One War and Two Visions

by Amir Taheri 

• The BBC gives massive coverage to so-called diplomatic initiatives to bring about a ceasefire. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's "shuttle diplomacy" between Washington and the Middle East is presented as a serious enterprise rather than a banal version of shadow-boxing.
• [T]he Beeb wants only Israel to rein in its furies, never mentioning that Hamas, too, could help by stopping rocket attacks on Israeli civilian targets.
• The IRGC cannot tell its audience that those heroes of the "Resistance" have been unable to protect the people they have under their rule for almost two decades. Thus, the IRGC offers no footage of "charred bodies of children" or heaps of rubble where once stood a Gazan village or town.
• Grand Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi assures everyone that "martyrs" in Gaza have the good fortune of going straight to paradise.
• IRGC Quds Force chief Major-General Ismail Qa'ani has put it succinctly: "We give our Arab brothers who join the Resistance Front everything they want, including arms and training. But we shall not fight on their behalf."
• In other words, the glory of martyrdom is not for us, but for those we hire to die on our behalf.

Pictured: Anti-Israel protesters outside the offices of BBC Scotland, on October 14, 2023 in Glasgow, United Kingdom. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

If you thought you knew all you need to know about the war in Gaza, think again. Much depends on where and how you get your news from. Last week I decided to do a little, obviously non-scientific, experiment by following the Gaza news through two channels: the old BBC, one of Great Britain's most adulated institutions, and in parallel with it, the various news outlets controlled by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Tehran.

A number of themes emerged.

The BBC has already sent the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel to its dead archives, while the IRGC outlets keep mentioning it as "the battle that ended the myth of Zionist invincibility." The fact that 7 October was an ambush unleashed against unarmed people, including youths attending a concert, and not a battle, is beside the point; it must be constantly mentioned to justify Iran's thinly disguised hope that the Gaza war continues "longer than any think."

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