As the war in Israel moves into its second week, a major broadcaster has launched an “urgent” probe into its own journalists for their apparent reporting bias in favor of Muslim terrorists.
The network is the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, which, according to the Telegraph newspaper in London, is focusing on six reporters and a freelancer accused of anti-Israel bias.
A BBC spokesman said: “We are urgently investigating this matter. We take allegations of breaches of our editorial and social media guidelines with the utmost seriousness, and if and when we find breaches we will act, including taking disciplinary action.”
The investigation comes amid calls for the broadcaster to call Hamas “terrorists,” instead of a “militant group.”
As WND reported a week ago, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, or CBC, also reportedly instructed its journalists not to refer to Hamas attackers as “terrorists.”
The Telegraph noted BBC reporters “appeared to justify the killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas” after “social media activity by several of its journalists in the Middle East appeared to celebrate the attack which left approximately 1,300 dead.”
The paper indicated: “Reporters at BBC News Arabic endorsed comments likening Hamas, which is a designated terrorist group, to freedom fighters, as well as describing the October 7 atrocity as a ‘morning of hope.””
While strong evidence has emerged revealing the indiscriminate slaughter of women, children and the elderly by Hamas, the journalists have been questioning the designation of Israeli non-combatants as civilians.
Mahmoud Sheleib, a BBC News senior broadcast journalist, reportedly mocked of relatives of a grandmother kidnapped by Hamas, and posted a tweet implying young Israelis were effectively combatants.
He tweeted: “[I see] In front of me on Al Jazeera, their so-called civilians are standing armed alongside the police and shooting because they basically don’t have any civilians among the youth. This is what the ignorant often don’t know. I am in favour of fighting them with love, yes, this is the solution.” His tweet was followed by a laughing emoji.
Another reporter, Sanaa Khoury, who is the Beirut-based religious affairs correspondent for BBC Arabic, tweeted: “Israel’s prestige is crying in the corner.”
BBC reporter Salma Khattab, based in Cairo, Egypt, liked a tweet appearing to refer to Hamas as freedom fighters.
“You cannot support freedom fighters in Ukraine as they resist Russian occupation but not in Palestine against Israeli occupation, unless you have no conscience,” it said.
The Telegraph also notes Nada Abdelsamad, a Beirut-based editor at BBC Arabic, retweeted a video of Israelis hiding in fear entitled: “Settlers hiding inside a tin container in fear of the Palestinian resistance warriors.” It featured a hashtag translated as “promise of the hereafter,” a Quran reference to killing Jews.
One freelance reporter, broadcast journalist Aya Hossam, liked a tweet saying: “Every member of the Zionist entity served in the army at some point in his life, whether men or women, and they all had victims of explicit violations … This term ‘civilians’ applies to the animals and pets that live there and they are not seriously at fault.”
She also retweeted a post which included the phrase “the Zionist must know that he will live as a thief and a usurper.”
A spokesman for Camera Arabic, which has filed numerous complaints to the broadcast giant, told the paper: “These revelations about BBC Arabic employees go hand in hand with the outlet’s ongoing conduct during the war. The BBC has repeatedly whitewashed the practice of targeting Jewish civilians in Israel even before the current escalation.
“They constantly claim that they apply the same editorial standards of accuracy and impartiality to their services in all languages, including those with which BBC management is not familiar and can’t oversee properly, such as Arabic.
“But these lapses do not occur anywhere near as frequently in their English language content, so that can’t be taken seriously.”
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