The Corporation is “urgently investigating” several of its taxpayer-funded journalists in the Middle East who have openly declared their support for Hamas on social media. The Telegraph has more.
Reporters at BBC News Arabic endorsed comments likening Hamas, which is a designated terrorist group, to freedom fighters, as well as describing the October 7th atrocity as a “morning of hope”.
One senior correspondent appeared to make fun of the Israeli relatives of a grandmother who was abducted by Hamas.
Another tweeted that “Israel’s prestige is crying in the corner”.
Separately, the output on BBC Arabic, which is funded by the licence fee, has provoked a flurry of complaints alleging bias and inaccuracy, such as for referring to towns inside Israel’s internationally recognised territory, rather than contested areas of the West Bank, as “settlements” and their residents as “settlers”.
Campaigners said this “whitewashed” the targeting of Jewish civilians.
The BBC is obliged to achieve “due impartiality” in all its output. According to its guidelines, while its news journalists also have a “particular responsibility” to uphold the principle in their actions on social media.
Responding to the allegations, the chair of the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Dame Caroline Dinenage said on Saturday: “Language matters and it’s vital that media coverage of the heartbreaking events in Israel and Gaza are covered with the utmost sensitivity and impartiality by all journalists, especially our public service broadcasters.”
It comes amid growing calls for the BBC to call Hamas terrorists, rather than a “militant group”.
An investigation by the Arabic department of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis has found social media activity by six BBC journalists and one affiliated freelancer which it alleges displays anti-Israel bias.
Several in the last week questioned the designation of Israeli non-combatants as civilians, despite evidence emerging of indiscriminate slaughter of women, children and the elderly by Hamas.
Mahmoud Sheleib, a BBC News senior broadcast journalist, tweeted suggesting that young Israelis were effectively combatants.
“[I see] In front of me on Al Jazeera, their so-called civilians are standing armed alongside the police and shooting because they basically don’t have any civilians among the youth. This is what the ignorant often don’t know. I am in favour of fighting them with love, yes, this is the solution.” Followed by a laughing emoji.
The Cairo-based journalist also took part in a Twitter conversation in which he joked about a woman whose grandmother was abducted by Hamas receiving an “inheritance”.
Aya Hossam,who describes herself as a broadcast journalist at BBC Arabic, liked a tweet saying: “Every member of the Zionist entity served in the army at some point in his life, whether men or women, and they all had victims of explicit violations… This term ‘civilians’ applies to the animals and pets that live there and they are not seriously at fault.”
She later retweeted a message which included the phrase “the Zionist must know that he will live as a thief and a usurper”.
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“Disinformation is one of the gravest threats weighing on our democracies,” he says.
This is absolsutely true, but it is the Governments who are using it to push narrative and silence opposition. Ergo, the Governments are the gravest threats to our democracies.
I must say, I’ve had doubts about how far Musk will go in his ‘free speech’ campaign. I dont think it reasonable for him to withdraw from the EU, so I expect he will sail somewhere close to the line, without actually crossing it.
Withdrawing from the EU might get people’s attention, though most likely people would blame Musk not the EU.
Musk can’t take on the EU by himself.
If the population were ready to see him as a champion and rally behind him to fight for free speech, then obviously he could.
But we’ve seen how spineless the population is. Many of them have offered up their children as guinea pigs for untested jabs to appease a menacing state bureaucracy, so…
I think it would do more harm than good for him to take that step, yes.
There’s little support for freedom of speech, at least in the UK and Europe, among people I speak to. People will tell you they like the idea, but when you start quoting types of speech (“hate”, “misinformation”) and ask if they should be allowed they will tell you “no of course not”.
It would also probably be suicidal.
I don’t see Twitter’s withdrawal from the EU’s code of practice an empty gesture. It is a signal. Now, one can debate what the signal is.
It might just be to try to look good. Or it might be a signal of measured defiance which says – ok, you might be forcing me to comply by turning a code into law, but I will t least, with my gesture, show you I don’t agree with it or like it.
I don’t know how committed Musk really is to free speech. I doubt few do. But if one assumes he is, how he plays his cards is anything but simple. It would be fiendishly complicated to try to runTwitter as a free speech platform in today’s regulatory environment, if that was what one wanted to do, without being destroyed by the heavy hand of ever more oppressive and authoritarian states.
My guess is that he’s trying to do his best, but I am ready to be disappointed and discover I’ve been naive.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again – Musk doesn’t give a flying duck about Free Speech.
Surely Twitter need to replace the display of offending content with a message saying banned in the EU. If people are really interested they can use a VPN to avoid this. If enough people are annoyed then there will be push back.
The EU appears not to want Twitter being what it is but wants something else instead.
The EU should build its own ‘service’ as it wants it to be – I’m sure they could make it just as popular eventually.
I hope Elon has the power and the balls to withdraw Twitter from the EU territory.