CAA submits complaint to BBC following alleged bias in reporting Israel’s response to Iran and Hizballah
Campaign Against Antisemitism has submitted a complaint to the BBC, following a report on BBC News that implied that Israel’s response to ongoing attacks by Iran and its proxies was unprovoked.
The report, which aired at the weekend, included a backgrounder on the recent targeting of military infrastructure in Iran by Israel, in which the news anchor listed a series of actions taken by the Jewish state, but failed to provide adequate context for why those actions were taken.
The anchor began: “Let us just remind you now of exactly how we got here.” She then said that “Tensions rose in Lebanon last month” due to the explosion of pagers that had been purchased by Hizballah and distributed to its members.
Apparently, 10,000 unprovoked rockets fired by Hizballah at the Jewish state, causing the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israeli civilians from their homes for over a year now, were not relevant to “how we got here”, because it all began when Israel randomly decided to blow up pagers.
The pagers, the BBC implies, were not purchased by Hizballah, a proscribed antisemitic genocidal terror organisation funded by Iran, and distributed to its members, but rather found their way to Lebanon somehow and a few just happened to be in the possession of Hizballah members when they exploded.
She went on to say: “Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated in Israeli air strikes on southern Beirut.”
According to the backgrounder, Israel has been doing everything, and Hizballah and Lebanon have done nothing at all. The viewer is presented with no possible motivation for Israeli action, which is portrayed as unilateral and unwarranted.
Moreover, throughout the report, Hizballah is not described as a terrorist organisation. Whatever it is, it just has a leader who was assassinated by Israel for reasons that are apparently unfathomable. The BBC’s failure to describe Hizballah as a terrorist group is not impartial but inaccurate. No context is provided for why this organisation, which began firing rockets at Israeli homes on 8th October in solidarity with Hamas, which is also a proscribed antisemitic genocidal terror group, might have provoked a response from the Jewish state.
The reporter continued to imply that it is Israel that expands conflict rather than Hizballah terrorists who created the northern front in this war in the first place, saying: “Three days later, Israeli tanks crossed the border into southern Lebanon opening up a new offensive in the conflict.”
“Within hours Iran had launched nearly 200 ballistic missiles towards Israel.” Iran is presented not as the financier and puppet-master of Hamas and Hizballah terrorists, which it is, but as a third party merely showing solidarity with Lebanon after Israel attacked for no reason whatsoever.
Of the Iranian missile attack – the largest barrage of ballistic missiles in history – the BBC is at pains to point out that “Most were intercepted”. But Israel, it seems, decided to target Iran for no good reason anyway.
Our polling shows, year after year, that British Jews believe that media bias against Israel fuels antisemitism.
When the Jewish state is falsely portrayed, as in this BBC report, as needlessly aggressive and the methods and motivations of its enemies are whitewashed, it invites viewers to view Jews negatively and gives licence to antisemites to attack them.
You can sign our petition calling on all broadcasters to call Hizballah terrorists here.
