EXPOSED: Israeli Spies Plant Fake News In The Media w/ Lowkey & Alan MacLeod

In this episode of The Watchdog, Lowkey catches up with journalist Alan MacLeod to hear about his latest investigations, including his exposure an Israeli intelligence-linked group spreading fake news about Lowkey and other pro-Palestinian figures in the mainstream media.

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. MacLeod noted that Murdoch was close friends with Prime Minister Shimon Peres and likely bankrolled Benjamin Netanyahu’s presidential bid.

At a 2009 meeting of the American Jewish Committee, he explained that he saw Israel as the linchpin underwriting Western civilization:

In the West, we are used to thinking that Israel cannot survive without the help of Europe and the United States. I say to you: maybe we should start wondering whether we in Europe and the United States can survive if we allow the terrorists to succeed in Israel… In the end, the Israeli people are fighting the same enemy we are: cold-blooded killers who reject peace… who reject freedom… and who rule by the suicide vest, the car bomb and the human shield”.

Earlier this year, another 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, as MacLeod and Lowkey discuss today, Cyabra is far from a neutral organization, as the Telegraph suggested. 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. “Half of the staff are fighting on the front lines with guns and tanks, and then the other half are fighting on the electronic front lines with their keyboards,” MacLeod told Lowkey.