis can easily migrate to Ukraine, while poorer Israelis may perish if Iran ever retaliates with Chinese support.
This is not the time to support Israel or Hamas, but to avert World War Three before it’s too late. Alas Spiked talking heads, as edgy as they may appear to the uninitiated, are controlled opposition. That’s why they’re always on the telly.