Mick Hartley

The revelations keep on coming. From the Telegraph:

The BBC has been accused of “whitewashing” the views of participants in its controversial Gaza documentary after repeatedly mistranslating references to “the Jews” and omitting praise of “jihad”.

The Telegraph can reveal that on at least five occasions the words Yahud or Yahudy – Arabic for “Jew” or “Jews” – were changed to “Israel” or “Israeli forces”, or were removed from the subtitles altogether.

An interviewee praising Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, for “jihad against the Jews” was also mistranslated as saying he was fighting “Israeli forces”.

The BBC is under pressure to reveal whether taxpayers’ money was given to Hamas during the making of Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone….

Orly Goldschmidt, of the Israeli embassy in the UK, accused the corporation of “intentional mistranslation”, which she described as a “sinister and misleading policy of the BBC”.

She said the translation was “not only false and deeply offensive, but it also excuses racism” and “does not allow viewers to see how children, and Palestinians at large, have been taught to hate ‘Jews’ from a very young age”.

She added that omitting the word “jihad” from the translations “downplays the threat of terrorism that Israelis face on a daily basis”, and that the issue of mistranslations went beyond the documentary. “It reflects a very serious and systematic issue, which has taken root at the BBC, with regards to its anti-Israel bias,” she said….

Fresh questions over the documentary come ahead of a planned protest outside the BBC by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism on Tuesday night. The group has said the film is a breach of the BBC’s editorial guidelines and “a betrayal of licence fee payers” and will protest outside Broadcasting House, in central London, from 7pm.

A spokesman for the campaign said: “The BBC has no shame, and Britain has had enough. For over 16 months, we have watched our national broadcaster provide ever more sympathetic coverage to a proscribed terrorist organisation, hiding behind claims of impartiality.

“There is nothing impartial about giving credibility to the claims of terrorists. Providing a platform for terrorists’ propaganda, downplaying their crimes and continuing to refuse to call them terrorists is the BBC putting its thumb on the scale.

“Enough is enough. It is time for the BBC to stop whitewashing terrorism. There must be an independent investigation into its bias in relation to its Middle East coverage.”