How the BBC became the propaganda arm of Hamas

Funny how it was the Trump thing that cost BBC director-general Tim Davie and his head of news, Deborah Turness, their jobs. Of course, doctoring footage of The Donald’s ‘January 6’ speech, to make it appear as if he had explicitly incited the Capitol riot, was remarkably egregious and brazen, a prime example of the BBC deciding not to bother with the mask for once. But what about its relentless bias – also exposed by that recent internal memo leaked to the Telegraph – against Jews and Israel?

In a way, that is the more serious problem. All over the world, antipathy towards the Jewish minority and their national home is simply the tip of a spear of hostility towards the West and everything it stands for.

When activists in London, New York, Toronto, Barcelona, Paris and everywhere else march to ‘globalise the intifada’, what they are saying is that they wish to overturn the democracies they live in. In fact, sometimes they say it out loud: in July, for example, a young woman with a cut-glass accent demonstrating in London for Palestine Action finished her video message with, ‘As always, I cannot wait for the West to fall’.

In its relentless bias against Israel, the BBC has been effectively lending its corporate heft to that same message. With every misleading piece of reporting sent out into the world, public opinion is hardened against the Jews. As has been the case for thousands of years, anti-Semitism is based on lies. The modern loathing of Israel is no exception.

To appreciate the scale of the BBC’s Israel problem, you have to get into the details. The memo is rather extensive, so here are its main points:

• BBC Arabic had very little reporting on Israeli suffering at the hands of Hamas or criticism of the terror group.
• BBC Arabic devoted huge swathes of articles to statements from Hamas and Hezbollah, denying factually accurate stories.
• BBC Arabic described Hamas’s terror attacks as ‘military operations’ and barely covered the deaths of Israeli hostages.
• BBC Arabic published fake news, such as Iranian and Syrian claims that Israel had staged an attack on children in the Golan as a pretext for attacking Hezbollah.
• BBC Arabic gave a platform to journalists who had openly glorified terrorism hundreds of times, but inaccurately downplayed them as ‘eyewitnesses’ in a public statement.
• The BBC as a whole gave ‘unjustifiable weight’ to Hamas casualty figures.
• BBC journalists reported extensively on the fact that Palestinians had been digging graves near Al Nasser and Al Shifa hospitals. Later, the same journalists strongly implied that Israel had dug the graves to bury mass casualties in subsequent reports.
• BBC Newsnight repeated the false claim that ‘14,000 babies’ would die within ‘48 hours’ even though it had already been exposed as false. In the same programme, it also aired pictures of an emaciated child as an example of starvation, even though they had already been exposed as showing a congenital oesophageal condition.
• Various BBC platforms spread fake news about starvation in Gaza and were sometimes forced to make corrections.
• BBC News did not inform viewers that, under international law, hospitals were allowed to be targeted when they were being used as military bases.
• The BBC lavished extensive coverage upon a letter signed by 600 lawyers claiming that Britain was breaking international law in selling arms to Israel, but largely ignored a letter signed by 1,000 lawyers arguing the opposite.
• Hamas tunnels were sanitised as being used to ‘move goods and people’, rather than for jihadi operations.
• Numerous BBC channels repeatedly suggested that the International Court of Justice had ruled there was a ‘plausible genocide’ in Gaza, despite the fact that the ICJ president herself had debunked this claim on one of the BBC’s own programmes.

There is much, much more. Yet perhaps the worst aspect of this sorry tale is that when presented with damning evidence of all the charges above, BBC chiefs dismissed it.

In the light of the findings, it is no exaggeration to say that the BBC has long been functioning as the propaganda arm of Hamas, funded by the British public. That is an extraordinary sentence to have written. But it is the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn.

For years, the broadcaster has been brushing this stuff under the carpet. In responding principally to the Trump allegations and largely ignoring the material on its anti-Israel bias, the BBC is pulling out the same playbook, hoping that when the dust settles, it will be back to business as usual.

The depressing thing is, it is probably right.

Jake Wallis Simons is author of Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself.