How luvvies became the useful idiots of Hamas

On the day Shiri Bibas and her babies were finally laid to rest, what were Britain’s luvvies doing? Defending a documentary that has links to Hamas. Standing up for a BBC film about Gaza that was fronted by the son of a Hamas official. Try to take this in: as the Jewish nation mourned a mother and her children who were kidnapped and condemned to death by fascists, the ‘virtuous’ of Britain were singing the praises of a film connected to those fascists. Rarely has the soullessness of their pious posturing been so vividly exposed.

This is the news that Gary Lineker, Juliet Stevenson, Miriam Margolyes and others, a real Who’s Who of tossers, have written to the BBC telling it to reinstate its controversial documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone. The hour-long doc tells the stories of children and teenagers in Gaza. It was broadcast on BBC Two last week. But it swiftly got mired in scandal after it was revealed that the 14-year-old narrator is the son of a minister in the Hamas government. Yes, our public broadcaster put out a film about Gaza featuring the kid of an official linked to the Islamo-fascists that carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Reith will be turning in his grave.

In their letter to BBC bosses, the doc’s defenders describe it as an ‘essential piece of journalism’. The criticism of the film is based on ‘racist’ assumptions about Palestinians, they say. The brass neck of these moral preeners is astounding. Imagine the ethical contortionism it must require, the outright doublethink, to damn as ‘racist’ those who are concerned that the BBC gave a platform to people with links to one of the most murderously racist movements on Earth. They sent their letter yesterday, as the Bibas family was being buried. Any comment on that? On the neo-fascist scum who dragged a mum and her two kids from their home for the ‘crime’ of being Jews? No? Fine, but kindly fuck off with the lectures about racism.

Something else happened yesterday, too: it was revealed that the BBC mistranslated the comments of some of the participants in the doc. Camera – the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis – found five instances of the filmmakers changing ‘the Jews’ to ‘Israeli forces’. So the doc’s subtitles show a woman describing 7 October as ‘the first time we invaded Israel’. But what she actually said was: ‘We were invading the Jews for the first time.’ In the most egregious mistranslation, a woman is shown lauding Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader killed by Israel last October. He was ‘fighting and resisting Israeli forces’, her subtitles say. But her mouth said something else. ‘He was engaging in… jihad against the Jews’ – those were her real words.

So this is what Lineker and Co are praising: a documentary that was not only narrated by the son of a minister in a bigoted government, but which also whitewashed the Jew-baiting of some of the interviewees. Which sanitised a Gazan’s openly stated support for ‘holy war’ against ‘Yahudy’ (‘the Jews’). What’s more, it’s been discovered that, on 7 October, during Hamas’s pogrom, one of doc’s cameramen posted the words ‘the flood’ alongside a saluting emoji on social media. I don’t know about you, but I would seriously interrogate my anti-racist credentials if I ever found myself gushing over a film made by people who are connected with or who cheered the psycho Islamists who murdered more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis.

Ask yourself this: what would these faux-virtuous libs say if the BBC made a film about the American South fronted by the son of a member of the KKK? They’d go mad. They’d call the Beeb ‘racist adjacent’. But the son of a man with ties to Hamas? No biggie. They only killed a thousand or so Jews.

Their letter says the BBC’s removal of the documentary from iPlayer was an act of ‘politically motivated censorship’. Apparently, the Beeb has kowtowed to a lobby hell-bent on ‘discredit[ing] the documentary’. Now, it’s my view that the BBC should not have taken the doc down – once you have broadcast something, you should leave it up, and let the public freely judge its merits. But to hear illiberal liberals hold forth on free speech is too much to take. These people were schtum when women were censored for saying people with cocks are men and when Brits of all persuasions found their names being logged by the cops for committing the Orwellian sin of a ‘non-crime hate incident’. Yet now they want to pose as the heirs to John Milton? It’s amazing: they’ve finally discovered the importance of free speech and all it took was the deplatforming of a doc in which people openly dream of further holy war against Yahudy.

To me, the worst part of the letter is its claim that the criticism of the film was fuelled by a ‘weaponisation of identity’. I get a chill when I hear that word ‘weaponisation’, and here’s why: it is almost always aimed at Jews. We hear about the ‘weaponisation of anti-Semitism’, the ‘weaponisation of the Holocaust’ and now the ‘weaponisation of identity’. What identity, guys? Say it. Try to imagine Muslims or black people being accused of ‘weaponising’ their trauma for moral gain. It wouldn’t happen. And if it did, these same letter-writers would go nuts. As German political scientist Lars Rensmann says, accusing people of making ‘illegitimate’ racism charges is mostly seen as unacceptable, yet claims that the Jews weaponise anti-Semitism are ‘ubiquitous’.

One more thing happened yesterday: the body of Israeli hostage Tsachi Idan was finally released by Hamas. On 7 October, Tsachi’s 18-year-old daughter, Maayan, was murdered in front of him by Hamas militants. With his hands covered in her blood, Tsachi desperately tried to comfort his other two kids as they cried: ‘Are they killing us?’ Hamas livestreamed the whole thing on the Facebook page of Tsachi’s wife, so her family would witness the violent persecution of their loved ones. Then Tsachi was taken hostage, and at some point he was murdered. Where are the luvvies’ thoughts on that? If you turn a blind eye to events as fascistic as this one, you will be blind to anything. A new rule: say nothing about Tsachi Idan, Shiri Bibas and the hundreds of other Jews murdered by Hamas, and you forfeit your right to ever comment on racism again.

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