The Hamas Broadcasting Corporation
Another report lays out the BBC's malevolence towards Israel. Will it ever listen?
Three weeks ago, the Asserson report claimed that the BBC had breached its own editorial guidelines 1500 times in its coverage of the October 7 pogrom in southern Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.
Now another very comprehensive report, “BBC coverage of the Israel-Hamas war”, has been published on the same issue. This one has been compiled and edited by the BBC’s former director of television, Danny Cohen, and accuses the BBC of making “false and damaging claims about Israel’s conduct of this war” and fuelling “the flames of antisemitism that have spread across the world”.
Cohen drew upon research compiled by the excellent Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA). In the forward to the report, Cohen and Baroness Deech, a former governor of the BBC from 2002 to 2006, write:
The BBC all too often accepts Hamas’s distortions as fair framing or fact. Worse than that, it then sells them on to a credulous world as news burnished by the BBC’s authority and reputation. Whenever the corporation is faced with the choice of whose account or narrative to believe, it seldom points in Israel’s direction. For Hamas in this war, proof is rarely necessary. For the IDF and Israel, proof is rarely enough.
This is not just a question of the BBC failing to discharge its charter obligation to be fair and balanced, serious as that dereliction of journalistic duty is in itself. The vicious media coverage in the west, produced by Hamas and its fellow travellers in the Palestinian cause and consisting of serial falsehoods, malicious distortions and blood libels designed to demonise, delegitimise and destroy Israel, is an absolutely essential weapon in the Hamas armoury.
Through the totally false narrative of Israeli interlopers in “Palestine” who first drove out the “indigenous Palestinians” and are now illegally and oppressively occupying their land — every part of which is untrue — the western public was softened up during many decades for the big lie that’s been pumped out for the past year that the IDF has been wantonly killing and starving civilians in Gaza.
That is the very opposite of the truth. This lie has helped incite hysteria and violent hatred against both Israel and diaspora Jews, and ramped up pressure on western governments to dump on Israel while giving Hamas an easy ride. And while much of the media has been complicit in this — Sky News has been particularly disgusting — the most influential and powerful media outlet that has led the pack in this incitement has been the BBC. whose coverage of this terrible war has been, in general, utterly monstrous.
As Cohen and Deech write:
Military analysts and experts across the world will tell you that Hamas cannot win the war it started with Israel by force of arms alone. Anti-Israel propaganda isn’t merely a tactic for Hamas; it is integral to its war effort. Indeed, it is a war aim in and of itself. Hamas must convince the world, through media outlets like the BBC, that Israel is brutal, indiscriminate, and unjust; that the deaths of innocent Palestinian civilians are something that Israel wantonly pursues, rather than a tragic consequence of Hamas turning the Palestinian people into human shields.
Hamas has embedded its terrorist infrastructure amongst civilians, including in former school buildings (often mistakenly described as working schools in news reports), hospitals and mosques. With an iniquitous disregard for the truth, Hamas even lays the false charge of ‘genocide’ against Israel in responding to the attack on 7 October - the worst antisemitic atrocity since the Holocaust and an indisputably genocidal act.
Through these tactics, they seek to claim that Israel is actually fighting a war of aggression, rather than taking necessary defensive action in an existential fight against Iran and its proxies.
As this report comprehensively demonstrates, the BBC all too often accepts Hamas’s distortions as fair framing or fact. Worse than that, it then sells them on to a credulous world as news burnished by the BBC’s authority and reputation.
Among the examples the report lists:
On the day of the October 7 pogrom itself, while the rest of Britain’s media were detailing the brutality of Hamas’s attack on Israel and before Israel went to war in Gaza, the BBC led its coverage with a headline about “Israeli revenge attacks”.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 pogrom, it broadcast interviews with Hamas apologists who used this platform to make comments which the BBC was forced to admit were “offensive”.
It reported that an “Israeli strike” killed “hundreds” at the Al Ahli hospital: thereby repeating, legitimising and reinforcing entirely false claims that directly caused unrest in some European and Middle Eastern countries, including serious arson attacks upon synagogues in Germany and Tunisia.
It failed to remove articles suggesting the same hospital blast may have been caused by the Israeli military, even after the BBC admitted it got its reporting wrong.
It reported that Israeli soldiers had been “targeting” medical teams and Arab speakers as they hunted Hamas terrorists in a hospital, when instead they actually had brought medical teams and Arab speakers with them to help the patients during the military operation.
It published an article that wrongly claimed a UN report had warned “half of Gaza’s population is starving” and peddled a false Hamas propaganda line that Gaza had become a “polio epidemic zone”.
At the height of the conflict, BBC Arabic was forced to correct articles on average every 48 hours, including copy that referred to Hamas as the “resistance”.
BBC Arabic platformed one guest who had previously referred to the October 7 massacre as a “heroic military miracle” and another who described Hamas atrocities against innocent Israelis as “necessary”.
It failed to remove graphs from its website that purported to show that 70 per cent of Gazan fatalities were women and children – after those figures were shown to be inaccurate.
It routinely quoted figures produced by the Hamas Health Ministry without highlighting it as a terrorist-run organisation, and routinely failed to stress in reporting that Hamas fatality figures are unverifiable and include thousands of Hamas terrorists.
It repeatedly reported Israeli strikes on Hamas command centres based inside school buildings as “strikes on schools” and repeatedly failed to explain the terror group’s use of innocent Palestinians as human shields.
It used freelance journalists and eyewitness reports without due diligence on their social media accounts which would have revealed clear anti-Israel bias.
A senior BBC executive admitted inaccuracies had “real world consequences” for British Jews but were inevitable because of the “fog of war”.
There’s much more in this vein — do read the whole thing — but even this very full report can’t adequately convey the full sickening impact of the torrent of malevolent lies and distortions about Israel that the BBC spews out every single day. Just listening to the flagship radio morning news show Today is enough to make any decent person ill.
The Cohen dossier has been endorsed by Britain’s Jewish community leadership. In a joint statement, prominent Jewish groups including the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust say the corporation’s coverage has led many British Jews to conclude that
the BBC has become, in practical terms, institutionally hostile to Israel.
Yet the chances of the BBC actually putting this right are vanishingly slim. That’s not because BBC executives and journalists dismiss their duty to be fair, balanced and impartial. On the contrary, they take it extremely seriously. The problem is that they believe that their twisted and malevolent coverage of Israel is fair, balanced and impartial.
As I wrote here, like others in liberal circles BBC journalists believe that people like them with the same political outlook are the embodiment of all things moral and good. Anyone who challenges their view of the world is therefore biased, “right-wing” and evil. So anything such a person might say to them must be biased, “right-wing” and evil. For those gripped by BBC group-think, truth has become a right-wing concept and must be resisted, repelled and cancelled. The BBC is thus a hermetically sealed thought system.
The BBC dismissed the Asserson report with contempt. The JC reports that it has responded to the Cohen dossier by saying:
The Israel-Gaza conflict is a polarising and difficult story to cover and we understand there are a range of views. The BBC has focused on reporting the conflict impartially, bringing audiences breaking news, insight and analysis, and reflecting all perspectives.While we do not recognise the overall characterisation of our journalism in this report, we will of course always look at anything raised with us with care and attention.
The BBC chairman, Samir Shah, said earlier this month that the corporation was considering a review of its Middle East coverage.
Don’t hold your breath.