Join us this Tuesday to protest outside the BBC

This Tuesday, we will be demonstrating outside BBC Broadcasting House, following the broadcast of a documentary that was tantamount to a Hamas propaganda film.

• When: 19:00, Tuesday 25th February
• Where: Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London W1A 1AA

There is no need to sign up. Placards will be provided.

We hope that you will join us.

You can read more about the BBC’s latest crimes against journalism below.

In the past week alone, the BBC has demonstrated time and again how it has become a mouthpiece for terrorists.

Broadcasting Hamas propaganda film

Last week, BBC Two broadcast a documentary called “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone”. It was directed by Yousef Hammash and Jamie Roberts and purported to follow the lives of four young people during the current Hamas-Israel war in the Strip.

The independent researcher David Collier investigated the protagonists and has alleged that one of the principal children featured in the film who also serves as the documentary’s narrator – Abdullah Al-Yazouri – is related to a senior Hamas official.

Al-Yazouri featured in a Channel 4 documentary last year, where he reportedly appeared under the name Abdullah Abu Shamala alongside a man claiming to be his father. That man, whom Mr Collier identified as Khalil Abushammla, is a former Director of anti-Israel NGO Al-Dameer, which allegedly has links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group.

Al-Yazouri’s real father is allegedly Mr Khalil’s brother-in-law, Ayman Al-Yazouri, the Deputy Minister of Agriculture in the Hamas Government in Gaza.

This would hardly be the first time that Gazans have played roles for gullible Western media, which has failed to do due diligence or has played along for reasons of convenience or ideology.

Mr Collier’s research makes further allegations about these individuals.

The BBC has essentially published long-form propaganda for an antisemitic genocidal terror organisation with licence-fee funds.

These broadcasts have real-life consequences for British Jews, 92% of whom rate our national broadcaster’s coverage of matters of Jewish interest as unfavourable, according to our polling.

Providing a megaphone for Hamas claims

Days after allegations that our national broadcaster published Hamas propaganda, it finally offered a flimsy apology in which it stated that it will air the so-called documentary again but will “add some more detail to the film”.

Then it provided a stage for stomach-churning claims from the very same antisemitic genocidal group.

How about pointing out that the hostages — including a baby and a four-year-old whom the terrorists kidnapped — would still be alive had they not been taken from their home by Hamas in the first place?

Why does the BBC insist on treating Hamas as though it were some neutral party?

It is a proscribed terrorist organisation that has explicitly stated its goal is the annihilation of Jews and Israelis wherever they may be around the world.

How can the BBC claim that this article is provided “For context” without providing that context?

How can they tell their worldwide audience and the British public who pay their salaries that Hamas says “it would have preferred to have returned them alive” when Hamas’s goal is the murder of every Jew?

(This was before Israeli examinations appeared to suggest that these hostages were murdered in cold blood and not killed by an Israeli airstrike as Hamas had claimed.)

All that the BBC has done is provide a megaphone for Hamas’s bogus and insulting claims.

Coverage of the Hamas ‘handover’ ceremony

But it got worse still.

Here is how the BBC summarised the transfer of the four coffins of dead hostages, and the picture that it published of the backdrop of the cruel and twisted Hamas ‘handover’ ceremony.

What the BBC carefully excluded from the picture of smiling (now dead) hostages was the antisemitic portrayal of the Israeli Prime Minister as a blood-sucking vampire looming over the pictures of the hostages who were abducted by Hamas and killed in captivity.

The BBC summary failed in its coverage to say anything more than that the ceremony was similar to previous choreographed events.

For some reason, our public broadcaster opted not to mention that Gazan civilians reportedly participated in the ceremony and danced to celebratory music as the coffins of dead Jewish children lay before them.

The BBC also declined to report that the coffins were labelled “date of arrest: 7th October 2023”, that they were apparently locked with no key provided to the Israelis, and that they had to be checked for explosives, given Hamas’s history and its aspiration to murder as many Jews as it can.

This was before it was discovered by Israeli authorities that the fourth body was not that of Shiri Bibas or indeed of any hostage. After that discovery, things still did not improve.

The “mix-up”

In a post and in its news article, the BBC referred to Hamas’s failure to hand over the body of Shiri Bibas as a mere ‘mix-up’.

They did not put that phrase in inverted commas, instead portraying the assertion of a mix-up as a fact.

In reality, however, the phrase is a quote from a Hamas spokesperson – who claimed that the bodies of people killed in an Israeli airstrike were simply “mixed-up”, which was purportedly why Shiri Bibas’s body was confused with another.

But that was nonsense, as Israel later determined that Shiri and her infant child and baby were murdered in cold blood.

Still, it did not stop the BBC from parroting the Hamas propaganda verbatim and representing it as fact, rendering the broadcaster in effect literally a spokesperson for Hamas.

We must protest

The Culture Secretary declared that she intends to meet with the Director General and Chair of the BBC in the coming days to discuss the propaganda film.

Following an outcry, and since we announced the protest, the BBC has pulled the so-called documentary from iplayer, but without an apology, investigation or any sort of reckoning. This is not good enough.

Our protest must go ahead.

The BBC has no shame and Britain has had enough.

For over sixteen months, we have watched our national broadcaster provide ever more sympathetic coverage to a proscribed terrorist organisation, hiding behind claims of impartiality.

But there is nothing impartial about giving credibility to the claims of terrorists.

Providing a platform for terrorists’ propaganda, downplaying their crimes and continuing to refuse to call them terrorists is the BBC putting its thumb on the scale. It is extremely partial, and inaccurate. It is a breach of the BBC’s editorial guidelines and a betrayal of licence-fee payers.

The BBC has become a mouthpiece for terrorists.

That is why we are inviting everyone to join us at 19:00 on Tuesday outside Broadcasting House. Enough is enough.

It is time for the BBC to stop whitewashing terrorism and serving as spokespeople for terrorists. There must be an independent investigation into the BBC’s bias in relation to its Middle East coverage.

We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday evening.