The BBC's Arabic Service

Thursday, 27th March 2008

Trevor Asserson is a British lawyer (who now lives in Israel) who for years has campaigned against the BBC’s bias against Israel. He has now produced an even more serious charge against the BBC — that during the 2006 Lebanon war, the BBC’s Arabic service provided a platform for the campaign by Hezbollah and Iran to delegitimise and demonise both the USA and Israel in the eyes of the Arabic speaking world.

With Deena Pinson, he recorded, translated and transcribed the BBC’s principal news analysis programme, Hadeeth Al-Sa’a, for a period of four weeks from 19 July to 20 August 2006. Their report (you can down load the pdf at number 6) says that during that period the programme put on 17 spokespeople for Hizbollah and Iran amongst programme guests but only 5 for Israel. It comments:

Many programme guests expressed blatantly and viciously anti American positions… In addition we came across a number of quite extreme statements. For example we were told that the bombing of an electricity station was a ‘crime’ which is ‘unprecedented historically’ and we learn that it is US policy ‘to crush the Palestinians completely and to take all of their lands.’ When comments as extreme as this go uncorrected and unchallenged, the BBC appears to have tossed its moral compass into the waves and completely to have lost its bearings…

The BBC Arabic gives little indication of the destruction, the evacuations and the deaths (often of Israeli Arabs), caused by the thousands of Hizbollah rockets fired into Israel. By contrast some of the language used to describe Israel is hysterical in tone and the translated transcript reads like an Islamist extremist tract.

The implications of such findings are clearly far more serious than merely transgressing the BBC’s own impartiality guidelines. When such propaganda is transmitted back into the Arabic-speaking world – and with the kite-mark of BBC journalistic integrity, no less -- this is bound to incite yet more violence and aggression, turning the BBC effectively into an accomplice of Iran against America and Israel. As the report comments:

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the BBC has in fact become detached from democratic principles and has become a proactive participant in the war of ideas, reflecting back to the Arabic speaking world some if its nastiest views.

Furthermore, since the Arabic service is funded by the Foreign Office it is the British taxpayer who is being turned by the BBC into an unwitting accomplice of Iran in its war against the free world -- and because this is an Arabic service, no-one knows about it. One would have thought that the British government would be using every means possible to broadcast truth into the Arabic-speaking world in order to combat the lies that are inciting the masses against the west. Instead, its principal organ appears to be transmitting to that Arabic-speaking world exactly the same lies and incitement.

Given the current state of world affairs – and with the BBC just having launched an Arabic TV service to rival al Jazeera -- surely these revelations should now be raised in the House of Commons as a matter of urgency?