Makhachkala airport in Dagestan (Picture: Fred Schaerli)
The media are using the storming of an airport in Dagestan, in Russia, this week as way of smearing the pro‑Palestine movement.
BBC Radio Four’s Today programme on Monday devoted as much time to the antisemitic, anti-Israel incident as it did to the horror being unleashed on Gaza.
Senior United Nations official Thomas White told the programme that Gaza is “on the brink of collapse”, with a breakdown of society as all vital supplies have run out. He said people were already going without food and that basic sanitation systems no longer function. The picture is “catastrophic”, he said.
Thousands that have so far survived repeated waves of missile attacks, will now be at the mercy of killer diseases. “Worrying times for people in Gaza,” agreed the presenters.
But the real story for them was the attempt to storm the runway in Dagestan. The BBC said that news would be awful for people in Britain—especially those that survived the Holocaust.
To make passing reference to the Nazi crime of the industrialised murder of six million Jews while discussing an antisemitic incident in Russia is not just a journalistic slight.
It is part of a policy to conflate Palestine supporters with one of the worst crimes in human history. And it is also a way of minimising the continuing atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza.
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