If Goebbels were alive today he would be proud of how the BBC’s Ros Atkins has sanitised the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion
It never ceases to amaze me that the left has never made an issue of the BBC license fee, which is the most regressive of all taxes. It currently stands at £159. However rich or however poor you are you pay the same amount. For someone over 24 Job Seekers Allowance is £77 pw, so the license fee is two full weeks of income plus a bit.
Compare this to the Chairman of the BBC, Richard Sharp, a man whose salary is £160,000 per year for a 3 day week. Leaving aside his other income, after tax he ‘earns’ £94,122, i.e. £1,810 per week. The license fee is 8.78% of one week’s salary.
But it’s not simply the unfairness of the tax. The real problem is that the BBC is in the words of John Pilger ‘the most refined propaganda service in the world’. RT has been silenced by Facebook.
To Palestinians the BBC is the ‘Voice of Israel’. It consistently portrays Israeli violence as ‘retaliation’ against Palestinian violence by ignoring the reality of Israel’s Occupation (a word that it never uses). It is a replay of the old Western movies where the Red Indians used to attack, for some unknown reason, those peaceful cowboys.
The BBC rarely reports the ongoing settler violence against the Palestinians. Only when a Jewish settler is killed is violence reported. The BBC is incapable of calling Israeli violence cold blooded murder.
The BBC rarely reports confiscation i.e. theft of Palestinian land and when it does it provides no background by showing that this is an ongoing process.
I have therefore penned an Open Letter to BBC Chair, Richard Sharp.
Tony Greenstein
Dear Mr Sharp,
I want to explain why I have no intention of paying a BBC license fee which pays your £160,000 salary. Given that you are reputed to be worth a mere £100 million I suspect you won’t be going to bed hungry tonight, unlike many of your viewers.
Since 2002 you have also been a director of the Centre for Policy Studies – a right-wing think tank founded by Thatcher.
The first duty of the BBC Board, to which you were appointed in February 2021, is to ‘Uphold and protect the independence of the BBC.’ Who could possibly be more suitable than a Tory Investment Banker and Islamaphobe who donated over £400,000 to the Tories? Among those who appointed you was Catherine Baxendale, who gave a trifling £50,000 to the Tory party.
A good example of your political neutrality was the £35,000 you gave to the Home Office ‘charity’ Quillam. The reasons you gave for this largesse were that you were impressed by Majid Nawaz and his efforts to combat ‘radicalism and extremism.’
Those of a more cynical mind might suggest that Majid Nawaz, who even LBC booted for his QAnon conspiracies about COVID and how the US election was ‘stolen’ from Trump, was the personification of ‘radicalism and extremism’ . He believed that vaccinations were the product of “a global palace coup that suspends our rights… by a network of fascists who seek a New World Order”
In 2012 Quillam received $75,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which funds ‘counter-jihad’ organisations including the anti-Muslim hate group the David Horowitz Freedom Centre.
Quillam received over $1 million from the John Templeton Foundation between 2014 to 2017. This Foundation works with right-wing Islamaphobic organisations with close ties to extreme right- Christian networks.
Templeton and his wife donated more than $1 million to Let Freedom Ring, so that it could campaign against gay marriage and contributed to “The Gathering” which promotes a “family values” agenda such as opposition to gay and reproductive rights. This is as well as financing climate denier groups such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and pro-war neo-conservative groups like the American Enterprise Institute.
Quillam drew up for MI5 a secret list which accused peaceful Muslim groups, politicians and media of sharing the ideology of terrorists. Groups included on this McCarthyist list included the Muslim Safety Forum and the Islamic Human Rights Commission. Quillam’s briefing document said:
“The ideology of non-violent Islamists is broadly the same as that of violent Islamists; they disagree only on tactics.’
This was based on the theory that ‘non-violent extremism’ had given birth to terrorism rather than such minor matters as the war in Iraq and the bombing of Libya. This crackpot theory was as good a way as any of demonising a whole community yet you saw fit to support.
Quillam staged the fake ‘deradicalisation’ of Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll in 2013. They had allegedly left the EDL. Quilliam director Haras Rafiq then lied to a Parliamentary Select Committee by denying that Quilliam had no “formal business relationship with Tommy Robinson.” It later transpired that Quilliam had been paying Robinson £2,000 a month, as Robinson later admitted. See:
The Charmed Life & Strange, Sad Death Of the Quilliam Foundation
The Quilliam Foundation is financed by Tea-Party conservatives and
Maajid Nawaz: From radical Islamist to ‘funded’ by the radical right
It’s quite an impressive record for an organisation dedicated to combatting radicalism and extremism.
As the Jewish Chronicle proudly proclaimed, you are the BBC’s third Jewish Chairman. It is reasonable to assume, having been an adviser to Boris Johnson, who combines racism, anti-Semitism and Zionism, that like most rich right-wing Jews, you are also a Zionist.
You have continued the BBC’s uncritical support for Israel. At the end of May Yolande Knell said of thousands of far-right settlers chanting ‘death to the Arabs’ as they invaded East Jerusalem that
‘the mood of them is jubilant, festive. It feels like a party…. they’re celebrating their presence at this spot.’
But it’s not just the BBC’s bias on Israel that renders its claim to impartiality an egregious lie. Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the BBC has functioned as a NATO Broadcasting Corporation.
The BBC has a bias against understanding. It always fails to give the background to the events it reports. That was true of the Troubles in Ireland until it was embarrassed into commissioning a series on Irish history by Robert Kee. What the BBC has never done is commission a similar series on the Zionist colonisation of Palestine.
Ukraine stands out as an example of how the BBC has jettisoned any claim to ‘due impartiality’. As John Pilger wrote you have
misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia – when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.
This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It’s not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war.
The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington’s secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out.
This was written in 2014, yet you chose not to report US funding of the Maiden coup or US military aid to neo-Nazi groups. The BBC has deliberately obscured the origins of the war that is now taking place in order to paint Russia as the main if not only culprit.
All of the ‘experts’ the BBC interviews coincidentally happen to be from the same pro-NATO think tanks. If the BBC even made a stab at impartiality how could it fail to interview John Mearsheimer of Chicago University, the Dean of the Realist School of Political Science who sees the breaking of Western promises to Gorbachev in 1991 over NATO expansion in Eastern Europe as the principal cause of Russia’s invasion?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qciVozNtCDM&t=540s
John Mearsheimer Lecture 16 June 2022
As Professor Nicolas Guilhot said Mearsheimmer is an ‘irritant to the Washington Foreign Policy Establishment.’ And what irritates the Masters of War in Washington irritates the BBC too. Yet the BBC has no problem interviewing war criminals like Kissinger and Blair. As Guilhot remarked we are in an ‘intellectual no fly zone.’
The BBC was born in the womb of the British Establishment. Lord Reith, its first Chairman, ensured that the BBC supported the government during the 1926 General Strike by banning the Archbishop of Canterbury from broadcasting. Unlike the Archbishop of Westminster, whose statement was broadcast, he refused to condemn the strike as a sin against God.
Pilger referred to two studies of the BBC’s coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq by the University of Wales and Media Tenor which found that the BBC’s coverage overwhelmingly reflected the Blair government’s propaganda, including its lies about WMD. Less than 2% of BBC reporting in this period allowed dissenting voices, despite a majority of British people opposing the invasion.
What a contrast to the BBC’s hostility to Russia’s invasion. The parallels between the 2 invasions were obvious, even to George Bush, the author of the Iraq war, when in a Freudian slip he condemned ‘the wholly unjustified invasion of Iraq’ before correcting himself.
The BBC has completely ignored the 8 year war on the Donbas by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi militia, A war that killed 14,000 people. See How ‘eastern Ukraine’ was lost.
On 9 April 2003, BBC political editor Andrew Marr stood outside 10 Downing Street and declared:
Mr Blair is well aware that all his critics out there in the party and beyond aren’t going to thank him, because they are only human, for being right when they’ve been wrong…
it would be entirely ungracious even for his critics not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger Prime Minister as a result.
Well we all know how that turned out! Researchers at John Hopkins University and the Lancet, estimated that more than a million people died as a result. The BBC ignored these findings.
The BBC has reported the Ukrainian resistance but during the Iraq invasion there was no such reports of the Iraqi resistance or the American atrocities that Wikileaks revealed. Nothing on the thousands of deaths in Falluja. To this day the BBC has ignored the kidnapping of Julian Assange, who did the job that you didn’t do.
The BBC has pride of place in the eyes of US neoconservatives as a cable from the US embassy demonstrated when London Ambassador Sussman told Hillary Clinton:
I hope you can take some time out to tape an interview with leading British journalist Andrew Marr…. It would be a powerful way for you to set out our priorities for Afghanistan/Pakistan, and underline our premier partnership with the United Kingdom. Marr is a congenial and knowlegable interviewer who will offer maximum impact for your investment of time.
US Ambassador Sussman to hillary clinton
So loved is Marr by the political elite that his book launch for Head of State, was held in Downing Street with David Cameron as the host.
Liz Thomson, breached the bonhomie and etiquette when she asked Marr if having Cameron host the book launch ‘mightn’t compromise his position as impartial political interviewer for the BBC’.
Marr’s wife, Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley went ballistic telling Thomson that ‘you’ve ruined my evening’ before she ‘resumed the harangue, calling [Thomson] ‘despicable’ and ‘a B-I-T-C-H’.
Normalising NATO’s neo-Nazi friends
When Putin declared that his war aims included the deNazification of Ukraine, the BBC decided to whitewash the Azov Battalion who had been occupying Mariupol and attacking the Donbas for 8 years.
The ‘Jewish’ Zelensky awarding the neo-Nazi head of Right Sector Ukraine’s highest award – Atkins didn’t get round to telling us about this!
Ros Atkins, in an uninterrupted monologue, whitewashed the latest version of the ‘moderate’ rebels that we saw in Afghanistan and Syria. Atkins asserted that their incorporation into Ukraine’s National Guard had de-Nazified them when it is far more likely that they polluted those around them. This was how Hitler Nazified the German state.
After all, when you place a rotten apple in a barrel you don’t expect it to become fresh as a result!
Atkin’s comment that Ukraine’s National Guard ‘was under government command’ begs the question, so what?
The National Guard was formed by Arsen Avakov, the fascist Interior Minister and friend of Andrei Biletsky, the founder of Azov.
Zelensky nonetheless kept Avakov on until July 2021 when he was replaced by Denys Monastyrsk, a ‘protege of Avakov.’
Belarusian neo-Nazi Serihy Korotkykh, the “Botsman,” who is suspected of masterminding the Bucha massacre, was close to Avakov. Korotkykh founded the Russian far-right National Socialist Society. According to his Ukrainian asset declarations, Korotkykh worked as the head of the Interior Ministry’s Police Department for the Security of Strategic Objects from 2015 to 2018.
According to Heroes of Mariupol or Neo-Nazi Menace?
‘National Corps figures routinely visit the regiment, and the party’s ideologists lecture Azov troops. Their blogs are published on the regiment’s site, while Azov’s social media pages promote the National Corps.”
How did Atkins achieve his objective? By pretending that Azov’s neo-Nazi origins were in the past. Atkins asserted that:
i. Zelensky is Jewish but he failed to mention that he is a Zionist. Zionists have a record of forming alliances with neo-Nazis. Israel’s has long supplied arms to the Azov Battalion.
ii. The main far right candidate in the 2019 election got 1.6% which was irrelevant since they occupied key positions in the security state.
iii. In 2014 it was ‘under pressure from Putin’ that the democratically elected Yakunovych backed out of an agreement with the EU. Strangely enough there was no mention of the role of Victoria Nuland, US Secretary of State and US funding of the fascist militias who killed over 100 demonstrators.
iv. Yakunovych fled to Russia with no mention of the armed neo-Nazi militias that staged the coup (see Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire).
v. Putin annexed Crimea and backed separatists in parts of Eastern Ukraine. Yes but Russian troops were not involved in the civil war caused by the abolition of Russian language rights in a population, 40% of whom speak Russian. No mention was made of the 90% of Crimea’s population who supported joining Russia.
vi. The Wolfsangel which the Azov militia wears is not considered a fascist symbol by Ukrainians. It was the symbol of SS divisions such as Das Reich. According to Reporting Radicalism
‘Modern neo-Nazis use it as a symbol of resistance. It is one of the most common neo-Nazi symbols and is widely used by the far right in various countries as an indicator of Nazi, neo-Nazi, and racist views… including the American neo-Nazi terrorist organization, the Aryan Nation.
Atkins failed to mention:
i. The Leaked conversation between Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, which proves that the US was actively involved in forming Ukraine’s post-coup government.
ii. The penetration at the highest levels of the Ukrainian state by neo-Nazis. In 2014 Vadim Troyan, a founder of the fascist Patriot of Ukraine and former Deputy Commander of Azov, was appointed Head of the Kyev Police. He was appointed by the Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who had a history of appointing fascists to senior positions in the Ukrainian state.
iii. That the founder of the Azov Brigade, Andriy Biletsky once wrote that Ukraine’s mission is to “lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade…against the Semite-led Untermenschen.” Atkins argued that Biletsky had left to form the National Corps and was therefore no problem.
iv. That in October/November 2017, according to a Home Office document 70% of conscripts did not show up for duty. Young Ukrainians refused to fight in the Donbas and preferred emigration.
v. That Azov’s symbolism remains unchanged from the days of Biletsky, the Nazi Wolfsangel, supposedly an intersection of the letters N and I, for “National Idea.” This was also the logo of Patriot of Ukraine.
vi. That Zelensky Made Peace with Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Paramilitaries after he had surrendered to their demands to abandon Minsk 2, which the Ukraine government had negotiated, in the face of death threats, after his meeting at Zolote in 2019. Minsk 2 would have granted federal rights to the Donbas within a unified Ukraine. The fascists rejected this. For example:
Sofia Fedyna, a Ukrainian lawmaker issued death threats against Zelensky. In an article ‘I’m not a loser’: Zelensky clashes with veterans over Donbas disengagement (VIDEO) Kyiv Post 28.10.19. she is quoted as saying:
“Mr. President thinks he is immortal.” Fedyana said: “A grenade may explode there, by chance. And it would be the nicest if this happened during Moscow’s shelling.’
vii. That in 2019 Zelensky met with a range of fascist groups telling reporters “Everyone was there – the National Corps, Azov, and everyone else.” A few seats away was Yehven Karas, leader of the neo-Nazi C14 gang.
viii. How in 2019 Zelensky defended Ukrainian footballer Roman Zolzulya against Spanish fans taunting him as a “Nazi.” Zolzulya had posed beside photos of Stepan Bandera and openly supported Azov. Zelensky, described Zolzulya as “a true patriot.” Zelensky’s Jewishness is irrelevant. He has thrown his lot in with Ukraine’s neo-Nazis.
ix. There was no mention by Atkins of the fact that Ukraine is the only country in the world to have a national holiday in memory of a Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera. Bandera is no ordinary collaborator. He and his Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA) were responsible for the death of 200,000 Jews and 100,000 Poles.
‘Most of the (Polish) victims were women and children (who) were tortured before being killed; some of the methods included rape, dismemberment or immolation, among others.
x. On January 22, 2010 Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko made Bandera a “Hero of Ukraine.” It was Victor Yakunovych, who the United States helped overthrow, who reversed this decision.
xi. According to The Forward, the oldest Jewish paper in the United States, in 2014 after the Maidan coup, ‘the country has been erecting monuments to Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators at an astounding pace — there’s been a new plaque or street renaming nearly every week.’ What was the ‘Jewish’ Zelensky’s reaction? “Stepan Bandera is a hero for a certain part of Ukrainians, and this is a normal and cool thing. He was one of those who defended the freedom of Ukraine.’
Atkins, who parades as an expert on Ukrainian neo-Nazism, must have been aware of this. The only conclusion one can draw Mr Sharp is that the BBC is happy employing an apologist for Ukrainian neo-Nazism as a broadcaster.
To not even mention how Ukraine’s neo-Nazis forced Zelensky to abandon his 2019 election platform to secure a peaceful solution of the crisis in the Donbas, is as good example as any of the BBC’s political dishonesty.
Atkins accepted that in 2015 Azov acknowledged that 10-20% of its members held neo-Nazi views and that the degree of nazi views was ‘impossible to verify’ Yet Atkins dismissed this as ‘irrelevant because Azov was now part of Ukraine’s National Guard.’
Peter Hitchens summed this up as ‘bilge… minimising the importance of neo-Nazis in Ukraine (‘only’ 20% of one Ukrainian Army unit are neo-Nazis, so that is all right).’ According to Atkins, even if Azov did have Nazi habits they ‘were just good fighters’.
‘Context is vital here’ said Atkins when suggesting that Azov was 1000 strong. This is a lie as Mariupol demonstrated. According to Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation in 2019 Azov had 22,500 followers (20,000 National Corps members, 1500 Azov Regiment, 1000 National Militia). Today it is far in excess of that. Atkins’ assertion that Azov is ‘a tiny fraction of the Ukrainian military’ is another BBC lie.
Atkins said that Azov is ‘not the same force as in 2014’. For once Atkins was telling the truth. Clearly it has grown stronger and far better equipped whilst losing nothing of its original ideology.
Atkin’s allegation that the original core had been ‘drowned out by the mass of newcomers’ is without foundation. It is speculation and wishful thinking. If a group of state-funded neo-Nazis enters an already far-right environment, the opposite is going to occur – namely that the rest of the barrel will become rotten. See Azov Battalion
There was no mention by Atkins of the Report Far Right Group Made Its Home in Ukraine’s Major Military Western Training Hub from George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian and Euroasian Studies. Why was evidence of the adoption of neo-Nazis by the main Ukrainian State training centre ignored by Atkins? Centuria consists of the traditional officer corps yet they have adopted the ideas of symbols of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis.
In celebration of International Women’s Day NATO’s Twitter account celebrated the “remarkable women of Ukraine” with a photo of a woman in military gear with a patch of the Nazi “Black Sun” on her uniform. It was quickly deleted when critics seized on it.
NATO was forced to delete this tweet as the woman in the picture is wearing a neo-Nazi symbol
Atkins referred to the w earing of White Supremacist symbols saying that there is ‘no evidence such sentiments are widespread’. Has Atkins not heard of Ukraine preventing Black people boarding buses out of Ukraine and turning back Black people at its borders? Perhaps he should consult this news story ‘Nigeria condemns treatment of Africans.’ It is after all on the BBC’s own website.
Atkins said that ‘Azov’s presence makes it central to Russia’s false narratives’. If Azov is what the media always accepted it was until the Russian intervention, then it isn’t a false narrative. See Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat
According to the Intercept’s Seth Harp at the end of June, the Azov Battalion’s base on the outskirts of Kyev was crawling with neo-Nazis and White Supremacists.
‘It also has far more autonomy than any other regiment of the army. “Azov is growing,” Maksym Zhorin, the commander of an Azov special operations unit in Kyiv, told me in April. “Our emphasis is on the future…. Also, who knows who was responsible for it, but “WHITE POWER” was spray-painted on the kiosk right in front of us, alongside the driveway — in English.’
But it’s not only the Azov Battalion. Bellingcat reported that on October 13 2019 photographs circulated on social media showing Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk on stage at a “Veterans Strong” concert in Kyiv organized by Andriy Medvedko a far-right member of C14 accused of murder headlined by a neo-Nazi band. Sokyra Peruna, whose swastika-like logo is behind Honcharuk.
‘The Prime Minister wasn’t the only cabinet member from Ukraine’s new government to be there — the Minister of Veteran Affairs, Oksana Koliada, joined Prime Minister Honcharuk at the concert, and even promoted the event in a Facebook post (archive) the day before it took place.’
The episode is a further example of how Ukraine’s far-right continues to be normalized by top leaders in the country. Not only are Ukraine’s top ministers attending events organized by far-right figures, they have also had a literal seat at the table with Zelenskyy… Simultaneously, far-right organizations across Ukraine have taken the lead in organizing “No capitulation!” protests against Zelenskyy’s soon-to-be-launched talks with Russia…’
See U.S. and NATO allies arm neo-Nazi units in Ukraine as Foreign Policy elites yearn for Afghan-style insurgency Alex Rubinstein
Atkins also:
i. repeated the story about Russia bombing a maternity hospital in Mariupol. Patrick Harrington’s interview with the Matron of the hospital told a different story. Azov forces had evicted the patients before setting up base. Atkins said that ‘there’s no evidence that Azov was based there or that it was a military facility’. What more evidence does he need? When the Israelis claims that hospitals in Gaza are Hamas bases the BBC accepts that without question. Why?
ii. Atkins assertion that ‘Putin has the reasons to do this but he doesn’t have the facts’. Nor it would seems does the BBC’s Ross Atkins. Or if he does he chooses not to use them.
iii. When Atkins said that ‘Nazis don’t hold Ukrainians hostage, they’re not launching attacks on Ukrainians’ he ignored the 8 year war on the Donbas by Azov forces. It is true that the BBC didn’t report it but it didn’t report the thousands killed by US drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan either. Presumably if the BBC doesn’t report something it hasn’t happened?
iv. Atkins informed us that the ‘search (for Nazis) will continue to be in vain.’ Perhaps he missed what happened in the Greek Parliament when the ‘Jewish’ Zelensky introduced an Azov member. According to the Greek City Times
By bringing Nazis into the video call in front of the Greek parliament to speak on behalf of his government… he insulted the parliaments and the peoples of our countries…. Zelensky handed a gift to Vladimir Putin by playing the role of one of his “useful idiots”, lending credence to the Russian president’s claim to need to “denazify” Ukraine. The Ukrainian president, in his address to the Greek Parliament, provided a platform to two neo-Nazis who supposedly represent the resistance of the Ukrainian people and indeed of the Greek homogeneity, thus undermining his country’s noble battle against Russia’s invasion.
Zelensky was presumably unaware of the fight of Greek people against the Nazi Golden Dawn Party which was responsible for a wave of murders, attacks against the Roma, attacks on migrants, illegal possession of weapons and racketeering..
What is remarkable is the BBC’s hypocrisy. You have gone to town over Russia’s occupation of Ukraine but can’t even bring themselves yourself to use the word Occupation when it comes to Israel’s 55 year occupation of the Palestinian territories. When the BBC reports from Palestine you take care to ensure that the Israeli version of events is given primacy.
When Israel assassinated Shireen Abu Akleh, the media investigated Israel’s assassination of a well known journalist. CBS, the Washington Post, CNN and even the New York Times. The BBC behaved as it always does. It faithfully reported the Israeli lie that it was a firefight in which it was the Palestinians who killed her.
‘Abu Aqla was shot dead in disputed circumstances on Wednesday, with Israel and Palestinians trading blame’
Such equivalence is not part of the BBC’s coverage when it comes to Ukraine
As David Roger, a former BAFTA winner wrote in an email to me, the BBC employs a sophisticated system to weed out anything that might give offence to the Israeli Embassy.
‘when I worked in-house at the BBC for a few months I met two journalists who were resigning because they said the whole news department had been told by the then BBC1 Commissioner to stop showing Israel in any bad light that would bring the Embassy down on their heads . It was Embassy intervention that had got Jeremy Bowen brought home after he stood in Gaza in 2014 and angrily refuted Israeli claims that the hundreds of dead children were being used as human shields.
They stressed reporters could file excellent reports giving the true picture but they were all filtered & in effect redacted by the London editors . The 24 news channel I feel often escapes the censorship that fillets the main channel news. Their long live footage of the Shireen funeral attack was really chilling and there was a half hour interview with her colleague who’d been trapped beside her that was very powerful .
None of this ever reaches their main channel bulletins or the truly dreadful Newsnight & Breakfast programmes . It’s the editors .
The BBC has consistently portrayed Ukraine as a democratic state despite the fact that the Communist Party of Ukraine and all left-wing parties and independent media are banned.
The deliberate targeting for assassination and torture by the Internal Security Police SBU is also ignored by the BBC. For example
An appeal by Mayor of Kupiansk, Gennady Nikolaevich Matsegora, for the return of his daughter who’s been kidnapped by Ukraine’s SBU as a way of getting at him. This has happened to a number of Mayors who don’t follow Zelensky’s narrative
Vlodymyr Struk the Mayor of Kreminna in Luhansk, was abducted from his home and murdered by Ukrainian forces for his support for a separate Luhansk. Imagine that someone advocating Scottish independence was murdered for their views. This is the reality of Ukraine over the past 8 years.
Denis Kireev, a negotiator for Ukraine was considered by the SBU to be too interested in reaching a peace agreement. The SBU therefore abducted and executed him. Or Mikhail & Aleksander Kononovich who have been arrested because they are communists.
Dmitri Djangirov is another journalist branded pro-Russian who has gone missing. Between 1991 and 2018 some 65 journalists have been murdered in Ukraine. Yet unlike Russia, Ukraine’s murder of journalists goes unreported by the BBC. Why?
There is no doubt that the Russian Army has committed war crimes and the BBC have faithfully reported these. But it has comprehensively ignored war crimes committed by Ukrainian forces. According to the BBC the Ukraine Army are an adult version of the Boy Scouts.
Bucha Massacre
At the beginning of April in Bucha Russian forces were alleged to have massacred over 700 Ukrainians. There is evidence that this was carried out by Ukraine’s National Police and its Safari Unit. The BBC have, of course, ignored anything contradicting NATO’s narrative.
In an article and on my blog I explained that the massacre in Bucha was probably a false flag atrocity attributed to Russia.
The independent Scheerpost has an article by Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe that also questions the accepted narrative. Questions Abound About Bucha Massacre which argues:
‘The West has made a snap judgment about who is responsible for the massacre at the Ukrainian town of Bucha with calls for more stringent sanctions on Russia, but the question of guilt is far from decided.’
Laurie’s article notes that:
Evidence of crimes in Bucha appeared only on the fourth day (after the Russian withdrawal) after the Security Service of Ukraine and representatives of Ukrainian media arrived in the town. All Russian units completely withdrew from Bucha on March 30, and ‘not a single local resident was injured’ during the time when Bucha was under the control of Russian troops,” the Russian MOD said in a post on Telegram.
What happened then on the 1st and 2nd Jason Michael McCann pointed out in a piece in Standpoint Zero that The New York Times was in Bucha on Saturday and did not report a massacre.
In Bucha, the NYT was close to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, whose soldiers appear in the paper’s photographs. In his piece, McCann suggests that Azov may responsible for the killings:
“Something very interesting then happens on [Saturday] 2 April, hours before a massacre is brought to the attention of the national and international media. The US and EU-funded Gorshenin Institute online [Ukrainian language] site Left Bank announced that:
‘Special forces have begun a clearing operation in the city of Bucha in the Kyiv region, which has been liberated by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The city is being cleared from saboteurs and accomplices of Russian forces.’
The Russian military has by now completely left the city, so this sounds for all the world like reprisals. The state authorities would be going through the city searching for ‘saboteurs’ and ‘accomplices of Russian forces.’ Only the day before [Friday], Ekaterina Ukraintsiva, representing the town council authority, appeared on an information video on the Bucha Live Telegram page wearing military fatigues and seated in front of a Ukrainian flag to announce ‘the cleansing of the city.’ She informed residents that the arrival of the Azov battalion did not mean that liberation was complete (but it was, the Russians had fully withdrawn), and that a ‘complete sweep’ had to be performed.”
Does this not raise suspicion? Clearly not because the BBC never questions NATO’s narrative. The BBC only reports the official version of events. It does not investigate. It acts as a conduit for our rulers’ lies and propaganda. Which is why it is having a hard time today explaining Russia’s victories in the Donbas.
It is a mystery why there were no bodies evident in Bucha when the Mayor spoke beaming to cameras on March 31. This also includes a clip of the head of the Safari Police Unit, neo-nazi Korotkykh asking for permission to shoot civilians – again not something the BBC would show
Why there were no bodies evident in Bucha when the Mayor spoke beaming to cameras on March 31.
This is why, alone of daily papers, the Morning Star does not appear on ‘What the Papers Say’. The excuse is that it’s a paper of the Communist Party. Yet the Telegraph, which is the house paper of the Tory Party, does appear. Virtually all papers are owned by billionaires like Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere. That does not bother the BBC because they all sing from the same hymn sheet. They were, like the BBC, opponents of Corbyn.
I trust therefore that you will understand that, being Jewish, I have no intention to help subsidise a propaganda broadcasting corporation that treats Ukraine’s neo-Nazis as the new normal.
Yours sincerely,
Tony Greenstein
The following links are related to this story but contain information that runs counter to the BBC narrative on Ukraine.
See also
Patrick Lancaster Interview with residents of Mariupol – Mariupol Residents Expose War Crimes & Show Dead Ukraine Soldiers
Ukraine: Interview with journalist Patrick Lancaster – woman with swastika
Fascist war crimes in the Donbas
Zelensky is Jewish but that doesn’t stop him being a front for Ukraine’s neo-Nazi militia
C14 Nazi terror gang carrying out a pogrom against a Romani camp
Yevhen Karas Ukraine’s neo Nazi C14’s speech
Azov Battalion propaganda video
Ukrainian neo-Nazis preventing people leaving Mariupol
https://www.illiberalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/IERES-Papers-no-11-September-2021-FINAL.pdf on the Centuria Project, where the West trains Ukraine’s neo-Nazis
Students accuse lecturer of sharing Russia war lies
Ukraine: The disinformation war
How to spot false posts from Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/c/PatrickLancasterNewsToday/videos
https://www.youtube.com/c/EvaKBartlett/videos
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSNuMQCrY2JsGvPaYUc3xA/videos
The Guardian reported on Nawaz’s “fascination with conspiracies” in January of last year.
LBC Radio Host Maajid Nawaz Bankrolled By US Republican Dark Money
Serious Questions about Bucha
Questions Abound About Bucha Massacre
The Bucha Massacre
