Israel kills a terrorist and the British media goes into mourning

The response to the killing of al-Sharif is a case study in how badly the mainstream media has failed in its coverage of the Gaza war.

Take John Simpson, the doyen of BBC correspondents and its world affairs editor, who posted that he was “deeply shocked by Israel’s deliberate killing of the Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif…”. Not a mention of the evidence of al-Sharif’s Hamas activities. Even if Simpson doesn’t believe the evidence supplied by the IDF, he should surely at least mention it, if only to dismiss it.

His BBC colleague, international editor Jeremy Bowen, referring to “Anas” – they were, it seems, on first name terms - did at least do that, albeit witheringly dismissing the evidence of al-Sharif’s role as a Hamas terrorist as “not convincing”. For Bowen, one does wonder on what basis the IDF version has been so airily dismissed, while taking at face value the words of Al Jazeera - which, of course, denied that it employed a Hamas terrorist to further its broader remit of pushing Hamas propaganda onto the world.

The BBC was far from alone – Sky and ITV all took at face value Al Jazeera’s line that al-Sharif was some sort of heroic seeker after truth, a journalist of whom all his colleagues should be proud.

The same al-Sharif, that is, who has been widely reported as having posted this at 15.39 on October 7 2023: “9 hours and the heroes are still roaming the country killing and capturing…Great God, how great you are” followed by three hearts.

The same al-Sharif who, according to dissidents in Gaza, handed over opponents of Hamas to the terror group after filming them.

And the same al-Sharif who posted proudly that he had named “my son Salah…in honour of my lifelong friend Salah Labad, who was martyred at the beginning of this war. My father instructed me to name my son after him, out of love for him and in recognition of this kind and virtuous Salah.” The “kind and virtuous” Salah Labad was “martyred” as one of the terrorists who took part in the October 7 massacre.

As the IDF put it yesterday: “Al-Sharif was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell and advanced rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and IDF troops. Intelligence and documents from Gaza, including rosters, terrorist training lists and salary records, prove he was a Hamas operative integrated into Al Jazeera. A press badge isn’t a shield for terrorism.”

Al Jazeera’s propaganda has had a major impact on the course of the war, being lapped up by the rest of the world’s media and politicians which are ready to swallow its lies wholesale. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt have banned Al Jazeera; they understand that it is a bad actor, on the side of Hamas. But the likes of the BBC and Sky simply parrot Al Jazeera’s Hamas propaganda.

They offer no scrutiny of Al Jazeera’s claims, whilst treating any evidence to the contrary as by definition flawed. On the BBC’s website, for example, we see this astounding statement: “Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told the BBC that Israeli authorities have failed to provide evidence to show that the journalists they killed were terrorists.” But the IDF has done exactly that, and not just the IDF – the incontrovertible evidence has been available for months on even a cursory trawl. Yet the report does not do even that cursory trawl.

Anas al-Sharif was a Hamas terrorist. That he was employed by Al Jazeera in no way signified that he was a serious journalist; quite the opposite, given Al Jazeera’s role in the war. But while the coverage of his killing teaches us nothing about Al Jazeera that we do not already know, it provides yet more disturbing evidence of how badly British and other news organisations are failing to report the reality of what is happening in Gaza, rather than Hamas’s version of it.