by Stephen Pollard, Jewish Chronicle
The regime’s fall would reshape the world. Yet for Britain’s national broadcaster, the Guardian and their ideological fellow travellers, there is little to see
Imagine that we are back in November 1989. There have been weeks of protests in East Germany and then on November 4 the huge Alexanderplatz demonstration takes place, with nearly a million people demanding the end of the communist government. Within days the protests have moved to the Berlin Wall – and the authorities effectively admit defeat by refusing to fire on the crowds. The Berlin Wall is breached – followed later by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself.
Then imagine that you turn to the BBC for coverage of these epochal events in East Germany. You watch the TV news bulletins but there is no mention of anything. You listen to the radio but only at the fag end of the news is there a sentence mentioning that there have been protests, with no details. You look at the BBC website (I know, I know – this is imaginary) and there is not a word until you have scrolled down through 20 other stories.
It’s unimaginable, isn’t it? The BBC was in its element covering the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it rightly understood that it was one of the most important stories of the century.
As I write, there are mass demonstrations taking place in Iran. It is possible, of course, that these will follow the same path as those in 2009, in 2017-2018, in 2019 and in 2022 and will fail, defeated by a lack of coordination and planning and the ferocious response of the regime. But it is possible that this time it will be different, not least because this time the US has made clear it backs the protestors. As President Trump posted earlier today: “If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
If the Iranian regime collapses it would not only transform the Middle East almost overnight, it would have a huge impact on the entire world, not least because the world’s leading sponsor of terror would have been removed (don’t forget it targets British citizens in the UK). And the economic impact would be huge. There would, for example, be no need for the sanctions which restrict Iran’s oil exports, leading to higher prices for the rest of us.
But according to the BBC, none of this matters. Iranian protests aren’t worth mentioning. If you relied on the BBC’s news broadcasts for your news in recent days you would have been entirely unaware that anything was happening in Iran. Only if you scrolled down the BBC news site would you, eventually, have reached a small story. You would have learned far more by following the social media posts of Iranian comedian Omid Djalili than the news organisation which we are all compelled by law to fund.
Why has the BBC ignored the Iranian uprisings? by Mary Dejevsky, spiked
Israeli embassy accuses BBC of ignoring Iran protests while ‘obsessing’ over Gaza by Gordon Rayner, Telegraph
Read also: The Netherlands is Burning, and the BBC Won’t Say Why by John Mac Ghlionn, Courage Media