The Man with the Flag and the Journalists Who Forgot Their Trade
Outside Birkbeck, reporters mistook provocation for journalism, offering a platform to ignorance draped in an Israeli flag. I stepped in; facts broke his certainty, silence swallowed theirs.
On Tuesday, 7 October 2025, outside Birkbeck, University of London, the atmosphere felt less like a march than a cross-examination of public conscience. The prime minister had already declared the day’s student demonstrations “un-British,” urging undergraduates to stay away1, university leaders issued cautions of their own. In the shadow of a recent, deadly attack outside a Manchester synagogue, police ringed campuses, and the news desks sent their people out with live rigs and empty notebooks. The protests went ahead anyway2. That much, at least, is indisputable.
A cluster of reporters converged on a man who would not give his name. He had unfurled an Israeli flag and began offering a string of assertions, Palestine and Hamas are “inseparable”; keffiyehs are “a terrorist symbol”; a genocide in Gaza is merely “debatable.” Presented with requests for particulars, who are you, what evidence, what chants here today, he declined to identify himself and defaulted to vagaries about “these people.” The journalists, some from titles that flatter themselves as London’s paper of record, gave him the floor. The questions were perfunctory, the challenge absent, the context missing. It was stenography with a mic.
When I finally intervened, the man’s bluster began to falter beneath the weight of his own contradictions. I asked him, on record, the questions none of the five reporters seemed prepared to voice.
“Have they shouted Hamas yet?” I asked.
“They don’t need to,” he replied, eyes narrowing.
“Oh, they don’t need to?” I pressed. “So you somehow think they’re supporting Hamas? Have you heard anything shouting Hamas?” He stammered, reaching for abstractions. “Palestine and Hamas at these kinds of events are inseparable. Calling for intifada, calling for death for Jews… the keffiyeh is a terrorist symbol.”
“The keffiyeh is a terrorist symbol?” I repeated. “I’m a journalist. I know the facts, so don’t lie to me. There is no Islamism there. There are people demanding justice for the victims of genocide, an unfolding genocide. Are you standing for justice, or for genocide?”
He blinked, his certainty unravelling. “I stand for justice for everyone and peace for everyone,” he murmured. “Then where is justice in your view?” I asked. “You deny genocide as though it were an opinion. It is not. It is a matter of fact. If you question genocide in Gaza, you question the Holocaust itself.”
By then his tone had shifted to retreat. “I… I just don’t think genocide is occurring,” he said, voice dropping.
“That’s not a point of view,” I replied. “That’s a refusal of evidence.”
The exchange ended there. He turned from the circle of reporters that had once been so accommodating and walked away into the dispersing crowd. The journalists, momentarily silent, watched him go caught between embarrassment and inertia, reminded, perhaps, of what their job was meant to be.
What they did is not reporting. It is laundering. Journalism has obligations, codified ones to accuracy, verification, and to resisting the easy theatrics of “both sides” when one side is making evidence-free claims. The UK Editors’ Code3 demands care not to publish inaccurate or misleading material and to correct significant inaccuracy. The NUJ’s Code4 expects work to be “honestly conveyed, accurate and fair.” Those standards do not pause because a man with a flag plants himself in front of a camera. They are most necessary precisely then.
By granting an unverified speaker an unearned platform, the reporters committed a familiar professional sin: mistaking performance for newsworthiness and amplifying it without the basic hygiene of identification, corroboration, or counter-evidence. We have been warned5 about the “oxygen of amplification” for years how credulous coverage turns fringe provocation into public agenda6. The corrective is not censorship, it is rigour, name the source or explain the anonymity, interrogate the claim, supply the missing facts, foreground consequences.
Consider the substance of what went unchallenged. The keffiyeh7 is a regional garment with a century of social, cultural and political meanings attached to it8, to declare it, categorically, a “terrorist symbol” is ahistorical rhetoric that competent reporters would situate or rebut with facts. Likewise, chanting at protests exists in a contested field of interpretation, the job is to report what was chanted, compare it with law and policy, and temper assertions with verifiable observation. None of that requires the reporter to agree with the marchers. All of it requires the reporter to know what they’re seeing.
On genocide, the gulf between evidence and the man’s dismissiveness is not a matter of taste. In September, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip9, a finding Israel rejects and which remains the subject of fierce legal and political dispute, even as the International Court of Justice’s earlier orders recognised a “plausible risk” and imposed provisional measures. The death toll in Gaza, tens of thousands continues to be documented by major newswires and UN agencies. A minimally prepared journalist would know this and be ready to cite it. To let a passer-by wave away genocide allegations as a “debate” without pressing the evidentiary record is to abdicate the core function of a reporter, to test claims against facts.
Context also mattered on the day. The prime minister’s “un-British” framing set a political backdrop that risked collapsing legitimate protest into insinuations of communal menace10, student organisers, by contrast, said they were protesting state violence and institutional complicity. Good reporting would place both in view, and then do the harder thing, test each against the law, the public record, and the scene on the pavement. It would note, too, the heightened fear in Jewish communities after Manchester11, naming the victims and the facts of the attack, without permitting that grief to be instrumentalised into a veto on assembly. This is the discipline of due accuracy and due impartiality in a plural society.
What happened outside Birkbeck was the opposite. Five journalists, lost in the fog of a culture war they were sent to map, let a stranger dictate their angle and their airtime. No insistence on identification. No request for evidence of the alleged chants at that protest. No challenge rooted in the public record. Not even the humility to say, we don’t know who this is. This is how false balance becomes falsehood by presenting uncorroborated accusation and calling it coverage. The harm is not abstract. It misinforms audiences, deepens suspicion, and makes our shared civic language less capable of holding pain and disagreement at once. We have frameworks to prevent this, Ofcom’s guidance on due accuracy12 and undue prominence of views, the Editors’ Code, the NUJ’s rules, but they are worth only what journalists are willing to enforce on the pavement as well as in the newsroom.
The remedy is not heroic. It is ordinary craft, applied relentlessly. Verify before you amplify. Attribute with specificity. Insist on naming or explain, to the audience, why anonymity is justified. Confront claims with facts in real time; if you can’t, say so on air and follow up. Record what is actually happening not what a provocateur says is happening, and situate it inside law, numbers, and history. In a season of grief and fear, with a country arguing about who belongs in the street, journalism cannot afford to be a loudspeaker for the nearest agitator. It must be a filter, porous to truth, proof against bravado. Otherwise, we become the stagehands of other people’s propaganda, packing up our ethics with the tripods when the shouting stops.
One Year of Unrelenting Grief: The Global Response to October 7, 2023
October 7, 2023, was not just another day in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it was a seismic rupture, sending shockwaves across the world. As we now mark one year since that catastrophic day, leaders, human rights organisations, and survivors have come forward to commemorate the dead and grapple with the collective grief that persists. From British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to international bodies like the United Nations, the weight of this day has shaped discourse in ways that continue to define our understanding of humanity, violence, and justice.
Palestine protests go ahead across UK on second anniversary of 7 October — The Guardian.
Code of conduct
The code of conduct has set out the main principles of UK and Irish journalism since 1936. The code is part of the rules of the union. — NUJ.
The Oxygen of Amplification
Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators — Data & Society.
The Oxygen of Amplification
Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online — By Whitney Phillips, for Data & Society.
The keffiyeh is a traditional Middle Eastern headscarf, typically made of cotton and worn folded into a triangle over the head or around the neck for protection against sun, dust, and cold. Beyond its practical use, it has come to symbolise Arab identity and, in particular, Palestinian nationalism. The black-and-white keffiyeh, popularised by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, represents resistance and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, while variations in colour and pattern are also associated with different regions across the Arab world.
How the keffiyeh became a symbol of the Palestinian cause
The iconic Palestinian scarf started out as a practical garment. It became an emblem of an aspiring nation. — VOX.
Keir Starmer calls student protests on 7 October anniversary ‘un-British’
Prime minister urges students not to protest on the second anniversary of Hamas’s 7 October attacks on Israel — The Guardian.