Neil Davenport
Spiked, Feb. 26, 2025
“For the British establishment, Islam is treated less as a religion and more a racial badge. To attack Islamist extremism is supposedly to attack a ‘brown-skinned’ community – a notion that smothers debate and only deepens divides between Muslims and non-Muslims.”
The BBC’s recent documentary about Gaza has been revealed to be thinly veiled pro-Hamas propaganda. The Beeb’s decision to produce and air it reaffirms a disturbing truth: the British establishment is incapable of reckoning with Islamism.
Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was shown on BBC Two last week. It features numerous children with links to Hamas, the Islamist terror group that rules over Gaza and orchestrated the 7 October massacre in southern Israel in 2023. The narrator of the documentary, a Palestinian teenage boy, is the son of a Hamas government minister. A second child who plays a large role in the programme is a recurring star of Hamas propaganda. Another has a father who is a captain in the Hamas-controlled Gazan police. Yet all are presented by the BBC as ‘ordinary’ Palestinians.
The documentary has faced an intense backlash since these facts were brought to light. The BBC eventually announced that it would pull the film from iPlayer and launch an investigation into the allegations. So how on Earth did such a film come to be made by the BBC in the first place?
When it comes to Islamism, the British establishment has an undeniable blind spot. Instead of facing up to the threat of radical Islam, the liberal media and state agencies have hidden behind a façade of multicultural tolerance. Anyone who dares criticise Islam or its extremist offshoots is tarred as a far-right ‘Islamophobe’. …SOURCE