BBC Retains Staff Members Who Retweeted Praise for October 7th Massacre

Despite their scarcely hidden biases, none of those named have ever been subject to any disciplinary action, much less been fired.

By Hugh Fitzgerald, Frontpage Magazine

The BBC has for many decades been notoriously anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian in its Middle East coverage.

Among the main offenders there was the execrable John Simpson, who for years was in charge of all foreign broadcasts as head of BBC World Services; there was Jeremy Bowen, who for years was the BBC’s Middle East Editor, and there is Lyse Doucet, now the BBC’s senior foreign correspondent, based in the Middle East, whose antipathy to Israel, and identification with the Palestinian cause, is palpable.

There is Barbara Plett, who wept on camera about the “frail old man” while reporting on the death of Yassir Arafat. Orla Guerin and Yvonne Knell bring up the rear of this unappetizing parade.

Despite their scarcely hidden biases, none of those named have ever been subject to any disciplinary action, much less been fired.

The BBC’s hostility to Israel hasn’t changed, even after Hamas’ actions on October 7.

Even the beheading of babies, the burning alive of children, the gang-rapes, tortures, and murders of girls, the slicing off of women’s breasts, the gouging out of eyes and cutting off of genitalia from men, the children murdered in front of their parents, and the parents in front of their children has had no affect on its coverage, or its pro-Palestinian sympathies.

None of that matters to the BBC, which never spelled out in detail what exactly those atrocities were, preferring to refer only to “attacks by Hamas in which 1,200 Israelis died.”

After those atrocities on October 7, it was discovered that two journalists working for the BBC had on social media expressed their approval of certain videos that celebrated the Hamas attack.

In addition, they had cowritten a virulently anti-Israel report accusing the IDF of “beating” medical personnel in Gaza.

Those who express, or approve of, such views, can hardly be trusted to report accurately on Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, and there have been calls for the BBC to fire both journalists.

Instead, it has stonewalled, and both have so far kept their jobs.

More on the BBC, which in its Middle East coverage can hardly be distinguished from Al Jazeera, can be found here: “BBC pressured to suspend journalists who ‘liked’ videos celebrating Oct. 7 or wrote anti-Israel post,” by Melissa Koenig, New York Post, March 18, 2024:

The BBC is under pressure to suspend two of its journalists accused of “liking’’ social-media videos celebrating Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack or writing an anti-Israel post.

“Any journalist who likes anything that is overtly racist is clearly not credible,” said John Mann, the UK’s independent adviser on antisemitism, to the Daily Mail in an article about BBC reporters Soha Ibrahim and Marie-Jose Al Azzi.

Nicola Richards, a Tory MP and officer for the Conservative Friends of Israel, was among those calling for the public broadcaster to suspend the two reporters during its internal investigation.

“The BBC have got a responsibility not just in the UK but around the world,” she said.

The BBC is facing calls to suspend reporter Soha Ibrahim after it was revealed she allegedly “liked” posts celebrating Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Ibrahim and Al Azzi recently wrote an article claiming Israeli soldiers beat and humiliated doctors during a raid at Nasser Hospital in Gaza last month.

The report led to international condemnation of the Jewish nation and has prompted the UK Foreign Office to call for a “full explanation and investigation” from the Israeli government, the Guardian reported.

The IDF has never, not in any of its many wars and campaigns, wantonly beaten and humiliated “medical personnel.”

The story by Ibrahim and Al-Azzi is either a Hamas fabrication fed to them, or just as likely, they simply made it up themselves.

The Israeli government has already provided its “full explanation” that no such event has occurred.

Doesn’t the IDF have a record of telling the truth at least as long as Hamas has for telling lies? Remember the non-existent “massacre at Jenin”? Or the nonexistent Israeli airstrike on the Al-Ahli hospital?

Surely that record, on both sides, counts for something.

But it has since been revealed that on the day of the Oct. 7 attacks by Palestinian Hamas terrorists against Israel, Ibrahim “liked” videos of people in Lebanon and Tunisia dancing and waving Palestinian flags and Egyptian soccer fans chanting, “We sacrifice our souls, our blood for Palestine,” according to the Mail….

So Ibrahim of the BBC “liked” videos of people in three Arab states celebrating — dancing and waving Palestinian flags in Lebanon and Tunisia in celebration of the monstrous acts committed by Hamas, and in Egypt, chanting their support of Hamas at a soccer game.

Soha Ibrahim was celebrating along with them. She finds nothing wrong with — here I will repeat the list – decapitating babies, burning children alive, raping, torturing, and murdering girls, with women’s breasts sliced off, and men’s genitalia cut off, and eyes gouged out, parents murdered in front of their children and children murdered in front of their parents.

For Ibrahim, it’s an occasion for Arabs to swell with pride at such deeds of derring-do.

In another instance, Ibrahim — who has worked for the BBC for 12 years — “liked” a post from parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn defending anti-Israel marches in which he stated that “protesting against the mass slaughter of civilians is not a threat to democracy.”

Ibrahim liked the post of the antisemite and disgraced former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, who apparently thinks the pro-Hamas marches are justified, a way to “protest” the “slaughter of civilians” by Israelis.

But there has been no deliberate “slaughter of civilians” by the Israelis — only by Hamas.

Israel tries not to kill civilians.

In just the first three weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped 14 million leaflets, sent six million messages, and made four million phone calls, to warn civilians in northern Gaza to move south.

There have been civilian casualties, of course, despite Israel’s colossal efforts to avoid them, and these should be blamed on Hamas and its policy of embedding its operatives and its weapons in the middle of civilian areas and civilian buildings.

For Hamas, the more civilians who are killed, the better, for they are useful in Hamas’ propaganda war against Israel, claimed as “deliberate victims” of the mad-dog Israelis.