On Monday night, a protest took place outside the BBC’s headquarters in London – jointly organised by the National Jewish Assembly, U.K. Lawyers for Israel and the European Jewish Association – against its continued bias and inaccurate coverage of the atrocities committed by Hamas.
No red paint was sprayed on the walls of Broadcasting House; there were no fireworks nor chants exhorting violence or ethnic cleansing. All that took place was a few speeches from campaigners, some songs and a few prayers.
The BBC’s decision to refer to Hamas as ‘militants’ rather than ‘terrorists’ is the latest example of a long history of sanitising Jew-hatred among Palestinians while demonising Israel’s efforts to defend itself. Given the scale and barbarity of the 7/10 atrocities, one has to ask the question: What would have to happen for the BBC’s leadership to get around a meeting table and agree: “Okay, Hamas has reached the bar now. Let’s start referring to them as terrorists”?
As a group of campaigning U.K. Jewish lawyers has already pointed out, Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation and has been for two years. That is not a matter of debate or discussion. It is a matter of legal fact.
As recently as July 2023, the BBC was compelled to apologise for the line of questioning taken by Anjana Gadgil with Naftali Bennet following a military operation in Jenin. She asked if “Israeli forces are happy to kill children”. This question and the pervasive BBC mindset behind it seems in particularly poor taste with the knowledge of what came to pass three months later. Unlike Hamas, the IDF has never entered a country with the express intention of murdering civilians.
The BBC has a history of sanitising the antisemitism that exists among many Gazans. The 2019 BBC documentary One Day in Gaza recorded daily life for Israelis in southern Israel and also that of Palestinians in Gaza. And yet when it recorded Gazans’ dialogue referring to Israelis as ‘Yehudi’ – Arabic for ‘Jews’ – it subtitled the word as ‘Israelis’. Why do this if not to sanitise Palestinian attitudes?
In the 2004 Balen Report, the BBC compiled its own investigation into historic antisemitism within the broadcaster but has not only refused to publish the report, it has spent some £350,000 of licence payers’ money on legal fees in order to prevent efforts to force it to do so.
In December last year, a parliamentary investigation was announced into the BBC’s coverage of Jews and Israel. This followed a petition set up by the Jewish Chronicle stimulated in part by the BBC’s coverage of an antisemitic attack on Jewish schoolchildren on London’s Oxford Street. The BBC said that an audio recording made during the incident included an anti-Muslim slur made from inside the bus, something for which there was no evidence. Ofcom found “significant editorial failings” in the BBC’s coverage.
At the same time that the parliamentary probe was announced, the BBC reformed its Arabic service, employing Output Monitors to enforce standards. As to how well that process went, we can only judge by some of the activity on social media by BBC News’s Arabic reporters. One endorsed a post describing October 7th as “a morning of hope”.
Language is important and never more so in the face of barbaric murder, outright terrorism and a climate of racial hatred and incitement to violence. During the Corbyn years, casual antisemitism and hatred of Israel became conflated but also normalised. The BBC has played an influential role in this normalisation. Last night’s small protest may have little or no impact and was dwarfed in scale by those over the weekend supporting Palestine. A small and marginalised Jewish community in Britain is grateful for government support and ministerial condemnation of those glorifying Hamas. It now needs the same from its national broadcaster.
Ian Price is a Business Psychologist. Find him on Twitter.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
All just an unfortunate cockup
Thanks to DS and the author for this article
I am bookmarking this article. Why so little comment from DS members? This blows the bloody doors off!
Absolutely. I am tempted to copy and paste the especially incriminating paragraph and email all my normie acquaintances, reminding them how I was accused of being an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist when I pointed all this out at the time.
…it’s a brilliant article, but quite a lot of this was known or suspected..so I feel we have been here before…..
Von der liar still hasn’t been thoroughly investigated in relation to the ‘text messages’ with Bourla…nor did anything come of the enquiry into the EU funds that just so happened to go to her husbands company….
I have no faith anyone will investigate, because they are all corrupt…and don’t want to be found out….or the status quo to change….
This is just more evidence to those of us in the know, that we were 100% correct….but it won’t make any difference.
We have said this a million times..they are openly corrupt and bloody evil..they don’t care that we know….they’ll keep it up because they think they’ll get away with it…and unless a damn sight more people wake up, they will……
This incredible journalism expose, should be acknowledged by those in parliament and published more widely dare I say in the big MSM.
BUT IT WILL BE IGNORED
In particular the Covid Inquiry needs to know and record this maline context of those who were given responsibility as public servants but instead served themselves and harmed the public long term.
Corrupt maline intent continues with agenda 21 and 30 just a mistaken cock up theory has to be binned.
Feeding the crocodile does not work, NEVER.
Malign. Otherwise; agreed.
Thx
The only thing that comes to my mind after reading this are the words fraud and graft. Now we know why Ursie, after her poor job as German defence minister, was popped into the top EU job – she had already demonstrated her excellent skills at graft and being happy to share taxpayer money with close friends.
It was astonishing that no questions were raised in May 2021, when she purchased another 10 doses of pfisser poison for every man, woman and child in the EU – even though it had not yet been rubber-stamp approved for children, even though enough doses had already been secured to give everyone in the EU the 2 shots that were supposedly all that were necessary – what a gift that Ursie could foresee in May 2021 that everyone would need ongoing doses of this poison. Why, it’s almost like she knew it was garbage and needed to help make pfisser a killing (literally, as it turns out) while the getting was good. It was already known that the pfisser garbage was showing ‘breakthrough’ infections (i.e. it was a failed vaccine), yet Von der Leyen, whose husband has ties to pfisser, was just doing the right thing. Right.
Courts can and must set aside these contracts as being against the public interest, nullifying them ab initio. Criminal investigations must then follow against both Von der Leyen and cohorts and pfisser, who participated in the fraud, knowingly misrepresenting their garbage non-stop and abetting Von der Leyen in perpetrating a fraud on national parliaments.
For any remoaner still left – do you not see what the EU has become? This level of fraud would never have been possible without the centralised, unaccountable control of hand-picked grifters. Whatever the benefits of an economic union are, they are far, far outweighed by the abomination of the corrupt political union that has been foisted upon us. A political union that is now hell-bent on destroying all of Europe with its nonsensical ‘green’ grift, destroying European businesses with its energy policies and eventually leading to food poverty for millions with its agricultural policies.
You nailed it Jane.
Thanks.
EU = Corporate + State = Mussolini.
It’s a protectionists paradise of statism, autarky, graft, grift, bribery, corruption.
This is what Remainers don’t get.
Not sure where else to post this good news, so here goes.
RFK Jr has won a legal case against NY City to reinstate (with back pay!) 1700 workers who were sacked for refusing the jab.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-york-supreme-court-reinstates-all-employees-fired-being-unvaccinated-orders-backpay
Brilliant. Well done RFK.
Some serious implications in this ruling stating as it does that the injections are useless.
“Robert” – you are fabulous and brave and we are all grateful to you but…please lead the charge on correcting the cobblers around mRNA.
ModRNA or MRNA are not the same as mRNA – I’m a very lay person BTW – and that distinction may seem pedantic but its symptomatic of the lies, and the scale of the lies, to date. In that single misrepresentation is an allegory of the whole, brazen charade.
At the very least stop calling it mRNA. Seems so odd Mike Y, Sasha L and also
all sorts of people who know far better than I continue to fall into line with these detritus.
Let us also not forget their use of Pseudouridine, a synthetic component which replaced the usual Uridine component of ‘real’ mRNA.
Our bodies are not familiar with this substance.
Politicians, Public Health Bureaucrats and their bought-and-paid-for scientists and medics, across the world, assured people that the jabs were safe and effective.
This statement from Pfizer “that the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the Vaccine that are not currently known” blows that out of the water.
No-one gave INFORMED CONSENT to be experimented on, if they were not given that information.
Brilliant article. Bribery corruption and favouritism in the EU? Well I never!!!