Kemi Badenoch and the lost art of telling the truth - The Jewish Chronicle

Something very unusual happened on Sunday. If you’ve been following coverage of the Gaza war and have wanted to scream at the TV most of the time over the lies and smears that are commonplace – which surely is all of us – then it will have seemed almost unprecedented.

The leader of one of our main political parties gave a series of interviews in which she – there you go, that gives it away – stood unequivocally and unambiguously behind Israel in its war with Hamas. No ifs, no buts, no maybes.

Many self-proclaimed supporters of Israel’s right to defend itself from terror – such as the prime minister – couch their so-called support with caveats that expose the reality of where they actually stand. Often it’s worse even than that – as last week, when Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney issued a statement lambasting Israel and threatening it with sanctions. So “supportive” were the three leaders’ words that they were greeted with enthusiasm by Hamas, which congratulated them for “an important step in the right direction”.p

Cue Sunday’s line of questioning on the political shows. But Kemi Badenoch is different. Not for her the attempts to ride every different horse, the desperation to make sure you don’t lose votes from the fellow travellers of terror in Britain, the “on the one hand, on the other” equivocation between a terror organisation and a democracy trying to defend itself. Asked about the statement by Starmer, Macron and Carney, Badenoch could not have been clearer: the public criticism of Israel “does not send the right message” and led to “terrorist cheers” from Hamas. “If Hamas is praising your actions, you’ve probably done something wrong.”

Badenoch has a bracing attitude to the truth – she tells it as it is, even if it doesn’t make her popular. In the same interviews, for example, she criticised moves to lift the two child benefits cap, pointing out that no one has to have a third child. But that attitude is not just unusual when it comes to the Middle East and Gaza, it’s vital – and so very rare. And not just among politicians, of course.

How many times have you heard a senior politician or supposedly impartial broadcaster point out the most basic fact of what is happening in Gaza – as Badenoch did – that Israel is fighting a “proxy war on behalf of the UK” and the West against Iran, which funds Hamas? I’d venture that almost the only times you’ve heard it said have been from her – or from analysts brought in to comment specifically because they have a pro-Israel stance.

There is a broader point here – albeit an obvious one – which is illustrated by the shocked reaction to Badenoch’s calm statements of reality. If people are ever to properly understand what is happening in the Middle East generally, they need to know the actual facts about what is happening in Gaza. And if the terrifying normalisation of Jew hate is ever to be countered, and the hate marches to be recognised as merely the latest manifestation of millennia-long prejudice, there needs to be a greater premium placed on truth and facts.

The big question, of course, is how to make that happen. I have no easy answers. But a prerequisite is that the mirror image should also happen: that there should be real consequences to inaccuracy. In politics, the ballot box is the only mechanism for that. But in journalism, too many supposedly impartial reporters are either incapable or unwilling to report the truth – and far from being pilloried for that, find that their careers prosper.

One example: in October 2023, just days after the Hamas massacre, BBC reporter Jon Donnison said in a live broadcast on BBC News that Israel was to blame for an explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. “It’s hard to see what else this could be really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli airstrike or several airstrikes,” he reported. The explosion was in fact caused by a misfired rocket from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group. Donnison’s words had a real impact, leading to riots on the West Bank. The calumny was then repeated by the BBC’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen. When questioned afterward about his misreporting, he replied insouciantly: “Oh yeah, well I got that wrong. I don’t feel particularly bad about that. I don’t regret one thing in my reporting, because I think I was measured throughout, I didn’t race to judgment.” Donnison and Bowen continue to flourish at the BBC.

There are so many other examples, the most recent of which is the lie pushed by Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, that 14,000 babies were about to die within 48 hours in Gaza. No apology has been issued despite the UN having to rein back from the assertion after it was demolished by analysts. It is still repeated on marches and and by the Free Palestine crowd.

Until we have a culture in which the truth is the basis of arguments and policy, and those who push distortions and smears are treated as pariahs, none of this will change.

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