Former BBC chief says news channel is ‘media wing of Hamas’

Former BBC Television Director Danny Cohen has slammed the outlet’s Arabic channel as the “media wing of Hamas.”

In a letter to BBC Director-General Tim Davie and published by The Mail on Sunday, Cohen said BBC Arabic is responsible for “a multitude of editorial failings.” In the five months following the October 7th massacre by Hamas, Cohen said the channel “was forced to make a correction at an average of one every 48 hours.”

“All of these corrections related to breaches that favoured an anti-Israel narrative . . . The BBC has also refused to sack BBC Arabic staff who had shown support for the October 7 terror massacres,” he wrote.

Samer Elzaenen, who has appeared on BBC Arabic over a dozen times, has called for Jews to be “burned as Hitler did.”

“Any single one of the many posts in which Mr Elzaenen displays vile racism against Jews should have been enough to preclude his being repeatedly platformed by the BBC, yet he has appeared as a reporter on BBC Arabic at least 14 times. To make matters even worse, the BBC's response to this information was to mislead licence-fee payers.”

The BBC has falsely claimed that Elzanen was just an “eyewitness,” even though the channel repeatedly introduced him as a journalist or reporter.

“Given the platform it has repeatedly provided to supporters of terrorism some may conclude that [BBC Arabic] has now effectively become the media wing of Hamas,” Cohen wrote.

A BBC source has reportedly said that “some form of action will soon be taken,” and BBC Chairman Samir Shah has stated there will be an investigation into the behavior of BBC Arabic journalists.

Collusion with Hamas

But it’s not just BBC Arabic that is under scrutiny. In February, the UK’s Conservative Party threatened to withdraw its legislative support for the BBC over the network’s collusion with Hamas.

The film “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone” paints Hamas and its supporters as victims of Israel, which is portrayed as a genocidal aggressor. It is narrated by a 13-year-old boy who has since been revealed to be the son of senior Hamas member Ayman Alyazouri. The BBC denied its link to Hamas after it was exposed and tried to place the blame on Hoyo Films, a London-based production company, claiming that the work was outsourced to Hoyo Films. 

However, the Daily Mail’s review of the BBC’s contract with Hoyo Films suggests the network’s claim is false and that the BBC was in fact heavily involved in the production of the film. One of the agreement’s clauses, for example, expressly says that “[p]ermission will be sought from the parents [or] guardians every time we film with them . . . the producers will act and work as we would in the UK.” Another says: “We will address editorial compliance issues as they arise by having regular updates and phone calls with the commissioning editor.”

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch issued a letter to BBC Director-General Davie expressing her shock at the network’s “potential collusion with Hamas” and demanding a full investigation into its pro-Hamas coverage.

The BBC’s pro-terror bias

The BBC has consistently avoided calling members of Islamic terror groups “terrorists,” instead referring to them as “freedom fighters,” “gunmen,” or “militants” and takes considerable care to favorably depict terror groups that target Israelis. In December, for example, the BBC published a story titled: “Five Gaza journalists killed in Israeli strike targeting armed group.” The “armed group” was Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), an organization that has carried out dozens of attacks on Israelis—including several suicide bombings—and is designated a terror organization in the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, and the EU. The “five Gaza journalists” were actually PIJ terrorists, a fact the BBC only acknowledged later in the article.

The BBC also uses sleights of hand to depict Gazans—who overwhelmingly support Hamas and even participate in attacks—in a favorable light. When including quotes from Gazans, for example, the network deliberately mistranslates the Arabic word al-yahud, which means “the Jews”, to “the Israelis” in an effort to gloss over Islamic antisemitism.