Last Updated on 29 May 2026 by Skwawkbox
The BBC’s former Middle East correspondent has described how the broadcaster was a “prime mover” in the ‘Labour antisemitism’ scam that helped topple Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Tim Llewellyn was writing a review, for Electronic Intifada, of Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt’s new book Killing Corbynism: Zionism’s War on Socialism.
Llewellyn says that the BBC generated a “tidal wave of lies and misreporting” on Corbyn’s party and the left in general. He adds that this tidal wave was so large — and so unchallenged by so-called ‘mainstream’ journalists — that it is routinely parroted as fact. Often by those same hacks, despite being entirely made up. The same tactics are now being deployed against Zack Polanski and his Green party.
The scam was “a political, racist libel that made impossible proper debate about foreign affairs running up to two general elections”. And it was driven and funded by Israel and its lobbyists:
Israel and its British-based Fifth Column of propagandists and character assassins helped deliver the party leadership to his deputy, Starmer, now prime minister, an active Zionist and supporter of Israel before and since the start of its genocide against Gaza’s Palestinians after 7 October 2023. …
…The coffers of the pro-Israel lobby are filled by businesses and Zionist organizations here and in Israel.
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its Ministry of Strategic Affairs are at the heart of the successful deception campaign to merge criticism of Israel – or criticism of Zionism as a political movement – with traditional, racist anti-Semitism.
The book lists 60 of these Israeli front organizations, many of them posing as charities. Gordon-Nesbitt selects just nine charities from the Zionist alliance, the best known being the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Campaign Against Antisemitism and UK Lawyers for Israel.
BBC — Manufactured moral panic
Llewellyn recalls a couple of the most notorious moral panics Corbyn’s opponents came up with during his tenure — and dismisses them as “nonsense”:
“Muralgate” emerged in a blog in 2015, which reported that in 2012 Corbyn had objected publicly (on Facebook) to the destruction of a mural painted on a London wall by a leftist street artist. This showed six capitalists sitting at a table borne on the backs of faceless black and brown men. Two of the capitalists were Jewish, Lord Rothschild and Paul Warburg. The Israel machine went into overdrive.
Observer journalist Nick Cohen asked: “Is there a difference in [sic] supporting anti-Semites and being one?” Three years later the mural was resurrected by one of Corbyn’s most virulent parliamentary enemies, the MP Luciana Berger. Pro-Israel organizations called it “blatantly anti-Semitic.”
It was not. It was, plainly, a leftist commentary on the capitalist system. But “Lady” Berger (after losing her seat in the 2019 elections upon quitting the Labour Party as a pre-election attack on Corbyn) is now in the House of Lords and Corbyn is a backbench independent MP, expelled from Labour.
Another egregious case was “Wreathgate.”
Just before the general election of June 2017, the London Sunday Times (owned by Rupert Murdoch) and The Jewish Chronicle, London’s Zionist weekly, published stories saying that in 2014 Corbyn had attended a wreath-laying event in Tunis, former HQ of the Palestine Liberation Organization, for Palestinian terrorists involved in the 1972 Munich Olympic killings of Israeli athletes.
The story was nonsense.
The ceremony was a memorial event for an Israeli air strike on the PLO’s area, in October 1985, which killed as many as 70 Palestinians and 25 Tunisians. This was where and why Corbyn laid his wreath. Such facts never hindered this much-repeated story; and it took its place among the stores of ammunition plundered to assassinate Corbyn during the coming five years.
And he recalls just how extensively the “prime mover” rigged the sham “debate”. Not just in the appalling Panorama mockumentary “Is Labour Antisemitic”, but across the BBC’s output:
The BBC was a prime mover in all this.
I remember many occasions on which a BBC report or discussion would have the Zionist or pro-Zionist accusers repeating false charges on air against Corbyn, nearly all citing his or his party’s “anti-Semitism.” For the required “balance,” Labour apparatchiks, often senior right-wingers – the very people who were the dedicated enemies of Corbyn within Labour – would explain how they were trying to deal with anti-Semitism, admitting thereby that it existed in Labour.
The debate was rigged. Hardly ever did a pro-Corbyn Labour voice get an airing.
Llewellyn is not the only current or former BBC employee to admit that the corporation panders to, or actively collaborates with, Israel and its UK lobbyists. In 2025, over 100 BBC employees wrote publicly and mostly anonymously of the BBC’s terror of offending Israel. But it goes far further than fear-driven compliance. Many senior BBC figures, both in front of and behind the cameras, are ardent supporters of Israel — many of them not Jewish. These affiliations are not disclosed as they parrot Israeli talking points.
The influence of Israel’s supporters and lobbyists has only lessened because of the Gaza genocide. That mass slaughter and Israel’s lies to justify it have increased the public’s awareness of what a racist, murderous ideology Zionism is. But even now, the British government refuses even to allow it to be discussed officially. In its recent ‘report’ on supposed ‘foreign interference’ in UK politics, Israel — the biggest interferer — is not mentioned once.
Featured image via Leon Neal/Getty Images
By Skwawkbox
