BBC bias on Israel: enter the chairman

Here we go again. BBC News programmes have been biased against Israel ever since October 7. Almost immediately John Simpson and Mishal Husain refused to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. Since then reporters and presenters alike have condemned Israel and accused it of “war crimes”, producers and programme editors have consistently arranged interviews with spokesmen and women of NGOs who have spoken darkly of “genocide” and “famine”, and Israeli spokesmen and women have been consistently interrupted and heckled. Even some of the best BBC presenters, such as Christian Fraser, have been surprisingly biased, going back to that interview with reporter Jon Donnison who wrongly blamed Israel for a missile attack on a hospital in Gaza and Fraser failed to advise Donnison to wait for proper information before making such an accusation. Donnison is still at the Corporation, even though the BBC later acknowledged that ”it was false to speculate” on the explosion.

A few days ago, reporting for the Israel National News on 4 May, Tziki Brandwine wrote, “The BBC corporation announced that it will review the way it covers the war in Gaza after it was revealed that some of the corporation’s contributors expressed antisemitic views.” He quoted the BBC’s new chairman Samir Shah, who told Times Radio on Saturday: “The Arabic Service, we are looking at it, we’ve been examining it. I think this whole business of how we’ve covered Israel-Gaza is a proper thing to examine thoroughly, which is why we’re going to identify… we’re going to get hold of an independent figure to look at our coverage.”

Why an independent figure? Because the BBC’s senior management, from the Director General to Deborah Turness, the CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs, have consistently failed to address the issue of anti-Israel bias at BBC News. This has been documented by Honest Reporting, Natasha Hausdorff and her colleagues at UK Lawyers for Israel, and by the Asserson Report. The latter ran to 199 pages, with a separate 188-page supporting document, and claims to have used both human and artificial intelligence to assess some nine million words of BBC output from 7 October 2023 to 7 February 2024. It claimed that the BBC had violated its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during just the first four months of the war between Israel and Hamas and noted a “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against the Jewish state during that period. The Sunday Telegraph also accused the BBC of bias: its headline said that the “BBC ‘has breached rules 1,500 times’ over Gaza war”. Finally, there are individual journalists and commentators, including Douglas Murray, Melanie Phillips, Richard Kemp, plus recent editors of The Jewish Chronicle, including Stephen Pollard and his successor, Jake Wallis Simons, and many more.

A week before Shah’s statement, the Telegraph reported that Samer Elzaenen, a freelance reporter frequently featured on BBC Arabic had been revealed to have posted antisemitic content online, including calls for violence against Jews. In a Facebook post from July 2022, Elzaenen wrote: ”When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything.” In another post from May 2011, he added: “My message to the Zionist Jews: We are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.”

Additionally, Elzaenen has repeatedly praised terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians. He lauded terrorists as “heroes” and “martyrs”, celebrating deadly assaults and expressing joy over the deaths of Jewish victims. Following a February 2023 car-ramming attack in Jerusalem that killed two young children and a young man, Elzaenen declared that the victims (not the perpetrators) “will soon go to hell”. Elzaenen has consistently referred to the October 7 Hamas terrorists, including those who massacred civilians at the Nova music festival, as “resistance fighters”.

In his piece for the Israel National News, Brandwine also accused, Ahmed Qannan, another freelance journalist working for BBC Arabic, of promoting violence. He had allegedly hailed a Palestinian gunman who murdered four civilians and a police officer in Bnei Brak in 2022 as a “hero”.

More worrying are the systematic kinds of bias rather than particular instances. For example, there is the consistent reliance on anti-Israel spokesmen/women for NGOs such as UNWRA, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam and Unicef, who all speak emotively of “genocide”, even though the population of Gaza has risen significantly during the conflict. These NGOs speak of “war crimes” and “famine”, with little or no evidence; use inflated statistics of the numbers of Palestinians killed, mostly produced by the Gaza Health Authority, run by Hamas and relying on Palestinian hospital doctors rather than visual evidence or neutral statistics.

On the other hand, I have never seen a BBC reporter show evidence of fabricated footage shot by Hamas. This is known as “Pallywood” footage, in which apparently dead children mysteriously start moving a limb and men (always men) carry wounded children to an ambulance without showing any emotion at all, probably because they know the child is fine. I have also hardly ever seen a single BBC News report showing Palestinians hurling abuse at Hamas or being beaten for criticising Hamas.

Then there are presenters. Christian Fraser, on a recent episode of The Context, constantly interrupted Natasha Hausdorff, a leading British lawyer and spokeswoman for Israel. He expressed the kind of scepticism towards her account which he and his colleagues at the Today programme or The World at One would never show towards someone from an NGO. For example, a Norwegian spokesman for a UN relief organisation was recently interviewed for a BBC News programme and spoke movingly about a Palestinian who still has the key to his home from 1947 before the Nakbah. How many times have you heard such a story from an East African Asian, a Syrian or an Armenian? Or how many times have you heard a BBC presenter or reporter asking why UNWRA is a UN relief organisation dedicated to a single group, the Palestinians.

Similarly, how many times have you heard BBC reporters discussing the anti-Israel rhetoric of many of our trade union leaders, Irish politicians, British university academics who fail to deal with the problem of antisemitism and anti-Zionism at their universities?

Then there is the ICC, often quoted approvingly by BBC and Sky News.

But how often have we heard about ICC judgments about the expulsions of Jews from almost every Muslim state over past decades, about homophobia and misogyny in countless Muslim countries, or calls to arrest the heads of state of Afghanistan and Iran, or the leaders of Hezbollah and the Houthis?

It is hard to know which are worse: the omissions in the BBC’s coverage, the systematic bias against Israel or the bad manners of presenters who interrupt pro-Israel spokesmen and women and repeatedly say “we are running out of time” when such people try to argue their case. Either way, it is time for a change of management at BBC News and to bring in executives who are prepared to clean up the worst cases of bias.

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