Ahlebait TV fined £10,000 by Ofcom for “antisemitic hate speech” 

Ofcom has fined the television channel Ahlebait TV £10,000 for “antisemitic hate speech”.

The fine comes less than one year after the regulator put the television channel on notice after deciding that it had breached hate speech regulations.

The media watchdog made the initial ruling last year against Ahlebait TV, which offers “current affairs and entertainment programming with an Islamic perspective”, following a complaint from CST.

The incident occurred on an edition of the programme 20th Hour entitled Money Power, Islam and a Just Order in March of 2021 when David Pidcock, one of the guests on the programme, said: “This is why the Jews have been expelled from 47 different countries and city-states in the last 1,000 years and as they recognise…their antisemitism comes from their actions of impoverishing people and they then respond and then they call it antisemitism but we know that it’s because they do and they get punished and as Allah says, you know, he will expel [sentence incomplete] – send them to all corners of the world to be an excoriation and a hissing and a booing to wherever he had sent them.”

Following this comment, fellow guest Clive Menzies remarked that “It’s worth just noting that antisemitism was created by Theodor Herzl at the back end of the nineteenth century in order to frighten and create the circumstances that would encourage Jews to migrate to Israel so antisemitism is actually a Jewish creation”. 

In a summary of its investigation, Ofcom said that it had “found this episode of 20th Hour contained uncontextualised antisemitic hate speech which justified and encouraged intolerance of Jewish people.”

It added: “We considered the breaches were serious. We considered that the programme contained uncontextualised antisemitic hate speech which amounted to abusive or derogatory treatment of Jewish people. We therefore considered that this programme contained statements which justified the hatred of Jewish people based on intolerance on the grounds of ethnicity, race, religion or belief.”

In a statement, the media watchdog said of the fine: “Ofcom has imposed a sanction on the Licensee of a financial penalty of £10,000, a direction to broadcast a statement of Ofcom’s findings on a date and in a form to be determined by Ofcom, and a direction not to repeat the programme.”