Mick Hartley

BBC Arabic has come under the spotlight again after Kemi Badenoch wrote to BBC Director-General Tim Davie last week demanding “wholesale reform” of the corporation’s Arabic service, saying it provided a “platform for terrorists” and promulgated “appalling antisemitism” and “anti-Israel bias”. David Rose at UnHerd has a closer look:

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.

Consider the ruling this week concerning a BBC Arabic report of the Amsterdam riot last November, when Israeli football fans were violently attacked by mobs yelling antisemitic abuse and saying they were on a “Jew hunt”. Five Israelis were hospitalised, and four of those responsible were later jailed. According to BBC Arabic, the attackers were merely “chanting slogans against Israel”. Yet after Camera appealed the BBC’s initial dismissal of its complaint, the ECU rejected it, saying that although BBC Arabic had indeed mentioned only “shouting”, this did not mean “violence did not occur”. Moreover, “the violence in Amsterdam was considered in much more detail elsewhere on the BBC” — which, given that the complaint was about BBC Arabic, could be said to be missing the point.

Other ECU decisions also look questionable. One concerned a BBC Arabic report in November 2023 saying 31 “journalists and media workers” had been killed in the Gaza conflict. It failed to state that 11 of them worked directly for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) propaganda units, and another nine for outlets that hailed the October 7 attacks as “heroic” and “legitimate”. Yet although other BBC services had made all this clear, the ECU decided BBC Arabic’s omission was not misleading….

Meanwhile, it appears that an old ECU decision helps to explain one of the most controversial aspects of How to Survive a Warzone: the repeated translation of the Arabic word yahud as “Israeli”, not Jew — its usual, dictionary meaning. In 2013, it ruled on a complaint made by Camera over the use of the same mistranslation in an item on Radio 4, determining that this did not breach the BBC’s duty to provide “due accuracy”.

This set a precedent, for in 2019 the TV documentary One Day in Gaza included a segment in which a young man said in Arabic that when he listened to “revolutionary songs”, they “excite you, they encourage you to rip a Jew’s head off”. Here too, yahud was translated as “Israeli”, a decision condemned by the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt as “not translation” but “#antisemitism denial”. Labour politician Wes Streeting also pitched in, saying the BBC’s action was “totally unacceptable”. As so often, the BBC stuck to its guns, claiming its usage was “true to the speaker’s intentions”.

In other words, the BBC decided for us that the speaker wasn't being antisemitic, when quite clearly he was. They're distorting the truth.

Camera is left unimpressed. “With every single complaint that reached the ECU having been rejected, this putatively independent body appears to function as a rubber stamp for the whim of BBC Arabic editors,” its spokesman told me. This, he went on, was part of a trend whereby “a small group of BBC officials have marked their own homework.”

It's part of the continuous BBC effort to present the Palestinian cause as entirely about land: a classic case of freedom fighters against colonialism. In fact, if we were allowed to hear what Hamas and the Palestinians in Gaza are actually saying, we'd see that it's all about Islam, it's all about Jew-hatred, and it's all about refusing to countenance the existence of a Jewish state.