Idon’t suppose it will surprise many Jewish people that BBC Verify – as staffed by people with ‘forensic investigative skills’ – used a rabid pro-Palestinian with links to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps when adjudicating on an alleged Israeli attack against a Palestinian aid convoy in Gaza. Verify – a new unit which is, of course, pristine and even-handed – turned to a ‘journalist’ called Mahmoud Awadeyah for an unbiased description of exactly what happened to the convoy, unbothered by the fact that this is a man who danced a jig of joy when Israelis were killed in a rocket attack and warned them that there was more of the same stuff coming.
The BBC Verify unit is merely an expensive way of telling the public, ‘We are always right’
Awadeyah works for a news agency called Tasnim, a semi-official Iranian outlet owned fully by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. His social media posts suggest he wishes for Israel to be destroyed. The BBC, for its part, has rejected the complaints from people who suspect that ol’ Awadeyah may have a certain amount of skin in the game. It was a former director of BBC television, Danny Cohen, who raised the matter and suggested that Verify had become a tool for promoting anti-Israel bias. That’s the least of it, mate.
There are two strands to this whole business, the first being the existence of BBC Verify, unveiled last year by the corporation’s chief executive of news, Deborah Turness. This mini-marvel was to be dedicated to ‘radical transparency’ and employ 60 journalists trying to finding the real truth about what is happening in the world. This rather prompts the question of what the BBC’s 2,000 other journalists spend their time doing. Making up lies? Evading reality? Knitting? And here is the problem with Verify: the whole concept is philosophically flawed.

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