So while thousands rallied against antisemitism on Sunday in the wake of the Golders Green stabbings and the rise of the Green Party, and the eyes of the country were fixed on the slow collapse of Starmerism, deep in the media bubble, the filmmakers behind a Gaza documentary shelved by the BBC were awarded a Bafta.
Gaza: Doctors Under Attack was commissioned by the Beeb in 2025 but then dropped amid impartiality concerns. The decision came also after presenter Ramita Navai said in a radio interview that Israel was “a rogue state that is committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass murdering Palestinians”.
The documentary was subsequently picked up by Channel 4, which saw it as “a meticulously reported and important film” and broadcast it to the public. On Sunday, in the same spirit, the Bafta judges decided to honour the movie with a bauble.
Ben de Pear, the producer, used his acceptance speech to humiliate the BBC and pour petrol on the embers of controversy. “Just a question for the BBC,” he taunted. “Given that you dropped our film, will you drop us from the Bafta screening (which is broadcast on BBC One after a two-hour delay) later tonight?”
To its credit, I suppose, the BBC chose not to air Navai’s speech in full, instead broadcasting a carefully-edited version deprived of most of the claims about Israel. But the message was unmistakable. It was delivered last year, when presenter Gary Lineker was named best TV presenter at the National Television Awards, just four months after he shared that notorious rat emoji, and now it has been delivered again. Britain’s media elites – the most mollycoddled and self-regarding demographic on the planet – are playing their part in the global jihadi propaganda campaign, and nobody’s going to stop them.
The same is true of media elites all over the world. The Bafta outrage followed a similar gesture in the United States, where a Pulitzer Prize for photography was awarded to Saher Alghorra, best-known for the picture of emaciated Mohammed al-Mutawaq, which was wrongly cast as evidence of malnutrition when he suffered from cerebral palsy and hypoxemia. Welcome to 2026, where dezinformatsiya wins prizes.
It could not be clearer: the media is a big part of the problem. The Gaza war might have ended in October last year, but the movement of Israelophobia that it spawned shows little sign of abating. So idiotic are these people that they throw all their abilities, experience and professional weight behind an effort to subvert the very society upon which they depend for their freedoms.
A similar travesty was on display in Berlin, where an Iranian woman who was blinded in one eye by regime gunfire was accosted by keffiyeh-clad leftists when she raised the lion-and-sun banner. They may have been resorting to thuggery rather than biased documentaries and star-studded award ceremonies, but the core dynamic was the same: these people are using the powers available to them to turn society into an instrument of its own destruction.
So multifarious is this assault on the architecture of Western civilisation, from the corruption of our history to the dismantlement of our national pride and hatred of the Jews – who are taken as totems of the West – that rooting it out is the challenge of generations. But there is one source of hope.
That lies with the people who are already making their voices heard. Though it was relatively small, the march against antisemitism was an expression of national resistance, as the anti-regime Iranian rallies have been. There are people turning away from Israelophobic political parties and institutions – just yesterday, a teacher friend of mine told me that one of his A-Level students had withdrawn support from the Greens due to its antisemitism – and there are those who simply will not be silenced.
These people speak on behalf of that most frustrating of demographics, the so-called silent majority. It is certainly silent, but in truth we do not know if it is a majority. Nonetheless, we cannot let go of the conviction that one day, the squeeze will become so tight that the silence is shaken off and the numbers of the resistance swell to reach critical mass.
If not, then there’s Israel.
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