24 October 2026
The following article on Mainstream Media bias lies at the outer edge of BRICUP’s activities, but serves to remind readers of this huge obstacle facing everyone seeking justice for Palestinians.
It’s what the mainstream media omits that makes their reporting so dangerously biased: commemorating only 7 October 2023 is an insidious example
Anonymous, 24 October 2026,
For the past three years our mainstream media (MSM) have regularly reminded their listeners, viewers and readers of the tragedy that befell Israel on 7 October 2023 when young Palestinian militants broke out of Gaza where they had been imprisoned all their lives and allegedly killed 1195 individuals including 738 Israeli civilians (of which 38 were children), 300 Israeli military personnel, and 79 foreign nationals.
7 October 2023 does indeed deserve to be commemorated, in view of the fact that the majority of the victims were civilians. But why only this date in the long history of Israel-Palestine conflict, when so many other dates also deserve to be commemorated? Why not also:
9 April 1948, date of the Deir Yassin massacre when Jewish militia, soon to be incorporated in the IDF, killed 107 Palestinian civilians who posed no threat to them and played no part in resisting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – the Nakba – which had begun over four months earlier and resulted in some 750,000 forced to flee, never to return to their villages and towns.
29 October 1956, date of the Kafir Qasim massacre when the IDF killed 49 unarmed Palestinians in Israel – 19 men, 6 women and 23 children – who, unaware that a curfew had been called only an hour or so earlier, were making their way home from their fields or remained outside.
9 December 1987, the start of the first Intifada when Palestinians began non-violent protests only to face a lethal response from the IDF which, over the following three years, killed at least 1087 Palestinians including 240 children while at most 160 Israelis including 60 IDF soldiers died.
28 September 2000, the start of the second Intifada which lasted five years and resulted in some 4,800 Palestinians and 1053 Israelis killed.
27 December 2008, when Israel launched Operation Cast Lead, a three-week long assault on Gaza, and, using depleted uranium and white phosphorous munitions, killed some 1,400 Palestinians of which over 1,000 were civilians, while 13 Israelis were killed by Palestinian rockets.
14 November 2012, when Israel launched its eight-day Operation Pillar of Defence, resulting in some 174 Palestinians and 6 Israelis killed.
30 March 2018, when Palestinians in Gaza launched their “Great March of Return”: weekly non-violent demonstrations to highlight their imprisonment, which lasted eighteen months and resulted in 223 Palestinians killed and at least 13,000 wounded by Israeli snipers firing from behind a steel fence, whereas one Israeli soldier was slightly wounded by stone-throwing Palestinians.
Dozens of other dates when Palestinians suffered lethal Israeli violence could be added to this list, but there is little point in doing so. Our MSM are evidently determined to discourage any comparison between Israeli and Palestinian suffering, especially as Palestinians have suffered far more than Israelis since 1948. (It was largely the one-sidedness of the violence before 7 October 2023 that produced the outrage among Israelis that day and near universal endorsement of genocide.) Subsequently, even though it is commonly discussed in Israel, our MSM refuse to mention the Hannibal directive, as the result of which a half or more of the Israeli victims on 7 October 2023 were probably killed not by Palestinian militants but by IDF forces who destroyed over 300 vehicles in their desperation to stop Hamas from taking hostages back to Gaza.
By sustaining the myth of Israeli victimhood, the MSM’s editors and publishers deserve to join the British government itself on charges before the International Criminal Court. Meanwhile the rest of us will rely for their news on alternative online sources such as Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, Palestine Chronicle, Middle East Eye, The New Arab, Tikun Olam, Judging Freedom, Al Jazeera and +972 Magazine.
