By Seth Mandel
Thursday, March
06, 2025
The BBC is officially in crisis. The UK broadcaster’s
reflexive anti-Israel posture and slackening standards created a perfect storm
that has smashed the Beeb’s credibility to pieces.
Don’t take my word for it—here’s BBC
Chair Samir Shah:
“What has been revealed is a dagger to the heart of the
BBC’s claim to be impartial and trustworthy… We will get to the bottom of this
and take appropriate actions.”
The incident is every bit the scandal it is being made
out to be and more, which is why BBC officials’ usual swagger has been replaced
by an unmistakable tone of panic. We have finally reached the point at which a
public media giant cannot even provide a defense for its actions—indeed, BBC
higher-ups appear shellshocked and uninterested in even trying to conjure a
defense.
Here’s what happened.
On Feb. 17, the BBC aired a documentary called How to
Survive a Warzone, a demonization of Israel’s counteroffensive in Gaza
narrated by a Palestinian teenager. It all fell apart a day later thanks to the
work of superb investigative
journalist David Collier, who revealed that the boy was actually the son of
a prominent Hamas official and the “documentary” was therefore a literal work
of official Hamas propaganda funded by British taxpayers.
How Collier figured it out is an important detail. He
noticed the same teenager was featured in a Channel 4 news item in November
2023. In that program, the information was being fed to the producers by the
boy’s uncle, who directs a group linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine, a terrorist organization. From there, the names provided in the
program led Collier to prove that the boy’s father was a Hamas official and the
family patriarch was among the founders of Hamas. Both father and son, then,
“are 100% Hamas royalty,” Collier wrote.
Collier’s work was featured in the British press and
within days the BBC pulled
the documentary from its website, and a government
inquiry was launched to figure out why taxpayers were being used as the funding
and distribution stream for a monstrous terrorist organization like Hamas.
It didn’t end there. The following week, the Telegraph
revealed that interviews with Gazans used in the film were
systematically mistranslated to clean up what was said in Arabic for the
program’s English subtitles. According to the Telegraph, “on at least
five occasions the words Yahud or Yahudy — Arabic for ‘Jew’ or ‘Jews’ — were
changed to ‘Israel’ or
‘Israeli forces’, or were removed from the subtitles altogether.
“An interviewee praising Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader,
for ‘jihad against the Jews’ was also mistranslated as saying he was fighting
‘Israeli forces’.”
The BBC thus had not only produced a Hamas propaganda
film but sanitized the murderous Jew-hatred expressed by Palestinians
throughout.
And that is why Shah, the BBC chair, was in front of a
government panel expressing his deep regret on Tuesday. The government is
letting the BBC take the lead on the investigation, but it is making clear that
this is a uniquely shameful tale of BBC infamy.
The earlier Channel 4 program won news awards, including
an international Emmy. It turned out that Channel 4 has known the family’s
identity since last summer, further casting doubt on the BBC’s
already-farfetched attempts to play dumb or claim to have been manipulated.
There are two important lessons here. First, as has
become fairly clear by now, a great deal of the “journalism” on the war is
being done by members of terrorist organizations fighting in that war. The
BBC’s documentary was, perhaps, the worst such example. But it was an example
nonetheless. Mainstream international media have corrupted their tradecraft in
their desire to enable Hamas’s genocidal cause against Israel.
Second, the fact that this keeps happening is a reminder
that in order to paint Israel as a convincing villain, news must be fabricated.
Documentaries are perfect vehicles for such audience manipulation, of course.
This is was part of the reason the Oscars award to No Other Land on
Sunday night was so divisive: As Jonathan Sacerdoti and others have meticulously
pointed out, the film’s narrative bears almost no relation to the reality
of its subject. It’s agitprop produced to legitimize baldly illegal Palestinian
land grabs.
One should consider the following: If Israel were truly
the evil oppressor its critics make it out to be, why would all this
documentary evidence have to be manufactured and distorted?
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