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Can the BBC Ever Be Trusted Again After Israel-Hamas War?
The BBC logo is seen at the entrance at Broadcasting House, the BBC headquarters in central London. Photo by Vuk Valcic / SOPA Images/Sipa USA.
In summarizing its mission as the publicly-funded broadcaster in the United Kingdom, the BBC states it must “provide impartial news and information to help people understand and engage with the world around them.”
This involves — the corporation promises — providing accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming that conforms to the highest editorial standards.
The commitment to impartiality is — or should be — what sets the BBC apart from other media organizations that nail their political colors to their mast.
While the BBC has staunchly defended itself against criticism that it has a deep-seated bias against Israel, its critics have pointed to many examples over the years of the broadcaster’s journalists brazenly breaking the corporation’s impartiality guidelines.
But the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7 has seen criticism of the BBC reach a climax amid accusations of an abject failure by the organization to report on the Israel-Hamas war fairly, accurately, and transparently.
Spreading Misinformation
There is an irony in the BBC’s publishing a piece one week after Hamas terrorists invaded southern Israel that asked: “Who’s behind Israel-Gaza disinformation and hate online?”
The article, by the corporation’s so-called “disinformation and social media correspondent” Marianna Spring, reported how social media was “awash with false claims, conspiracy theories and hateful content surrounding what’s happening in Israel and Gaza.”
This, Spring warned, was resulting in successful attempts to distort and confuse the online conversation, which “can have serious implications for the international community when it comes to investigating allegations of war crimes, providing aid and figuring out what’s happening where.”
Yet, the BBC itself has been guilty of spreading distortions and false claims about the Israel-Hamas war online.
One of the most damaging was undoubtedly the corporation’s reporting on the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion in Gaza, which saw the BBC print unverified (and later debunked) claims by Hamas-linked officials that hundreds of Palestinians had been killed in an Israeli airstrike at the hospital.
Even as Israel said it was investigating the blast and as facts were still emerging, the corporation doubled down on its misinformation when BBC correspondent Jon Donnison announced live on air that he thought it was most likely that Israel was to blame.
And when conclusive evidence emerged that a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket was responsible, the BBC still sought to defend its coverage on the basis that while it made a mistake, it was a “fast-moving story,” where there were “claims and counter-claims” and where its journalists were “reporting in difficult and dangerous conditions.”
.@BBCNews likes to tell us that Israeli videos “cannot be verified.” But they’ve got no problem broadcasting footage featuring a Palestinian who has appeared in multiple videos playing different characters, including one where he fakes his own death. https://t.co/BaGMchjUxn
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 3, 2023
The Obsession With Balance
Balance is important when it comes to the news: outlets have a duty to report both sides of the story.
However, the BBC has been accused of having a fetish with its attempts at balance in its reports on the current war.
But giving equal weighting to claims made by an internationally recognized terrorist group to those of a democratic state such as Israel is simply absurd.
The absurdity of this was perfectly encapsulated in the BBC’s refusal to call Hamas what it actually is — a terrorist organization.
The BBC’s world affairs editor, John Simpson, even defended the decision not to call Hamas terrorists because, “terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn — who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.”
While the corporation eventually walked back from its insistence that it would refer to terrorists as “militants” following a considerable backlash — announcing that in future coverage it would make clear that Hamas is a UK-proscribed terrorist organization — the fact that the BBC couldn’t decide who was the good guy and the bad guy between Israel and Hamas speaks volumes.
Another example of the BBC trying to offer “two sides” in a report where none exists was during the IDF’s raid on Al-Shifa Hospital, which for many years has been used as a Hamas command center.
The IDF clearly states it is bringing medical teams & Arabic speakers into Al-Shifa Hospital to help patients.@BBCNews reinterprets it to libel the IDF as *targeting* medical teams & Arabic speakers.
Just how much lower can the BBC go? https://t.co/I9kVy3MC87
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 15, 2023
When the IDF provided real-time evidence of how Hamas had embedded itself within the hospital, the BBC seemed to work overtime to try and undermine and discredit as much of the IDF’s proof as possible.
In one the many instances of its disturbing tendency to give weight to the claims of a bloodthirsty terror group, the BBC’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen, suggested that the caches of weaponry uncovered by Israeli soldiers inside Al-Shifa may have belonged to the hospital security team.
Utterly incredible. @BowenBBC trying to “normalize” the presence of weapons in a Gaza hospital. Anything to avoid acknowledging that Hamas could be using Al Shifa for nefarious means.
Keep going, Jeremy. Maybe you’ll end up on Israel’s favorite satirical comedy show next week. https://t.co/jN3kZ40rPc
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 17, 2023
The BBC is also facing what appears to be growing anger from within its own ranks at how the corporation is covering the Israel-Hamas war.
HonestReporting recently revealed that the head of the BBC’s Global Service, Liliane Landor, was forced to address allegations from reporters based in the Middle East that the corporation is biased in favor of Israel.
Yet, rather than robustly challenge staff who threatened to walk out in protest, Landor reportedly promised to set up a special team to handle staff complaints and receive opinions on rectifying harm caused by the alleged pro-Israel bias.
Meanwhile, bosses at the BBC’s London HQ denied permission for journalists to attend a massive march against antisemitism using guidelines that prevent employees from attending demonstrations deemed “controversial.” This despite the BBC having a policy that allows staff to demonstrate in “opposition to racism [which] is a fundamental democratic principle.”
As mentioned, allegations of an anti-Israel bias have dogged the BBC for years.
But the barrage of criticism aimed at the BBC over its coverage of the current Israel-Hamas war has shown that the corporation cannot continue burying its head in the sand where this issue is concerned.
The BBC will lose all credibility if it does not.
The post Can the BBC Ever Be Trusted Again After Israel-Hamas War? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has informed the International Criminal Court that it will contest arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The office also said that US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had updated Netanyahu “on a series of measures he is promoting in the US Congress against the International Criminal Court and against countries that would cooperate with it.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move comes after the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
“Israel today submitted a notice to the International Criminal Court of its intention to appeal to the court, along with a demand to delay the execution of the arrest warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Court spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah told journalists that if requests for an appeal were submitted it would be up to the judges to decide
The court’s rules allow for the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that would pause or defer an investigation or a prosecution for a year, with the possibility of renewing that annually.
After a warrant is issued the country involved or a person named in an arrest warrant can also issue a challenge to the jurisdiction of the court or the admissibility of the case.
The post Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage
Shomrim officers at the scene of a hate crime in London in which Jewish girls were struck with glass bottles. Photo: Shomrim Stamford Hill/Screenshot
A group of young Jewish girls were the victims of an “abhorrent hate crime” when a man hurled glass bottles at them from a balcony as they were walking through the Stamford Hill section of London on Monday evening.
One of the girls was struck in the head and rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local law enforcement.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the Woodberry Down Estate in the city’s borough of Hackney following reports of an assault on Monday evening at 7:44 pm local time.
“A group of schoolgirls had been walking through the estate when a bottle was thrown from the upper floor of a building,” the spokesperson said. “A 16-year-old girl was struck on the head and was taken to hospital. Her injuries have since been assessed as non-life changing.”
Police noted they were unable to locate the suspect and an investigation is ongoing before adding, “The incident is being treated as a potential antisemitic hate crime.”
Following the incident, Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and serves as a neighborhood watch group, reported that the girls were en route to a rehearsal for an upcoming event. The community, the group added, was “shocked” by the attack on “innocent young Jewish girls,” calling it an “abhorrent hate crime.”
14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill.
Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4.
This… pic.twitter.com/MzHPHusgyX
— Shomrim (London North & East) (@Shomrim) November 26, 2024
Since then, another Jewish girl, age 14, has reported being pelted with a hard object which caused her to be “knocked unconscious, and left feeling dizzy and with a bump on her head,” according to Shomrim.
Monday’s crime was one among many which have targeted London Jews in recent years, an issue The Algemeiner has reported on extensively.
Last December, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”
Months prior, a perpetrator stalked and assaulted an Orthodox Jewish woman. He followed her, shouting “dirty Jew” before snatching her shopping bag and “spilling her shopping onto the pavement whilst laughing.” That incident followed a woman wielding a wooden stick approaching a Jewish woman near the Seven Sisters area and declaring “I am doing it because you are Jew,” while striking her over the head and pouring liquid on her. The next day, the same woman — described by an eyewitness as a “serial racist” — chased a mother and her baby with a wooden stick after spraying liquid on the baby. That same week, three people accosted a Jewish teenager and knocked his hat off his head while yelling “f—king Jew.”
According to an Algemeiner review of Metropolitan Police Service data, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred in London between October 2023 and October 2024, eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The problem is so serious that city officials created a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.
“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Jewish Chronicle in a statement about the policy decision earlier this year. “So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet, areas with two of the biggest Jewish communities in London] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”
Khan added that the route “connects communities, connects congregations” and would reassure Jewish Londoners they would be “safe when they travel between these two communities.”
However, it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything seen in the Western world since World War II. Just this week, according to a story by GB News, an unknown group scattered leaflets across the streets of London which threatened that “every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be slaughtered.”
Responding to this latest incident, the director of the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs UK Isaaz Zarfati told GB News that the comments should be taken “seriously.”
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of red lines being repeatedly crossed,” he said. “This is not just another wave that will pass if we remain passive. We must take those threats and statement seriously because they will one day turn into actions, and decisive steps are needed to combat this alarming phenomenon.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks
Israeli soldiers gesture from an Israeli military vehicle, after a ceasefire was agreed to by Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, near Israel’s border with Lebanon in northern Israel, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
While US President Joe Biden hailed the new ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah on Tuesday as a “courageous” step toward peace, security experts and residents of northern Israel voiced starkly contrasting sentiments, criticizing the agreement as falling far short of addressing the ongoing threats posed by the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group.
“I applaud the courageous decision made by the leaders of Lebanon and Israel to end the violence. It reminds us that peace is possible,” Biden said one day before the ceasefire took effect on Wednesday.
He added that it was “designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” vowing that Hezbollah, which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon, would “not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again.”
But according to Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, a resident of northern Israel and the founder and director of Alma — a research center that focuses on security challenges relating to Israel’s northern border — the ceasefire deal, the details of which have not been made public, is nowhere close to establishing peace.
“Let’s not be mistaken. Ceasefire is not peace,” Zehavi told The Algemeiner. “There is a gap between the two and in order to bridge the gap, we need a thorough change in Lebanon and in the Iranian involvement in the region.”
According to Zehavi, the deal was problematic at the outset because it was based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War and has been criticized for its historical ineffectiveness. Zehavi highlighted the failures of the Lebanese army and UNIFIL [UN Interim Force in Lebanon] troops in enforcing the resolution in the past, warning that the same could happen again.
As part of the deal, Israel has insisted on retaining the ability to enforce the resolution independently, but this approach carries risks, Zehavi said. “If we enforce the resolution, it means that there won’t be a ceasefire. If there isn’t a ceasefire, it means that Hezbollah will retaliate, and we will continue the ongoing fighting.”
Hezbollah had already violated the terms of the deal within hours of its signing, with operatives disguised as civilians entering restricted zones in southern Lebanon, including the villages of Kila, Mais a-Jabal, and Markaba, despite warnings from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Another sticking point is the lack of safeguards preventing Hezbollah from rearming, leaving Israel reliant on Lebanese assurances. “After what happened on [last] Oct. 7, Israelis are not willing to enable Hezbollah to recover,” Zehavi asserted. “We cannot rely on just promises; we need to make sure that Hezbollah is not capable of threatening us and our families over here in the north.”
The international community, Zehavi argued, has a crucial role to play in pressuring Lebanon to sever its ties with Hezbollah. So long as Lebanon does not designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, she said, the Shi’ite Muslim group will continue to exert influence over the country and therefore pose a threat to neighboring Israel. Members of the group hold influential positions in the Lebanese government, including ministers who control border crossings and airports, facilitating the smuggling of weapons into Lebanon.
Zehavi also pointed to Iran’s declaration that it will help rebuild both Lebanon and Hezbollah, even while continuing to funnel weapons and financial aid into the terrorist group through smuggling routes.
“As long as the ayatollahs of Iran continue to nourish proxy militias in the Middle East against Israel, we are not going to see peace,” she said.
Other northern residents similarly argued that halting the fight against Hezbollah now would give the terrorist group an opportunity to rebuild its arsenal, strengthen its forces, and potentially replicate the scale of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel’s northern region.
“We never learn. Just like in 2006, and many other times, we stop at the brink of total victory, handing our enemies the opportunity to rebuild and return years later, stronger and deadlier than before,” said Moti Vanunu, a resident who was evacuated from the northern town of Kiryat Shmona.
Gabi Naaman, mayor of the battered northern city of Shlomi, expressed skepticism that the ceasefire would bring lasting security to Israel’s northern residents.
“Everything we’ve seen indicates that the next round is inevitable, whether it’s in a month, two months, or ten years,” he said.
Despite her reservations, Zehavi explained that Israel had no real alternative but to accept the ceasefire, citing the need to provide northern residents with a return to normalcy and to provide the opportunity to the IDF to resupply ammunition and allow soldiers time to recover. “We had to choose between two bad options,” she said.
Some 70,000 Israelis living in the north were forced to evacuate their homes amid unrelenting rocket, missile, and drone attacks from Hezbollah, which began firing on Oct. 8 of last year, one day after Hamas’s invasion of and massacre southern Israel from Gaza. Israel had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah across the Lebanon border until it ramped up its military efforts over the last two months, moving ground forces into southern Lebanon and destroying much of Hezbollah’s leadership and weapons stockpiles through airstrikes.
While Zehavi viewed the timing of the campaign’s start in September — ahead of the challenges of fighting during the winter months — and not in May as a strategic error, she applauded the army’s achievements of the past two months.
In a poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 12 News on Tuesday night, half of those surveyed felt there was no clear winner in the war against Hezbollah. Twenty percent of respondents believed the IDF emerged victorious in the war, while 19 percent thought Hezbollah prevailed. A further 11 percent were unsure who had the upper hand.
The post Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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