Hundreds of people descended upon the BBC’s headquarters in London on Monday evening to protest the British publicly-funded broadcaster’s continued insistence on refusing to refer to Hamas terrorists as “terrorists”.
The left-liberal BBC, which is funded by a licence fee on anyone who watches live television in the UK on pain of prosecution and potential jail time, has come under increasing scrutiny for its editorial decision to label Hamas terrorists in Palestine as merely “militants”, “fighters”, or “gunmen” in the wake of the largest terror attack against the Jewish people in Israel.
According to the Daily Mail, hundreds of protesters gathered outside of the broadcaster’s HQ in central London on Monday evening, waving Israeli flags and banners blasting the BBC including one which read: “If the King can call Hamas terrorists, so can you.”
Addressing the crowd, chairman of Campaign Against Antisemitism Gideon Falter asked: “How many dead Israelis does it take before the BBC can find the courage to call terror by its name?”
LONDON, ENGLAND – OCTOBER 16: Hundreds attend a protest called by the National Jewish Assembly, The Camapaign Against Antisemitsim and the Uk Lawyers for Israel at the BBC Broadcasting House on October 16, 2023 in London, England. The National Jewish Assembly is protesting at the BBC’s refusal to label Hamas terrorists and comes after the militant group’s recent attacks on Israel. Hamas was prescribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK in March 2021. (Photo by Guy Smallman/Getty Images)
The decision to refrain from calling Hamas terrorists was criticised by the Prime Minister’s office on Monday, with a Downing Street spokesman saying: “The legal position is that Hamas is a proscribed terrorist group – the term terrorist is an accurate legal description.
“The BBC has described other attacks as terrorism. To put it into context, the attack we witnessed in Israel was the third deadliest terror attack in the world since 1970. So there is no restriction on the BBC using that term, certainly not from Ofcom.”
It comes after the BBC suggested last week that the decision was a result of guidelines from the Ofcom broadcasting regulator, however, other broadcasters bound by Ofcom rules such as ITV and Sky News have not followed the same policy as the BBC.
The BBC said in a statement that “careful consideration has been given to all aspects of our coverage to ensure that we report on developments accurately and with due impartiality,” adding: “The BBC, along with many other UK and global news organisations, does use the word ‘terrorist’ but attributes it. We have made clear to our audiences that Hamas is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UK.”
The BBC also appeared to contradict its own policy on Monday evening following a suspected Islamist terror attack in Brussels that left two Swedish nationals dead and a third injured. Immediately following the attack, a BBC headline read: “Brussels Shooting: Suspect at large after two Swedes killed in terror attack”.
The apparent hypocrisy was immediately picked up on by social media users, and the article’s title was amended to read: “Brussels shooting: Two Swedes killed and suspect still at large.”
A BBC spokesman later said: “This was a mistake – the headline should have attributed the words, so it was swiftly changed.”
The public broadcaster has also come under criticism for its coverage of the Hamas massacre at the Kfar Aza kibbutz in which terrorists killed numerous peaceful residents of the small farming community, including families and even babies, according to Israeli authorities.
A report published by the BBC originally read according to The Telegraph: “Hamas rejects accusations that its gunmen carried out atrocities in the Israeli Kfar Aza village.” However, this was later changed and the entire article was later scrapped from the BBC website and from YouTube for failing to meet editorial standards.
BBC Arabic presenter Serena Ghokeh seemed to suggest that there were two sides to the story, claiming that the only evidence of a massacre came from Israeli soldiers and saying that Hamas “rejected accusations that it had committed violations and added that the Western media must be accurate and not blindly side with the Zionist narrative, which is full of lies and slander.”
A spokesman for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera), accused the BBC of using the “dual-narrative tactic” of “using speculations and half-truths to build an ‘alternative perspective’ that would discredit well-corroborated stories from Israel.”