JERUSALEM, Israel – One of Israel’s ongoing battles isn’t on land. It’s in the world of information. Since October 7th, 2023, Hamas has masterfully spread its messaging on major media outlets around the world. One of those is the BBC, which government officials now accuse of being a tool for jihadist propaganda.
There’s also a call for this once-revered institution to face a criminal investigation.
The BBC made headlines when it had to pull the controversial documentary, “Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone,” from streaming platforms. The film follows the lives of four young people in Gaza after the October 7th Hamas attack.
The decision to pull the documentary came after investigative journalist David Collier revealed that the film’s central figure – a 13-year-old boy – is not just any Palestinian child.
Collier told CBN News, “The narrator, the young boy that the BBC had used for the documentary, the star of their show, was actually the son of a senior Hamas minister, a terrorist, part of the terrorist group.”
The BBC maintains that its production company made payments to the boy’s family. Still, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel notes, it’s a move that could potentially violate U.K. anti-terror laws.
“The BBC actually paid 400,000 pounds for Hamas propaganda, where their crew actually followed three children with deep ties to Hamas,” Haskel stated.
Although the BBC has apologized for serious flaws in the documentary, Haskel still wants a full criminal investigation by British authorities.
“Who did they pay? They paid the children. Or did they pay the parents?” Haskel asked. “The parents are Hamas members, OK, officially. And so that means that the BBC paid money to Hamas. This is a criminal offense as Hamas is prescribed as a terrorist organization in the UK.”
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The media watchdog CAMERA reports that BBC-Arabic had to make 80 corrections in its coverage of the first five months of the Israel-Hamas war, including citing Hamas terrorists as “the resistance.”
“The BBC said, ‘Oh, that was a mistake’. 80 times is not a mistake, it’s on purpose,” Haskel insisted. “So, you know, this is a problem we challenge in the international media.”
Collier adds that the BBC’s audience reach gives it a global platform, including an audience of 38 million people in the Arabic-speaking world.
“When they produce something, you’ll see it automatically goes viral…you’ll see many other platforms reposting it or quoting it or using it to build their own articles,” Collier explained.
Haskel’s major concern is the impact on her country. She said, “We know how much this channel has really destroyed Israel’s reputation when they published fake stories – propaganda – complete fabrications.
For Collier, the issue runs deeper than bias because it leads to a manipulation of some in the Western press.
Every single thing that comes out of Gaza comes out of Gaza because radical Islamic Jihadists want it to come out,” Collier contended. “Not on one single occasion over the last 18 months has a single one of those journalists broken a story about a hostage or rockets or tunnels.”
He added that media outlets sympathetic to the Palestinian cause have become tools for radical agendas.
“What’s taking place in Israel is, it’s a jihadist battle against the Jewish State, and that jihadist battle is piggybacking on the issue of Palestine to raise sympathy and consciousness throughout the West,” Collier said.
He continued, ” We now have millions of people walking through the cities of the West waving jihadist flags, calling for the destruction of the Jewish State. The media should be reporting this for what it is, which is an ideological battle between the West and Jihad; that’s what this is. But it’s not, it’s portraying the Palestine flag-wavers sympathetically, it talks about them as peace groups.”
Collier sees the worldwide rise of anti-Semitic violence being fueled by a media narrative that can be dangerously misleading.
He asserted, “This uptick in violence towards Jews across the world is coming from the media that has been feeding the narrative of genocide, falsely, for 18 months.
This is a fight against jihadist ideology that is coming for all of us.”
