So the moral rot at the BBC appears to run even deeper than we thought. The storm over its Gaza documentary just got a whole lot worse. As if it wasn’t bad enough that this Israel-mauling hour of TV was fronted by the son of a leading member of Hamas, now we discover that the Beeb whitewashed the bigoted views of some of the doc’s participants. It omitted their Jew-bashing. This is as serious a breach of broadcasting ethics as I can remember.
The film was swiftly mired in scandal
Gaza: How To Survive a War Zone was first broadcast on BBC Two last week. The film was swiftly mired in scandal when it was revealed that its 14-year-old narrator is the son of a prominent figure in the Hamas government in Gaza. Yes, our public broadcaster, which we are compelled by law to fund, broadcast an hour-long moan about Israel featuring a kid whose dad has links to the movement that butchered Israel’s men, women and children. Even for the Beeb, it was a new low.
It turns out they went even lower. On at least five occasions in the doc, they mistranslated the Arabic words for ‘Jew’ and ‘Jews’, changing them to ‘Israel’ or ‘Israeli forces’. So when a Gazan woman raged against ‘Yahudy’ – ‘the Jews’ – for invading our lands, someone tweaked it. The BBC subtitles had her saying ‘the Israeli army’ invaded our lands. But that isn’t what she said. She said ‘the Jews’. Is it now BBC policy to conceal hostility towards Jews?
Camera, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, has re-translated the documentary, and its findings are chilling. In one scene, the BBC’s subtitles show a boy saying he fled his home because ‘the Israelis destroyed everything, and so did Hamas’. But what he really said was that ‘the Jews came, they destroyed us, Hamas and the Jews’.
A woman is shown saying that Hamas’s 7 October attack was ‘the first time we invaded Israel’ – but what she actually said was: ‘We were invading the Jews for the first time’.
In the most egregious mistranslation, the documentary shows a woman commenting on Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in October last year. Sinwar was ‘fighting and resisting Israeli forces’, her subtitles say. But that isn’t what she said, which was: ‘He was engaging in resistance and jihad against the Jews’.
So our national broadcaster withheld the truth from us. The BBC, which loves to puff itself up as a liferaft of truth in a sea of misinformation, engaged in what was essentially a cover-up, a slippery form of censorship. The filmmakers encountered Gazan after Gazan who slammed ‘the Jews’ for their allegedly wicked behaviour, but the Beeb airbrushed it all away. The people of Gaza are mad at Israel, its doc said, but now we know the truth: some of them are mad at the Jews.
There are so many breaches of journalistic standards here – and of basic morality – that it is hard to know where to begin. Mistranslating the words of foreign interviewees is a huge no-no in journalism. It deceives viewers, blinding us to the truth of how other people think.
As for turning invective about ‘the Jews’ into criticism of ‘Israeli forces’: that isn’t journalism, it’s propaganda. The job of the journalist is to reflect back to us the world as it really is, not to feed us half-baked morality tales. The BBC found people in Gaza who were more than happy to rail against ‘the Jews’ and even to praise ‘jihad’ (holy war) against them. Yet it fed us an image of Gaza as brimming with people who just want to make heartfelt political criticisms of ‘Israel’. It was fake news.
Why would the BBC memory-hole Gazans’ fury against ‘Yahudy’? Why did it even disguise a woman’s celebration of holy war against Jews? It seems to me the Beeb sacrificed objectivity at the altar of political narrative. It knows that the kind of people who watch late-night documentaries on BBC Two probably dislike Israel and pity Palestine. And it couldn’t possibly show these viewers the reality on the ground, which is that many Palestinians sympathise with the monsters of Hamas and disdain ‘the Jews’. So it buried the truth in order to prop up the chattering classes’ infantile conviction that Israel is evil and Palestine is pure.
The end result is that it has essentially provided moral cover for Hamas and its supporters. In erasing Gazans’ fury with ‘Yahudy’, in sanitising their support for ‘jihad’ against ‘the Jews’, it obscured the truth of what Israel is up against. This was a propaganda coup for the terror group that carried out the worst assault on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. It is not good enough that the BBC has now removed this dishonest documentary from iPlayer – heads need to roll.
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