Israeli Spies Plant Fake News In The Media with Alan MacLeod

The British public has spoken, and they have collectively let out a sigh of apathy. The latest election results might have produced a landslide for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. But going beneath the surface, Britons appeared less than pleased with the options they were given. Turnout was among the lowest seen since the 1880s when women (and most men) could not vote.

The notorious British press relentlessly promoted the far-right Reform U.K. party, but to little avail: Reform U.K. ended up with only five seats. Chief amongst those outlets were those of Rupert Murdoch’s empire. The Australian billionaire – described by former prime minister Tony Blair as one of Britain’s four most powerful people and an unofficial member of his cabinet – has worked for decades to push a reactionary agenda into British public life. This has included near-total support for the Israeli government and its expansionist project.

Today, “Watchdog” host Lowkey is joined by Alan MacLeod to discuss the U.K. media’s relentless support for Israel. Alan MacLeod is a senior staff writer and podcast producer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, he published two books on media and propaganda and regularly teaches media studies at universities. He has recently published investigations into Murdoch’s close connections to the Israeli government and on Cyabra, an Israeli intelligence cutout organization posing as a neutral fact-checking group.

While Israel has failed to defeat Hamas militarily, it has been able to rely on the support of corporate media in the West, and most of all from Murdoch, who has extensive economic and ideological ties to the state of Israel. 

Earlier this year, conservative British newspaper The Daily Telegraph went after Lowkey, claiming that a network of Russian, Chinese and Iranian bots was artificially inflating his online pro-Palestine messaging. The basis for this extraordinary claim was an intelligence report from private firm Cyabra.

Yet Cyabra is far from a neutral organization. It was co-founded by Israeli military intelligence veterans and continues to work hand-in-glove with the Israeli government. Moreover, around fifty percent of its employees are military reservists who have been called up to serve in Gaza. 

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Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip-hop artist, academic and political campaigner. As a musician, he has collaborated with the Arctic Monkeys, Wretch 32, Immortal Technique and Akala. He is a patron of Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Racial Justice Network and The Peace and Justice Project, founded by Jeremy Corbyn. He has spoken and performed on platforms from the Oxford Union to the Royal Albert Hall and Glastonbury. His latest album, Soundtrack To The Struggle 2, featured Noam Chomsky and Frankie Boyle and has been streamed millions of times.