Media Storm - News Watch: How the Green Party beat Reform, and is war on Iran legal?

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Care about independent and ethical news? Support Media Storm on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Last week’s by-election in Gorton and Denton saw massive losses for Labour and a massive win for Hannah Spencer of the Green Party, despite Reform's overconfidence. So did the Greens cheat, as Reform claim… or are Reform just really bad losers? They seem to think abusive Muslim husbands stole their vote, and that the definition of sectarianism is brown people voting for a white woman in a party led by a gay Jewish man. And perhaps worse - the mainstream media think these ideas are worth multiple headlines, articles and broadcast discussions. Also: remember when Trump said he’d achieved 'everlasting peace' in the Middle East? Since he joined Israel in bombing Iran on Saturday; Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Oman are caught in the crossfires. Trump insisted the attack was an act of self-defence, and now US officials are scrambling to justify exactly how that’s true. Has the media learned from its devastating mistakes in 2003, when it circulated false intelligence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq? Or are they doomed to repeat the same mistakes? This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bluesky⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every family tree holds extraordinary stories, especially those of the women who shaped who we are. In honor of International Women's Month, Ancestry invites you to shine a light on their legacy. Until March 10th, enjoy free access to over 4 billion family history records, and discover where they lived, the journeys they took, and the legacy they left behind. Start with just a name or place and let our intuitive tools guide you. Visit Ancestry.ca to start today. No credit card required. Term supply. Hi Matilda. Hi, Helena.

Uh, what is happening in the world? Helena, what about the year of the firehorse? You promised me on day one. Everything was going to be good. Yeah, the year of the fire horse, the fire horse has betrayed me. Maybe I shouldn't have put my entire belief system in the lunar new year because World War III has broken out. Wow, who'd have thought? Well, now I've decided I'm going to put my entire belief system in my own culture.

in the Parsi New Year on March 21st. Okay, guys, we can do it. We can get to March 21st. You're really learning the lessons of history there, there, Helena. Anyway, I get a new year before March 21st because Saturday is my B day. And for your birthday, you have thrown your back out, which is why you're recording on the floor. Yes, I am coming to you from the floor because my back has decided to stop being a back and hold up the rest of my body. I guess that means that you're finally a grownup.

There are no grownups in this world, Helena. I think that's the lesson of the world news right now. Speaking of which, what's coming up on today's episode? We will be looking at the by-election in Gorton and Denton here in the UK. To many, it looks like a standoff between the polar parties of the immigration debate. And guess what? It was a landslide win for the least scaremongering side, despite it getting the least coverage from the scaremongering media.

After the break, war in the Middle East, except it's not just the Middle East. Besides the U.S. and Israel and Iran and now Hezbollah of Lebanon, many countries have been caught in the crossfires. Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Cyprus, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Oman. Wow. Remember when Trump told us he'd secured peace, and I think it's going to be a lasting peace, hopefully, an everlast thing. peace. Yes, well, apparently, this is what peace looks like. The United States military began

major combat operations in Iran. It's not really in line with Trump's political interests or the US national interests. So what's it all about? Iranian human rights, perhaps? We can certainly hope so. But given Trump and Netanyahu haven't got such a great track record on human rights, and given they're not actually claiming to be doing this in the Iranians' interests, you sort of have to ask why? Uh, hello, the Epstein files. Oh my God, Matilda, you've cracked it. I know.

Our media has such short-term memory loss, but look, they also have a history of publishing false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, which Western governments like to use to justify probably illegal wars. So we'll take a look at that. Just a moment before we get into all of that to thank our new patrons. Many of you have been listening to our callouts

and signing up and we see you and we love you and we thank you. We have been discussing some ideas about Media Storm's future and we would love to put them to our community on Patreon. So if you can afford to support what we do at Media Storm, please consider subscribing to our patron. You can do so for less than a cup of coffee per month or at any rate that you feel is appropriate. The link, as always, is in the show notes.

Thank you for giving us a minute to plug that. Now, let's get on with the show. Not yet, actually. First, I want to open with a mini news watch because this is a shocking and important story, but one that has been completely buried in the news cycle. Just wondering if you knew that it's now illegal for trans people to drive in Kansas.

What? Is that like a specific law? or an accident of a new law. Okay, I'm doing like a little bit of a clickbait headline there, but also not really at all. So this week, trans people in Kansas in the US received letters that their IDs are now invalid. Here's a couple of trans voices who this happened to.

Hi, I'm Avery Rowland. I'm a transgender woman in Kansas, and today I got a letter from the driver's license bureau saying my license is invalid. It happened. I received my letter from the Kansas government saying that I need to change my driver's license back to mail. The IDs will remain invalid

unless they go to the DMV and get new IDs listing their sex assigned at birth. And if they're caught driving with their current license, which affirms their identity, they could face a Class B misdemeanor which carries up to six months in prison. Wait, but how are they meant to get to the DMV to get a valid license if they can't drive themselves

because there was no time to change the licences. I mean, not that this should have happened to them anyway, but that seems like a problem. Honestly, it's a great question. Or you could ask, if the government is imposing this change on them, why didn't the government just send them valid IDs with their sex assigned at birth? And the answer, which was explained brilliantly by Matt Bernstein,

host of the podcast A Bit Frutie, is that preventing trans people from participating in public life was always the goal. I want to give a huge shout out to Matt Bernstein for elevating this story, which has had little to know mainstream coverage. Here's what Matt said. Giving trans people paths to freedom is not the point. Preventing them from participating in public life is.

Much like how ICE has been arresting people when they show up for their lawful immigration appointments, the fascist regime is pretending that there's a pathway to becoming a persecuted minority the right way. When we know that that's not their goal. They don't want trans people. driving, or getting paid at their jobs, or renting apartments, or voting. And once they've achieved that, they will move on to another group. So if you're thinking, I'm not trans, what does this have to do with me? Allow me to put it another way.

The same politicians pushing for ID requirements on voting day just singled out a group of people that they did not like and invalidated their IDs overnight. I think you should care about this because it happened to anyone. But if you also belong to any minoritized group and think that something similar couldn't happen to you when you become inconvenient to the fascist project, I don't really know what to tell you. On with the News Watch. She calls herself Hannah the Plummer and says she's ready to throw a spanner in the Westminster Works.

What they played on was sectarianism. They can never have a nuclear weapon. I take the fact that he develops weapons of mass destruction very seriously. Imagine if I had done any of this. Welcome to Media Storm's News Watch, helping you get your head around the head. headlines. I'm Helena Wadia and I'm Matilda Malinson. This week's media storms did the Greens cheat in Gorton and Denton and the media that cried nukes. Look, I have a great piece of journalism that I just want to start by plugging. I had this whole idea I was going to render it as an audio

scape, which I'll have to do on an upcoming episode because too much has happened this week, but I still want to direct listeners towards it. It's a multimedia piece by The Guardian who used AI to identify patterns in immigration rhetoric. They compared parliamentary speeches over the past 100 years. And this is really, really useful as an exercise because it helps us to spot patterns, identify what causes them, and how they, in turn, cause real world events, right? The relationship between rhetoric and reality. And one of the patterns that they are able to identify when they mapped out this sort of macro-linguistic graph is that we are currently at the the trough of a historic nosedive in the quality of rhetoric on migration,

in anti-migrant rhetoric. For no party is this plummet more extreme than for the Labour government. But if you look at the historical patterns, it's predictable, right? Certain events in the world trigger more negative or more positive attitudes towards migration. For example, in the wake of EU stripping of border regulation and a massive spike in immigration that hadn't been strategised for, there was a rise in negative sentiment. When the windrush scandal broke out

and everyone realised the extent of like racist policy, there was a huge improvement in rhetoric and attitudes towards migration. Post-war, when migrants massively propped up the economy, positive spike. During the Brexit campaign, when you had a coordinated political agenda founded on anti-migration, well, you know, plummet. And what you also see in this pattern is that when there is a,

successful anti-migrant party, the other parties, or the weaker among the other parties, start to mimic and copy their rhetoric. The last time there was this sort of like coordinated nosedive where other parties started following the neo-fascists was in the late 1920s. This is just before the rise of Nazism in Germany. And when that Nazi threat reared its head, and we started to see an influx of Jewish refugees with whom we all felt a lot of compassion as a that change and it started to rise again. That was the only time it dipped into a net negative in the entire 20th century. We are now at a lower point than we were in pre-fascist Europe.

And the Reform Party, by the way, expresses more hardline anti-migrant rhetoric than any party of the past century. Oh my God. If you want to read this piece, it's titled How Right Wing Rhetoric has risen sharply in the UK Parliament, an exclusive visual analysis and is by a whole team at The Guardian. There is a lesson here for the media, too, I beg. And the lesson is that sometimes, yes, society must reform immigration policies

based on changing contemporary circumstances. But we do not need to pair reform of the immigration system with rhetorical depreciation of migrants themselves. Thank you for highlighting this piece. And I feel like this segues absolutely perfectly into the by-election that took place in Gorton and Denton, which is what I wanted to bring to Newswatch this week. Two weeks ago, we spoke about Matt Goodwin. Remember him? Oh, the reform guy who was obsessed with women's wombs. What was the, what was the, what was the,

right wounds? With the ripeness. The underused ripeness of women's womb. It's so horrible. You're telling me that he didn't win? It's so horrible. Anyway, that's correct. If you remember, listeners, Matt Goodwin made a lot of comments about women and what they should and shouldn't do. Should have lots of babies. Shouldn't have those babies when they're too bloody old. Think we're over the hill, Helena.

Yeah, like 30. Anyway, he was running to be the MP in Gorton and Denton in Greater Manchester, which had a by-election last week. And this was a significant by-election because it gives us. perhaps just a little hint of what we might face in May's local elections. This is the second Westminster by-election since the general election. Reform UK won the first one in Runcorn and Helsby in Cheshire last May, beating Labour by just six votes. So this was pretty significant because I think people knew that every vote counted and because reform were out in force trying to rally

up votes. Just a bit of background context. The Gordon and Denton areas have been a labour stronghold for decades. Prime Minister Kier Stama kind of pitched this by-election as a two-horse race as one between Labor and reform, dismissing the Green Party's chances and saying that supporting them was effectively a vote for reform. And boy was he wrong. Hannah Spencer, 34-year-old Plummer from the Green Party won this by-election, receiving nearly 15,000 votes, which was nearly 41% of all votes cast, and there was a swing of 26.4% from Labour to the Greens. Reform came in second with 28.7% of the vote, and Labour came in third with 25.4%. This is an enormous loss for labour in a historic Labour stronghold.

And you can see here a defection of Labour voters both to the right and to the left. There's a lot of evidence of residents saying that Labor let them down on immigration. For people who actually have a lot of humane compassion for refugees and minorities, there's a massive sense of betrayal. But you're also going to lose people to the right

when you mimic their rhetoric because you cannot point to reform and say, yeah, what they're saying is right. So vote for us. That is just like idiotic politics. It's so stupid. It's stupid politics. And what do you think happened after Hannah Spencer won as the Green Party's first ever Westminster by-election winner?

Do you think reformer shook hands and said, well done? Well, no, of course not. They blamed Muslim people. I just, how? How? Oh, Matilda, if you want to find a scapegoat by Jove, there's always a way. Here's what Nigel Farage tweeted after reforms lost. Incidents of family voting in Gorton and Denton

reached the highest level of any election in the past 10 years, says Sky News. This is deeply concerning and raises serious questions about the integrity of the democratic process in predominantly Muslim areas. What is family voting and why am I supposed to have such a problem with it?

So family voting is kind of a cutesy name for what is an illegal practice. It's where a family member is seen to be influencing somebody else's vote, or where multiple voters confer with one another while voting. And what happened in this case is that shortly after polls closed, an organisation called Democracy Volunteers released a statement in which it claimed to have observed concerningly high levels of family voting at polling stations in the constituency. Democracy Volunteers describes itself as a non-partisan domestic election observation

organization committed to improving the security and accessibility of elections. So first of all, note that the statement from democracy volunteers is where the family voting initial reports came from, not from Sky News, as Nigel Farage tweeted. In response to the statement from Democracy Volunteers, a spokesperson for the returning officer who is the person who has overall responsibility for the conduct of any elections held within their borough, said, Polling station staff are trained to look out for any evidence of undue influence on voters.

No such issues have been reported today. If democracy volunteers were so concerned about alleged issues, they could and should have raised them with us during polling hours so that immediate action could have been taken. Additionally, Greater Manchester Police, who, by the way, had a presence at every polling station, also confirmed that no reports of alleged family voting had been made to them in connection with the Gorton and Denton by-election

until a report was made by none other than Nigel Farage himself. I think what's important to say is that voting coercion is a real thing and can happen especially to women who are in, for example, abusive relationships. But the Democracy Volunteer's statement did not provide any information about the people allegedly involved in family voting. But this didn't stop Nigel Farage immediately blaming Brown people, because obviously women with brown skin only ever do what their husbands tell them to do. It also didn't stop the right-wing press seizing upon the narrative.

Recent defect to the Reform Party, Robert Jenrick, tweeted, South Asian men instructing women how to vote at polling stations in modern Britain. Remember, no details were given about who was allegedly involved in family voting. As soon as Robert Jenrick weighs in, though, you know their evidence has just been cast to the wayside. That man gets more and more ridiculous in direct parallel to becoming more and more prominent in reform, which is just a concerning correlation.

Also ridiculous, Peter Gold, a conservative counsellor in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, which has a large Bangladeshi community, wrote an op-ed in the telegraph, saying that he has repeatedly witnessed family voting happening in polling stations where friendly chats between husband and wife are in fact an easy way for unscrupulous parties to carry out voter fraud. Also in the Telegraph, this headline penned by a lord, who was once labelled one of the most powerful right-wing figures in Britain,

reads, Electoral Fraud may have won the Greens a by-election, and it's just the start. Wait, so now fraud won them, the by-election. How many cases of alleged family voting did the Observer Group say that they'd witnessed? They claimed to have witnessed 32 cases of family voting.

The Greens won by more than 4,400 votes. And my personal favourite, also from the Telegraph, written by none other than Nigel Farage himself, family voting is a monstrous attack on our democracy. He writes, and I quote,

husbands and wives, and sometimes whole family groups, were going into the polling booths together. Many of them do not speak English as a first language. Some of them do not speak English at all, but on instructions of the head of the family, and we know what that means in a Muslim context, their vote was overseen. Is that based on anything other than his own, like... Racism, no. You know what, this echoes. Just this week, Donald Trump, US president,

conflating the anti-war vote in the UK with the Muslim vote, right? He said Kirstama is bowing to the Muslim vote because he didn't immediately jump into a war. The implication here is a classic trope of extremism. If you don't agree with us, you're not legitimately disagreeing. You're inferior or you're brainwashed, and you're definitely like a homogenous other. Now, this isn't the first time this by-election was blamed on Muslims. I wonder listeners, if you heard the term sectarianism

being thrown around during this by-election. So after saying that Muslim voters were being forced to vote green by their evil husbands, he then said that the reason for this was that the Green Party seemed to care far more about Gaza than they did about Gorton and Denton. This election was a victory for sectarian voting and cheating, Farage said. Sectarian voting, right, is when voters back a candidate based on religious identity. So essentially voting for a candidate of their own identity on those grounds. Just keep that in mind, listeners. But it was not just reform, by the way, who played into this. Kirstama said that the Green

Party were willing to welcome divisive sectarian politics. What? Essentially, that the Green Party focused on the genocide in Gaza to win the Muslim vote, rather than focusing on local issues in Gorton and Denton. And these claims of sectarianism thrown into the public sphere by Farage and repeated by the right-wing press made it onto mainstream TV programs immediately after the Greens' historic win. Here's Zach Polansky, leader of the Green Party, being interviewed.

on ITV's Good Morning Britain. Let's speak to the Green Party leader, Zach Glansky, who joins us now from Salford. Good morning to you. And we should say, of course, congratulations on what is an absolutely historic moment for your party. But we do have to ask you, obviously,

about the accusations that are being put forward that you won this by election because you, in the words of others, used a sectarian campaign. essentially using the idea of Gaza, nothing to do with local politics, as a way to whip up a kind of a desire to vote for the Greens, which is to do with nothing to do with local politics. Well, first of all, I can't count the amount of times during this election.

I talked about lowering people's bills, protective of the National Health Service, and rebuilding our public services. Most importantly, Hannah Spencer on the ground was constantly talking about her local community and working there too. in the same breath, it is absolutely right that as any MP as she now is also talks about the fact that our government is still selling arms and sharing intelligence to the Israeli government

who are committing a genocide and that doesn't just make our government complicit. It makes them active enablers in it. You can do more than one thing at once. Aside from being hypocritical, which I'm sure we'll get on to, it also really reduces a smart campaign by Hannah Spencer. I mean, Hannah's campaign maintained a relentless focus on the cost of living crisis. And as a plumber, she can actually talk about it in a relatable way. And from first-hand experience, she paired social media with door knocking, which as a 34-year-old,

she was also in a far better position to do than a lot of her running mates. Exactly. She campaigned on hope and not hate. Let's listen to a little bit of her acceptance speech. I am no different to every single person here in this constituency. I work hard. That is what we do. Except things have changed a lot over the last few days.

Because working hard used to get you something. It got you a house, a nice life, holidays. It got you somewhere. But now, working hard, what does that get you? Because talk to anyone here and they will tell you. The people who work hard but can't put food on the table. Can't get their kids' school uniforms. Can't put their heating on.

Can't live off the pension they worked hard to save for. can't even begin to dream about ever having a holiday, ever. Because life has changed. Instead of working for a nice life, we're working to line the pockets of billionaires. We are being bled dry. And I don't think it's extreme or radical to think working hard should get you a nice life. And clearly, I'm not the only person who thinks that. Because I've made clear my position and my commitment to working class communities,

the community that I am from. People in their thousands told me on the doorsteps and at the ballot box that what we are sick of is being let down and looked down on, that we are sick of our hard work making other people rich. This is what people wanted and people needed. Also, side note on the claims of putting Gaza above any other issue, other people, not just Muslims, care about Gaza too. Yeah, I didn't realise I was Muslim.

I mean, a flip, look, to be interesting, perspective, a flip side, I think, would be like people on the left calling everyone they disagree with racist. And this is a flawed approach from a politician's perspective politically because, you know, clearly you don't understand your electorate and you don't care what genuinely motivates them. But also, that conflation is racist. As you say, this is what a lot of people want, hope not hate. It is so rare in this day and age to have a politician who actually offers us a vision, who gives us their utopia, rather than just saying everything that they see wrong with every other candidate

and everyone they see to blame for society's problem other than themselves. But yeah, much of the British media seem to just go along with the narrative that Gaza being an issue for anyone in Gorton and Denton is ridiculous. They didn't even bother to challenge that perhaps people are legitimately angry

that their current government is complicit in a genocide. You mentioned the hypocrisy. Just listen to this. Reform MP Richard Tice on LBC being interviewed by presenter Lewis Goodall. What they played on was sectarianism. Why is that sectarian? Because they were seeking division and hate

by saying things in a different language, in a different language about us. And frankly, I just think that is irresponsible. Reform is saying the Greens were seeking division and hate. I mean, it's literally so funny. He was just describing his own party. It's just like the lack of grace as a loser. You know, be embarrassed to be such a bad loser.

Honestly. It's okay to lose. Like, it's a democracy. We want people to have lots of different views and it's okay to lose. Just take the loss like a grown-up. Yeah. And the press are playing into a narrative whereby they are trying to convince the public

that Muslims voting for a white woman in a party led by a gay Jewish man is sectarianism. That's the opposite of sectarianism. Oh my God, it is like, believe what I tell you, not what you see. Yeah. Also, I don't know if you picked up in that clip when he said the Greens were saying things in a different language. Now, this refers to the fact that the Greens translated one of their campaign

leaflets into Urdu to reach the large Urdu-speaking population in Gorton and Denton. The next clip I'm going to play is probably one of my favorite interview questions and answers in the last week. Here's Zach Polanski being interviewed on BBC's Newsnight. Why did you produce a late leaflet in Urdu in Manchester? We produced a leaflet in Urdu

because we want to communicate with people who speak Urdu. I think that's quite simple. Why did you produce a leaflet in Urdu? Because people speak Urdu. I'm laughing, but actually, I'm actually quite horrified by that line of question.

I actually feel quite disgusted by how legitimising our media is of this hateful and racist smear campaign. And I just want to take you back to Richard Tice on LBC being interviewed by Lewis Goodall. Here, he tries to claim that reform has many Muslim voters. Isn't it a truth, Richard Tice, that Muslim voters here... Of which we have many alongside Sikh voters and non-vote people have... And this was, I think, quite unbelievably, a narrative that spread across the right-wing press, which led to Camilla Tomini, the presenter of the Telegraph's Daily podcast, asking this, with no level of irony at all.

Why have right-wing parties not been able to appeal to Muslim voters who, to all intents and purposes, are socially conservative? Oh, I wonder, why have right-wing parties not been able to appeal to the Muslim vote? Riddle me that, five-year-old? Is it perhaps because they keep telling them to go back to where they came from? Is it perhaps because Farage has built his party on the message of ethno-nationalism that you have to be white to be British? What a mystery! Riddle me this!

I think also here it's just so important to say that Muslim people are not a monolith. There may well be Muslim people who vote for right-wing parties, but the rights rhetoric is dependent on viewing them as a threatening group that think the same and will take over Britain. And despite the interviews that have been making me laugh out loud, as is so often the case here, the themes beneath these interviews are far more sinister. A couple of days ago, Farage went further to say that...

I'm absolutely convinced that amongst British-born voters, Matthew Goodwin came first in that election last week. The fucking arrogance. In order to vote in a year, UK election, you must be a British citizen, or an Irish citizen, a qualifying Commonwealth citizen, or a qualifying EU citizen living in the UK. If you are not one of these things, you cannot vote. But this blindingly obvious piece of information didn't stop the Daily Mail from going with this headline, foreign-born voters stole by election, blasts Farage. This is straight out of the

Trump playbook, and it's plain and simple racism. And we must be. alert to it because if the Green Party can capture one of Labor's safest seats and beats Reform's aggressive tactics, then Labour reform, the right-wing press, the billionaire-backed politicians are going to come after the Greens pretty damn hard. Already in this by-election, we had reform saying that Greens stole the election because of brown people and we had Labour saying that Zach Polansky would turn children's playgrounds into crack dens if he was elected because part of his campaign is to decriminalize drug possession. Yeah, but they're terrified of evidence,

and there's actually evidence on drug decriminalization, which we never ever report. So, you know, scary stuff. And if this is happening now, we have to be the most media storm about it that we've ever been, and we have to read everything with a critical eye. You don't need AI agents,

which may sound weird coming from Service Now, the leader in AI agents. The truth is, AI agents need you. Sure, they'll process, predict, even get work done autonomously. But they don't dream, read a room, rally a team, and they certainly don't have shower thoughts, pivotal hallway chats, or big ideas. People do.

And people, when given the best AI platform, they're freed up to do the fulfilling work they want to do. To see how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988, Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know, just in case.

Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada. There has been war in the Middle East. Israel and the U.S. declared war on Iran, which immediately retaliated launching strikes on Israel and U.S. air bases across the Persian Gulf. On the streets of Iran, we've seen celebration, we've seen terror. Among the diaspora, there's a divide between those hateful of or exiled by the current government of the Islamic Republic and those hateful of or traumatized by histories of Western military intervention and imperialism.

We looked at this binary divide a couple of weeks ago during the January protests in Iran. It can be hard to know how to feel in such a divided climate. For me, I find a helpful grounding to be international law or humanitarian theory. I suppose my bottom line here is I don't want to live. in a world in which war can be lawlessly waged. I understand if people feel like they can't have an opinion here, it's very complicated. But I don't think that is a particularly controversial opinion. There is a theory of just war and there is a framework of legal war. Honestly, though, is it worth having the legality debate when Trump has made quite clear that

he just doesn't have any regard for the law? Is there even any pretense that this is a legal war. Actually, I think that, yes, I actually think Trump has gone out of his way to try and give this a guise of a legal war. And I suppose my second answer to that is regardless, there has to be. And it is our job as the media to enforce that at every step of our analysis. And here I just want to quote really quickly from a German opinion piece I wrote. In Germany, there's a similar situation to here in the UK. The, the, the, Leader Friedrich Merz has used what this guy terms, soft and evasive rhetoric like Keir Stama, not condemning what America is doing while clearly being very reluctant to actually get involved. He would answer your question, yes. And to quote, because international law requires constant reaffirmation, words matter. Important states, such as Germany, must defend the rules governing war and conflict. Otherwise, there will soon be little of them left.

No one is asking the German government to side with the Mullers, but it should stand on the side of the law. Now, back to this initial question about whether Trump is even bothering to cloak his attack in the language of the law. I think the commentary has underplayed just how far he has gone to cloak his attack in the language of the law. He didn't actually justify it on the grounds of defending Iranian protesters. Probably the most quoted line from his speech was him calling on Iranians to rise up. This is your one moment. That was one of the last things he said on his speech on the morning that the war began. The bulk of the speech was him justifying the war as an act of self-defense for Americans.

And this is interesting because under the law, a sovereign state can only wage war in self-defense, except for very extreme circumstances. So Trump went out of his way to lay out Iran's imminent threat to the U.S. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime. He characterized this threat most acutely as one of nuclear weapons, and he emphasized this is another condition for a legal war that every diplomatic, peaceful option, had been explored and had failed. It has always been the policy of the United States, in particular, my administration, that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon. I'll say it again, they can never have a

nuclear weapon. And we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it. Again, they wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it. They didn't know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil. More than words, Trump made a show of exploring diplomatic, peaceful solution. Right up until the 11th hour, the U.S. and Iran were negotiating a peaceful nuclear deal, and hours before the strikes, an Ammani diplomat. involved in mediation, told CNN, serious positive progress was underway. In my assessment of the way the talks are going, really I can see that the peace deal is within our reach. Literally the next morning, the US and Israel bomb Iran, which is why Israeli former negotiator Daniel Levy told me this.

Negotiations were a distraction, were a decoy, were a ruse, diplomacy as a ruse for war. Not only that, Trump bombed Iran alongside Israel in a 12-day campaign last June, which targeted Iranian nuclear facilities. He did so despite CIA intelligence at the time, concluding Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon. After that campaign, Trump told us he'd obliterated Iran's nuclear capacity. In fact, I'm going to read you the title of the White House press release, which is still online. Iran's nuclear facilities have been obliterated and suggestions otherwise are fake nuclear. use. Now Trump tells us, it will be totally again obliterated. Who knew you could obliterate something twice? So look, the legality question, it isn't actually complicated. To go to war,

according to the UN Charter, you have to invoke the right of self-defense. While a preventative strike can be justified under second circumstances, right, both US and Israel characterize their strikes as preventative, the conditions for that are very strict. There would have to be an imminent threat by the Iranian regime that cannot be averted by any other means, a latent threat posed by a nuclear weapons program whose realization, especially after last year's attacks, is by no means foreseeable. That is not sufficient, especially not when ongoing negotiations are underway. The thing is, and as people have probably picked up on by now, we've been here before.

We have seen preemptive strikes because they're developing weapons of mass destruction used before. And our media has really picked up on this clear analogy to the 2003 illegal invasion of Iraq. I take the fact that he develops weapons of mass destruction very seriously. Just for anyone who doesn't know the history, the U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq, which was joined by the UK and other allies, was sold to the public with a lie. A lie either formulated or falsely believed by George W. Bush, who claimed Saddam Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Here's George W. Bush joking about weapons of mass destruction at a fancy White House dinner party the following year. Those weapons of mass destruction got to be somewhere. Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here. What the hell? Treating it like a total joke as if you

didn't decimate a country because of it. Weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq. nor any proof Saddam Hussein intended to develop them, nor did Iraq, by the way, have anything to do with the 9-11 attacks, which might surprise some listeners due to heavy propagandising by Bush's White House, falsely connecting Hussein with al-Qaeda. The Bush administration, and whoever was involved in lobbying for that war, took false intelligence and turned it into popular fear, and they did so with the help of the mass media.

It became a circle of citation, right? The government leaked intelligence to the media, then cited that media as justification for their intelligence. And one of the most powerful supporters of the war was Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who owns over 175 different news stations across three continents. And every single one of those publications reported false claims that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction.

This, by the way, was an error that wounded public trust in Western media across those three continents on a scale unparalleled in recorded history. So which media is still guilty today? Fox News is the top contender. It was one of the most ardently biased supporters of the 2003 invasion. All live coverage at the time on Fox News had a little waving flag animation in the corner and the headline Operation Iraqi Freedom. A survey of Fox News viewers years after found that 80% believed either Iraq was directly involved in the 9-11 attack

or that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. That was years after the war when all of those things had been falsified. So in June last year, when America was bombing Iran, Fox News gave a platform to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to say this. The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear. It was absolutely clear they would achieve a test device and possibly an initial device within months, whether it would be six months or 12 months or 13 months is immaterial. The intelligence Netanyahu described.

directly contradicted CIA intelligence at the time that found no such evidence Iran was a feasible nuclear threat. Just to rattle off some Fox News headlines today, beyond the Iran deal, why Trump's refusal to kick the can just saved generations. Vice President J.D. Vance. President Trump wanted to make sure Iran could never have a nuclear weapon. And here, IDF illustration video shows, quote, covert nuclear compact. of Iranian regime. So the pattern there again is they are platforming Israeli intelligence that Iran has an imminent threat of nuclear weapons development. And while it's true and I do have to commend that most Western media today are certainly more skeptical than Fox News this time around, there are still, across all those media, very serious deliberations of this Israeli

intelligence on Iran, none of which we have the evidence for. We are humoring this intelligence despite the fact that in 2002, Netanyahu testified before US Congress that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and pushed for the Western invasion of Iraq that left over 461,000 people in Iraq dead. Oh, I did not realize that Netanyahu was involved in the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction narrative. Then the media is not doing its job. Because in 1992, Netanyahu claimed a... Iran was three to five years away from a nuclear weapon. Three years later, he wrote in his book, Iran was again three to five years away.

In 2012, he made a speech to the UN in which he held up a picture of a cartoon bomb and insisted Iran was roughly one year away from building a bomb. And on Fox News in June, he said mere months until nuclear holocaust. Each time, he insisted on military intervention. So now let's take a look at some other media that are not doing the Fox News thing, but are also not giving you this absolutely essential context. Another Merdoch paper is The Times. In an article on Tuesday titled,

How Close is Iran to Building a Nuclear Weapon? I want to read you the Times' concluding statement. It begins, however. And that's because they've just laid out that all the evidence is not saying there's an immediate nuclear threat. But their conclusion goes, however, the baseline knowledge and capabilities are now present in Iran.

So if the regime survives, anything is possible, especially if an even more hardline figure takes over from Ayatollah Ali Khomeini. He always ruled it was un-Islamic to build a bomb, but others in the regime disagreed. And then they quote, Iran now cannot quickly acquire nuclear weapons, but the risk is that an extremist could take charge and press ahead with the program while Khomeini has held back. Helena, you have to say something because of your face. That is basically like, fear rising. It's not in any way a legal justification for war.

So why write it? It's basically irrelevant. Exactly, because the whole reason the Times is publishing an article on Iran's nuclear capacity today is because there is a war now there. As you point out, there is so little legal justification in that claim that it is essentially irrelevant to this article. And also the irony of saying that, you know, Khomeini thought it was un-Islamic to develop a bomb, but he could be replaced by someone more extremist. The only reason Kamani is about to be replaced, probably by someone more extremist,

is because he was killed in day one of the strikes. And I am not mourning that man's death. But this sounds like a very self-fulfilling logic. So look, I want to make a comparison in media coverage to point out that despite the media's cynicism about the whole weapons of mass destruction thing today, there is still a very blinkered Western way we apply our analysis.

And they want to do that by comparing it to how seriously our media took Putin's justification for war in Ukraine. Because he, like Trump, also tried to frame it as an act of self-defense. When he invaded Ukraine, he invoked the right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Did you know that? No. Did you know that Putin claimed Ukraine was committing genocide against Russian minorities as justification for his war. First, I'm hearing of it. So you see, even the most warmongering leaders do generally try to frame what they're doing

within the realm of the law. Why? Because their populations care. Like, we care. Why our leaders go to war, wherever in the world we are. And their media will have to deliberate the justification that they give. And even if they seriously deliberate it, they legitimize it through serious deliberation.

So yes, of course our media gives serious debate to Trump and Netanyahu's claims that Iran is an imminent threat. But our media would never have done that for Putin. So this is a good moment in my eyes to consider what I think is the most overt bias shaping most of our media, whether you read the telegraph or the Guardian. And that's Western bias. When it comes to invading Iran, we are prepared to humor the civility of madmen and liars. We express cynicism, but we do not really learn from the past. why? Because Iran is not friendly to our interests. It's as simple as that. And I have one more

sort of argument to say that this is an incredibly biased narrative we're getting in our media. And that's that there is a whole side of the conversation, which is not missing from non-Western media, but is entirely absent from ours. What's that? One country in the region is widely evidenced to be in breach of the international ban on nuclear proliferation. Under the sleepy watch of the Western media, it's an open secret that Israel has its own nuclear program. Though Israel has never formally confirmed or denied this, our own parliamentary evidence finds Israel has over 90 nuclear warheads today. And no one is talking about that. Nope, no weapons over there. Maybe under here. Of course, there is a potentially more pressing moral justification for the invasion of Iran,

which is that many Iranians who have been protesting their repressive and murderous government have called for intervention. Some of them have celebrated it since. And this is a very tricky one because, look, under the law, any such justification would firstly need to be approved by the UN Security Council, which Trump is obviously not interested in doing. But even then, though the UN Charter allows humanitarian intervention to stop atrocities, e.g. Rwanda, there is still the provision of it being an absolute last,

resort. We didn't see it, even when the UN panel declared Gaza a genocide, partly for political reasons, but also history. Libya, Iraq, the legal consensus now is that forced regime change is a dangerous breach of international law and often produces worse humanitarian outcomes. When it comes to the humanitarian sector, the area I know best is displacement. I know from my work that one day of war is untold days, months, years of hangover in displacement. And it's displacement that the world is becoming less able and less willing to handle. The same day that the UK actually waded into the war, even if just in a defensive capacity, it announced new asylum restrictions.

Our media fails to point out the irony and the sheer unsustainability of this, that we bomb with one hand and we close refugee routes with the other. Yeah, the irony is unbelievable and I felt this starkly in two ways since Saturday. The first was blindingly obvious when Trump posted on his platform Truth Social and wrote that the heavy and pinpoint bombing will continue uninterrupted throughout the week or so as long as necessary to achieve our objective of peace throughout the Middle East and indeed the world. I mean the irony is just so obvious. The bombing will continue to achieve peace. You cannot and never has anyone bombed their way to peace.

But I remember being almost more annoyed by this news headline. For context, I woke up on Saturday to a message from a family member who lives in a Gulf state and I searched online to find up-to-date information. I picked Reuters, which is one of the largest news organizations in the world. But Reuters was running a headline that said, Trump says, you know, that this war in Iran will give the Iranian people the greatest chance to overthrow their leaders. This will probably be your only chance for generations, Trump said, so let's see how you respond. Contrast this statement with the fact that the largest

mass casualty so far of this war has been a girls' school in Minab in Iran, which was hit directly by a missile, killing dozens of 7 to 12-year-old girls. The official death toll is hard to verify, but it's said to be over 160 people. You cannot bomb people, kill people, and then say, we're liberating you. Let's see how you respond. Trump like transferring the responsibility for regime change to the Iranian people essentially just gives him a potential get-out clause at a later date if the regime survives. This bombing into supposed liberation is a narrative scene again and again by US or Western foreign intervention forces in countries in the Middle East especially, especially.

for women. Western powers will pat themselves on the back and say, we've liberated women from tyrannous regimes. Yet this has never happened. Like there is no precedent for this. It's just an all too familiar pattern of imperialist exploitation. What women receive instead is devastation, occupation and deep social divisions. As the old adage goes, when the West say they care about women's rights, those women are about to be bombed. you know, to end this segment, I want to take that Reuters headline you just read, and contrast it to an interview with Donald Trump by Esquire magazine in 2004, when he shared his thoughts on the ongoing US invasion of Iraq.

He asked, to quote, does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the country? Come on, two months after we leave, there's going to be. be a revolution and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over and he'll have weapons of mass destruction which Saddam didn't have. All I can say is, I hope he's wrong. Thank you for listening. If you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a

cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes and a special shout-outs to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much. And if you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast, so please do tell your friends. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal at Helen Awadier and follow the show at MediaStorm Pod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wadia and Matilda Mallinson. The music is by Samfire.