It’s been a pretty average few days on UK Planet Monstrous.
Last Saturday, the Telegraph revealed that a journalist who appears prominently on the BBC’s Arabic channel reporting from Gaza had called for Jews to be burned “as Hitler did”. The paper reported:
Samer Elzaenen has appeared on BBC Arabic more than a dozen times since the conflict erupted following the October 7 Hamas attacks on southern Israel…It has now emerged that Elzaenen, 33, has issued a stream of social media posts which single out Jews for condemnation and even appear to call for violence against them…
In a Facebook post in July 2022, he stated: “When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything”.
Elzaenen has also appeared to call for a repeat of the Holocaust, stating on Facebook in May 2011: “My message to the Zionist Jews: We are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.”…
Elzaenen’s social media output over the past decade has included endorsements of more than 30 separate attacks against Jewish civilians in Israel, calling the actions “blessed” and “heroic”; describing the perpetrators and “heroes” and “martyrs” who “ascended” to “heaven”; and appearing to express joy at the victims’ deaths.
Of course he did. It’s the BBC. And oh look — here’s another journalist upholding the BBC’s obligation to objectivity :
Ahmed Qannan, another regular BBC Arabic freelance contributor, appears to have expressed his hope that Israelis wounded in a shooting near a Jerusalem synagogue, which claimed the lives of seven civilians on Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2023, would also die.
Writing on Facebook in response to a friend who stated “We want to see some throats cut”, Qannan replied: “Don’t give up on your ambition”. Qannan also described a 26-year-old Palestinian who killed four civilians and a police officer in a series of shootings in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak in March 2022, as a “hero”.
So how did the BBC respond to these revelations? A spokesman said:
These are not BBC members of staff or part of the BBC’s reporting team. We were not aware of the individuals’ social media activity prior to hearing from them on air. We are absolutely clear that there is no place for antisemitism on our services.
No-one does prim and pious humbug better than the BBC.
On Saturday night, violent antisemitic thugs threw an aggressive, chemical-based substance at the car belonging to David Collier, the indefatigable and heroic investigative campaigner against Jew-hatred. The attack, which caused substantial damage to the car, followed a “keying” attack on the car a few weeks previously.
Collier’s revelation in March, that the teenage narrator of another BBC Palestinian propaganda pantomime entitled “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone” was the son of a senior Hamas government minister who had supported the murder of Israelis by Hamas terrorists, got the show pulled. His now legendary exposés of Jew-hatred in Britain have put a large target on his back.
But as he said on his blog yesterday, this wasn’t what had upset him the most. He wrote:
In a normal world, politicians and media would rush to defend press freedom and would see a physical attack on a journalist at his home - as a threat against a pillar of our democratic values. In any normal world…
The truth is that I am left fighting for a UK that won't stand by me and does not seem to want to fight for itself. So the question I ask myself is this — what is the point? Why not just get on a plane and go to Israel. I (unlike most Brits) actually have a nation that will protect and defend me. Even though I was born in the UK, why stick up for a nation that does not even seem to want to stick up for itself?
The cowardly Jewish leadership do not actually represent the Jewish community — the police are lost, the education system is turning our children into progressive, dumbed-down clones, the government is acting like a band playing music on a sinking ship, and much of legacy media has been overrun by naïve, bloated, arrogant and decadent supremacists — or ex al Jazeera staffers — who together are spinning lies daily to their British audience…
So why do I stay? The answer is simple. Both because I was born here and this is where I can make a difference. I was brought up waving the flag and singing God save the Queen. I have studied my history — and I know where capitulation, cowardice, and appeasement will lead. I cannot afford to turn my back. My family have fought for this country before — and I will continue to fight for it now.
Stay safe, David. The need for that fight is growing by the day.
On Sunday, BBC2 transmitted The Settlers, a purported “documentary” demonising the Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria. Presented by Louis Theroux, it was a risible piece of propaganda which any half-competent editor would have thrown onto the cutting-room floor.
As critics have noted, it was full of howlers. It claimed that the “settlements” were illegal under international law — false; Israel had committed war crimes by “transferring” Israelis from Israel to these territories — false; Theroux described his guide Issa Amro as “an advocate for nonviolent resistance against the Occupation” for nearly 20 years — false: in 2021, Amro was convicted in an Israeli Military Court on three counts of protesting without a permit, two counts of obstructing security forces and one count of assault.
Honest Reporting observed about this latest BBC travesty:
October 7 is barely mentioned. When it is, it’s framed as a pretext for settlement expansion…He interviews Israeli “critics”—activists who say Israel never wanted peace. Not one mention of the many peace offers Palestinian leaders rejected. It’s not an exploration. It’s a rigged debate.
Theroux visits the Palestinian village of Beita and the nearby Israeli outpost Evyatar. He frames settlers as violent extremists—but says nothing of Beita’s riots: the flaming Stars of David, the Nazi swastikas. The context? Omitted.
Settler violence is portrayed as rampant and unchecked. He never mentions that these acts are condemned by Israeli society and punished by law. Meanwhile, the PA pays Palestinians who kill Jews—and that’s never touched.
The most grotesque moment? Theroux calls Israelis “sociopathic” for caring more about their own children than Palestinians. Would he dare say that about any other people? This isn’t journalism. It’s demonisation.
Of course. It’s the BBC.
On Tuesday, the JC reported that Satvinder Juss, Labour’s candidate for yesterday’s municipal council election in Radlett, Hertfordshire, had promoted social media comments including claims that Zionism is a “white supremacist project”.
One post shared by Juss, stated:
Zionism began as a Christian (not Jewish), white supremacist, imperialist project and continues to function as such. An enemy can only be defeated if you know its origins and functions.
Another said:
Money, improper influence + promotion of Israeli interests above our own contributed to the destruction of UK’s independent foreign policy, undermined UNRWA, the UN + international law. All at expense of innocent Palestinians.
A third shared the opinion of anti-Zionist, Britain-based Israeli Professor Avi Shlaim that Zionists bombed Iraq to frighten Iraqi Jews into fleeing to Israel, and that “ Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing, nothing to do with us”. And in a fourth repost, Juss shared a view that “the collective West is psychologically unprepared for a world in which it is not dominant”.
Juss is a professor of human rights law at King’s College London.
But of course.
The JC reported on Tuesday a ruling by the British press regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) that a description of Palestinian Arab prisoners detained in Israel as “hostages” was not inaccurate because the word “hostage” was “somewhat subjective”.
After a Scottish daily newspaper, The National, published an article in February headlined: “Hundreds of Palestinian hostages released by Israel,” the UK co-editor of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting, Adam Levick, filed a complaint that the word “hostages” in the headline was a “gross misrepresentation” because “it puts on equal moral footing” Israeli civilians kidnapped during Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023 and Palestinian prisoners, “most of whom were members of a proscribed terrorist group and were convicted of violent offences”.
In its reply, IPSO cited a BBC article from February 15, 2025, which reported that out of the 369 Palestinians released that day, 36 of them had been serving life sentences, and 333 were detained without charge since the October 7 attacks. Given this, Ipso said, “it was not significantly inaccurate to refer to 333 of the Palestinians released on 15 February as ‘hostages’”. It described the issue as “highly contentious” and said the term “hostage” was “somewhat subjective”.
Levick said that the Palestinian detainees were being held under the Israeli legal practice known as “administrative detention”, where a person is held without trial, without having committed an offence, on the grounds that he or she plans to break the law in the future. Levick added that it is a practice used by both the UK and the US in the post-9/11 years.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a hostage is defined as:
Someone who is taken as a prisoner by an enemy in order to force the other people involved to do what the enemy wants.
Under the Geneva Conventions, hostage-taking has been considered a war crime since 1949. For Britain’s press regulator, it appears that accuracy means implying that Israeli detention procedures for terrorist suspects under the rule of law are actually a war crime.
On Wednesday, IPSO underscored its reverence for objectivity and its imaginative approach to journalism when it upheld a complaint by the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) against the Telegraph over allegations made by the current Spectator editor Michael Gove, when he had been the government’s minister for communities last year, that the MAB was “affiliated” to the Muslim Brotherhood, a subversive Islamist organisation banned in a number of countries.
Gove made the allegations in the Commons under parliamentary privilege, which gives politicians immunity against legal action over what they say in Parliament. Reports of parliamentary proceedings are covered by qualified privilege, meaning news organisations have a complete defence for reporting what is said as long as they report accurately and in good faith.
Nevertheless, IPSO ruled that the Telegraph’s report was misleading because it failed to secure and publish a response from the MAB, which denies it is affiliated with the Brotherhood. This was even though the Telegraph’s online report included a statement from the MAB made at the time in which it denied extremism. IPSO ruled:
While the article had accurately reported Mr Gove’s comments, the omission of the complainant’s position that it was not an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood was significant given the seriousness of the allegation and, therefore, required a correction.
The requirement that statements made by politicians in parliament invariably need to be balanced by ripostes in any press coverage of those comments is applied to no other issue.
In 2019, IPSO was criticised over draft guidance for journalists reporting on Islam, which warned reporters about “insensitivities” in their reporting that could “damage communities” which went far beyond the traditional rules of “fair, balanced and accurate” reporting.
The Telegraph has reported:
Anas Altikriti, who was president of the MAB from 2004 to 2005, has described the mass slaughter and rape of Israeli citizens on Oct 7 2023 as “a lie” and called the taking of hostages “a very important part” of any “act of resistance”.
The MAB has tried to distance itself from Mr Altikriti, saying he “does not speak for, nor represent the views of the MAB”. Yet Companies House lists Mr Altikriti as not only a current director of the MAB, but also the only director designated as a “person with significant control” of the organisation.
The MAB was founded by Muhammad Kathem Sawalha, the former Hamas chief, and was one of the groups that organised a pro-Palestine march in London on Armistice Day, a month after the Oct 7 massacre.
Why is Britain’s press regulator running interference for Islamic extremists against established British convention and practice?
On Wednesday, the Express reported:
NHS staff have been told that converting to Islam would be the “best decision you'll ever make” in a guide made by the organisation's Muslim Network. Its handbook for “New Muslims” also reassures readers who are concerned that family members and friends “initially [do] not have a positive reaction”.
It was written by and handed out to staff, according to GB News, and addresses the reader as “convert”. The guide adds that it is composed “with the intention of pleasing God by providing support to converts to Islam, their peers and colleagues”.
It adds: “For many converts, becoming Muslim isn't always a celebration, as many friends and relatives need some time to accept the good news.”
You don’t say.
On Wednesday morning, wildfires started raging on the outskirts of Jerusalem. A state of national emergency was declared, residents were evacuated from their homes, and some 5000 acres of land, including 3000 acres of forest, were destroyed.
Israel Independence Day celebrations were cancelled. The scale of the threat from the fires was such that Israel asked other countries for help in bringing the fires under control. Firefighter planes from Greece, Cyprus, Croatia and Italy helped tackle the inferno.
While firefighters have reportedly blamed the fires on hiker negligence, evidence that trees were set alight from the base of their trunks strongly suggested that at least some of them were set deliberately. The Jerusalem Post reported:
Hamas declared on Telegram yesterday:
“Burn whatever you can of groves, forests and settler homes. Youth of the West Bank, youth of Jerusalem, and those inside Israel, set their cars ablaze...” As the wildfires continue to burn across central Israel, the channel posted a photo of a masked person setting fire to a field as a town burns in the background, with the text ‘Settlers’ homes will be ashes under the feet of the revolutionaries’ and the hashtag ‘Burn settlers’ houses.’
“O, youth of the West Bank,” called one inciting video. “Let us be the flame of freedom which will not die. Let us make their night — a burning day. Let us bring back to them the nightmares of the occupation, so they know that every day is a struggle for the resistance. Set fires of freedom everywhere. We will not give in and will not give up until we burn every piece of stolen land.”….
Other posters shared on these channels included calls to “exploit the heat of the summer and set fire to the forests of the settlers. There will be not one settler left in our land,” while others wrote: “Let’s burn their settlements and make them a living hell for them… Don't underestimate what you have and what you can do.”
A BBC News report on the fires made no mention of the Hamas calls to burn Israel down.
Yesterday, Hamas executed at least nine men in Gaza and shot 27 others in the legs as part of a brutal campaign to crack down on the growing wave of protests against its rule. And how has the BBC covered this?
It hasn’t. It’s the BBC.
*** My new book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, can be bought on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk