BBC’s stance on Israel has forever tarnished its reputation

Abdullah Al-Yazouri in a scene from Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone. Abdullah, the film’s narrator, is the son of an official in the Hamas-run government. Picture: AMJAD AL FAYOUMI/HOYO FILMS/BBC

Britain’s national broadcaster, the BBC, was once great, like the nation it serves.

It was long viewed internationally as impartial, principled and objective. And that reputational momentum has served it well; 91 per cent of Britons tune in to one of its services each week. It is the largest broadcaster on the planet with an audience of 450 million. Were that a country, only India and China would be more populous.

It has survived various crises and controversies: its first director banned jazz describing it as that “filthy product of modernity”; Winston Churchill believed socialists in its ranks were behind him being banned from its airwaves; until recently, MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence service, vetted potential staff and marked the files of anyone considered a risk with a secret green stamp; it was accused by MPs of treason during the Falklands War; and it infamously cancelled a documentary that would have outed its favourite son, Jimmy Savile, one of the world’s most prolific pedophiles.

But the damage done to the BBC name in more recent times, as it has evolved into a bastion of Jew-hate, is much more serious. Its flaws and lies and lapses would have killed off a lesser broadcaster.

Its unrelenting campaign of aggressive anti-Semitism peaked on February 17 with the release of a documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, an hour-long film that purported to tell the story of how the war Hamas provoked defines the lives of four young people who live there.

It was stylish Hamas propaganda bankrolled by the British taxpayer.

It was narrated by a then 13-year-old Abdullah and produced by an independent company “overseen” by the BBC. More likely its appalling bias suited too many at the BBC who did not wish to undermine Abdullah’s story. His full name is Abdullah Al-Yazouri. He is the son of Ayman al-Yazouri, a deputy minister for agriculture in the Gaza “government” run by the proscribed terrorists of Hamas, membership of which makes Al-Yazouri senior a terrorist.

It is reported that they are both related to the late Ibrahim Al-Yazouri, a prominent founder of Hamas. Perhaps the old man contributed this to the 1988 Hamas charter: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight Jews and kill them.”

Hamas deputy minister of agriculture Dr Ayman Al-Yazouri, is said to be Abdulla's father

And as deputy minister for agriculture, Ayman should hang his head in shame. Gazans long ago lost the ability to feed themselves.

While their neighbours turned granite into green and made arable land of the desert, Gazans, on being given sole rights over their territory 20 years ago did something extraordinary. Led by Sydney-born former World Bank president James Wolfensohn, a group of Jewish benefactors purchased from the expelled Israeli farmers 3000 greenhouses for more than $20m, (Wolfensohn kicked in $750,000 himself) and transferred their ownership to the Palestinian Authority.

As payback for this noble generosity, the Gazans looted and destroyed the greenhouses. They then spent foreign humanitarian funds on a more than 500km tunnels system where they could live like rats while planning to kill Jews across the border.

Quite what Ayman achieved for agriculture above ground is unrecorded. But he was possibly more efficient than a BBC that failed to join the dots in an effort its own chairman conceded was “a really bad moment”. He told a parliamentary committee: “What has been revealed is a dagger to the heart of the BBC’s claim to be impartial and trustworthy.”

The boy’s mother was paid by the documentary makers despite it being a crime to fund Hamas.

And last week it was revealed that one of the BBC’s regular UK taxpayer-funded correspondents from Gaza, Samer Elzaenen, had posted online that his message to Zionist Jews was: “We are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake, the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.”

It was reported again recently that the BBC still translates the Arabic word Yahud as “Israelis” when they know — because they have stated so in the past — that it means Jews. That is important because at one point in the disputed documentary a Gazan speaks of Yahya Sinwar, the liquidated boss of Hamas who purposely sacrificed thousands of non-combatant Gazans for his cause, and refers to Sinwar’s “jihad against the Jews” but this is translated into fighting “Israeli forces”.

Shamefully, earlier this year, the BBC reported “the Palestinian Red Cross are facilitating the hostage swap in Gaza”. That was not lazy reporting; it revealed the BBC’s mindset. Israel released hundreds of sometimes murderously criminal Palestinians fighters for their innocents who had been kidnapped from their homes and tortured in the tunnels of Gaza for more than a year. Israel takes no hostages.

But the BBC, and our own ABC often chimes in, sees Israelis as vile and Palestinians as virtuous and “report” the news informed by those assumptions.