Israel lobby now targeting C4 after broadcaster streamed Oscar-winning Palestinian documentary

Zionist hypocrisy exposed still further – daughter of chief complainant about ‘Hamas’ child served in occupation military

Fresh from cowing the BBC into the deletion of, and grovelling apology for broadcasting, its documentary on the suffering faced by Palestinian children in Gaza under Israel’s genocide, siege and forced displacement, the Israel lobby in the UK has turned its sights on Channel 4.

No doubt driven by Channel 4’s decision to show the newly Oscar-winning ‘No Other Land’ documentary about Israel’s land-theft, ethnic cleansing and murder in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank – and presumably hampered in attacking that documentary (beyond Israel’s hissy fit over the win) because of its Academy Award and the fact it was made by Palestinian and Israeli film-makers – pro-Israel mouthpieces have focused on a few seconds of footage in which Abdullah Al-Yazouri, the narrator of the BBC’s documentary, appeared in Channel 4’s award-winning documentary “Inside Gaza: Israel and Hamas at war”.

Israel’s lobbyists seemed to have no issues with the boy’s inclusion in that programme when Channel 4 broadcast it in December 2023, but it seems the need for a stick to beat the broadcaster with now has changed that – even if the ‘friends of genocide’ crew were a little slow to catch on. Skwawkbox had revealed Al-Yazouri’s appearance in ‘Inside Gaza’ fully eleven days before right-wing pro-Israel papers ‘exposed’ the lad’s involvement – selling chocolate bars on the street to try to make a living – but that didn’t stop them blaring that “Channel 4 used Hamas official’s son in award-winning coverage”:

But what’s good for the goose, as the saying goes: Israel’s apologists targeted the BBC and Channel 4 for not revealing the family links of a young boy to the Gaza government, but one of the main movers in that campaign has strong family links to the genocidal, rogue-state military that has killed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians and has just announced its criminal intention to deprive the Palestinians of food, water, fuel, medicine and everything else via a renewal of the illegal blockade that killed others through disease, starvation and hypothermia throughout the now 17-month Gaza genocide.

David Collier is a pro-Israel activist and self-described ‘investigative journalist’ who has been described as an ‘anti-Palestinian fanatic’, is well known to the British left from his prominent role in the notorious antisemitism smear campaign targeting then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and has called Palestinian refugees a ‘weapon’ and an ‘artificial entity’.

Collier featured prominently in the campaigns against both the BBC and Channel 4 documentaries and is trying to get the British Academy of Film and Television and the Emmys to rescind their awards to Channel 4 for its documentary because of Al-Yazouri’s meagre participation.

But Collier has his own close family links to a terrorist military: Tal Cohen, his daughter with Miri Horowitz-Cohen, served two years, from 2020 to 2022, in the Israeli army and says so proudly on her Linkedin profile:

The pride is evident from the fact that she includes her ‘military liaison’, ‘international diplomacy’ and ‘diplomacy’ skills as ‘top skills’:

There is no indication that Cohen has played a direct role in Israel’s slaughter in Gaza and the West Bank, but Abdullah Al-Yazouri’s father was an agriculture minister and that didn’t stop Collier and others from using it to drive the BBC’s documentary off the air and attempting to do the same with the Oscar-winning No Other Land. And Cohen appears to have played an active role in Collier’s attempts to get into pro-Palestine events. Cohen writes on his website about one such example, where she helped him try to infiltrate a Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) event – leading to Collier implying antisemitism must be the driver for PSC being cautious about who got a ticket and might want to spy on it:

Collier’s family connection and other indications of bias were not declared in coverage of his complaints, such as him spending nineteen years – according to the ‘about’ section of his website – in Israel, where he ran a business. Nor was it mentioned in the so-called ‘Campaign Against Antisemitism’ (CCA)’s coverage of its protest outside the BBC – unlike anti-genocide protests, CAA has no problem getting to protest at the BBC – about its (ludicrously) supposed anti-Israel bias:

The BBC made no mention of Collier’s connection to Israel’s terror force or his anti-Palestinian comments during its grovelling apology for broadcasting its Gaza documentary, nor in the testimony of its CEO and chair to MPs earlier this month, in which they claimed the corporation had made serious mistakes in the creation and transmission of the programme and pledged to ‘restore trust’ – presumably the trust of those who objected to it showing footage of Israeli attacks and terrorising of children.

And it seems they have a long way to go before its critics are persuaded. Collier, as his website shows, is adamant that the BBC is deeply biased against the Zionist occupation and that, for that, there can be no forgiveness, no acceptance of its apology:

So far, Channel 4 seems to have resisted the Israel lobby onslaught. At the time of writing, the programme remains online to view, for free, at least for those in the UK.

There is certainly a bias in the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s genocide, and in that of other UK broadcasters – but not in the way that Collier and his fellow apologists for the genocidal state would have you think. Let’s see if Channel 4 manages to stand against the pressure, at least as far as its streaming of an Oscar-winning documentary showing Israel’s crimes and impunity is concerned.

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