The BBC’s shameful moral cowardice over Hamas

The BBC has reached a new low. It has tumbled further down the well of moral relativism. This week, it will broadcast a new documentary about Hamas’s massacre at the Nova music festival on 7 October last year. But according to the doc’s director, the version the Beeb is showing ‘won’t describe Hamas as terrorists’. If this is true, if the BBC can’t even park its weird aversion to calling Hamas terrorists when it is airing a film about Hamas’s butchery of the young at a festival in the desert, then that shames Britain.

We Will Dance Again tells the story of what the pogromists of Hamas did when they happened upon the Nova festival in the Negev desert during their invasion of Israel on 7 October 2023. Combining harrowing testimony from survivors with graphic footage of Hamas’s barbarism, it paints a grim picture of arguably the worst event of the pogrom: 364 people were slaughtered at Nova. Yet according to the director, Yariv Mozer, one thing will be missing from the version us Brits will see: the T-word.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter on ‘what they kept’ and ‘what they cut’ from their disturbing film, Mozer says ‘the version [the BBC will] air won’t describe Hamas as terrorists’. Hinting at his irritation at this alleged omission, Mozer says ‘it was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities’. Then Brits can decide for themselves, he says, ‘if this is a terrorist organisation or not’. Some of us have already decided, of course. The BBC might be reluctant to call the mass murderers of Jews ‘terrorists’, but others are more than happy to do so.

It is not clear from the interview with Mozer if the BBC explicitly instructed him to take out the word terrorist, or if Mozer and his team pre-empted the Beeb’s odd concern about that word and decided to take it out themselves for an easier life. The Jerusalem Post assumes it’s the former: the BBC ‘told director’ to ‘not describe Hamas as “terrorists”’, it says. Yet even if it’s the latter, even if there are tellers of Israelis’ stories out there who get the vibe that you shouldn’t call Hamas ‘terrorists’ if you want to appear on the BBC, then that’s still epically embarrassing for Britain.

If this was self-censorship, it’s understandable. After all, for the past year, ever since Hamas visited its racist terror on Israel, the BBC has been pathologically resistant to calling Hamas ‘terrorists’. Even though that’s what they are. There was a storm in the aftermath of the pogrom over the BBC’s linguistic cowardice. Just four days after the pogrom, Beeb big gun John Simpson offered a thin explanation for the corporation’s dodging of the T-word. ‘We don’t take sides’, he said. ‘We don’t use loaded words like “evil” or “cowardly”. We don’t talk about “terrorists”.’

You don’t? You could have fooled me. The BBC ‘takes sides’ on every culture clash of the modern era, from Brexit (which it hates) to environmentalism (which it loves). As to not ‘talking about “terrorists”’ – explain, then, your references to ‘far-right terrorism’ and your wondering out loud if even incels are representative of a ‘far-right terrorist ideology’. The Beeb does talk about terrorists. Just not where Hamas is concerned. To some of us, its failure to say ‘terrorist’ even in the wake of the worst act of fascistic violence against the Jews since the Holocaust spoke less to its imaginary uber-neutrality than to its kneejerk Israelophobia. It didn’t want to be seen slamming Israel’s haters too hard. That really was it.

David Cameron, then the foreign secretary, rebuked the Beeb. Call them terrorists, he said, because ‘they are terrorists’. The BBC relented, ever so slightly, promising it would call Hamas a proscribed terrorist organisation ‘where possible’. It hardly ever did, though. According to a recent study of the BBC’s output in the four months after the pogrom, it used the terms ‘proscribed’, ‘designated’ or ‘recognised’ terror group for Hamas just 409 out of the 12,459 times it mentioned them. Seriously, what is happening here? What is this bitter unwillingness to call a terrorist a terrorist?

And now, reportedly, even a film on Hamas’s most evil act of terrorism won’t say the word ‘terrorism’, either because the BBC didn’t want it to or the filmmakers presumed the BBC wouldn’t want it to. One year after 364 young Jews were murdered by anti-Semitic terrorists – yes, terrorists – Britain’s public broadcaster won’t call their killers by their proper name. You couldn’t ask for better proof of how Israelophobia rots the brain and warps the soul.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy