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Analysis

BBC Arabic is Ducking Scrutiny Over Anti-Israel Bias

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David Rose

Unherd, Mar. 16, 2025 

“As so often, the BBC stuck to its guns, claiming its usage was “true to the speaker’s intentions.”

Earlier this week, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch wrote to BBC Director-General Tim Davie demanding “wholesale reform” of the corporation’s Arabic service, saying it provided a “platform for terrorists” and promulgated “appalling antisemitism” and “anti-Israel bias”. Such claims have been made before, notably by Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television. But Badenoch’s letter came after BBC chairman Samir Shah told MPs that employing the son of a Hamas official to narrate the Gaza documentary How to Survive a Warzone had been “a dagger to the heart” of the corporation’s vaunted impartiality. It may thus be hard to dismiss.

The Arabic service, which includes a TV channel and a website, is funded by both the Foreign Office and the licence fee, and is supposedly bound by the same editorial standards as the rest of the BBC. Mindful of this, when Davie gave evidence to the Commons media and culture select committee in September, he said “every accusation we’ve had on the Arabic service we have looked at”, and that “broadly, I think we are doing a very good job.”

However, new figures supplied by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera), which monitors BBC Arabic closely, call Davie’s assurance into question. In the first year of the war that started on 7 October 2023, BBC Arabic was forced to issue 141 separate corrections following Camera complaints. Some related to reports that described the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah as “the resistance”; others characterised those killed while fighting for them as “martyrs” and inhabitants of Israel (as opposed to the Occupied Palestinian Territories) as “settlers”. The channel has also featured interviewees who praised those who “killed the Jews”, while some BBC Arabic contributors celebrated the Hamas massacre on social media.

In all, the BBC upheld more than 80% of the complaints Camera made about its Arabic output. Yet some of those it dismissed are worrying, especially those which Camera appealed to the Executive Complaints Unit (ECU), the corporation’s highest internal court…..SOURCE

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