The Hamas Broadcasting Corporation
The BBC has become the most powerful disseminator of murderous disinformation in the world
The BBC Director-General, Tim Davie, appears to be well satisfied with the broadcasting organisation he runs. He told the Commons culture, media and sport committee this week that the BBC’s news coverage of the war in Gaza was “balanced and fair”.
This is what might be called a state of terminal pathological denial.
Far from being balanced and fair, the BBC’s coverage of the war in Gaza constitutes an institutional emergency. This national and international broadcasting icon, bound by its Charter obligations to uphold the highest standards of balance and objectivity, has behaved as the broadcasting arm of Hamas.
Day after day, its news coverage and analysis of the war in Gaza has been characterised by an eye-watering degree of selective reporting, distortion and malice. It has uncritically parroted demonstrably nonsensical Hamas claims, such as “30,000+ Palestinian civilians killed” of whom “70 per cent are women and children” — with not one of those killed, apparently, being a Hamas combatant despite Israel’s estimate that it has killed 13,000 Hamas combatants so far.
Day after day, it has broadcast harrowing pictures of Gazan civilian casualties without telling its audience that, even according to Hamas’s exaggerated figures, Israel’s ratio of under 1.5 civilians killed for every combatant is a vastly lower rate of civilian casualties in war than has ever been achieved by any other country’s armed forces, including Britain and America.
It has repeatedly reported alleged atrocities, inspiring public fury and outrage, only to find days later that these were false claims. On October 17, the BBC reported that an Israeli rocket hit al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, killing hundreds of Palestinian patients and staff. As Tom Gross has noted in Sapir journal:
A further BBC news report was headlined “Indescribable Scenes at Hospital.” Perhaps the scenes at the hospital were “indescribable” because the hospital hadn’t been hit at all. It was the hospital parking lot that had been hit, producing far fewer casualties. And it had not been hit by an Israeli bomb but by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket, evidently fired from a nearby cemetery. Israel doesn’t bomb hospitals.
In November, the BBC reported that Israeli troops had targeted medical staff during a raid on the al Shifa medical complex in Gaza City. In fact, what the IDF spokesperson had said was:
Our medical teams and Arabic speakers are on the ground to ensure that these supplies reach those in need.
In December, the BBC accused Israeli troops of “carrying out summary executions in the Gaza Strip” of 137 Palestinian civilians and burying them in unmarked graves. Two weeks later, after pressure from Conservative MPs, it ran an apology for reporting this Hamas fabrication. But by the time it issued its grudging apologies for all these errors, the blood libels it had broadcast had incited further hatred of Israel in Britain and beyond.
The indefatigable researcher David Collier has painstakingly unearthed multiple examples of wholly compromised sources that the BBC uses for its pernicious coverage. Time after time, it relies on people who are Hamas supporters, terrorism sympathisers or Jew-haters. Collier has caught the BBC red-handed — and yet it still won’t acknowledge its gross and serial derelictions of duty.
Collier’s recent discoveries involved the BBC’s Orwellian “fact-checking” Verify team. On March 1, BBC Verify published a story about the 100-plus deaths that occurred during the chaos surrounding an aid convoy in Gaza. The story was built around the eyewitness testimony of a Palestinian journalist named Mahmoud Awadeyah, who claimed to the BBC that the Israelis had fired “purposefully” at the Gazan men approaching the aid trucks.
Collier discovered that this “journalist” worked for outlets connected to Hamas and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard. Collier also found him celebrating deadly terrorist attacks, along with images of him dining with a leading Islamic Jihad terrorist. In response, the BBC merely doubled down and said:
The fact that someone has expressed an opinion on social media doesn’t automatically disqualify them from giving eye-witness testimony.
So to the BBC, celebrating terrorism is “expressing an opinion”.
On March 12, Collier wrote, BBC News / BBC Verify published an exclusive story that accused Israel of abusing Gazan medical staff. Britain’s Israel-bashing Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, was quick to tell the world that this report was “very disturbing”. It was indeed; but not for the reasons he assumed.
For Collier discovered that the piece relied entirely on three Arabic speaking journalists and three “witnesses” from the hospital. He then discovered that the three journalists, two of whom worked for the BBC, had between them celebrated the October 7 pogrom, supported the Israel boycott and written hatefully about Jews. Of the three “witnesses”, the first was a doctor who in 2021 had celebrated rocket attacks against innocent Israeli civilians; the second had posted an encomium to a Palestinian terrorist; the third was an activist for Fatah who in the past had also glorified terrorism.
The BBC presumably decides that there is no need to “verify” such sources.
There’s much, much more about the BBC’s malevolent coverage of Israel on Collier’s website as well as on Honest Reporting and CAMERA UK. The endemic nature of the BBC’s animus against Israel has prompted repeated horrified protests by Danny Cohen, a former BBC director of television. He wrote this week:
The BBC has been on notice for many months that it has a serious problem with anti-Israel bias in its newsroom. This means that it has also had months to address it. And yet nothing seems to have changed. How can this happen and keep happening? The answer can only be one of two things: either senior BBC managers don’t care about this ongoing bias and are happy to let it continue, or they can’t control it. Either is a gross dereliction of their duty.
It is also a terrible failure of responsibility by the BBC in an environment in which antisemitism is exponentially on the rise and Britain’s Jewish community feels under a level of threat that many have not experienced in their lifetimes. The BBC is contributing to this poisonous atmosphere with reporting that is biased and highly emotive.
A former attorney-general, Sir Michael Ellis, told MPs last month that “the relentless bias of BBC News coverage has contributed to the record levels of intimidation and attacks on British Jews”. He said:
Dozens of current Jewish employees at the BBC are understood to have filed formal complaints about their concerns over antisemitism, describing it as a grim and frightening time to be Jewish at the corporation. The BBC’s senior management has fundamentally failed to deal with this problem and uphold its own guidelines, and the organisation now appears complicit in peddling misinformation and allowing antisemitism to fester. And in those circumstances, I have come to the conclusion that the BBC is institutionally antisemitic.
The BBC director-general wrote to staff last month to warn them about rising antisemitism. The Times (£) reported:
Tim Davie called on the organisation’s 21,000 staff to treat each other with “consideration and respect” as he indicated his discomfort with a number of antisemitic incidents that have beset the BBC. “As many of you may have seen, sadly in recent weeks we have been alerted to some antisemitic behaviour by people who worked with us,” he wrote. “I want to be clear that there can be no place at the BBC for racist abuse of any kind, whether towards our Jewish colleagues or indeed colleagues from any background or belief. Any form of antisemitism, Islamophobia or racist abuse is abhorrent, and we will always act whenever it occurs. We must play our role to build understanding and tolerance.”
Given the way these incidents have all been batted aside by senior BBC executives, and the degree to which the BBC’s shocking coverage of Israel has fanned the flames of anti-Jewish incitement, this feeble flapping of the wrist was, to put it mildly, utterly inadequate.
The influence and reach of the BBC place it in a different league from other broadcasting organisations. For decades, it was regarded as the kitemark of truthfulness and fairness, balance and objectivity. It has now become the most powerful disseminator of murderous disinformation in the world.
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