The BBC, which has a long and dishonorable history of anti-Israel animus, has again shown its bias by refusing to call the members of Hamas “terrorists.” No, for the BBC, those who decapitate babies, rape girls as they are made to lie on the corpses of murdered Israelis, photograph the dead bodies of grandmothers and post them on their Facebook page, cut off the heads, and then mutilate the bodies, of IDF soldiers — these are merely “militants.” More on the story, and the pushback from both Labour and Conservative leaders appalled at the BBC’s decision not to describe Hamas killers as “terrorists” in the coverage of the recent attacks in Israel, can be found here: “BBC defends policy not to call Hamas ‘terrorists’ after criticism,” by Ian Youngs and Paul Glynn, BBC News, October 12, 2023:
Veteran BBC foreign correspondent John Simpson said “calling someone a terrorist means you’re taking sides.”
John Simpson has a long history of “taking sides” against Israel. Calling someone a “terrorist” who is, in fact, a terrorist — defined as someone who through extreme violence against civilians hopes to strike terror in an enemy — is not “taking sides” but reporting accurately. And isn’t referring to a “terrorist” as a “militant” also taking sides?
A BBC spokesperson said: “We always take our use of language very seriously.
Yes, for decades the BBC’s use of language in its coverage of Israel and the Palestinians has “very seriously” and most determinedly damaged Israel’s image. While I am reluctant to quote BBC reports at length, I urge readers to do Internet searches for “Israel” and the names of John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen, Orla Guerin, Lyse Doucet. A little about each of them is offered below.
Here’s a bit about Orla Guerin:
Orla Guerin, the BBC’s international correspondent, at the end of an interview with Holocaust survivor Rena Quint ahead of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, which included images of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem, Guerin said: “In Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, images of the dead. Young soldiers troop in to share in the binding tragedy of the Jewish people. The state of Israel is now a regional power. For decades, it has occupied Palestinian territories. But some here will always see their nation through the prism of persecution and survival.” So Israelis, she is suggesting, see themselves as perennially threatened, while in fact the powerful Israeli state is now treating the Palestinians as the Nazis treated the Jews.”…
In 2004, the Israeli government accused Guerin of antisemitism and “total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror groups” over a report on a 16-year-old would-be suicide bomber. In 2015, [Sir Michael] Grade filed a complaint with the BBC accusing Guerin of “directly misleading” viewers by failing to acknowledge the involvement of militant Palestinian groups in a wave of stabbings of Israelis.
Here is Lyse Doucet, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent at the BBC. In one interview, a Gazan child says the “yahud” are massacring Palestinians. However, the subtitles read, “Israel is massacring us.” The BBC in the past has offered a correct translation of the word “yahud.” It means “Jew.” Doucet, on the advice of Palestinians, deliberately translated “yahud” as “Israelis” to hide the antisemitic significance of the remark.
Here is the BBC World Affairs Editor at the time, John Simpson, writing in 2013:
Have we, perhaps, just witnessed a moment like that in 1975, when the Americans evacuated Saigon and their power in South East Asia was brought to a close?
That may be going too far. As the international protector of Israel, the US will still have a major part to play in the central dispute in the region, even though the Israeli tail usually seems to wag the American dog.
CAMERA comments:
As has already been pointed out, there is something very revealing in the fact that Simpson – and presumably his editors – are still pushing the line that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the “central dispute in the region” after nearly three years of turmoil in the Middle East.
No less notable is the fact that the country Simpson describes as “the international protector of Israel” has – along with its British allies – recently opted for a policy on Syria which halts the decline of the Assad/Iran/Hizballah conglomerate in that country – and legitimizes it – as well as taking the pressure off an overstretched Hizballah in Lebanon.
But what of Simpson’s totally unnecessary use of the ‘tail and dog’ phrase? That of course has undertones of classic “Jewish lobby” antisemitism. Taking a look at who else uses that idiom we find it, for example, on websites such as the Iranian regime’s ‘Press TV’ by antisemitic conspiracy theorist Mark Glenn of the ‘Crescent and Cross Solidarity Movement’.
We also find the same phrase used on the Far-Left website ‘Solidarity‘, by anti-Israelcampaigners Kathleen and Bill Christison, on the anti-Israel blog ‘Mondoweiss‘ and on Russia’s government radio station ‘The Voice of Russia’.
Is that really the sort of ideological company the ‘impartial’ BBC thinks its World Affairs Editor should be keeping?
Here is Jeremy Bowen, who was the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, based in Jerusalem, between 1995 and 2000, and the BBC Middle East editor from 2005 to 2022, before being appointed the International Editor of BBC News. In 2021, the Campaign Against Antisemitism called for the BBC to dismiss its Middle East Editor, Jeremy Bowen, over a tweet on his official BBC Twitter account, instructing “every Jew” to read an “exploration of Judaism” that claimed that “Racism, hate and violence are Jewish values too.”
Mr Bowen has prior form. In 2015, he tweeted that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, “plays the holocaust [sic] card” during a speech in which Mr Netanyahu had acknowledged that Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel was in the audience and promised to learn the lessons of the Holocaust by ensuring that Jews never again faced annihilation. Bowen never apologised, but tweeted that he considered himself to be neither an antisemite nor a Holocaust denier, without addressing his vile turn of phrase, which the BBC dismissed as “journalism shorthand”.
The BBC’s editorial guidelines say:
The corporation’s editorial guidelines say the word “terrorist” can be “a barrier rather than an aid to understanding”.
Weasel words. The word “terrorist” can be “a barrier to understanding” if applied incorrectly. But when the word is is deliberately avoided even though it is exactly the right word to describe someone based on his acts — the rapes and murders of civilians in order to terrorize a whole population — that is an even greater “barrier to understanding.”
“We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator such as ‘bomber’, ‘attacker’, ‘gunman’, ‘kidnapper’, ‘insurgent’ and ‘militant’.
In that list, not only is “terrorist’ missing, but so is another word that fits the case: “murderer.” Haven’t the men of Hamas deliberately committed mass murder? Why, then, does the BBC so carefully refrain from using that word?
“We should not adopt other people’s language as our own; our responsibility is to remain objective and report in ways that enable our audiences to make their own assessments about who is doing what to whom.”
So the word “terrorist” is “other people’s language” that the BBC — to be fair, to be judicious, to be unbiased — must never use. Who are those “other people”? Why, it’s the Israelis, of course. It is they who call Hamas members “terrorists.” And the BBC never ever wants to be on the same side as Israel.
Ask yourself: would the Americans during World War II have described Hitler, or Himmler, or Goebbels, or Goering, as a “militant”? Would we have described Admiral Tojo as a ”militant”? What would you think of a news service or television news program that called Osama bin Laden a “militant”? Or that described the 19 Muslims who hijacked four planes on 9/11 merely as “militants”? They were hellbent on killing civilians, and in terrorizing Americans and other Infidels. They were “terrorists.”
The word “militant” ordinarily implies a strong political persuasion, rather than the desire to use terror as. weapon. Dolores Ibárruri, a/k/a La Pasionara, was a Spanish Republican militant. So was the cellist Pablo Casals, who refused to perform in Spain or, indeed, in any country that had relations with Franco’s Spain. The Rosselli brothers were anti-fascist militants, as was Leone Ginzburg. None of those I have listed called for using terror as a weapon. They had nothing in common with the Hamas murderers.
So why won’t the BBC use the word “terrorist” to describe Hamas? For that matter, why does it refuse to use the word “murderers” about them? Hasn’t Hamas, after all, been murdering Israeli civilians indiscriminately, with as much cruelty as possible? But just as the BBC won’t use the word “terrorist,” it won’t use the word “murderer” to describe the Hamas men who raced into Israel on October 7, killing everyone they could. The BBC has a lot of explaining to do. Perhaps now is the time for the British government to stop forcing every British household to pay a stiff licence fee of 159 pounds each year, which supports reporters who propagandize against the Jewish state and whitewash the jihadis.
Wellington says
Waffling on where moral truth lies will always represent descent. This is bad enough in the individual but when it becomes present in society at large (an example being the major broadcasting network in a nation), then expect precipitous descent into a morass of a terrible No Man’s Land. Sure happening now in the UK—and sadly in many other Western nations.
Isabella van der westhuizen says
According to the BBC the IRA were terrorists
Hammas are not
Such hypocrites
Lisel Sipes says
The BBC is owned by muslimes.
mike says
News flash the BBC is no longer a network I will watch
James Lincoln says
Just when you thought that the BBC could not get any worse…
Eva says
The bbc can always get worse.
Lars says
The BBC is MI6 and the official mouth piece of the British Government. That’s how they role.
Eva says
I’ve been boycotting the bbc for years.
They’re absolute garbage.
And these particular‘correspondents’ should be put up against a wall.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
BBC should be treated as a terrorist organization by countries like Israel and India, and their correspondents should either be denied entry into their countries proper, or if they turn up there illegally, they should be hunted down & disappeared. End of story
Aum says
Biased Broadcasting Corporation is the correct name.
Scotsman48 says
Bloody Bullshit Crap… aka BBC.
Once upon a time the BBC were thought of as a wonderful Station and I have seen it on MANY different languages around the World and the peoples in those various countries glued to their TV sets listening intently to what was being said and knowing they were hearing truth being spoken..
That was a very different generation than we have today running that station.
tom_ says
Alright, don’t call them terrorists (militants, jihadis). Go for the common denominator, Call them Muslims. Muslims killed Israelis; Muslims beheaded babies; Muslims raped women; Muslims kidnapped Jews. Muslims tortured captives. There.
Christopher Watson says
Sacker is just as bad!
FYI says
And the Jimmy Saville memorial award for protecting pedos and for outstanding failure to tell us the News goes to..
The BBC
The British Bolshevik Conartists..sorry “Broadcasting..”{what?Lies?}
garry pollack says
In 1776 we were the terrorists…& in Palestine—the Zionists were terrorists—how dare the BBC put the muzzies inn such illustrious company!
Judy in Harrisburg says
The teen-age niece and nephew of a close friend were waiting on a Jerusalem street for a bus.
A Palestinian man driving his truck saw the two kids and deliberately ran over them, causing devastating head injuries to the boy and severe leg injuries to his sister.
The truck flipped after the collision and when the driver got out of the vehicle an alert Israeli policeman shot and killed him.
I wouldn’t call the truck driver a militant. He was – plain and simple – a savage vicious terrorist and maybe a wannabe jihadi hoping to be spirited away to collect his 72 milk-fed virgins.
Evidently the Palestinians living on the West Bank considered him a terrorist; they celebrated his achievement and handed out candy to the residents. The IDF clearly considered him a terrorist: the next day they had his family home bulldozed into dust.
Would the BBC refer to this man as a militant? He wasn’t in military uniform. Would a simple militant aim his truck at two kids waiting for a bus in a vile attempt to kill then?
BBC should call the Hamas fighters exactly what they are, and BBC should be ashamed to refer to them and their cohorts as anything but terrorists.
After I read the information you just provided, I deleted the BBC news channel app from my cell phone and my computer. Many, many others should do the same.
James Lincoln says
Judy in Harrisburg says,
“Evidently the Palestinians living on the West Bank considered him a terrorist; they celebrated his achievement and handed out candy to the residents.”
Yes, Judy.
But the lamestream media wants us all to believe that:
Palestinians- good.
Hamas- bad.
Eva says
They don’t want us to think hamas is bad.
They want us to think hamas are ‘freedom fighters’ who did some justifiable things to their enemies along the way.
Never allow yourself to be tricked into believing they feel any other way.
James Lincoln says
Eva,
You are correct, I oversimplified.
Major Tom says
I remember when we called them “Jihadis!”