Fact-Checkers Extraordinaire | Power Line

The notoriously anti-Semitic BBC has stepped in it again. It produced a documentary titled “Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone” that was intended to stimulate sympathy for the Gazans who had the misfortune to start a war, and then lose it. The documentary featured, and was narrated by, a young boy supposedly named Abdullah. Reportedly, BBC employees at some point asked their Gazan contacts whether the production had anything to do with Hamas, and didn’t get an answer.

The mockumentary aired, and within a couple of hours observers–not the BBC–figured out that “Abdullah” is the son of a Hamas official, and, while this has not been made explicit, the whole thing was a Hamas propaganda film:

The most senior news executive at the BBC watched its controversial Gaza documentary before it was broadcast but failed to question it, The Telegraph can disclose.

Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC news and current affairs, was a guest at a special BBC screening held almost three weeks before the airing of Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone.

The documentary has now been removed from iPlayer after it emerged the boy narrating the programme was the son of a senior Hamas official.

The BBC has since identified “serious flaws in the making of the programme”, including its failure to uncover the connection as well as payments made to the Hamas official’s family.

The Hamas official is the Deputy Minister for Agriculture, which, given the recent attrition in Hamas’ ranks, is probably pretty senior.

This is the point:

The BBC suggests on the one hand that there is a problem with fact-checking the news from Gaza because it does not have anyone physically there to verify what is being reported. If this is true, then why on earth did it commission a documentary and then spend £400,000 of the licence-fee money on making one?
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And let’s face it, if I can find out that Abdullah’s father is a Hamas official while sitting in a room in London – then so can the BBC fact-checkers. They did not find it – because they never bothered to look.

It is not the only problem with the BBC’s messaging. We are told this documentary had to be made “to give voice to unheard voices”. However, each of the documentary’s key subjects had already appeared on major networks before. So which unheard story exactly needed to be told?
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The BBC has an institutional and obsessive problem with Israel that is so bad, when it comes to reporting on the Jewish state, the BBC’s collective brain falls out.

It starts with an engine room full of activists dressed as journalists, who are desperately seeking new ways to demonise the only functioning democracy in the Middle East.

I hear that for every Israel-sympathetic article suggestion the BBC editorial teams receive, there are more than a dozen skewing the other way.

Not all get accepted of course, but motivation is key here, and the trend is towards ever more outrageous claims, with less and less editorial oversight as the BBC becomes institutionally desensitised to its own obsessions and failings.

As time goes on, you can imagine those involved becoming increasingly confident that nobody is even looking.

We have plenty of receipts from when the BBC was caught using terror group-affiliated witnesses or journalists, which it should have gone nowhere near.

Which is how it ends with the BBC’s reputation in tatters, as the UK’s state broadcaster is now known to have aired a documentary full of Hamas propaganda and handed money to the family of a Hamas official to be able to do it.

The BBC’s reputation is in tatters, because it is a hateful, anti-Semitic outlet that no longer has even a fig-leaf to use as cover.