This, don’t forget, came just weeks after the corporation had been rocked by the biggest scandal of journalistic standards in its history, a disaster entirely of its own making and one that had long been waiting to happen.
The row kicked off in November, when the Telegraph revealed the contents of an internal dossier produced by Michael Prescott, who had spent three years as an independent external adviser to the broadcaster’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee (EGSC) before leaving in June.
As readers will recall, the headline disclosure was that Panorama had spliced together separate parts of Donald Trump’s speech into what appeared to be one sentence calling on his supporters to “fight like hell” after marching on the Capitol. In fact, Trump said he would walk with them “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard”. Broadcast just a week before the US election, the programme “completely misled” viewers, the report said.
This was as bad as the “shocking” breaches of impartiality of the “Crowngate” scandal in 2007, when footage of the late Queen Elizabeth II was edited to make it look as though she was storming off a photoshoot. The controller of BBC One resigned on that occasion, and the Director-General and head of news were forced out on this.
Where were the Jews in all this? Aside from the Trump revelations, the report contained much Israel-related material that was perhaps even more egregious on account of its systemic nature and longevity, particularly the travesty that is BBC Arabic.
This part of the Prescott report was overshadowed by the Trump debacle, and in a way this was understandable; no Jewish campaign group has threatened to sue the Beeb for up to $5 billion, after all. Nonetheless, it felt like something strategic was going on here. In ignoring charges of antisemitism almost entirely and focussing all apologies on the Trump outrage, the BBC provided itself with a smokescreen and has since returned to business as usual.
Yet as we start to move backwards through a year of disinformation – some may call it incitement – at the BBC, it is useful to consider some of Prescott’s findings. Among his many disturbing findings on the BBC, Prescott alleged that:
• Output systematically gave “unjustifiable weight” to Hamas casualty figures.
• Journalists reported at some length on the fact that Palestinians had been digging graves near Al Nasser and Al Shifa hospitals; later, those same journalists suggested that Israel had dug the graves to bury mass casualties in subsequent reports.
• BBC Newsnight repeated the claim, originally made by the United Nations humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher, that “14,000 babies” would die within “48 hours” even though it had already been exposed as false.
United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Coordinator Tom Fletcher speaks on the famine in Gaza during a press conference in Geneva, on August 22, 2025. "It is a famine that we could have prevented if we had been allowed. Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel," Tom Fletcher told reporters, calling it "a famine that will and must haunt us all". The United Nations on August 22, 2025 officially declared a famine in Gaza, the first in the Middle East, with its experts saying 500,000 people were facing "catastrophic" hunger. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP) (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images
• BBC News did not inform viewers that, under international law, hospitals were allowed to be targeted when they were being used as military bases.
• The BBC gave extensive coverage to a letter signed by 600 lawyers claiming that Britain was breaking international law in selling arms to Israel, but largely ignored a letter signed by 1,000 lawyers arguing the opposite.
• Hamas tunnels were sanitised as being used to “move goods and people”, rather than for jihadi operations.
• BBC channels repeatedly suggested that the International Court of Justice had ruled there was a “plausible genocide” in Gaza, despite the fact that a former ICJ president had debunked this claim on one of the BBC’s own programmes.
The claims regarding BBC Arabic merit their own section:
• Minimal reporting on Israeli suffering at the hands of Hamas or criticism of the terror group.
• Describing Hamas’s terror attacks as “military operations” and barely covered the deaths of Israeli hostages.
• Publishing such fake news as Iranian and Syrian claims that Israel had staged an attack on children in the Golan as a pretext for attacking Hezbollah.
• Giving a platform to journalists who had openly glorified terrorism hundreds of times
Which brings us to the absurd way in which some voices within the broadcaster responded to the crisis: by joining forces with the Liberal Democrats and the Guardian to insist that the scandal had been manufactured by a solitary board member who formerly worked for Theresa May and had once been involved with this newspaper. One non-leftie among its 21,000 employees, in other words, had single-handedly conspired to whip up this storm.
The problem, it emerged, was simply that in the BBC mindset a leftwing worldview is the very definition of “impartial”. But that was not all.
In February, there was the small matter of the BBC documentary narrated by the young scion of a Hamas family, as the redoubtable David Collier revealed; fast-forward to July and an independent report by Peter Johnston, the director of editorial complaints and reviews, ruled that Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone had contravened editorial guidelines for accuracy.
Scenes from Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was broadcast on Monday on BBC Two and narrated by Abdullah Al-Yazouri, the son of a Hamas official (Image: BBC)[Missing Credit]
Mystifyingly, he had not found a breach of impartiality, as he had seen no evidence “to support the suggestion that the narrator’s father or family influenced the content of the programme in any way”.
Really? I watched the programme in the few days before it was deleted from iPlayer. As with the Prescott scandal, in which attention to the Trump indiscretion masked a wealth of other misdemeanours, the intense focus upon the Hamas connections of the family of 13-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri obscured the documentary’s numerous other problems.
For one thing, there was the consistent mistranslation of the word “Yehud” as “Israeli” rather than “Jew”, apparently the result of some BBC bleeding heart imposing upon the Palestinians an alibi for which they had seen no need themselves.
One telling detail spoke volumes. At one point, we see Abdullah trundling along in a cart, lamenting the fact that “trying to get drinkable water is a very hard task”. All the while, in the background, we saw stall after stall peddling bountiful bottled water and even soft drinks.
The fact that nobody at the BBC picked up this glaring contradiction is testament to how easy it is to gaslight professional editors when they are predisposed to sympathise with you. For me, this was the heart of the scandal.
Where does the BBC go from here? The justification for the licence fee rests upon the corporation’s impartiality. Lose that and it would seem inevitable that the licence fee is abandoned. This brings us to the crux of the thing. GB News knows what it is: a rightwing broadcaster. The BBC, however, has no such self-knowledge, persisting in the delusion that it is politically neutral. After the last 12 months, there can’t be a person in Britain – much less in the Jewish community – that takes that argument seriously.
Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, by Jake Wallis Simons, is published by Little, Brown
