BBC’S Gaza coverage has sunk to new lows
Impartiality breaches have occurred so often at its Arabic channel that they almost look deliberate
The BBC’S royal charter sets out five “public purposes”, the very first of which is a commitment to impartiality. Yet the Israel-hamas war has seen the BBC fail to deliver on this crucial test on more occasions than can be explained away as “errors” or bad luck.
A source of repeated issues over impartiality is BBC Arabic. Since the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, BBC Arabic has been forced to make 80 corrections to its reporting. Something is going badly wrong. Mistakes don’t happen 80 times.
The failures of impartiality have included BBC reporters describing Hamas terrorists as “the resistance”, as well as labelling attacks which targeted and killed civilians as “resistance operations”. It’s the language you would hear from a Hamas spokesman.
The corporation was forced to remove an episode of the BBC Arabic programme Trending, which questioned whether the Kfar Aza kibbutz massacre on October 7 actually happened. This plays into an antisemitic conspiracy theory that seeks to undermine the terrible truth of what happened that day. How was a video of that nature produced and distributed by the BBC in the first place? How is it possible that editorial standards at BBC Arabic had fallen so low that this was seen as legitimate reporting?
There is plenty more. Last month a BBC Arabic presenter asked an Egyptian guest to apologise for expressing sympathy for Israel. One BBC Arabic journalist interviewed a Palestinian woman about her life amid the conflict but decided it was not relevant to ask her directly about the time she stabbed an Israeli neighbour in front of her children.
There is no sign that this blatant lack of impartiality at BBC Arabic will be dealt with any time soon by senior management. Yet this is not even the worst of it. The BBC continues to employ people who actually celebrated the October 7 terrorist attacks.
Sally Nabil, a BBC Arabic correspondent, “liked” a number of tweets which appeared to legitimise the targeting of Jewish civilians, including tweets which called the October 7 atrocities “a morning of hope”. She also “liked” a comment on a video which showed footage of jeeps loaded with Jewish bodies and kidnapped civilians. Ms Nabil is still employed by the BBC.
Another BBC Arabic journalist, Sanaa Khouri, reposted and liked tweets appearing to support the massacres, including one about celebratory sweets being distributed in Lebanon in its aftermath. The Beirut-based correspondent also tweeted in the wake of the attacks: “Israel’s prestige is crying in the corner”. Some BBC employees have even gone as far as mocking civilians who were kidnapped by Hamas. BBC executive producer Mahmoud Sheleib took part in a Twitter conversation shortly after October 7 in which he appeared to joke about a woman whose grandmother was abducted by the terrorist group.
The BBC is employing people who celebrated the worst massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. This means that our licence fees are paying the wages of people who celebrated the rape and slaughter of men, women and children. How can this be possible? Why should we accept it? If any other publicly funded organisation supported terrorist sympathisers, the outcry would be enormous. Yet the BBC seems to be impervious to its problems, unwilling to recognise and address the management failures that are poisoning one of Britain’s great institutions.
When breaches of impartiality are so egregious that they extend to the exaltation of a massacre, something has gone very wrong with the public broadcaster. But these scandals are made so much worse when the organisation fails to deal effectively with the problem.
Indeed, far from publicly recognising the scale of this issue, the BBC has gone out of its way to support and endorse its Arabic service. Director-general Tim Davie has recently stated his admiration for BBC Arabic, saying that the service was something “we should be very proud of ”.
On taking the role of directorgeneral, Davie chose to put impartiality at the heart of his tenure, describing it as his “number one priority”. Given the actions of BBC Arabic over the past seven months, it now seems clear that, unfortunately, he has failed in his mission in the most shameful way possible.
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