Ohwellism

The pages of the British press are full of glib answers and opportunistic digs in response to abject horror.

Note: This edition considers media coverage of Hamas’ attack on Israel and the Israeli response. I’ve taken my time to think about and write this but feel free to skip this one.

---

11.3.6 The word ‘terrorist’ itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should convey to our audience the full consequences of the act by describing what happened. We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator such as ‘bomber’, ‘attacker’, ‘gunman’, ‘kidnapper’, ‘insurgent’ and ‘militant’. We should not adopt other people’s language as our own; our responsibility is to remain objective and report in ways that enable our audiences to make their own assessments about who is doing what to whom.

— BBC Editorial Guidelines: Section 11: War, Terror and Emergencies

---

How much was caution and how much was cowardice?

I write about the media and it took me almost a week to start writing this; is that caution or cowardice? Reversing at speed from a complicated topic, littered with ways of going terribly wrong? Or just keeping my head down?

Hamas is a vicious terrorist organisation. In last weekend’s attacks on Israel, it murdered civilians, including babies and children, and kidnapped many others; it was the worst massacre of Jews since the Second World War.

The terrorist group’s brutality towards Israelis is coupled with its willingness to murder Palestinians — rivals from Fatah and civilians it deems collaborators — and to wage war in sites that Muslims should consider sacred (for instance, to kill a rival — the Al-Qaeda-backed cleric Abdel-Latif Moussa — they stormed and destroyed a mosque).

Hamas is no more a summation of the Palestinian people than the Israeli far-right is the summation of Israel. The Gaza Strip is a thin piece of land — about 139 square miles — and houses around 2.3 million people. For comparison, Las Vegas — 135.8 square miles — has a population of around 660,800. 50% of the residents of the Gaza Strip are children. They could not and did not choose Hamas.

There is a moral responsibility to protect all children; the moral responsibility that we — humanity as a whole — have to Israeli children is the same one that we owe to the Palestinian children in Gaza. Their lives are of equal value and should be of equal potential. As I write this, The Daily Telegraph is receiving plaudits from people who would usually — and rightly — scorn a paper whose editorial values have been in free fall for years because it splashed with the words of Israel’s Twitter account…

This is the most difficult image we’ve ever posted. As we are writing this we are shaking. We went back and froth about posting this, but we need each and every one of you to know. This happened. 

… and published the image of a murdered baby on page 3 of its print edition with a front page warning and after two warnings on its website. Far down page, it noted that it “could not independently verify” the image. The murder of babies is a special kind of horror and one that should not be shrugged off.

The killing of Palestinian children is routine. In June 2023, Haaretz — the only left-wing, anti-occupation, two-state solution-advocating paper in Israel — published an accounting of 28 children killed by Israeli forces since January. It wrote:

Since September 30, 2000, the start of the second intifada, Israeli forces have killed 2,252 Palestinian children, 42 of them last year. Forty-four percent of the 5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza (including Jerusalem) are under 18.

They were born into the violent reality of the military power ruling their lives, settling on their land and having no regard for their lives. These children mature fast, living with no hope for normalcy or a decent present or future.

It’s likely — certain, really — that some people will consider the previous paragraphs to be ‘whataboutery’, especially so soon after such a horrendous attack.

‘Whataboutery’ as a term is a Northern Irish invention. It began with a 1974 letter to the Irish Times written by history teacher, Sean O’Conail, decrying people he called “the Whatabouts”: defenders of the IRA who bolstered their arguments by pointing out the wrongdoings of their enemies:

These are people who answer every condemnation of the Provisional IRA with an argument to prove the great immorality of the ‘enemy’, and therefore the justice of the Provisionals’ cause: “What about Bloody Sunday, internment, torture, force-feeding, army intimidation?” Every call to stop is answered in the same way: “What about the Treaty of Limerick; the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921; Lenadoon?” Neither is the Church immune: “The Catholic Church has never supported the national cause. What about the Papal sanction for the Norman invasion; condemnation of the Fenians by Moriarty; Parnell? 

Three days later, “the Whatabouts” evolved into “whataboutery” via the pen of John Healy in a column for the Irish Times:

As a correspondent noted in a recent letter to this paper, we are very big on Whabout Morality, matching one historic injustice with another justified injustice. We have a bellyful of Whataboutery in these killing days and the one clear fact to emerge is that people, Orange and Green, are dying as a result of it. 

In an article published in The Furrow ¹— “a journal for the contemporary church” — in 1982, the Right Reverend John Austin Baker, then Bishop of Salisbury and a former Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, wrote:

I am going to write now something that may shock you but which I believe to be theologically sound: We must accept that the things our enemies do are, in a way, justified. You cannot say this of all human situations but it can be properly said of most… This sounds un-Christian, unethical, almost perverted. When we consider the story of Belfast over the last 140 years, and the huge number of innocent people who have suffered and died from rioting and terrorism in that time, how can we say any of it was justified? Murder is always wrong, whoever commits it. To claim justification is surely to fall into the trap which Bishop Cahal Daly so acutely pinpointed when he said: “… whataboutery is one of the commonest forms of evasion of personal moral responsibility.” 

In fact, however, it is not. Bishop Daly was not saying that questions such as, “What about the sectarian killings?” or “What about the brutalities of the Brits?” had no basis in fact, that there were no such things as just grievances. He was saying that just grievances are no sort of open warrant to do what we like, no ‘licence to kill’… 

… What I am trying to say is that along with our moral responsibility not to render evil for evil we have a companion duty to recognise that our own evil has given grounds for the evil done to us. We are not in the position of sinless martyrs turning the other cheek to baseless violence. The violence is wrong, and has to be restrained and punished; but it has a moral dimension to it. 

We find it hard to accept this for many reasons. The victims of individual acts of violence may be personally quite innocent. One thinks of the children on both sides who have been killed. The idea of corporate guilt is hard to take. Why should we be blamed for matters in which we had no hand? And when we are held guilty for crimes committed long before we were born, we revolt in anger.

… Dreadful as the terrorist activities of the paramilitary groups are and urgent though it is to extinguish them, they are but symptoms. The disease is the long-term impasse we have described.

It is not whataboutery to say that the Palestinians suffer and have suffered for a very long time, nor that they have not, for the most part, chosen Hamas. Neither is it whataboutery to say that dead Palestinian children do not tend to make the front pages of British newspapers much. That’s not to say the victims — children and adults — of the massacre last weekend should not. They should. Of course, they should. But it takes moral blindness and a kind of cowardice to pretend that the lives of one side are treated as equal to those of the other in the British media.

In The Times, Gerard Baker — the headbanging former editor of the Wall Street Journal whose columns are like downloading Rupert Murdoch’s brain — writes:

… Israel does, of course, exercise restraint. If they could, the Israel Defence Forces would pursue their military objectives while avoiding any loss of noncombatant lives. But last weekend was a searing reminder of a truth many of us had almost forgotten: the Jewish state is surrounded by people who want it eliminated. Ah, but the restrainers say, that will only play into the hands of Hamas. 

As William Hague, the former foreign secretary, wrote in these pages, Hamas wants to make Israel lash out in a way that starts a conflagration. But does this mean Israel is obliged to play by Hamas’s rules? Because Hamas deliberately exploits its own people’s lives — and deaths — for propaganda purposes, must Israel back off? No one wants a single innocent life lost but we know from our own history that sometimes, try as we might, when faced with an existential threat from psychopaths who want to destroy us, sadly the innocent do die.

Israel has learnt bitter lessons from exercising restraint in response to international demands. As Michael Oren, former ambassador to the US and a historian of Israel’s wars, told me, in 1967 it “tried to gain American and international favour by not launching a pre-emptive strike against Egypt and Syria. And Israel has regretted that decision every single day since.” As Israel goes about its righteous task in the weeks ahead, as Hamas manipulates the watching world, all of us — including those who are not Jews — should heed the timeless words of Ecclesiastes: “For everything there is a season.” For Israel, this last week has been a time to weep and a time to mourn. What comes now is a time for war; a time to tear down before, some day, a time to build up again. For the rest of us, it is a time for silence.

If there is “whataboutery” this is “ohwellism”, the hands-in-the-air, this-is-how-it-is pose of the cold columnist. Oh well, “sadly the innocent do die”. Oh well, it’s “time to tear down”. Oh well, “no one wants a single innocent life lost,” but…

At around the time Baker’s column was published on the Times website, the IDF told all civilians in Gaza City to evacuate “for their safety and protection”, calling on around a million Palestinians to move south ‘for [their] own safety and the safety of [their] families”. This is ohwellism at its most extreme: The UN has called on Israel to take a different course, warning that the forced evacuation “could transform what is already a tragedy into a calamitous situation”.

Eleven UN refugee workers in Gaza have been killed 30 children in UN schools have been killed since the start of the bombing.

The Israeli government has cut water and electricity supplies to the Gaza Strip and says it will not restore them until all hostages taken by Hamas are released. According to The Jerusalem Post, before the Hamas attack last weekend, “the typical Gaza resident only had access to approximately four hours of uninterrupted electricity daily.”

In the same piece — Cutting off electricity and water to Gaza: Ethical or excessive? — Dr Elai Rettig of the Department of Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University and a researcher at the at the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies says:

Israel is meeting the basic criteria [of international law]. We are not bombing the power plants, which would be collective punishment. We are not taking away the option for them to generate electricity. Israel is temporarily cutting off Gaza's share [of electricity] for tactical reasons - and using the time to hinder its enemy's ability to monitor and attack Israeli forces. As long as Israel can say, and so far Israel can say, that it is taking action for a limited time frame, then it is not a war crime.

Yoav Gallant, the Israeli Defence Minister, was far blunter; he told reporters:

We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza; there will be no electricity, no food, no water, everything will be closed. We are fighting against human animals and we are acting accordingly. 

The same rhetoric was used by Israel’s ambassador to Berlin, Ron Prosor, on Politico’s Power Play podcast:

This is civilization against barbarity. This is good against bad. This is people who basically act as animals and do not have any, any respect for children, women.

In a column for The Times of Israel, Haviv Rettig Gur argued:

A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot. A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel. 

That is the provisional wing of ohwellism: In the most horrific way, men, women, and children were murdered and desecrated by Hamas so now there is no time to “[worry] about the humanitarian fallout”. It is a grim and yet entirely understandable conclusion from the world’s only Jewish state: There is nowhere else to go. But there is also nowhere else to go for the Palestinians; if they leave they have no right to return and are stateless. Hamas uses Palestinians as pawns and the Israeli government and IDF sees them as acceptable collateral damage.

On Friday, in comments reported by the FT then deleted², Israel’s president Isaac Herzog said that Palestinians in Gaza were collectively responsible for the attack:

It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians [being] not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état. 

The Geneva Conventions — which Israel ratified in 1951 — class collective punishment as a war crime. In the same way, Israelis are not a homogenous group that endorses the decisions of their government without criticism or equivocation, being a Palestinian does not mean you support Hamas. The last elections in the Gaza Strip took place in 2006 before many of the area’s residents were even alive. They did not choose Hamas; they have never known anything but the group’s chaotic rule.

While there are a variety of voices in the Israeli press that make that point, the UK press has foregrounded those who seem hungry for vengeance on Israel’s behalf; those who have no qualms about classing Palestinian lives as lesser and including children in that equation. Possibly the most vile example of Ohwellism came, quite unsurprisingly, from Douglas Murray in The Spectator. He writes:

Naturally, the calls for ‘restraint’, ‘de-escalation’ and more poured in from the moment that the attacks became known. For Israel is the only country in the world which is expected to accept with equanimity the mutilation of its citizenry. All the people who think that there is a two-state solution on the table which could come about if only the Israelis tried a bit harder are back at it, apparently without knowing that they are singing a dead song. There is no two-state solution possible. Especially not now. Israel gave Gaza to the Palestinians and the Palestinians gave Israel Hamas and war. If anyone thinks the West Bank should be given similar autonomy then they are simply dreaming of the destruction of Israel…

… The Israelis will respond as they see fit – it isn’t for non-Israelis to give them advice. Maybe Israel will cut off Gaza and starve Hamas out. Maybe they will have a full-scale military operation to rescue the Israeli captives. Or maybe they will finally put an end to this insoluble nightmare, raze Hamas to the ground, or clear all the Palestinians from that benighted strip. A strip which Egypt owned but nobody wants.

Oh well, “clear all the Palestinians from that benighted strip” shrugs Murray, his face a botoxed mask of indifference.

As Murray exploits the horrors to bare his teeth, the Tories and their outriders in the right-wing press have used them as an opportunity to round on the BBC. The smallest events can offer that excuse for them so why wouldn’t they leap on something so huge and horrendous?

In The Times, Stig Abell — who once presented BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, a job I am told he was given without an interview — writes beneath the headline Hamas are terrorists. Why does the BBC find that so hard to say? that:

Hamas are terrorists. They committed acts of abhorrent terrorism last week that shocked the world. Two sentences that are true, and straightforward to write and to say. It is strange to me that the BBC has been unable to say them.

… It is the problem of being so committed to the impossible ideal of absolute impartiality that it becomes a refusal to recognise reality. It is also what happens when a big bureaucracy over-intellectualises the obvious and lacks the agility to change course.

… It is possible to ask about potential war crimes contemplated by Israel, such as refusing water and energy to civilians, or to consider the plight of a child killed by an Israeli missile, while still broadcasting the stories of Israelis who have lost their families to terrorism. More than that, it is necessary to do so. A radio audience is full of humane and intelligent people who can hold multiple perspectives at any one time.

Abell’s piece was published after Mishal Hussain’s exchange with Defence Secretary Grant Shapps — I still cannot believe that’s a phrase I have to write — about the issue on the Today programme. Shapps, asked by Hussain whether the UK government supported the Israeli order to evacuate northern Gaza, replied:

It is good that they provided information in advance... Hamas certainly didn’t do that before they went and slaughtered people. And I would have thought a good start is to warn people in advance that the area that they are in is likely to be part of an attack where the Israelis are trying to get hold of the Hamas terrorists, who you don’t seem to be particularly interested in, and the BBC seems to refuse to call terrorists even though the British Parliament has legislated that they are terrorists.

Hussain referred to the BBC’s extensive coverage of the attacks on Israel and the retaliation in Gaza (covering “the atrocities, the dead, the injured, the survivors”) and continued:

How can you say we’re not interested in those atrocities? Broadcasters are not the same as newspapers and indeed all UK broadcasters stick to the same language around terrorism and these groups that the BBC is. We are not unique in this.

She’s correct; Sky News refers to “Hamas militants”, as do ITV News and Channel 4 News (the term “fighters” is also commonly used). BBC News is the focus of criticism from right-wing newspapers, Tory politicians, and other figures on the right because it is generally disdained by them whatever it does.

It is notably snide that ‘Stig’ Abell implies that in avoiding using “terrorist” as a term in commentary from its own reporters, while frequently noting Hamas is proscribed as a terrorist group by the UK and other nations, the BBC is not “broadcasting the stories of Israelis who have lost their families to terrorism”. That’s simply not the case.

Along with Abell’s op-ed, The Times runs a leader column — the un-bylined ‘voice of the newspaper’ that is written by any of a number of ‘leader’ writers — which argues:

The more than 1,000 people who perished in the [Hamas] attacks were, by any sane definition, victims of terrorism. The Oxford English Dictionary describes terrorism thus: “The unofficial or unauthorised use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Slitting throats in a kibbutz is, safe to say, violence; it is also reasonable to assume that the young people fleeing from the massacre at the Supernova pop festival felt intimidated. And someone who perpetrates terrorism is a terrorist.

The BBC’s coyness in not using terrorism as a descriptor stems, according to John Simpson, its world affairs editor, from the desire to be “impartial” and not to take sides. But this is an issue not about fairness but precision. News organisations as a rule should be careful in their use of language, especially in cases of great sensitivity. But that should not preclude them from designating an act in terms that its nature merits…

… Eminent lawyers have explained why the corporation’s position, which it clings to fiercely, is illogical. In a letter to Lord Grade of Yarmouth, chairman of Ofcom, Jeremy Brier and Lords Grabiner, Pannick, Polak and Wolfson, four of them KCs, explain that the BBC is being anything but impartial in excluding terrorism from its news lexicon. They argue, convincingly, that it is a precise term rooted in statute in this country. The crimes perpetrated in Israel, while not within the jurisdiction of England and Wales, satisfy the terms of the Terrorism Act 2000. Hamas, they point out, is a proscribed organisation under the terms of the act. 

Its nature as an organisation is not a subject of debate in this country; it is a matter of legal fact. They conclude that by persisting in refusing to describe Hamas as such, and by using “watered down” terms as a substitute for terrorism, the corporation is being the opposite of impartial. It is being sympathetic to Hamas in a way not justified by its legal status. The BBC is, in effect, cloaking the evils committed by Hamas in euphemism.

The Times talks of precision and, in a move that would be lumpen if an intern did it, quotes from the dictionary to define “terrorism”. There are other definitions it could have reached for, such as the one proposed by the Jewish-American philosopher Michael Walzer:

Terrorism is the deliberate killing of innocent people, at random, to spread fear through a whole population and force the hand of its political leaders. 

In his book Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument (1977), Walzer says that jus ad bellum — the conditions under which a state may resort to the use of armed force — should be distinguished from jus in bello — justice in war. He writes, “A just cause can be undone if it is pursued in unjust ways” and in an interview at the Council for Foreign Relations in 2017 explained:

I think it’s very important to recognize that states can also be terrorist actors. I think the bombing of Dresden was an act of terrorism. I think the bombing of Hiroshima was an act of state terrorism. So I have no—I have no argument about defining state actors as terrorists. 

That, in part, is why the BBC bowing to the demands that it use the term “terrorist” at the behest of the government and opposition — Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have both said it should — would be, at best, unwise. As I’m writing this edition, news has broken that Israeli airstrikes on convoys fleeing Gaza City — in accordance with the IDF’s call to evacuate that area — have killed 70 people, mostly women and children.

The forced transfer of over 1 million people from one densely populated area of Gaza to another contrary to international law; airstrikes on those fleeing is arguably an act of state terror — the deliberate killing of innocent people to force the hand of political leaders — but there would be outrage if the BBC took that position.

I don’t shy away from calling Hamas terrorists — I did so at the top of this newsletter and am doing so again here — but I am not a BBC editor, presenter, or reporter. I don’t have to worry about colleagues on the ground or the ability of a wider organisation to report on countless other complex and horrifying situations.

It’s easy for the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson, to castigate the BBC for “cowardice” from the comfort of her desks. Or for her colleague Tim Stanley to sneer, “These people” — he means, ‘The Left’ — “always want us to ‘understand the history’, don’t they?” as if nuance is the enemy of journalism.

The massacres perpetrated by Hamas last weekend were terrorism and a war crime. To stand with Jewish friends does not require the acceptance of the worldview or actions of Benjamin Netanyahu. It is antisemitic to suggest that every Israeli, let alone every Jewish person, is an advocate for the policies of the Israeli government. By the same token, it’s obscene to hear sentiments that concern for Palestinians means being an advocate for Hamas.

Ohwellism as a media strategy is deceptively easy. You write with emotion about your ‘side’ and then practice the very dehumanisation which you rightly decry in your enemies. And through repetition, those editorial lines become the arguments that readers take out into the world. But war quickly outstrips the simple moral cant of the newspaper columnist.

To slip into ohwellism about the brutal murders of Jewish men, women, and children or to practice it when Palestinian men, women, and children are forcibly displaced, terrorised, and killed is to embrace moral emptiness; to treat one of the world’s most complexly grotesque and ongoing tragedies as little more than a football match.

---

Thank you for reading.

1. Collected in ‘Where I sensed the breath of God: A footnote in Anglo-Irish History’ (2002)

2. There is video of the press conference.