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
The BBC 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.
BBC chairman Dr Samir Shah told The Times Radio yesterday (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.”
A week earlier, the Telegraph reported that Samer Elzaenen, a freelance reporter frequently featured on BBC Arabic has been revealed to have posted antisemitic content online, including calls for violence against Jews.
In a Facebook post from July 2022, he 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 used inflammatory hashtags, such as “#We Are All Hamas You Son of a Jewess,” and 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 the victims “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.”
The same report revealed that another freelance journalist for BBC Arabic, Ahmed Qannan, has also been implicated in promoting violence.
In response to a Facebook comment advocating for throat-slitting after a terror attack near a Jerusalem synagogue that killed seven civilians on Holocaust Memorial Day in January 2023, Qannan replied: “Don’t give up on your ambition.” He also hailed a Palestinian gunman who murdered four civilians and a police officer in Bnei Brak in 2022 as a “hero.”
The BBC said in a statement, “International journalists including the BBC are not allowed access into Gaza so we hear from a range of eyewitness accounts from the strip. These are not BBC members of staff or part of the BBC’s reporting team. We were not aware of the individuals’ social media activity prior to hearing from them on air. We are absolutely clear that there is no place for antisemitism on our services.”
The BBC has long been criticized for its blatant anti-Israel bias. This criticism has increased since Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the war in Gaza which followed.
In November of 2023, the corporation published an apology after falsely claiming that IDF troops were targeting medical teams in battles in and around the Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
Before that, the BBC falsely accused Israel of being responsible for an explosion at a hospital in Gaza, which was proven to have been caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket. The network later acknowledged that “it was false to speculate” on the explosion.
In September, a report found that the BBCviolated its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the first four months of the war between Israel and Hamas, and noted “deeply worrying pattern of bias” against the Jewish state during that period.
In March, the British corporation issued an apology after using footage of the Israeli city of Tiberias – located well within Israel’s internationally recognized borders – while discussing “settlements” in the Golan Heights.
