Georgia to sue BBC over ‘absurd’ chemical weapons claims
RT | December 3, 2025
Georgia has announced that it is suing the BBC “for spreading dirty, false accusations,” after the British state broadcaster alleged that the government in Tbilisi used chemical weapons against protesters last year.
The South Caucasus nation was rocked by violent pro-EU demonstrations in late 2024, which broke out after the government temporarily froze integration talks with the bloc, accusing it of weaponizing Tbilisi’s accession bid for political leverage.
In an article on Monday, the BBC claimed that the Georgian authorities used WWI-era chemical weapons during the protests – an allegation which the ruling Georgian Dream party said was based on “absurd and false information.”
According to the BBC investigation, authorities used an outdated riot-control agent mixed into the water fired from water cannons to disperse protesters.
Tbilisi said the broadcaster provided no evidence to substantiate its claims.
Despite approaching the BBC for an explanation and giving exhaustive answers to its questions, the Georgian government “received a cornucopia of lies” and “serious accusations” in response, it said.
“We have decided to start a legal dispute against the false media in international courts. We will use all possible legal means to hold the so-called media that spread lies accountable for spreading dirty, false accusations.”
Georgian Dream claimed that the BBC “has no moral or professional inhibitions about carrying out dirty orders and spreading lies,” and referred to recent scandals which have damaged the broadcaster’s credibility.
Earlier this month, several top-level staff resigned after it emerged that the BBC had aired a documentary in 2024 that spliced together two parts of Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech at the US Capitol in a way that it admitted falsely gave the “impression of a direct call for violent action.”
Trump has accused the broadcaster of meddling in US elections with the controversial 2024 documentary, and threatened to sue for “anywhere between $1 to $5 billion.”
The BBC is losing more than £1 billion ($1.3 billion) a year in mass cancellations and fee evasion, according to a recent UK parliamentary report.
BBC Editors Blocked Story on Latest Fluoride Science Over ‘Scaremongering’ Concerns, Former Reporter Says
By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | November 19, 2025
A former BBC health correspondent said editors repeatedly prevented him from reporting on emerging scientific debates over the safety of water fluoridation, dismissing the story as “scaremongering.”
Michele Paduano spent three decades reporting for the BBC from the West Midlands, the first region in the U.K. to fluoridate its water supply, in 1964.
At a Fluoride Action Network (FAN) press conference on Tuesday, Paduano said he became interested in water fluoridation after reviewing the landmark 2024 decision by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The court found that the U.S. fluoridation level of 0.7 milligrams per liter (mg/L) posed an “unreasonable risk” to children’s health. The West Midlands fluoridates its water at 1 mg/L, about 30% higher than the recommended U.S. level.
Paduano said professor Vyvyan Howard, a pathologist specializing in toxicology and a long-time collaborator, alerted him to several major cohort studies in top academic journals linking water fluoridation to lower IQ in children.
Paduano said mainstream media rebuttals were “so strong and absolute” that he knew publishing a story on the findings would be difficult.
He said he pursued the story only after reading the September 2024 court decision, which cited new evidence pointing to potential neurodevelopmental risks at lower fluoride concentrations.
“At that point, it felt like my public duty to tell people in the West Midlands that there was potentially a problem,” he said.
BBC editors rejected story as ‘scaremongering’
Paduano said he pitched the fluoride story through the BBC’s planning process and arranged an interview with West Midlands anti-fluoridation campaigner Joy Warren. Senior online and television editors abruptly cancelled the interview.
“They told me the story was scaremongering,” he said. Internal BBC scientists and public-health staff insisted there was no credible new evidence. Paduano said he challenged the decision and urged editors to read the U.S. court judgment, but they instead accused him of bias.
“As a BBC journalist, impartiality is fundamental. But impartiality also means reporting new evidence when it emerges,” he said.
Paduano continued investigating the issue and spoke with professor John Fawell, a leading U.K. pro-fluoridation expert and adviser to the World Health Organization (WHO).
As a result of their conversation, Paduano said Fawell acknowledged that recent research should prompt the U.K. to consider lowering fluoridation levels to match U.S. and Canadian guidance. Fawell, who co-authored a book on fluoridation’s oral health benefits, urged U.K. officials to reexamine the country’s dosage and consider aligning it with the U.S.
“If somebody who is a leading pro-fluoride proponent adjusts their position, that is a story,” Paduano said. But he said BBC editors still refused to let him cover it.
Paduano said he then emailed CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs Deborah Turness and BBC Director-General Tim Davie, but the response was “radio silence.” He then took his concerns to Nicholas Serota, a BBC board member responsible for editorial standards.
In the meantime, Paduano said he learned of planned BBC coverage in the North East about proposed fluoridation expansion, and he told Serota that failing to mention the U.S. court decision would constitute “significant censorship.”
Paduano said the article on the North East fluoridation expansion that eventually appeared briefly mentioned the U.S. judgment. He continued arguing that the West Midlands — which has fluoridated its water for decades — should also have reported on the new developments.
The editorial board refused to cover the story. “Concern was that we would be scaremongering, we would frighten people and that the science wasn’t there,” Paduano said.
Paduano said frustrations over fluoride reporting, along with broader concerns about the broadcaster’s impartiality and its close relationship with government, ultimately pushed him to leave the BBC.
Soon after, the BBC published an article about a recommendation by Worcestershire public health officials to expand fluoridation countywide. In what Paduano described as “the ultimate bias,” the article didn’t refer to the U.S. judgment or related research.
After leaving the BBC, Paduano contacted The Independent, which published his story on Fawell’s changing position on water fluoridation.
Paduano said he again approached the BBC, arguing that national coverage proved the issue’s newsworthiness, but editors held their ground and directed him to the complaints process — which he says has resulted in little progress.
‘We should avoid worrying our audiences unduly,’ BBC says
The BBC has not responded publicly to Paduano’s allegations, and it did not respond to The Defender’s request for comment.
The organization did reply to complaint letters from Howard and FAN’s science adviser Paul Connett, Ph.D., author of “The Case Against Fluoride: How Hazardous Waste Ended Up in Our Drinking Water and the Bad Science and Powerful Politics That Keep It There.” The letters urged the BBC to show “objectivity and professionalism on the latest research into the risks of water fluoridation” and to investigate Paduano’s claims.
In its initial response, the BBC complaints team said it had “provided a fair and appropriate view” of the water fluoridation issue.
In a follow-up response to Connett and Howard, the BBC defended its decision not to mention recent science linking fluoride exposure to neurodevelopmental issues in children.
The BBC said its reporting reflects “the majority view — from the World Health Organisation, US Centre for Disease Control, the American Dental Society [sic] and others,” and argued that it maintains a “higher bar for publishing stories around health risk.”
The BBC cited its editorial guidelines:
“The reporting of risk can have an impact on the public’s perception of that risk, particularly with health or crime stories. We should avoid worrying our audiences unduly and contextualise our reports to be clear about the likelihood of the risk occurring. This is particularly true in reporting health stories that may cause individuals to alter their behaviour in ways that could be harmful.”
Kevin Silverton, who signed the letter, said the complaints team could not continue corresponding and that further concerns should be taken to the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit.
BBC reporting on fluoride ‘can’t be trusted’
Connett told The Defender he was “shocked” when the BBC justified its position by citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American Dental Association (ADA) and the WHO as representing the majority expert view. He said:
“As you well know, the CDC oral health division’s mission was to promote fluoridation, and the ADA has avidly promoted it for years — so much so that any study that found any harm was immediately dismissed as being bad science, and the WHO has not looked at fluoride’s neurotoxicity for many years, if ever. It is incredible to me that this very large government-funded body should rely on such one-sided, essentially partisan.”
Connett said the public and local officials rely on the BBC for accurate information, but on fluoride, “it can’t be trusted.” He said:
“When a major media entity gets involved, you would hope that they would do their homework and review the science when it is available for them. In this case the issue should have been easy because it did not entail slogging through all the studies themselves. They had a major review by a government entity, the National Toxicology Program, and they also had the judgment of a judge in a seven-year lawsuit.
“In short, the BBC is abusing the public’s trust on this important health issue, and that is shocking. Scientists like myself have an obligation to speak out. In our case, we were lucky to have a journalist to give us an inside view of the censorship that went on. We are often not that lucky.”
Related articles in The Defender
- Breaking: Fluoride in Water Poses ‘Unreasonable Risk’ to Children, Federal Judge Rules
- CDC Stands by Water Fluoridation After Report Linking Fluoride to Lower IQs in Kids Finally Published
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
BBC Ignored Internal Request to Correct Claim Anas Al-Sharif Worked With Hamas
The BBC report remains uncorrected – evidence of a culture of intimidation, fear and political control
By Harriett Williamson | Novara Media | September 10, 2025
The BBC ignored an internal request to correct reporting that smeared a high-profile Palestinian journalist killed by Israel as a Hamas operative, in what a whistleblower has described as a “grave editorial breach”.
According to a leaked email seen by Novara Media, Global Journalism – part of the BBC Global News team, which is run by BBC deputy director Jonathan Munro – sent an “essential amendment and correction” request regarding BBC News reporting which claimed that Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif “did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current war”.
Al-Sharif was killed on 10 August in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a tent marked “PRESS” outside the entrance of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. Five other media workers were also assassinated in the strike: Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and photographers Ibrahim Thaher and Mohamed Nofal, freelance photojournalist Mohammed al-Khalidi and cameraman Momen Aliwa.
In a statement posted on X/Twitter, Israel said: “Al-Sharif was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell and advanced rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and IDF troops. Intelligence and documents from Gaza, including rosters, terrorist training lists and salary records, prove he was a Hamas operative integrated into Al Jazeera.” Accompanying the post were unverified screenshots from spreadsheets. The IDF provided no justification for the killing of al-Sharif’s five colleagues in the same airstrike.
Al Jazeera has categorically denied that al-Sharif was in any way Hamas affiliated.
The leaked email, dated 18 August, was sent by Global Journalism to hundreds of BBC journalists via two distribution addresses. It singled out a line in a BBC News article for correction: “The BBC understands Sharif did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current war”.
Screenshots seen by Novara Media show the email was sent to a significant number of senior journalists, including World Service Languages controller Fiona Crack, senior news editors Kate Forbes and Abigail Mobbs, director of audience growth Jamie Wakefield, and head of digital content for World Service, Claire Williams.
The email said the sentence “should be amended” to: “A source has told the BBC that Sharif had worked for a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict, but Al Jazeera has denied this and the BBC News Arabic correspondent also says that he has seen no evidence.”
The email is signed by Global Journalism, part of BBC Global News which is led by Munro, who currently serves as BBC News’ senior controller of news content and the deputy CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs.
One BBC employee told Novara Media that the email went out to at least 1,200 journalists. The BBC disputed this and says the number is closer to 400. However, a screenshot seen by Novara Media confirms that just one of the two distribution email addresses goes to over 1,200 accounts.
At the time of reporting, the line in question remains uncorrected on the BBC News article, last updated 13 August. The same claim was also presented as fact on the BBC News liveblog on 11 August in reporting by Jon Donnison from Jerusalem, as well as cropping up in BBC Verify reporting on TikTok.
A BBC employee told Novara Media: “This leaked email […] exposes from the inside the culture of intimidation, fear and political control that journalists are subjected to within the corporation.
“The email admits a reported line that should never have made it onto the BBC’s front page was published without evidence, yet the error remains uncorrected and no one has been held accountable.
“In any other newsroom, such a grave editorial breach on a matter of major public interest, the targeted killing of a fellow journalist, would have led to senior resignations.”
A BBC spokesperson said: “We stand by our reporting in the BBC News article you reference from 13 August and liveblog from 11 August, and can assure audiences that we scrupulously fact check and verify all information we obtain. This internal email was sent to a specific team about a different article and contained a suggested amendment that was incorrect. We are updating our copy to remove the amendment where it has been applied.”
Munro became global director of BBC News in September 2024. The role includes leading the BBC World Service, overseeing BBC Monitoring, and continuing as deputy CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs
In the months leading up to al-Sharif’s death, Israeli officials repeatedly claimed the reporter was a Hamas operative, including in a ‘kill list’ graphic with the names and pictures of six Al Jazeera journalists.
Two weeks before al-Sharif was killed, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP) called on the international community to protect him due to “repeated threats” from IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee. The CJP said accusations of al-Sharif being a Hamas operative “represent an effort to manufacture consent to kill al-Sharif”.
In August, it was revealed that Israel has a secret military unit specifically tasked with linking Palestinian journalists to Hamas and Islamic Jihad as part of a drive to tamp down on global condemnation for the murder of journalists in Gaza.
This isn’t the first time the BBC has been criticised for biased reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A blistering report from the Centre for Media Monitoring in June showed that Israeli deaths were given 33 times more coverage per fatality by the corporation, that both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards, and that content consistently shut down allegations of genocide.
Last week, Novara Media revealed that BBC reps for the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) discouraged colleagues from attending a vigil in London – organised by the NUJ – for their murdered colleagues in Gaza.
Gaza is currently the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. Since October 2023, Israel has killed more media workers in Gaza than in both world wars, the US civil war, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the wars in former Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan combined.
Harriet Williamson is a commissioning editor and reporter for Novara Media.
Dehumanize and destroy: How western media helped target Gaza’s journalists
By Robert Inlakesh | The Cradle | August 14, 2025
On 29 September 2024, an Israeli airstrike targeted the home of displaced Palestinian journalist Wafa al-Udaini in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. She, her husband, and their two young daughters were killed. Her two sons survived but were left injured and orphaned.
Udaini had long been a target. At the start of the war on Gaza, she appeared on a TalkTV broadcast hosted by British anchor Julia Hartley-Brewer, who had just finished a soft interview with Israeli army spokesperson Peter Lerner. When Udaini described Israeli attacks on Palestinians as a “massacre” – using the same word Lerner had applied to Hamas – she was ridiculed and cut off. The segment went viral. Israeli media outlets weaponized the interview to smear Udaini. She was soon receiving direct threats from the Israeli military. In private conversations, she described herself as a marked woman. In the months that followed, when asked by The Cradle if she had moved from her home in Al-Rimal, Gaza City, she said, “I can’t say, sorry.” She added:
“The anchor killed me … They are using the interview to justify killing me.”
Months later, Israel killed Wafa.
Wafa’s assassination was not isolated. It was the culmination of a campaign to normalize the erasure of Palestinian journalists. The occupation army even has a special unit dedicated to this war crime, known as the ‘Legitimization Cell.’
The killing of Anas al-Sharif
The most prominent recent example was Israel’s assassination of one of Gaza’s most famous reporters, Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif, and his entire crew. Nearly 270 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 2023. Western press has actively facilitated the cover-up of the murder of journalists in Gaza and failed to hold the occupation state accountable. Calls for accountability have been challenging Israel and western media outlets that have provided cover for the deliberate campaign to murder journalists.
Back in October 2024, the Israeli military published a hit list consisting of six Palestinian journalists working for Al Jazeera, claiming that the occupation state had obtained documents proving they were either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) militants. Sharif was on that list.
Al Jazeera outright rejected the allegations. The so-called intelligence files released by Israel were riddled with contradictions, fabrications, and recycled narratives. One claimed Sharif had been a commander in the Qassam Brigades’ Nukhba unit; another stated he had been injured in a training exercise in early 2023 and deemed unfit for combat. Both cannot be true. In reality, neither is.
When the occupation state announced Sharif’s assassination, it escalated its smear campaign by accusing him of firing rockets. Speaking to The Cradle on condition of anonymity, a senior Hamas official dismisses the claim as “ridiculous,” noting that rocket units and Nukhba forces are not the same, and that Anas was never affiliated with either.
These were not the first threats Anas received. On 22 November 2023, he publicly revealed that Israeli officers had threatened him via WhatsApp, and pinpointed his location. Weeks later, his 90-year-old father was killed in an airstrike on the family home in Jabalia Refugee Camp.
The Israeli military’s documents alleging Anas was a militant have been available for almost a year. Yet no major media outlet attempted to verify them. On the contrary, both the UN Special Rapporteur on press freedom, Irene Khan, and the Committee to Protect Journalists dismissed the Israeli claims. But the disinformation campaign intensified.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry began circulating old images of Anas with Hamas figures. Pro-Israel social media accounts unearthed decade-old tweets in which he expressed support for resistance. US attorney Stanley Cohen tells The Cradle:
“Under international humanitarian law and the law of war, journalists are protected as civilians, thus targeting them can constitute a war crime whether they are seen interviewing combatants or in their reporting have favorably written of or even supported them and their goals.”
Collusion and amplification
Possessing access to all this information and Israel’s long record of fabricating stories, the western media continued to amplify Tel Aviv’s talking points and character assassinations of Gaza’s journalists.
While Israel produced a series of claims to justify the murder of Anas al-Sharif, no such justifications were issued to explain why they struck the well-known tent used by the Al Jazeera broadcast team – which included correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, assistant Mohammed Noufal, and cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Moamen Aliwa.
Yet Reuters ran with the headline “Israel kills Al Jazeera journalist it says was Hamas leader,” a title triggering so much backlash that it forced them to change it to the sanitized “Israel strike kills Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza”. German outlet Bild, which is also the bestselling newspaper in Europe, published perhaps the most outrageous headline of all, entitled “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza,” also later altering their piece to read “Killed journalist allegedly was a terrorist.” Fox News and Canada’s National Post joined the chorus, parroting the occupation army’s narrative.
BBC coverage was equally complicit. In a profile-style article, the British broadcaster stated, “The BBC understands Sharif worked for a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict.” This unverified claim contradicts Sharif’s own criticisms of Hamas, aired before the war. Even the Palestinian resistance movement has denied any formal affiliation. Hamas official Bassem Naim tells The Cradle that there is no known relationship between Sharif and “the movement or its military wing.”
Documented targeting and newsroom dissent
Western media failures began long before these assassinations. Israel’s systematic targeting of media workers has been copiously documented. In August 2024, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published an open letter signed by over 60 rights groups and journalist unions, calling on the EU to take action against Israel’s “unprecedented killing of journalists and other violations of media freedom” in Gaza as part of “widespread and systematic abuses.”
Inside newsrooms, dissent has grown. Marina Watanabe, formerly of the LA Times, was barred from covering Palestine for three months after signing a petition against the killing of journalists. In July, over 100 BBC employees and 306 media professionals signed an open letter accusing the broadcaster of “anti-Palestinian racism.”
The BBC letter also states:
“The BBC’s editorial decisions seem increasingly out of step with reality. We have been forced to conclude that decisions are made to fit a political agenda rather than serve the needs of audiences. As industry insiders and as BBC staff, we have experienced this firsthand. The issue has become even more urgent with recent escalations in the region. Again, BBC coverage has appeared to downplay Israel’s role, reinforcing an ‘Israel first’ framing that compromises our credibility.”
According to Cohen, if media agencies or reporters are found to have willingly participated in propaganda that gives cover for targeting journalists in Gaza, “it could constitute conspiracy to further acts of genocide as it carries with it a state of mind and intent.” He argues that while such cases against the media and journalists can be difficult to win in court, there is precedent for punishment.
However, western corporate media has not only been accused of intentionally aiding Israel in whitewashing war crimes, but has also been implicated in specific cases of outright dehumanization of Gaza’s journalists that have directly correlated to threats and harassment.
Impunity paved by past killings
The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has been sounding the alarm on the murder of journalists in Gaza since 14 December 2023. Yet western corporate media has continued to feign ignorance and treat Israel’s repeated lies as if they are credible.
Reuters, which just published and then changed its biased headline covering the assassination of Sharif, is perhaps one of the worst offenders in willfully providing cover for Israel. On 13 October 2023, Tel Aviv targeted a group of journalists in southern Lebanon, killing Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah. At the time, Reuters refused to name the attacker, saying only that the munition came from the direction of Israel. It took until 7 December for the outlet to publish an investigation confirming what everyone already knew: Israel was responsible. By then, the window for accountability had closed.
On 11 May 2021, Al Jazeera‘s Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while covering an Israeli army raid in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. Despite overwhelming evidence and international outrage, her killers faced no consequences – a precedent that paved the way for today’s open season on Gaza’s journalists.
That silence, or worse, that complicity has consequences. Honest journalism demands scrutiny, not stenography. Every time western media echoes Tel Aviv’s lies, it helps normalize the slaughter of Palestinian journalists – not out of ignorance, but to deliberately spread propaganda.
How Western media aids Israel’s genocide and targeted killing of journalists in Gaza
Israel and the end of The Times
By Marzieh Hashemi | Press TV | August 12, 2025
Never in the history of mankind have human beings witnessed a genocide in real time, in the way we are watching what is unfolding in Gaza today.
We have seen people being sniped, hospitals being bulldozed, refugees in tents being burned alive, the starvation of the population, and so much more, on our screens.
Most of what we are witnessing is due to the tireless and courageous commitment of Palestinian journalists in Gaza who know that they can be killed at any time by the regime, but despite this, continue to show us the reality of what’s happening on the ground in Gaza.
It is an extremely difficult job for them; however, the streaming of videos and providing live coverage have finally helped change the narrative on Palestine and its occupation globally.
Before this latest round of genocide, no matter the type of brutality and oppression that Palestinians endured, they would be confronted with comments such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” or “the Israelis have no choice because of Hamas’ missiles raining down upon the innocent Israeli population.”
But now, the greatest fear of the Israeli regime is coming to fruition. Zionists are losing control of the narrative. The truth has been seeping out, one war crime after another. People around the world have awakened and many no longer believe in the hasbara version of events.
The child-murdering regime tried to prevent this from happening. Thus, from the very beginning of this latest round of genocidal war against the Palestinian people, international journalists were not allowed by the Israeli regime to enter Gaza.
The regime gave the excuse of protecting the journalists’ safety, but the reality is that it did not want the real story of what is happening in Gaza to be exposed.
Thus, the primary responsibility of showing the reality on the ground fell on the backs of Palestinian journalists, whom the Israeli regime continues to try to control, discredit or silence.
Due to this, the deliberate targeting of Palestinian journalists by the regime has been ruthless and has intensified with time.
The cold-blooded assassinations of journalists have been taken to a whole new level in Gaza. Journalists have never been targeted in the way they are today.
As of the writing of this article, 242 journalists have been killed in Gaza, with the latest five murders taking place just on Sunday night. A tent housing Al Jazeera journalists was deliberately targeted by the regime, killing all five members of the crew. Israel has taken responsibility for the assassinations, saying that the tent housed a “Hamas cell.”
This is the action of a regime to which Western powers have given impunity. Israel is not sanctioned due to killing babies in incubators. It is not even held accountable for starving a whole population of people. It is not pressured in any way.
Thus, during the last 22 months, we have seen the targeting of journalists expand throughout the region, including the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Iran, where the main news building of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) was targeted, killing three people.
Why? Because it can. It is not held accountable. If any condemnations are made, they are simply some verbal jargon on the international level, resulting in no consequences for the regime to stop its illegal actions.
Thus, the Western political machine and its corporate media are totally complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. One day after the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, many Western outlets such as BBC, Reuters, and Fox News repeated Israeli accusations that Anas was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell or that he once worked for Hamas’ media office.
Instead of showing its outrage at the targeting of fellow journalists, the BBC, which prides itself on being the largest broadcast corporation in the world, simply repeated Israeli hasbara.
This is the reason 238 journalists have been killed in Gaza over the past 22 months and their colleagues in Western countries have done nothing about it or have instead magnified the lies of the Zionist regime. These so-called journalists are toeing the line of the Zionists.
Why haven’t the BBC, Reuters, New York Times or other media entities called Israel out for preventing them from sending journalists to Gaza?
Why try to demonize the messenger who has just been assassinated, unless you too, like the Israeli regime, want to keep the message from getting out?
Is the exposure of the real narrative of Palestine and Israel fatal for you too? You are all complicit in genocide and your efforts to stifle the truth are too late, as too many people have awakened.
The narrative has changed. Increasingly more people are realizing that Palestine was not a land without a people, as they had been taught, nor had Palestinians agreed upon their land being taken.
There was a Nakba that has never ended and all parties complicit in it are being exposed, as the world awakens and shows its disdain for genocide and its supporters.
Marzieh Hashemi is a US-born, Iran-based journalist, commentator and documentary filmmaker.
Why BBC editors must one day stand trial for colluding in Israel’s genocide
Journalist Peter Oborne sets out six ways the state broadcaster has wilfully misled audiences on Israel’s destruction of Gaza
By Jonathan Cook | June 20, 2025
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.
Oborne was one of several journalists to confront Burgess.
Oborne makes a series of important points that illustrate why the BBC’s slanted, Israel-friendly news agenda amounts to genocide denial, and means executives like Burgess are directly complicit in Israeli war crimes:
1. The BBC has never mentioned the Hannibal directive, invoked by Israel on 7 October 2023, that green-lit the murder of Israeli soldiers and civilians, often by Apache helicopter fire, to prevent them being taken captive by Hamas. The Israeli media has extensively reported on the role of the Hannibal directive in the Israeli military’s response on 7 October, but that coverage has been completely ignored by the BBC and most UK media outlets.
Israel’s invocation of the Hannibal directive – essential context for understanding what happened on 7 October – explains much of the destruction that day in Israel usually attributed to Hamas “barbarism”, such as the graveyard of burnt-out, crumpled cars and the charred, crumbling remains of houses in communities near Gaza.
Hamas, with its light weapons, did not have the ability to inflict this kind of damage on Israel, and we know from Israeli witnesses, video footage and admissions from Israeli military officers that Israel was responsible for at least a share of the carnage that day. How much we will apparently never know because Israel is not willing to investigate itself, and media like the BBC are not doing any investigations themselves, or putting any pressure on Israel to do so.
2. The BBC has never mentioned Israel’s Dahiya doctrine, the basis of its “mowing the lawn” approach to Gaza over the past two decades, in which the Israeli military has intermittently destroyed large swaths of the tiny enclave. The official aim has been to push the population, in the words of Israeli generals, back to the “Stone Age”. The assumption is that, forced into survival mode, Palestinians will not have the energy or will to resist their brutal and illegal subjugation by Israel and that it will be easier for Israel to ethnically cleanse them from their homeland.
Because Israel has been implementing this military doctrine – a form of collective punishment and therefore indisputably a war crime – for at least 20 years, it is critically important in any analysis of the events that led up to 7 October, or of the genocidal campaign of destruction Israel launched subsequently.
The BBC’s refusal even to acknowledge the doctrine’s existence leaves audiences gravely misinformed about Israel’s historical abuses of Gaza, and deprived of context to interpret the campaign of destruction by Israel over the past 20 months.
3. The BBC has utterly failed to report the many dozens of genocidal statements from Israeli officials since 7 October – again vital context for audiences to understand Israel’s goals in Gaza.
Perhaps most egregiously, the BBC has not reported Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s biblically-inspired comparison of the Palestinians to “Amalek” – a people the Jews were instructed by God to wipe from the face of the earth. Netanyahu knew this clearly genocidal statement would have especial resonance with what now amounts to a majority of the combat soldiers in Gaza who belong to extreme religious communities that view the Bible as the literal truth.
The hardest thing to prove in genocide is intent. And yet the reason Israel’s violence in Gaza is so clearly genocidal is that every senior official from the prime minister down has repeatedly told us that genocide is their intent. The decision not to inform audiences of these public statements is not journalism. It is pro-Israel disinformation and genocide denial.
4. By contrast, as Oborne notes, on more than 100 occasions when guests have tried to refer to what is happening in Gaza as a genocide, BBC staff have immediately shut them down on air. As other investigations have shown, the BBC has strictly enforced a policy not only of banning the use of the term “genocide” by its own journalists in reference to Gaza but of depriving others – from Palestinians to western medical volunteers and international law experts – of the right to use the term as well. Again, this is pure genocide denial.
5. Oborne also points to the fact that the BBC has largely ignored Israel’s campaign of murdering Palestinian journalists in Gaza. A greater number have been killed by Israel in its war on the tiny enclave than the total number of journalists killed in all other major conflicts of the past 160 years combined.
The BBC has reported just 6 per cent of the more than 225 journalists killed by Israel in Gaza, compared to 62 per cent of the far smaller number of journalists killed in Ukraine. This is once again vital context for understanding that Israel’s goals are genocidal. It hopes to exterminate the main witnesses to its crimes.
6. Oborne adds a point of his own. He notes that the distinguished Israeli historian Avi Shlaim lives in the UK and teaches at Oxford University. Unlike the Israeli spokespeople familiar to BBC audiences, who are paid to muddy the waters and deny Israel’s genocide, Shlaim is both knowledgeable about the history of Israeli colonisation of Palestine and truly independent. He is in a position to dispassionately provide the context BBC audiences need to make judgments about what is going on and who is responsible for it.
And yet extraordinarily, Shlaim has never been invited on by the BBC. He is only too ready to do interviews. He has done them for Al Jazeera, for example. But he isn’t invited on because, it seems, he is “the wrong sort of Jew”. His research has led him to a series of highly critical conclusions about Israel’s historical and current treatment of the Palestinians. He calls what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide. He is one of the prominent Israelis we are never allowed to hear from, because they are likely to make more credible and mainstream a narrative the BBC wishes to present as fringe, loopy and antisemitic. Again, what the BBC is doing – paid for by British taxpayers – isn’t journalism. It is propaganda for a foreign state.
Burgess’ answer is a long-winded shrugging of the shoulders, a BBC executive’s way of acting clueless – an equivalent of Manuel, the dim-witted Spanish waiter in the classic comedy show Fawlty Towers, saying: “I know nothing.”
Other lowlights from Burgess include his responding to a pointed question from Declassified journalist Hamza Yusuf on why the BBC has not given attention to British spy planes operating over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus. “I don’t think we should overplay the UK’s contribution to what’s happening in Israel,” Burgess answers.
So the British state broadcaster has decided that its duty is not to investigate the nature of British state assistance to Israel in Gaza, even though most experts agree what Israel is doing there amounts to genocide. Burgess thinks scrutiny of British state complicity would be “overplaying” British collusion, even though the BBC has not actually investigated the extent or nature of that collusion to have reached a conclusion. This is the very antithesis of what journalism is there to do: monitor the centres of power, not exonerate such power-centres before they have even been scrutinised.
Labour MP Andy McDonald responded to Burgess: “To underplay the role of the UK is an error.”
It is more than that. It is journalistic complicity in British and Israeli state war crimes.
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.
As is only too evident watching Burgess respond, he is not there to learn from the state broadcaster’s glaring mistakes – because systematic BBC pro-Israel bias isn’t a mistake. It’s precisely what the BBC is there to do.
Western media complicit in Kiev regime’s terrorism
Strategic Culture Foundation | June 6, 2025
Western news media have given up the pretense of being independent and impartial sources of information. American and European mainstream outlets are nothing but propaganda services for the NATO proxy war against Russia.
That observation is hardly new. Since the NATO-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, the Western media have systematically and relentlessly whitewashed the NeoNazi regime and its strategic purpose as a cat’s paw to embroil Russia in conflict. Russia’s inevitable military response to the decade-long proxy war has been distorted as “unprovoked aggression” against “democratic” Ukraine.
The Western “news media” have now outed themselves for the propaganda functionaries that they are. The veil is shredded.
Last weekend, the NATO-backed Kiev regime deliberately attacked a civilian passenger train in Russia’s Bryansk region. Seven people were killed and over 100 were injured after a bridge was blown up, crashing down on a train passing underneath. The death toll could have been much higher, given the hundreds on board.
Within hours of that heinous act, a second train was derailed when a bridge it was traveling over in Kursk was blown up. Mercifully, there were no deaths in the second attack despite several injuries.
Three more explosions have been reported on Russia’s railways this week: another in Bryansk and two in the Voronezh and Belgorod regions.
These calculated acts to cause maximum civilian casualties by the Ukrainian regime and its NATO enablers are nothing short of state terrorism. They are war crimes of the first magnitude.
Yet the Western media, like the Western governments, have maintained a shameful and damning silence on these crimes. One can imagine the outpouring of condemnation if Russia were to carry out such attacks, deliberately targeting civilians in Ukraine.
Instead, the Western “news” outlets gave prominent coverage of the drone attacks on Russia’s airfields. Certainly, the targeting of five airbases where Russian nuclear-capable bomber aircraft are stationed was big news.
However, Western media reports let their colors show by being ecstatic in tone about an “audacious” operation, amplifying unverified Ukrainian claims that 40 aircraft were destroyed. Britain’s Daily Telegraph and other Western outlets shared video of one plane exploding, headlining with glee that “Putin’s bombers” were knocked out.
For its part, the Russian military said that most of the drones were intercepted and only a few aircraft were damaged.
None of the Western outlets reported on the obvious role that NATO intelligence must have played in such a recklessly provocative attack on Russia’s strategic defenses. As such, the Western media is covering up for what could be deemed an act of war on Russia.
The gloating propagandist reporting on the airfield raids was in stark contrast to the relative silence over the terrorist attack on the passenger train.
U.S.-based ABC headlined with “Ukraine targets Russian airfields in major drone attack” and relayed dramatic details of the operation. It was only much further down in the report that ABC mentioned the deadly train explosion, as if it were a minor incident.
It reported: “Elsewhere, at least seven people were killed and 66 injured when a railway bridge collapsed and a train derailed in Russia’s western Bryansk region overnight.”
Note how ABC makes out that a bridge collapsed as if by gravity without explosive sabotage. It goes on to distort the terror attack by quoting a Ukrainian regime propagandist who insinuates that the wreckage was somehow carried out by Russia. The warped logic dignified by ABC was that the Russians carried out a fiendish false-flag ploy to scuttle negotiations that were due to take place the following day in Istanbul between Russian and Ukrainian delegates.
The British BBC deployed the same reprehensible disinformation. Its headline was: “At least seven dead after two Russian bridges collapse.”
Again, according to the BBC, bridges just collapse on passenger trains. Like ABC, the BBC buries important Russian information implicating Ukrainian responsibility for detonating explosives in the mass murder of civilians.
Significantly, the BBC also quotes the same Ukrainian regime propaganda source, Andriy Kovalenko, aired by ABC, who is described as “head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council’s Centre for Countering Disinformation.” He is also permitted by the British outlet to accuse Russia of self-inflicted terrorism, allegedly “laying the groundwork to derail the negotiations” in Istanbul.
With blatant distortion, Western media are minimizing what are outrageous acts of terrorism by the NATO-weaponized regime. Sickeningly, deliberate acts of murdering civilians by the NATO-backed regime are twisted upside down as Russian dirty tricks.
Of course, Western media are obliged to tell lies to cover up crimes by their governments and their proxies. In that case, they have lost their pious and pretentious claims of being “independent media”. They are abject propaganda tools, dressed up with self-ordained virtue. And still they have the arrogance to accuse other nations’ media of being state-run propaganda. This charade by Western media has been running for a long time, decades and indeed centuries. It has always been a charade. It’s now flagrantly obvious. No wonder so many Western citizens have contempt for their mainstream media.
The peace talks in Istanbul – the second round was held earlier this week – to try to find an end to the proxy war in Ukraine have largely come about because of Moscow’s initiative. American President Donald Trump’s declared wish to end the conflict has brought the Kiev regime to the table. It is not clear if the talks will succeed.
In the meantime, it is abundantly clear that the NATO axis on both sides of the Atlantic wants the proxy war to continue.
Carrying out provocations and terrorist crimes against civilians is aimed at sabotaging any diplomatic effort.
Russia responded in recent days to the terror assaults last weekend with massive bombardments on Ukraine’s military sites.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned Trump in a phone call mid-week that retaliation was imminent.
Western media reported Russia’s air strikes by giving prominence to the deaths of five civilians, according to Ukrainian officials. Russia claims it is not deliberately targeting civilian centers. That is an important distinction compared with the NATO-backed regime.
As usual, the latest Russian strikes were reported without a single mention of the terrorist murders of civilians in Russia. It is an all-too-familiar and deplorable pattern of bias. Russian lives are worthless, evidently from the Western perspective.
The one-sided Western media dereliction of journalism is seen over and over again throughout the proxy war in Ukraine. In another notorious distortion this week, the nuclear power plant in Zaporozhye – the biggest in Europe – came under drone attack from the Kiev regime. There were no reports in the Western media of this nuclear terrorism to contaminate Europe. When Western media reported on previous attacks on the ZNPP (by the Kiev forces), it absurdly claimed that Russia is doing the sabotage on a power plant under its control. Just like supposedly blowing up its own trains and citizens.
Western media silence and distortion are not merely disgraceful false propaganda. It is complicity in war crimes by giving cover and license for more.
The BBC’s climate science problem
By Andrew Montford | Net Zero Watch | May 20, 2025
You could be forgiven for thinking the BBC is out to get Richard Tice. Their chosen battleground is the Reform man’s position on climate and Net Zero, but it’s fair to say the campaign is, thus far, not going too well.
Question Time last week was a car crash for the corporation, with chairman Fiona Bruce interrupting Tice to contradict his contention that only 4% of carbon dioxide emissions are manmade. Thirty percent was the correct figure, she boldly asserted. Unfortunately, Tice was right, and she was wrong, so the Corporation’s gophers got to work and quietly edited the recording to remove her gaffe. Unfortunately someone noticed, and sceptics had a field day.
Undeterred, the Corporation returned to the fray a few days later, when Nick Robinson had Tice on his Political Thinking podcast. They decided, somewhat surprisingly, to take up cudgels on exactly the same subject, namely the human influence on climate.
Once again, Tice expained that human emissions were dwarfed by natural ones, and there was no attempt to probe this argument more deeply. The conversation meandered off elsewhere.
However, shortly aferwards Robinson decided to stick in a metaphorical boot, tweeting a clip from the interview with the comment:
He’s denying the scientific consensus that climate change is partly man made & can be slowed or halted.”
This is a very strong take given that Robinson had not attempted to pin down Tice on precisely what he meant. But at face value it’s a misrepresentation.
Tice’s words could only reasonably be interpreted as implying that the human contribution is nugatory compared to the natural one. To get to Robinson’s take – that Tice believed that there was no human influence – would mean considering his words as meaning natural CO2 emissions affected the climate but human ones didn’t. This would be ludicrous.
Tice’s words clearly implied that he thought mankind affected the climate, but only marginally so. In other words, far from “denying… that climate change is partly man made”, this was his starting point!
As to the rest of Robinson’s claim – that Tice was denying that climate change “can be slowed or reversed”, we need to note what appears to be a fatal contradiction in Robinson’s position. If climate change is “partly” manmade, then it is also partly natural. How, we wonder, does Robinson think we can halt the natural element?
It is undoubtedly substantial. We are sure that the climate changes on all timescales, from the decadal and centennial to the millennial and beyond. We know this from, for example, long-term temperature records, such as the Central England Temperature Series, the 800-year record of the waters of the Nile, and proxy climate records covering even longer periods. And the natural changes that are seen in history can be dramatic. One notable example was the sudden temperature rise at the end of the period, over 10,000 years ago, known as the Younger Dryas. Temperatures around the world are thought to have increased by 3–10 degrees in just a few decades.
How does Nick Robinson think we are going to stop that kind of climate change?
Charitably, Robinson – who is a generalist – simply hasn’t thought through what he means by “climate change”. He has no robust understanding of climate history and climate science, and is therefore unable to probe the position of people like Tice, who have given the issues some thought.
That being the case, he needs to think before he speaks, and perhaps to be a little more cautious about dishing out accusations of denial.
EU Wildfire Trends 2024
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 23, 2025
Wildfire activity in southern Europe was below average last year, according to the latest data from the EU. The trend is clearly downwards since 1980, contrary to the disinformation spewed by the establishment media.
The BBC’s Matt McGrath, for instance, recently claimed that a warmer world increased the chances of devastating wildfires occurring, while the Guardian’s Damien Carrington also falsely stated that “globally, scientists agree that climate change is increasing the global risk of wildfires starting and spreading”.
Last summer the BBC went into full propaganda mode over some fires in Greece, even though the burnt area was actually below average:
And in December, a BBC World Service broadcast falsely claimed that a warmer earth was making “deadly fires in Spain and Greece increasingly common”.
The BBC – the place where facts go to die!
Sources
1) Data for 2024 is from Copernicus: https://forest-fire.emergency.copernicus.eu/apps/effis.statistics/seasonaltrend
2) Earlier data id from the EEA: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/burnt-forest-area-in-five-4/#tab-chart_5
and EFFIS:
https://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/reports-and-publications/effis-related-publications
BBC Rides to the Rescue as Scientists Inconveniently Find the Gulf Stream Isn’t Getting Weaker
By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | February 6, 2025
Last month a group of scientists published a paper in Nature stating that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) had shown no decline in strength since the 1960s. Helped by publicity in the Daily Sceptic, the story went viral on social media, although it was largely ignored in narrative-driven mainstream publications. The collapse of the Gulf Stream, a key component of the AMOC, is an important ‘tipping point’ story used to induce mass climate psychosis and make it easier to impose the Net Zero fantasy on increasingly resentful and questioning populations. Obviously, reinforcements to back up such an important weaponised scare needed to be rushed to the front and the BBC has risen to the challenge. The AMOC “appears to be getting weaker” state BBC activists Simon King and Mark Poynting. Their long article is a classic of its kind in trying to deflect scientific findings that blow holes in the ‘settled’ narrative.
In the Nature paper, three scientists working out of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution stated that they came to their conclusion showing the stability of the AMOC after examining heat transfers between the sea and the atmosphere. It was noted that the AMOC had not weakened from 1963 to 2017, “although substantial variability exists at all latitudes”. This variability is the basis for much of the Gulf Stream fear-mongering. The BBC notes that the presence of larger grains of sediment on the ocean floor suggests the existence of stronger currents, pointing to a “cold blob” in the Atlantic that appears to have cooled of late. Thin pickings, it might be thought, to run an article titled ‘Could the UK actually get colder with global warming?’ The Woods Hole scientists note that records “are not long enough to differentiate between low frequency variability and long-term trends”.
The Nature story is not the only recent scientific finding that suggests the Day After Tomorrow alarm about the AMOC is a tad overdone. In 2023, Georgina Rannard of the BBC reported that “scientists say” a weakening Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025. There was no later reporting, needless to say, of subsequent work from a group of scientists at the US weather service NOAA that discovered the huge flow of Gulf Stream tropical water through the Florida Straits had remained “remarkably stable” for over 40 years.
Of course the BBC, along with most of the legacy media, has form as long as your arm when it comes to producing deflective copy seemingly designed to head off inconvenient scientific findings. The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is the largest and best observed collection of tropical coral in the world. Any sign of ill health is a boon for green propogandists who argue that warming measured in tenths of a degree centigrade will destroy an organism that has survived for millions of years in temperatures between 24-32°C. For the last three years, coral on the GBR has hit recent record levels with scarcely a mention in mainstream media. Days before last year’s record was announced, the places where journalism goes to die were full of stories from a paper that conveniently noted climate change posed an “existential threat” to the reef. “The science tells us that the GBR is in danger and we should be guided by the science,” Professor Helen McGregor from the University of Wollongong told Victoria Gill of BBC News. Professor McGregor’s statement was an opinion readily broadcast by the BBC, a courtesy that does not appear to have been extended to the fact that coral on the GBR was at its highest level since detailed observations began.
It beggars belief that the BBC and all its fellow alarmists can run this stuff with a straight face knowing that crucial scientific information is missing from their reports. Important findings from reputable sources emerge about the current stability of the Gulf Stream and the response is to blow more smoke around that raises wholly unnecessary fears.
The main concern is that the AMOC “could suddenly switch off”, state King and Poynting. To back up their statement and provide the inevitable political message they note the comment of Matthew England, Professor of Oceanography at the University of South Wales: “We’re playing a bit of a Russian roulette game. The more we stack up the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, the more we warm the system, the more chance we have of an AMOC slowdown and collapse.” Now look what you plebs have done with your steak chomping, gas-guzzling central heating and naff holidays in Benidorm, is an unpleasant subtext here.
Of course, keen and dedicated followers of climate alarmists will note a master craftsman at work. In 2023, aided by 35 million computer hours and using an improbable rise in temperature of up to 4°C in less than 80 years, Professor Matthews suggested that there was a dramatic slowdown in deep Antarctica ocean currents. Melting Antarctica ice could lead to a 40% slowdown in just 30 years. The fact that Antarctica has barely warmed in 70 years is ignored.
Who needs Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters when we have the BBC.
BBC’s Fake Wildfire Claims
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 30, 2025
The climate establishment are going to great lengths to blame the Los Angeles fires on global warming.
One attempt has already bitten the dust, with claims of increasing winter droughts contradicted by the real world data.
So another team of so-called scientists have come up with an even more ridiculous idea – that it is now both to wet and too dry in California.
The BBC report:
Climate change has made the grasses and shrubs that are fuelling the Los Angeles fires more vulnerable to burning, scientists say.
Rapid swings between dry and wet conditions in the region in recent years have created a massive amount of tinder-dry vegetation that is ready to ignite.
Decades of drought in California were followed by extremely heavy rainfall for two years in 2022 and 2023, but that then flipped again to very dry conditions in the autumn and winter of 2024.
“Scientists” say in a new study, external that climate change has boosted what they call these “whiplash” conditions globally by 31-66% since the middle of the 20th Century.
“This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold,” said lead author Daniel Swain from UCLA.
“First, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush in the months leading up to fire season, and then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels with the extreme dryness and warmth that followed.”
Once again though the actual data shows the new study to be just as fake as the previous one. Most of California’s rain comes in the winter half, October to March; the last two years have been wetter than average, but no more so than many other years on record:
The same applies to the South Coast Drainage Division, which includes Los Angeles:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/national/time-series
Neither is there any evidence of bigger swings from year to year.
Patrick Brown of the Breakthrough Institute has written a full scientific rebuttal here, which demolishes this latest fake science.
This is his summary:
Summary
So, let’s recap. At the annual timescale that is most relevant to the Los Angeles fires…
-
- Figure 1: There is no clear increase in overall whiplash occurrence or wet-to-dry whiplash occurrence in Los Angeles in the premiere observational dataset (ERA5) using data directly from Swain et al. (2025).
- Figure 2: There is no clear increase in overall whiplash occurrence or wet-to-dry whiplash occurrence over southern California in the premiere observational dataset (ERA5) using data directly from Swain et al. (2025).
- Figure 3: There is a long-term decrease in whiplash events globally over land (where it matters) in the premiere observational dataset (ERA5) using data directly from Swain et al. (2025).
- Figure 5: There is no increase in the variability (standard deviation) of annual SPEI either for all months or centered on January) in the Los Angeles grid point using the pre-existing standard SPEI dataset.
- Figure 6: There has been a decrease in the variability (standard deviation) of SPEI over global land since the 1980s using the pre-existing standard SPEI dataset.
- Figure 7: There is no agreement on the direction of change (if any) in annual precipitation variability (standard deviation) over the Los Angeles area across eight different precipitation datasets.
- Figures 8 and 9: There is no agreement on the direction of change (if any) in annual precipitation variability (standard deviation) globally across eight different precipitation datasets.
While “climate whiplash events” may be increasing in frequency under most of the very specific, selected definitions used and datasets investigated in Swain et al. (2025), the general idea that annual precipitation (or more generally, the water cycle, which includes evaporation) is becoming dramatically more variable is not supported when a broader set of datasets and definitions are used.
Would a reader of Swain et al. (2025), or especially its coverage, have any idea about the weakness of its broader conclusions or the lack of robustness of its results to different definitions and datasets? Almost certainly not, and I contend that this is a major problem for public understanding and trust in climate science.
Why don’t we see a robust increase in water cycle variability given the strong theory underpinning “wet gets wetter, dry gets drier”? For one thing, the theoretical size of the effect is known to be quite small relative to natural, unforced variability, making it inherently difficult to detect. For example, we see in Figure 7 above that year-to-year rainfall in Los Angeles naturally varies by as much as 300%, yet the signal we are looking for is one to two orders of magnitude less than this. It is also apparently the case that observational uncertainty is larger than the signal (or there would not be such disagreement between datasets). Physically, perhaps increasing mean precipitation is offsetting the increase in calculated evaporation in the SPEI index, reducing its variability. Maybe reduced temperature variability (via arctic amplification) is reducing calculated evaporation variability.
I don’t know the full answer, but these would be great research questions to identify and outline in a Nature review like Swain et al. (2025). Unfortunately, Swain et al. (2025) missed this opportunity because the paper seemed so focused on assembling evidence in favor of increasing water cycle variability that contradictory evidence was never presented or seriously grappled with.
My main discomfort with Swain et al. (2025) and its rollout is that it appears that the primary goal was to create and disseminate the “climate whiplash” meme rather than conduct a truly rigorous evaluation of the evidence, including countervailing evidence. Ultimately, this makes the research a much larger advance in marketing than an advance in science.
https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/how-much-did-increasing-climate-whiplash
Of course, studies like Swain’s are not intended to be serious science; they are written to generate headlines.
And the climate industry is now highly organised to ensure that theses fake studies are disseminated worldwide via a corrupt media.
Climate Bombshell: New Evidence Reveals 30 Year Global Drop in Hurricane Frequency and Power
By Chris Morrison | The Daily Sceptic | January 4, 2025
Last month a small but powerful cyclone named Chido made landfall in Mayotte before sweeping into Mozambique, causing considerable damage and leading to the loss of around 100 lives. Days after the tragedy, the Green Blob-funded Carbon Brief noted that scientists have “long suggested” that climate change is making cyclones worse in the region, while Blob-funded World Weather Attribution (WWA) at Imperial College London made a near-instant and curiously precise estimate that a Chido-like cyclone was about 40% more likely to happen in 2024 than during the pre-industrial age. Not to be outdone, Green Blob-funded cheerleader the Guardian chipped in with the obligatory “cyclones are getting worse because of the climate emergency”. Almost unnoticed, it seems, among all the Net Zero dooming and grooming was a science paper published during December by Nature that found no increase in the destructive power of cyclones – the generic term for typhoons and hurricanes – in any ocean basin over the last 30 years. In the South Indian basin, the location of cyclone Chido, there was a dramatic decrease in both frequency and duration in recent times.
Reality rarely gets much of a look-in these days when fanatical Net Zero activism is afoot, but the paper, written by a group of Chinese meteorologists, makes its case by considering the facts and the data. The scientists apply a “power dissipation index” (PDI) which they consider superior to single measure indicators since it combines storm intensity, duration and frequency. The graphs below show the cumulative index for tropical cyclones across all ocean basins along with a global indication.
Downward trends in the cumulative PDI can be seen in a number of Pacific regions, while the trend holds steady in the North Atlantic. The southern Indian ocean downward trend is particularly pronounced while the overall global line is also heading in a similar direction.
So why does all this scientific twaddle get written by the green activists in mainstream media? Much of it arises from the new pseudoscience that claims it can tie individual weather events to human-caused climate change. Press releases peddling climate Armageddon are issued days after a natural disaster and are eagerly reprinted by activist journalists promoting the Net Zero fantasy. The distinguished science writer Roger Pielke Jr. is a fierce critic of this new pseudoscience, which he calls weather attribution alchemy. In a recent Substack post in the aftermath of Chido, he noted that the WWA at Imperial College simply assumes the conclusion that it seeks to prove by accepting that every storm is made stronger because of warmer oceans. Using this explanation, continues Pielke, it is straightforward to conclude that the storm was made more likely due to climate change. Or as Imperial states: “The difference in the storm intensity and likelihood of this storm intensity between the counterfactual climate and today’s climate can be attributed to climate change.”
As the new Chinese paper shows, the matter is not quite so simple. Pielke notes that tropical storms encounter numerous environmental influences such as vertical wind shear and storm-induced ocean surface cooling, even when they remain over warmer waters. “Such complexities mean that simple storyline attribution – warmer oceans predictably mean stronger storms – is inappropriate when used to characterise the behaviour of individual storms,” he argues. Pielke also comes down hard on the statistical evidence backing the WWA claims. Even if storms such as Chido were more likely in the future, it would take a very long time to detect a significant change using the threshold 90% confidence set down by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). And by very long time, he means thousands of years.
“Perhaps that is why assumptions are favoured over evidence,” suggests Pielke.
There were plenty of assumptions on display in a now routine end-of-year weather report from the BBC headed: ‘A year of extreme weather that challenged billions.‘ Written by Esme Stallard, it claims that record-breaking heat brought extreme weather including hurricanes and month-long droughts. Pride of place is given to Dr. Friederike Otto, lead of WWA and Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at Imperial, who claimed: “We are living in a dangerous new era – extreme weather caused unrelenting suffering.” “The impacts of fossil fuel warming has never been clear or more devastating than in 2024,” she added.
The redoubtable Paul Homewood is unimpressed with Stallard’s opening line about increasing extreme weather and has filed a complaint with the BBC. Stallard goes on to list a handful of random events, “but fails to provide any evidence that these are anything other than natural events which happen all the time”, states Homewood. “Nor is any evidence provided that such events have been getting more frequent or extreme over time,” he adds.
The BBC story highlighted typhoons in the Philippines as well as hurricane Beryl and stated that such events may be increasing in intensity due to climate change. Official data do not show any evidence of them becoming more powerful over time, notes Homewood. Much play was made of a recent drought in the Amazon, but Homewood points out that the World Bank Climate Portal reveals that rainfall has increased in the area by 5% over the last 30 years. Throughout the report, observes Homewood, the BBC bases its claims on weather attribution computer models. “However, computer models are not evidence, and can be manipulated to provide whatever results are desired. That is why they are widely derided by the wider scientific community,” he states.
For Roger Pielke, extreme weather attributions are “puzzling”. The most charitable explanation for their proliferation is that there is a demand for them, including from many in the media. The demand will be filled by someone, he concludes. “A less charitable explanation is that there is a systematic effort underway to contest and undermine actual climate science, including the assessments of the IPCC, in order to present a picture of reality that is simply false in support of climate advocacy. We might call that pseudo-scientific gaslighting,” he suggests.
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The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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Aletho News- Sexual Blackmail Makes the World Go ‘Round
- Powerful Israeli Strikes on South Lebanon and Bekaa
- UAE-backed militia in Yemen reaches out to Israel for alliance against ‘common foes’: Report
- The UAE’s reverse trajectory: From riches to rags
- Chris Minns Defends NSW “Hate Speech” Laws Linking Censorship to Terror Prevention
- Majority of Belgians oppose theft of Russian assets – poll
- Czech–Slovak alignment signals growing dissatisfaction with Brussels’ authoritarianism
- Colonel Jacques Baud & Nathalie Yamb Sanctioned: EU Goes Soviet
- Who gets to be a hostage? The language that legitimises Palestinian captivity
- Israel’s all-seeing eye is the stealthiest cruelty of all in Gaza
- If Americans Knew
- Amnesty: ‘Utterly preventable’ Gaza flood tragedy must mobilize global action to end Israel’s genocide
- Israel Propagandists Are Uniformly Spouting The Exact Same Line About The Bondi Beach Shooting
- Ha’aretz: Free the Palestinian Activist Who Dared to Document Israel’s Crimes in the West Bank
- Garbage Is Poisoning Gaza
- Palestinian journalist recounts rape and torture in Israeli prison
- Gaza is crumbling, but its people persevere – Not a Ceasefire Day 69
- Pro-Israel billionaire Miriam Adelson green-lights a Trump 3rd term
- Australians Being Massacred Shouldn’t Bother Us More Than Palestinians Being Massacred
- Garbage, stench, sewage, and rats plague Gaza – Not a Ceasefire Day 68
- The Zionist Billionaire Circle Hiding in Plain Sight
- No Tricks Zone
- The Wind Energy Paradox: “Why More Wind Turbines Don’t Always Mean More Power”
- New Study Reopens Questions About Our Ability To Meaningfully Assess Global Mean Temperature
- Dialing Back The Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence Of Climate Tipping Points!
- Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon Challenges The Climate Consensus … It’s The Sun, Not CO2
- Regional Cooling Since The 1980s Has Driven Glacier Advance In The Karakoram Mountains
- Greenland Petermann Glacier Has Grown 30 Kilometers Since 2012!
- New Study: Temperature-Driven CO2 Outgassing Explains 83 Percent Of CO2 Rise Since 1959
- Climate Extremists Ordered By Hamburg Court To Pay €400,000 In Damages
- More Evidence NE China Is Not Cooperating With The Alarmist Global Warming Narrative
- Ecological Impacts Of Offshore WindParks Are Worse Than Expewcted, New Study Finds
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