Just to put this out there with clarity: Robbie Gibb, who is responsible for turning the disgraced JC into a right-wing Pro-Netanyahu propaganda rag, is one of five people - including the Director General - on the @BBCNews editorial guidelines and standards committee. It’s on the BBC website. Minutes of the last meeting show they discussed complaints about Israel/Gaza. Quite apart from the fact he is not remotely impartial on the Middle East, how can the owner of a paper with such poor journalistic standards have a role over the BBC’s? Robbie Gibb gets to censor the BBC's Middle East coverage. He needs to resign today. bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/whowea…

I can’t see you how you can possibly avoid using the term ethnic cleansing, without losing your last remaining shreds of integrity as a journalist, @adamparsons. Lebanon's internal displacement rate is now 22.6 percent — more than one in five of its people. Over 1.2 million people, including 350,000 children, have been forced from their homes, with the IDF launching more than 1,840 attacks on Lebanon since March 2, killing more than 1,497 people and injuring more than 4,639. Moreover, the language used by Israel Katz to describe his aims in Southern Lebanon is extraordinarily explicit and self-incriminating. He has confirmed that Israel's military would establish a permanent "security zone" inside Lebanon up to the Litani River, that hundreds of thousands of displaced residents would be "completely prevented" from returning, and that "all the houses in the villages adjacent to the border in Lebanon will be demolished in accordance with the Rafah and Beit Hanoun model in Gaza." The targeting of civilians for displacement specifically identified by their religion (Shia), combined with the destruction of their homes to prevent return, combined with the explicit statement that they will not be permitted to return — these are precisely the elements that international law identifies as forcible transfer and ethnic cleansing. Human Rights Watch has said that "the displacement of the Shia population looks less like a temporary military necessity and more like a move to permanently displace the civilian population based on their religion." Its not complex, Adam. You just haven't got the balls to say it straight, and that failure makes your reportage worse than worthless. It makes it morally bankrupt.

"'Over the Border It Was Okay to Be Crazy': IDF Soldiers Tell About the Army's Moral Decay in Lebanon" haaretz.com/israel-news/isra…