Peter Oborne (@OborneTweets) confronts Richard Burgess, the BBC's Executive News Editor, about their coverage of the Gaza genocide and the data revealed by @cfmmuk at the Houses of Parliament.

Burgess's response: "I'm not an expert on the Middle East". pic.twitter.com/WpwjrW4T0q

— NewsCord (@newscord_org) June 18, 2025

🔴 Jonathan Cook | Veteran journalist Peter Oborne eviscerated the BBC this week over its shameful reporting of Gaza – and unusually, he managed to do so face-to-face with the BBC’s executive news editor, Richard Burgess, during a parliamentary meeting. | Oborne’s remarks relate to a new and damning report by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which analysed in detail the BBC’s Gaza coverage in the year following Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023. The report found a “pattern of bias, double standards and silencing of Palestinian voices.” These aren’t editorial slip-ups. They reveal a systematic, long-term skewing of editorial coverage in Israel’s favour. ● Here are a few key statistical findings from the Centre for Media Monitoring’s report on BBC coverage of Gaza over the year following 7 October 2023:

■ The BBC ran more than 30 times more victim profiles of Israelis than Palestinians.
■ The BBC interviewed more than twice as many Israelis as Palestinians.
■ The BBC asked 38 of its guests to condemn Hamas. It asked no one to condemn Israel’s mass killing of civilians, or its attacks on hospitals and schools.
■ Only 0.5% of BBC articles mentioned Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.The BBC mentioned “occupation” – the essential context for understanding the relationship between Israel and Palestinians – only 14 times in news articles when providing context to the events of 7 October 2023. That amounted to 0.3% of articles. Additional context – decades of Israeli apartheid rule and Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza — were entirely missing from the coverage.
■ The BBC described Israeli captives as “hostages”, while Palestinian detainees, including children held without charge, were called “prisoners”. During one major hostage exchange in which 90 Palestinians were swapped for three Israelis, 70% of BBC articles focused on those three Israelis.
■ The BBC covered Ukraine with twice as many articles as Gaza in the time period, even though the Gaza story was newer and Israeli crimes even graver than Russia ones. The corporation was twice as likely to use sympathetic language for Ukrainian victims than it was for Palestinian victims.
■ In coverage, Palestinians were usually described as having “died” or been “killed” in air strikes, without mention of who launched those strikes. Israeli victims, on the other hand, were “massacred”, “slaughtered” and “butchered” – and the author of the violence was named, even though, as we have seen, the Hannibal directive clouded the picture in at least some of those cases.

Rutte says higher spending top priority | Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte has said there is "no alternative" to the 32 member states spending more on defence, given the threat from Russia and the broader international security situation. ● The leaders of the Western defensive alliance have gathered in The Hague, where they are set to commit to spending 5% of national output on defence and related infrastructure. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has described the meeting as historic. ● It is US President Donald Trump's first Nato summit since 2019 and as he travelled he appeared to raise questions about the alliance's mutual defence guarantee under which an attack on one member is seen as attack on all. ● Wednesday's main session is set to last only two and a half hours, with a brief final statement expected to endorse a spending pledge of 3.5% of GDP on defence and a further 1.5% on "defence-related expenditure", although Spain's prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has described the target as unreasonable.

✅ Eric Zuesse | Almost as soon as FDR died, Truman turned the Government to be and become what has since been consistently neoconservative | In fact, the evilness of the people who lead Israel has actually been blatant ever since Israel’s founding in 1948, but Israel has been heavily backed by the U.S. Government throughout the entire period, and decent Jews in America at that time of its creation were outraged at the U.S. Government’s support of the Israelis against the Palestinians. For example, Albert Einstein was a prominent American when he was one of the signatories to a letter to the editor of the New York Times, on 4 December 1948, in which he and many other prominent American Jews condemned as “fascists” (but hadn’t Americans just fought AGAINST fascists in WW II?) Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir and their gangs who slaughtered whole Arab villages in order to seize their land for Zionist Jews to take as ‘Israel’, and the letter’s signatories strongly condemned that movement — the movement which created this apartheid racist ‘Israel’, called “Zionism” — as being “akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties,” against which America had waged and won World War II.

🔴 Trump official to The Grayzone: CIA’s Ratcliffe acts as ‘Mossad stenographer’ on Iran (M. Blumenthal & A. Parampil)

✅ Trump Threatens to Bomb Iran to Smithereens for "Playing By the Rules" (Mike Whitney) | Did we mention that the Trump campaign was given over $100 million by wealthy Zionist donors whose driving ambition is to topple the government in Tehran and absorb territorial Iran into Greater Israel? Could that be a factor?

Lavrov just called the IAEA spies (in a polite way). | ️Lavrov commented on the demand to provide the IAEA with access to Iran's nuclear facilities, noting that the West has a serious influence on the secretariats of international organizations.

💬 "Now he (Grossi) is speaking, demanding that Iran immediately provide the IAEA with access to nuclear facilities to make sure where the enriched material is, and in general to see what is going on there. Are there any guarantees that this will not leak? I do not see such guarantees. To find out: you know, we bombed and tried, we did not find anything there, you hid it somewhere - show us where. This is the director general of a respected agency. This is a question about what I spoke about from the podium - that the West has a serious influence on the secretariats of international organizations."

■ Iran's parliament passes law to suspend cooperation with the IAEA (Cyberspec News)
■ Spying for enemies: Beware ‘intergovernmental’ organizations (Al Mayadeen)
✅ UN official gave Israel cover – and Iran paid the price (Sasan Karimi)
✅ Middle East in Crisis – 5 (M. K. BHADRAKUMAR)

✅ Simplicius | Thus, Israel was slowly losing its capability to deal damage, and more importantly, rapidly losing its capability to reflect damage from Iranian ballistic missiles. Thus, a quick claim of “victory” was in order to wrap things up before the humiliation got too palpable for the general populace. | Yesterday, Iran retaliated for the US ‘strikes’ on its nuclear facilities, concluding the final act of the choreographed play we’ve been witnessing. It launched Operation Basharat al-Fath (بشارت الفتح), which reportedly means ‘Glad Tidings of Victory’, or ‘Good News of the Conquest’ if you ask Google, hitting the US Al Udaid base in Qatar. [...] The US claims everything was intercepted, and of course, again it was revealed that the entire act was ‘agreed upon’ between both sides. Afterwards, Trump responded in a way indicating that he was fine with letting Iran blow off some steam in order to conclude the off-ramp for everyone involved.

Daniele Ganser is a historian with a focus on contemporary history since 1945 and international politics. His main research focuses on peace studies, geostrategy, covert warfare, resource conflicts, and economic policy. Dr. Ganser discusses Operation Gladio, the stay-behind mission of NATO's secret army to fight on after a possible Soviet invasion. The secret army and hidden weaponry outside of public scrutiny enabled violent terror against Europe to ensure the correct political forces would have the power.

✅ Alexander Rostovtsev | From this point onward, the British pustule will be emblazoned on the nose of the despised extinct one, but in Russia, everything will be cleaner. | The decision to designate the British Council as an undesirable organisation was made by the Ministry of Justice back in December 2022. This measure became part of the general policy of the Russian state to limit the activities of foreign NGOs that contradict the interests of national security. ■ FSB investigation reveals the close ties between the British Council and the UK's foreign intelligence service MI6, which is not news. The legendary head of the KGB's illegal intelligence service, Yuri Drozdov, warned about the spy nature of BS, and the hacker group Anonymous put the final point in this matter by conducting its own investigation. Interestingly, despite the official declaration of BS as an undesirable organization, the office continued to operate in Moscow for almost another year and a half under the guise of "cultural programs" of the British embassy.

Ukraine's air defense will be strengthened at Russia's expense | He added that our support would never waver and repeated his call for Russian President Vladimir Putin to return to the negotiating table during the stalled peace talks. ● Volodymyr Zelensky arrived at the NATO meeting shortly after meeting King Charles and Starmer in London. The latter publicly backed the Ukrainian guest when acute tensions in the Middle East threatened to overshadow Ukraine's problems. ● British Defense Secretary John Healey warned that it is in Putin's interest to focus the world's attention on the conflict between Israel and Iran, and we must keep our focus on Ukraine. ● At a panel discussion at the NATO summit, Healey said the defense of Ukraine will remain a bipartisan issue in the UK and has strong public support. (Translation: DeepL + Grammarly)

While defending Serbia’s right to military preparedness, Vucic rejected suggestions that the country poses a threat to its neighbors. | Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has stated that Serbia has been secretly rearming its military in recent years, with the goal of significantly boosting its capabilities to ensure national freedom and security, BGNES repoirts. According to him, the Serbian Armed Forces are now stronger than ever, and the extent of the country’s new military capabilities has been deliberately kept under wraps. “Few people know what weapons we’ve brought in. We’ve done it in secret,” he said. ● Vucic pointed to a growing defense alignment between Kosovo, Albania, and Croatia, claiming that the three countries are “creating a military alliance” and have repeatedly encouraged Bulgaria to join their efforts. In this context, he argued, Serbia is compelled to reinforce its own military strength. The president announced that a major military parade in September will serve as a public display of Serbia’s enhanced arsenal.