It's worth noting the BBC has also been accused of an anti-Israel bias including but not limited to airing a documentary produced by a Hamas linked individuals[1].
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> The only other BBC documentary which focused on the apocalyptic plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza was taken down as a result of a hysterical pro-Israel campaign - because the father of the child narrator’s son had a junior technocratic position in the Hamas administration. Irrelevant, given the narrator’s words were written for him by the documentary producers.
this was confusing but I think it's supposed to just be "father of the child narrator." Also kind of weird they (the original parent link, it is in the bbc article) didn't name the documentary (maybe it's common knowledge to their audience?).
Like nobody would say "death to the Khmer Rouge" is a death call against Cambodians. It technically would be, since it was Cambodians in the Khmer Rouge who were killing innocent children, but it's a specific subset of Cambodians (the Khmer Rouge) and only those who were actually doing the killing.
You can disagree with Mr. Vylan or that the BBC should have cut the broadcast but let's not misrepresent the situation.
How does this remark differ from what the Israeli government regularly says about the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, just as much an official body in Iran as the IDF is in Israel? No one, to my knowledge, would consider calling for the demise of the IRGC to be hate speech against Iranians. No one has ever shut off a live transmission of a Netanyahu speech because he advocated for violence against the IRGC.
(Not defending the IRGC here, they are ghouls. Just noting the intellectual dishonesty.)
Amusingly, he probably didn't intend for it to be ambiguous, since on a previous occasion he chose the wording "death to every single IDF soldier out there"
https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2025/0702/1521558-uk-police...
Please correct me if I am wrong.
This argument makes no sense to me. You're basically saying that it's bad to call for the deaths of a genocidal military… once a certain percentage of the country enlists? Like, at what threshold do you think it would have been unacceptable to chant "death to the Nazis" or "death to the Imperial Japanese Army"?
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/israel-posts-video...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eICdhG1qgI
[3] https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/poll-overwhelming-majority-of...
- Israel is at war with Gaza after it was attacked by Gaza. This war will end as soon as Hamas surrenders and the hostages are returned. Could have ended a long time ago.
- Gaza is ruled by Hamas that just like Bob Vylan advocates for the murder of all Israelis and Jews. That is the genocidal party to this conflict, by their own declaration and actions.
- The correct analogy is the US going to war with Japan after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. Even that analogy is weak because Pearl Harbour was a military target while Gaza attacked civilians including massacring random people who went to a music festival. Just like Glastonbury. What would the UK do if Glastonbury was attacked by ISIL, 10's of thousands of people murdered, and thousands taken hostage? I mean we've seen what it did for a lot less than that.
- Israel's defensive war looks exactly like this war would look like if any other western country had similar military action. It is generally targeting military targets and civilians unfortunately also get hurt. If you compare to similar recent campaigns and adjust for the significantly more dense population, tunnels, the use of civilian infrastructure, you will see that Israel is waging this war with less impact to civilians compared to e.g. the western allies war against ISIL or Al Qaeda. None of Israel's critics are able to give a realistic option here for Israel to achieve its legitimate goals of self defense. Hamas has been attacking Israeli cities with rockets and massacred Israeli civilians. Israel can not let it remain in control, and a force, in Gaza.
- No other country in the world would do less in terms of military action under similar circumstances. We've seen countries like the US, the UK, Australia, France, take significantly more violent measures in significantly less serious (to their self defense) circumstances.
- The argument that Gaza was somehow occupied before Oct 7th and Palestinians had no choice to improve their situation without violence is a lie. Their violence, against civilians, is an explicit, declared, contiunous, choice. Gaza was handed to the Palestinians in 2005. Even if you can somehow twist the blockade on Gaza to be something else there is still no other country in the world that would act any differently. Gaza has received billions of dollars in support since 2005 and Hamas has invested it in weapons and tunnels.
- The IDF is not a "genocidal military". It's just a military. It's fighting a difficult war to defeat a brutal enemy that is holding hostages, doesn't care about deaths of its own people, and refuses to surrender. No other western military would fight in a more "clean" or "fair" way under the same circumstances and non-western militaries would be a lot more brutal and violent (like Russia did to the Chechens or Turkey to the Kurds). The allegations of genocide are false. They are an antisemitic blood libel. Civilian casualties are unfortunately an outcome of this kind of war which Hamas started and is continuing to date.
- The media, including the BBC, is reporting Hamas PR as news and certain media (like Al-Jazeera) is basically engaged in a PR campaign on behalf of Hamas. According to Hamas any militant that dies is a civilian and civilians that die without relation to any military activities are also killed by the IDF, including Palestinians killed by Hamas. According to the media there are no combatants and no military infrastructure and no tunnels e.g. in Gaza. All targets are civilians and all infrastructure is civilian. The truth is the opposite.
- According to the media "there is no safe place in Gaza". The truth is the humanitarian zone, designated as a safe area, accounts for a tiny minority of casualties in this war, mostly related to Hamas commanders hiding there. Palestinians who have chosen to move there are significantly more safer than those who for whatever reason do not.
It's generally bad to call for the death of anyone. Doing it in a music festival given Hamas' massacre of music festival goers is doubly stupid/insensitive/evil. Sometimes you have to fight, and kill, but you should never wish for anyone to be dead.
The Israeli government doesn't say "Death to the IRGC". Iran however regularly (like weekly) has massive crowds chanting "Death to the USA" and "death to Israel", stepping on and burning Israeli and American flags.
Israel consistently says they consider the Iranians their friends who are also oppressed by the regime. There are zero calls for death of anyone from Israel.
There's a reason that support for Israel in the US has dropped to just 12% among Democrats. [1] Even among Republicans, it's down 18 percentage points! And this is despite heavy censorship of pro-Palestinian narratives (as evidenced by the article).
[1] https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/the-shift-just-12-of-dem-vote...
Not to justify but they (the minority) are partly referring to the complicity of random Palestinians in cheering and participating in parading hostages and dead bodies brought in from the Oct 7th attacks. Civilians that followed the militants on Oct 7th to pillage and kill. The general support Hamas has in the population, including for the Oct 7th attacks. The celebrations after the attack. Civilians involved in holding Israeli hostages (some/many of the Israeli hostages were held by civilians) and otherwise actively participating in the conflict.
Either way civilians should not be a target, regardless of the views they hold. Trying to draw a target on all civilians, is not ok. The statement that there are no innocents in Gaza (that's usually the framing) is also very obviously wrong. Even if a large number is Hamas and engages in the kinds of behavior described above it's certainly far from all. Many Palestinians are under death threats from Hamas as well.
This expression isn't at the same level of calling for their death (though "Death to Arabs" has been chanted by the Israeli right wing after e.g. terrorist attacks in the past). It's possible some Israelis use this to support more aggressive tactics but in general the official policy is that the IDF targets Hamas and not civilians. It's also different when these things come out of parties to the conflict vs. random third parties.
[1] https://www.gbnews.com/news/bbc-hamas-propaganda-documentary...
[2] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/exclusive-palestinian-chi...
They translated the documentary's participants use of the word Yehud i.e. Jew into 'Israeli'. One of the cameramen Amjad Al Fayoumi (who effectively directed it, since the 'directors' were based in the UK) had posted on Facebook support about the 7th October terrorist attacks that kicked all of this off.
The problem is that the BBC and other media producers need to be squeaky clean when doing reporting on this, on both sides. It's not even like this was a quick news broadcast where accuracy needed to be checked, it was commissioned well in advance, they followed the boy around for months.
But I don't see how it is committing genocide. They are not trying to destroy the people, the genus. There are 2+ mill people in Gaza and with all those bombs they killed 100k or less? Basically that is just what urban warfare looks like.
This is like the Diddy trial, where you give the perp a way out by overprosecuting.
That was in December 2023, after two months, when the death toll was only around 17,000 [2]. It's now been 19 months of near constant siege; if you check Wikipedia, as of today the official count is around 58,000 people killed directly. That's likely to be a vast undercount of the total number of deaths: an estimated 64,620 had died from traumatic injury by June 2024 [3], and probably many thousands more from malnutrition and disease. There are also thousands of uncounted bodies buried under the rubble. Israel has (intentionally) destroyed almost every hospital in Gaza, damaged or destroyed at least 92% of residential buildings [4] and cut off all food and water at least twice (and repeatedly massacred civilians at aid sites).
Do you really think fewer than 100k people have died as a result of this?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38576316
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/how-many-palestini...
[3] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Does that mean that Ukrainian civilians are worse off than Palestinians? No, obviously not. Israel is guilty of many crimes and many of them are worse than some forms of genocide.
Words have meaning and you are offering the Israeli apologetics an easy way out arguing semantics and the easy way is that they are right.
Israel "does not do that" only if you ignore remarks by IDF members, MKs and the Prime Minister himself explicitly saying they are doing that.
https://www.allsides.com/blog/bias-killing-news-trust
Cheers!