ON November 6 I wrote to the BBC Executive Complaints Unit complaining about the insanity of not calling Hamas ‘terrorists’. I referred them to an old report on their website where they described the perpetrators of the 7/7 bombings in 2005 as ‘terrorists’ and asked why they couldn’t do the same with Hamas.
I received the auto response that ‘Someone will be in touch.’
A week later, on November 12, I was infuriated by Laura Kuenssberg who was totally out of order with her biased inferences when interviewing the Israeli President Isaac Herzog on her programme. I wrote to the programme the next day expressing my disgust and used the same rationale of their 7/7 report to ask why they would not call Hamas terrorists.
By then, I had also found a BBC website named ‘Bitesize’ which describes itself as ‘the BBC’s free online study support resource for school-age pupils in the United Kingdom. It is designed to aid pupils in both schoolwork and, for older pupils, exams’. On this site, I found a piece headed ‘The growth of terrorism in the 20th and 21st century’.
It said in part: ‘Terrorists are people who use violent methods, or violent threats, to achieve their demands. Terrorists aim to bring a complete change in the country, such as overthrowing the Government, or forcing a major change in the law or policy . . . Most terrorists have political aims. Terrorists use a variety of tactics including bombings, suicide attacks, arson, and hijackings.’
I had not included this in my earlier complaint to the BBC ECU, but I mentioned it in my communication to the Kuenssberg programme and said: ‘Why is it that the BBC can teach children what a terrorist is and does – but cannot apply it to Hamas? I look forward to your response, explaining the difference between other terrorist atrocities where the BBC describes the perpetrators as terrorists but not in Palestine. The fact is, you cannot give anything like a single balanced, rational reason.’
On November 21, I received the following email from the BBC ECU with regard to my complaint to the ECU (not the Kuenssberg programme, from which I have had no response).
Dear Mr Anderson,
Thank you for getting in touch about our article 7 July London bombings: What happened that day?
The principle around the word ‘terrorist’ has been the same for many years but the editorial guidelines are periodically reviewed and the latest edition, from 2019, makes clear that the word shouldn’t be used without attribution. Before that previous versions of the guidelines had some limited flexibility to use the word without attribution and that is why it is possible to find examples in our online archive.
Best wishes,
Sean Moss
BBC News website
www.bbc.co.uk/complaints
In disavowing the word ‘terrorist’ in those archived reports with an irrational, self-serving, soviet-style utterance being brought into their warped lexicon of biased phrases and inferences, they disrespect the October 7 dead and injured and promote the perpetrators of wanton slaughter to ‘freedom fighters’.
This playing with words to disguise their contempt for Israel is an outrage, it is duplicitous skullduggery, compounded by the fact that looking at the main Bitesize website a few days later, I saw they have deleted the piece on educating children about what terrorism is. However they have missed or forgotten this duplicate piece which is separate from the main Bitesize site.
What next? If we have further bombings and slaughter in the UK, do we have mealy-mouthed presenters telling us that the UK ‘proscribes the perpetrators as a terror group?’
Interestingly on last weekend’s news bulletins the BBC’s newsreaders and presenters had gone from ‘Hamas has been proscribed as a terror group by the UK,’ to ‘Hamas has been designated a terrorist organisation by the UK government.’
These hypocrites should be exposed for their totally irrational, treacherous, nonsensical stance on describing indisputable fact. Every member of Hamas is a terrorist and cannot be called anything else.
To quote Hamas Commander Mahmoud al-Zahar, in December 2022: ‘Israel is only the first target . . . The entire planet will be under our law.’
It is already happening here without a shot being fired, enabled by a shambolic government and their BBC propaganda unit.