‘The Telegraph Headline That Exposes the Hollowness of Right-Wing Rage’

No headline in May, when Israel bombed the Freedom Flotilla’s aid ship in international waters off the coast of Malta. No headline last week, when the World Food Programme identified 76,000 children in Gaza as acutely malnourished. No headline on Friday, as thousands of volunteers walk aid across North Africa in a bid to break the siege on Gaza. But when ‘Greta Thunberg’s ‘selfie yacht’ stunt is brought to an end’ (LBC), the Telegraph leads with ‘The Greta photo that exposes the hollowness of Leftie activism’.

It is not hard to understand why activism is “hollow” when it takes a stunt to make the media do its job.

These media are not as allergic to “self-serving PR” as they claim. The “selfie yacht” and “Instagram story” jibes come directly from Israel’s foreign ministry, who can also be credited with the Telegraph’s leading image of Greta Thunberg being “offered a sandwich and a bottle of water” (give me a stuntier stunt that spraying a boat with chemicals and then photographing yourself handing its crew sandwiches). “That awkward moment when the Israel Defence Forces spoil your Instagram story”, writes Stephen Daisley. But a news outlet that lets leaders write their own headlines is just Instagram with bylines.

According to Daisley, this IDF-accredited picture is “perfect” because it “exposes the hollowness of Leftie activism”. Activism can be hollow, believe me. I grew cynical of celeb-fronted humanitarianism in my days distributing aid in despairing environments. But nothing makes my stomach pang like the hollowness of the coverage I have seen from these outlets, which give more airtime to male keyboard warriors bitching about women half their age than they do to plausible genocide.

Search ‘Gaza’ on The Telegraph. This month, the outlet has published 10 (11, if I’m generous) news reports about what is happening inside the warzone. Just one is about Israeli attacks. It tells us “Israel has admitted firing ‘near’ civilians in the vicinity of a Gazan aid centre”. This was the third fatal shooting of Palestinians by Israeli military in three days of aid distributions under the new militarised arrangement. On the first day, the Telegraph headline was “Israel denies shooting dead dozens of civilians at Gaza aid site”. Other than these contradictory press releases, there is not a single report given to the killing of 2,000 Gazans by Israeli attacks in the two weeks of June.

The Telegraph has, however, published sixteen opinion pieces regarding Gaza. opinions entirely unjustified by a balance of factual reporting to demonstrate their writers really know they’re talking about. Comically, 10% of The Telegraph’s total coverage of Gaza this month is about the bias of the BBC’s coverage of Gaza. Over a quarter is about Greta Thunberg.

Again: over a quarter of the Telegraph’s total Gaza coverage this month is about Greta Thunberg. This is absurd. The Telegraph is one of the oldest news outlets our proud nation has to offer. But it is trading in unearned opinion, not information, and I fear its readers are unaware.

On Monday, Piers Morgan interviewed the UN Special Rapporteur to the Occupied Palestinian Territories on TalkTV, and spent twenty minutes denigrating Thunberg. “All I can say for sure,” said Morgan, “is that this stunt has done absolutely zero to help any of the people in Gaza”.

Francesca Albanese replied: “I’m an international law expert and you call me on your program to talk about Greta Thunberg? You don’t want to talk to me about Gaza and the awful situation there? You just wanted to talk about what you think is a ‘stunt’?” The interview was over, and Albanese left in fury. 

The next day, I asked Albanese to explain her anger during my own interview on Middle East Eye. “Poor Piers, he really got the worst of me!” she admitted. “This is as upset as you can ever see me.”

“It was not just about Palestine and the denial of genocide, it was [about] the insult against a young lady who’s doing something that Piers cannot even dream of, something for humanity, getting out of the comfort zone of his or her chair. It’s the misogyny, it’s the alpha male attitude, the ‘I know it all, even if I don’t know anything about it’.”

There is nothing insightful in observing that the Freedom Flotilla’s mission this week, which carried a crew with tens of millions of followers, was at least in part a social media stunt. And I could understand why readers might take that to be “self-serving” and “vacuous”, if they are not given the context that the Flotilla’s previous aid missions saw 10 crew members killed by Israeli attacks, six detained, a third crew tasered, and a fourth ship set ablaze by military drones.

Stephen Daisley chose to omit this. But look, if the self-described ‘opinion journalist’ has ever offered his services as a human shield, I am prepared to take his accusations of “hollow activism” more seriously.

There is another “stunt” currently unfolding that the Telegraph pundit is either unthreatened by or unaware of. In the North of Africa, over 1,500 volunteers have gathered to march an aid convoy to Gaza’s border in Egypt. They are due to reach the enclave this weekend.

They do not actually expect to break Israel’s siege: “We know that we won’t be able to get into Gaza,” one participant, Ousman Nour, said, evoking the unbreachable barriers separating Gaza’s Rafah from safety. “We are there to tell the people of Gaza that we are as close as humanly possible to them, so that they know that we are one with them.  So that they know that we are not going to abandon them”. Does the symbolic nature of this act make it “hollow”?

News outlets have missed the most significant, and somewhat scary, phenomenon behind both these stories. What we are seeing is civilians taking action upon themselves, in lieu of their governments acting to prevent what many fear is genocide. People have seen (likely on social media rather than in mainstream outlets) what is happening inside Gaza under siege. They are watching their fellow civilians being starved and maimed, and they are apparently unconvinced by the common response that it is justified by the events of October 7^th.

These people don’t expect to break Israel’s siege, precisely because they are civilians, not an army, and they know the limits of their power. Still, they march. What is hollow is a media that sees a girl eating sandwiches, not a generation starving, nor a tidal wave of global civilians out of line with governments’ positions.

Media Storm’s latest episode ‘News Watch: LA protests, Gaza Freedom Flotilla, and all sides of assisted dying,’ is out now.