BBC: "Deeply unacceptable" to show Palestinians as human.

Ed note: If you never want to sleep again read this round-up by Radley Balko of every outrageous thing the Trump admin has done in 5 days with the help of the rich guy who, don’t you think looks like Dwight from The Office? Must suck for someone so concerned about good genes. Anyway, every day I read the news until my eyes bleed and I still only knew like 30% of this.

And now onto a genocide that is enabled, instead of fought, by the West this time around (the 21st century is really just running circles around the 20th).

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“God damn you Sinwar!” screams a woman running from a bomb explosion. It’s not the only time in the BBC film “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,” that Palestinians criticize Hamas for unleashing Israel’s apocalyptic Hell on their loved ones.

Israel should rejoice. Doesn’t that fit with their hasbara that Gazans are under the yoke of Islamist terrorists they’re desperate to topple? (Do you know they don’t even have gay techno clubs like in Tel Aviv, the sole moral metric by which you judge a society?).

And, even though almost everyone is painfully thin, you do see food, and people eating it. Doesn’t that fit with Israeli propaganda that Gazans are getting enough aid?

Yes you see bombings and bags of remains and rubble and people screaming over dead kids — but, uh, that’s not exactly classified information. There’s absolutely nothing controversial or even political about the movie, which depicts the genocide from the perspective of three kids: Abdullah, a charming, deeply intelligent boy, who narrates. Abed, a 10-years-old that hangs out at the hospital all day. He alternates being a helper and a pest. A helper, mostly, pushing gurneys and performing other tasks. A pest when the paramedics have to shoo him out of the ambulance because they’re headed to an area where they’ll likely be attacked. There’s Mariam, 19, who has—improbably—become an online food influencer. She has an infectious smile, curly hair and the ability to make a cake with almost nothing. “You’re so famous!” a man tells her, making her grin. The first time they show her after a bomb has dropped disturbingly close by, she bursts out laughing. In terror.

That’s it. Three kids trying to navigate the most brutal war of the century.

Yet swiftly after release, pro-Israel factions, and likely the government itself, pressured the BBC to take down the film. At first, they “pulled it for review”, because it turns out Abdullah is the son of the Minister of Agriculture.

“Links to Hamas!” the Zionests bleated. And then after editing the movie so the boy’s “link” to Hamas is disclosed in the opening shot, they decided to permanently pull it anyway—it’s not available on the BBC site, and somehow, also YouTube.

On top of that, the pathetic, spineless BBC board prostrated themselves apologizing for “significant and damaging” mistakes in the documentary.

“The subject matter of the documentary was clearly a legitimate area to explore, but nothing is more important than trust and transparency in our journalism,” they added.

“While the board appreciates that mistakes can be made, the mistakes here are significant and damaging to the BBC. The board has required the executive to report back at the earliest opportunity on the outcomes of the work the director-general has commissioned.” Although they refer to mistakes, plural, the only example they cite is that Abdullah’s dad’s identity was not disclosed in the original version.

It’s been going around the Internet though. You should watch it here. It’s brilliant. It rivals, even I think exceeds, “No Other Land,” the West Bank documentary that’s also being essentially censored, with no distributor willing to touch it despite an Oscar nomination.

There is simply no reason for the BBC to pull “Gaza” except for one. And it’s a big one. It shows Palestinians as normal people, not as terrorists, tragedies, or corpses. As hilarious, funny, flawed people. Abed’s Dad says he was a troublemaker at school, when there was still school, which tracks. He hero-worships the adult paramedics, especially one who’s become like a big brother. A woman who just gave birth tells us she left her husband because he hit her. The cutie influencer grins as her follow count blows up. People. As people whose joys and sorrows and hopes you can `identify with.

You can’t empathize with a dead person on your screen. Empathy is the absorption of others’ feelings, which dead people famously lack. You might recoil and rage at an image of a dead person, but you can’t empathize. For me, at least, as hard as it is to see the images of dead people, it’s even more emotionally wrenching to watch their loved ones scream and cry and beg them to come back to life. And even then it’s so hard to feel that suffering that you block it off somehow after the millionth such image.

But normal kids being kids? In a war? That I guess threatens to topple the Israeli state. Fortunately the brave BBC did the honorable thing and said, Sorry we portrayed Palestinians as human it is “deeply unacceptable.”