March 16, 2025 - 8:00am
Earlier this week, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch wrote to BBC Director-General Tim Davie demanding “wholesale reform” of the corporation’s Arabic service, saying it provided a “platform for terrorists” and promulgated “appalling antisemitism” and “anti-Israel bias”. Such claims have been made before, notably by Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television. But Badenoch’s letter came after BBC chairman Samir Shah told MPs that employing the son of a Hamas official to narrate the Gaza documentary How to Survive a Warzone had been “a dagger to the heart” of the corporation’s vaunted impartiality. It may thus be hard to dismiss.
The Arabic service, which includes a TV channel and a website, is funded by both the Foreign Office and the licence fee, and is supposedly bound by the same editorial standards as the rest of the BBC. Mindful of this, when Davie gave evidence to the Commons media and culture select committee in September, he said “every accusation we’ve had on the Arabic service we have looked at”, and that “broadly, I think we are doing a very good job.”
However, new figures supplied by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera), which monitors BBC Arabic closely, call Davie’s assurance into question. 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.
A third example concerns a report on an Israeli drone strike in the West Bank last August that killed five “Palestinian citizens”, without stating the fact that four of them were armed Hamas and PIJ terrorists. BBC Arabic’s source was a local reporter who also supplied the story to Reuters and Palestinian TV, which did report this. But according to the ECU, this was not “bias by omission”, because the story did say Israel had claimed it had bombed a militant operations centre.
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”.
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.”
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SubscribeThe BBC is deeply infected with anti-semitism. It needs a root and branch overhaul, a complete renewal to its original mission to inform and educate, instead of its current left-wing, woke proselytising.
Claiming that Palestinians commonly use “yahud” (Jew) when they mean Israeli (which in Arabic should be “Israyiyli” or “Israyiyliun”) is factually correct. But it is still a mistranslation, because it elides the heart of the matter: that the main problem that the Palestinians, and the Arabs in general, have with Israel, is its identity as an independent Jewish state. Their problem is with the notion that the Jews, as dhimmis, had the nerve to establish an independent state where they are not subservient to Muslims anymore. Thus, by translating yahud as “Israeli”, BBC obfuscates the deep antisemitism that is inherent in the position of those Arab interviewees vis-a-vis Israel.
I love “fact check” articles because the majority of the are actually designed to obfuscate the facts. A favored method is to mention facts which by distorting context are disingenuous. Now, I don’t listen the Arab Service and have no idea as to what bias I might find, but I I have read the above article and do find interesting bias in the fact checking.
The article states that “a BBC Arabic report of the riot last November, when Israeli football fans were violently attacked by mobs yelling antisemitic abuse and saying they were on a “Jew hunt”. Conspicuous by its absence is any mention that the “attack” was preceded by attacks and vandalism by the Israeli team and fans against private dwellings displaying Palestinian flags and other pro-Palestinian motifs. Also a Palestinian cabbie was assaulted by this Israeli mob. In reporting on news from Gaza, the article mentions that the journalists quoted “worked directly for Hamas or PIJ propaganda units. No mention is made of the fact that as the IDF does not allow independent journalism, the source of all war information is either the IDF, Hamas/other fighting groups, and Al Jazeera, (which operates w/o Israeli permission). The fact that the reporters come from one group or another can only have its source in the IDF, is also not mentioned.
So, have you considered that most fact checkers need to be fact checked.
If we’re (correctly) going to criticise the BBC Arabic for bias, then this article needs to be balanced as well otherwise it can be easily dismissed.
The trouble at the football was largely started by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. They smashed the windows of student accommodation blocks because some had Palestinian solidarity stickers in them, violently attacked numerous taxi drivers throughout the city before the game, started fights with locals and tourists in Dam Square, booed a minutes silence for the victims of the Valencia flooding and sung songs about killing babies and children in Gaza.
Them being attacked after the game wasn’t antisemitism, it was a reaction to their own disgusting behaviour
While BBC Arabic is undoubtedly biased I don’t understand why you should attract downvotes for putting the attack on the Maccabi fans in context. If you go abroad and stir up trouble you might expect a reaction.
Given the savagery of the attack on Gaza, we can all live (!) with a bit of bias from BBC Arabic. In any event, given Britain’s increasingly precarious economic and financial position, significant cuts to the BBC are inevitable. Cuts are already happening but they are only scratching the surface.