by Nicole Lampert, spiked
How can anyone trust BBC Arabic to report impartially on the Gaza war?
It is difficult to believe that the BBC was once the voice of the free world against the Nazis. During the Second World War, the BBC’s foreign-language services aided the European resistance to fascist rule. These days, it has become a platform for extremists across the Arab world.
Take Samer Elzaenen, a regular contributor to BBC Arabic, whose social-media posts were brought to light last weekend in the Telegraph. ‘We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left’, the Palestinian journalist said of Jews in a post from 2011. ‘When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything’, he also wrote. Recently, Elzaenen praised the perpetrators of the 7 October massacre – including those who abducted, raped and murdered defenceless attendees of the Nova music festival – as ‘resistance fighters’. He has appeared on BBC Arabic 12 times since the Israel-Hamas war began. Worse still, Elzaenen’s case is far from unique.
BBC Arabic is the BBC’s most influential foreign-language service, reaching a weekly audience of 35million people. Ironically, taxpayers fund services such as BBC Arabic in order to flex the UK’s ‘soft power’ and spread our liberal values abroad – but this clearly is not what is actually happening here.
The jubilation expressed by some of BBC Arabic’s senior staff over 7 October reveals the extent of the problem. Sally Nabil, a bilingual correspondent based in Egypt and the Middle East, liked a tweet that described the massacre as ‘Palestinian resistance taking the initiative and surprising the Israeli occupier with an operation of quality’. She also liked a comment that described a photo of jeeps loaded with bodies and kidnapped civilians as ‘a proud scene’.