The BBC was accused of “whitewashing” sourcing from Palestinian news outlets that have made extremist statements that glorify attacks on Israel in a report by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).
The report found that the BBC repeatedly cited Palestinian news agencies that glorified acts of terror and made repeated extremist and antisemitic statements.
CAMERA said that the BBC “all too often accepts Hamas’s distortions as fair framing or fact.” The BBC has not responded to these claims, and CAMERA noted that it had not challenged or acknowledged the extremist views of the various Palestinian media outlets.
The report came after the BBC conducted an investigation that showed that Facebook restricted Palestinian news outlets from reaching broader audiences during the course of the Israel-Hamas war.
A CAMERA spokesperson told the Telegraph that the British broadcaster “credited no fewer than five staff members from three different BBC departments with conducting ‘comparative research’ which it used as the basis for an article claiming that Palestinian ‘prominent media outlets’ suffer from a ‘shadow-ban’ that does not affect their Israeli counterparts.”
Antisemitic sources and employees
The spokesperson noted, however, that “seeing as Palestinian outlets consistently support targeting Israel’s Jewish civilians and peddle antisemitism, the entire research is based on false equivalence and fails to note a single Israeli outlet that even remotely engages in such hate speech.
One such instance is when Palestine religious TV host Basha’ir al-Awiwi said: “We’re happy the killed Jews are in hell.”
In another instance, Omar el Qataa, a Palestinian photographer in Gaza who the BBC quoted in the BBC investigation, reacted to a March 2022 attack in Israel that killed four civilians and an Israeli police officer by writing: “If only the rifle could cheer.”
Qataa also posted footage of a January 2023 stabbing attack in Jerusalem with the caption: “Your screams are music [to the ears].”
The BBC did investigate claims that its employees were engaging in and reposting anti-Israel and antisemitic content. However, only one employee was fired.
CAMERA reported that Dawn Queva, a schedule coordinator at BBC Three, was investigated for antisemitic posts that she had made for years.
In one instance, she wrote: “It’s not the land of the Ashkenazi, that is the German Rhineland. It is the land that belongs to the Palestinians. The Zionist genocidal land squatting so-called ‘Jew’ irrespective of the fact that the UKKK and Amerikkka gave away land they had no god-given right to a people who have no god-given right to!”
CAMERA claims that the Wattan News Agency repeatedly describes acts such as the shooting of a 12-year-old Israeli child as "heroic." The Palestinian news agency also described the murders of six Israeli citizens by an al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorist as an act of heroism.
“With all five reporters either missing that fact or deeming it irrelevant, they ultimately whitewash the bigotry of the same Palestinian voices that the BBC is supposed to cover impartially," the CAMERA spokesperson told the Telegraph.
British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis responded to the report by emphasizing the BBC’s importance but noting that CAMERA’s findings were “deeply troubling.”
“I know this is a matter that senior leaders at the BBC take seriously, but the multiple failings highlighted by the report show just how much work there is yet to do,” Mirvis wrote in a statement. “Trust in the BBC is crucial, but trust can only be restored when impartiality is upheld and accountability is ensured.”
A BBC spokesman told the Telegraph that the outlet included Meta's response to the article, "which states that algorithm changes for Instagram comments respond to what it called a ‘spike in hateful content’ coming out of the Palestinian territories, to ensure readers are aware of Meta’s reasons for taking action.
“As a control on our findings, we carried out the same analysis on 20 Israeli news sites with a large amount of war-related content and these sites experienced increases in engagement."
The BBC spokesperson said that both Israeli and Palestinian outlets had some hate speech, but that was not the "focus of the article."