RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/09/the-bbcs-israelophobia-is-even-worse-than-you-think/

Remember when the BBC went nuts at Nigel Farage over comments made by some of the candidates for his Reform Party? It was in the run-up to the General Election. Farage was taking part in a BBC debate. Presenter Fiona Bruce huffed and puffed at him for half the show about three candidates who’d said nasty things about immigrants, including calling them ‘savages’ who should ‘get off [their] lazy arses’. Looking back, we can see what a load of old cant that was, for the BBC employed far worse bigots than those Reform racists. It employed people who openly praised the worst act of Jew murder since the Holocaust.

A new report on the BBC’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas War in the aftermath of Hamas’s pogrom of 7 October is a sobering read. It’s outright jarring in parts. Some of it is pretty ‘dog bites man’. Anyone who’s watched any of the Beeb’s pained output since 7 October will not be surprised to learn it has exhibited a ‘deeply worrying pattern of bias’ against Israel. But they’ll be horrified – I hope – to read that the BBC used journalists who had ‘shown sympathy for Hamas’. Including one who described Hamas’s pogrom as a ‘morning of hope’, and another who appeared to mock the Jewish State even as its citizens were being raped and murdered, saying that ‘Israel… is crying in the corner’.

The Beeb has done many awful things of late. There’s its Brexit-bashing. Its indoctrination of schoolkids with bollocks about ‘white privilege’. Its gratingly woke podcasts, including one asking how ‘white women’ can avoid becoming ‘Karens’. Its transformation of Doctor Who into naff LGBTQ propaganda in an effort to stir the throng from its supposed bigoted stupor. But this – its association with journalists so anti-Israel that one defended a Lebanese reporter who had said ‘Sir Hitler, rise, there are a few people that need to be burned’ – is surely the worst. We’re paying for this fascist-adjacent nonsense?

The new report is called ‘The Asserson Report: The Israel-Hamas War and the BBC’. It was overseen by Trevor Asserson, the British-Israeli lawyer. He deployed around 20 data scientists and 20 legal minds to analyse no fewer than nine million words of BBC output from the four-month period of 7 October 2023 to 7 February 2024. The researchers claim to have identified a total of 1,553 breaches of the BBC’s own guidelines on impartiality and accuracy. Time and again after the 7 October pogrom, they say, the BBC’s output soft-soaped Hamas’s atrocities while depicting Israel as ‘militaristic and aggressive’.

Some of the report’s stats are alarming, even to those of us who’ve long thought the Beeb has an unhealthy animus for Israel. We hear that in that four-month period, BBC coverage associated Israel with war crimes four times more often than it associated Hamas with war crimes. There were 127 incidents of the Jewish State being discussed as a possible war criminal, in comparison with just 30 incidents of Hamas being discussed in similar terms. Israel was 14 times more likely to be associated with genocide (283 incidents vs 19 for Hamas) and six times more likely to be associated with breaking international law (167 vs 27).

We’re also reminded of the BBC’s sick, stubborn refusal to call Hamas terrorists. The BBC insisted on referring to 7 October as a ‘militant attack’ and to the fascists who carried it out as ‘militants’. It wheeled out big gun John Simpson to explain why it wasn’t using 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”.’ That this isn’t true – the BBC has referred often to ‘far-right terrorism’ and even wondered if incels are adherents to a ‘far-right terrorist ideology’ – seemed not to matter. The BBC takes sides all the time – on Brexit, climate change, woke – and we all know it. That it refused to ‘take sides’, or just use the right bloody words, following the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust was unnerving. Faced with a thousand dead Jews, the Beeb finally rediscovered the importance of impartiality. It’s chilling.

The then foreign secretary David Cameron, among others, slammed the BBC for its avoidance of the T-word. ‘They are terrorists’, he said of Hamas on a BBC show. The BBC said it would start calling Hamas a ‘proscribed terrorist organisation’, ‘where possible’. How gracious. And yet the Asserson report finds that, in those four months, the BBC used the phrases ‘proscribed’, ‘designated’ or ‘recognised’ terrorist group just 409 out of the 12,459 times it mentioned Hamas. That employees of the public broadcaster seemingly could not bring themselves to say ‘terrorist’ about men who’d just invaded the Jewish nation to behead civilians, rape women and kidnap grannies is almost beyond belief. Nothing has made me want to stop paying the licence fee more than this.

At BBC Arabic, things were particularly bad. The report gives the grim details. It reminds us that two weeks after Hamas’s pogrom, six BBC Arabic reporters were taken off air for social-media posts in which they seemed to praise Hamas’s murderous pogrom. One reporter who assisted the BBC with its coverage had liked a post celebrating ‘the first martyrs of the operation’. Another had once posted on Facebook about encountering yet more pesky Jews during a holiday in Thailand. ‘I’m fleeing… to the Far East, and I find more Jews’, he wrote. I look forward to Fiona Bruce’s grilling of the BBC editor who sought out this person’s services.

The pompous self-styled guardians of truth at BBC Verify carried eye-witness testimony from a ‘journalist at the scene’ who turned out to be someone who had dined with Hamas leaders and had celebrated the 7 October bloodshed. Does anything better sum up the hollow sanctimony of the modern Beeb than the fact that its Verify wing constantly wrings its hands over ‘far right’ conspiracy theorists in the UK while platforming someone who’d celebrated the worst act of far-right, anti-Jewish violence in almost 80 years? Then there was the BBC Arabic reporter who publicly defended a Lebanese colleague who had prayed for a return of Adolf Hitler, because ‘there are a few people that need to be burned’. We all know who.

It can feel difficult to take this all in, the sheer magnitude of the BBC’s failures post-pogrom. Following the worst act of racist violence of modern times, the BBC refused to utter the word ‘terrorist’; it said ‘genocide’ more often about the state that was the victim of genocidal terror than it did about the genocidal terrorists; and it worked with reporters who seem to have cheered the pogromists, mocked their victims and slurred Jews. This is a very serious situation, no? For any institution to fail so spectacularly in terms of truth, accuracy and morality in the aftermath of the mass murder of Jews would be dreadful; for the BBC, the self-styled world-beater of honest reporting, to fail in such a fashion is unforgivable.

This goes beyond the Beeb. The BBC is both the shaper and embodiment of elite consensus opinion. It both influences and reflects the fashionable views of the upper classes. So its awful reporting post-7 October points to more than a crisis at BBC HQ – it speaks to the moral and intellectual disorder of the establishment more broadly. These people really could not see how serious 7 October was, what a violent break it was with civilisation itself. ‘We don’t take sides.’ On a war between barbarism and civilisation? Then you’re not fit for purpose.

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 – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy