THE BBC was reported to the police for possible terrorism offences after it admitted that Hoyo Films, the production company behind Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone, made payments to the family of the child narrator of the film despite knowing he was the son of a member of the Hamas government. He is also the grandson of a founder of Hamas.
Caroline Turner, director of UK Lawyers for Israel which filed the report, said: ‘The BBC has either been duped by the Hamas propaganda machine or has co-operated with it – or both. While the BBC has been caught out on this occasion, we wonder how often this occurs.’
The short answer is: regularly. A report published by CAMERA-UK in September 2024, examining the BBC’s output on Israel/Gaza since the start of the current war, found numerous examples of the BBC pushing pro-Hamas propaganda.
For example:
- On the day of the October 7 massacre in 2023, while the rest of Britain’s media were detailing the brutality of Hamas’s attack on Israel, the BBC led its coverage with a headline about ‘Israeli revenge attacks’;
- The BBC broadcast interviews in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity with Hamas apologists who used their platform to make comments which the BBC was forced to admit were ‘offensive’;
- The BBC refused to call Hamas ‘terrorists’ because it would be seen as ‘taking sides’, only to back down following criticism from the outraged Jewish community and senior politicians from all sides.
There are many more besides.
One can describe these examples as ‘lax journalistic standards and institutional bias’, as the report does, or one can see them for what they really are: firm evidence that the BBC is running propaganda for Britain’s deep state, which is allied with Islamic terrorist entities.
That’s a bold claim, and I don’t make it lightly. But it’s an important statement to make as we need to understand what’s going on here.
Let’s start with a simple question: what is the deep state? The words typically conjure up images of a shadowy unelected cabal, directing government from behind the scenes. But the deep state isn’t some Elders of Zion-style conspiracy, a group of 12 powerful men who control the world’s leaders like puppets on strings. In reality, it’s a complex web of non-governmental organisations, charities, agencies and quangos which work together and fund each other to wage soft power abroad, and, more recently, at home.
Everyone is aware that the CIA has long had a hand in directing coups, uprisings and election outcomes in places such as Iran, Nicaragua, Italy, Indonesia. Fewer understand that, increasingly, those influence operations have been largely outsourced to NGOs and charities.
The watershed moment came under the Reagan administration with the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983. Its stated raison d’être was ‘strengthening democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts’. In practice, this meant funnelling US money through USAID to NED, then on to a range of international NGOs, all tasked with running programmes designed to spread US state influence. Author William Blum noted: ‘An NGO helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have.’ NED’s first president, Allen Weinstein, admitted openly that ‘a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA’.
The BBC and the Deep State
BBC Media Action is the BBC’s ‘charitable arm’ – which in itself is a big red flag. How, precisely, does the BBC’s charitable wing serve people around the world?
‘We use media and communication to help deliver stronger democracies [my emphasis], a safer, more habitable planet and inclusive societies’, they say on their website. How do they do that?
‘We create and support networks and coalitions [again, my emphasis] of media and civil society organisations working to tackle information disorder, including fact-checking networks . . . [We combat] the toxic combination of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation polluting our information environments.’
BBC Media Action was launched as the BBC World Service Trust in 1999. In 2011 it changed its name to BBC Media Action, and now sits within the BBC’s World Service Group (BBC World Service, BBC World News, BBC Monitoring and BBC Media Action). Although outwardly it claims to be wholly independent from the BBC, tucked away in its annual accounts it does boast of its ‘unique position at the heart of the BBC’. The organisation’s 85 London employees, over half of whom earn more than £60,000 a year, are based in the BBC’s White City broadcasting complex, though it pays not a jot of rent. Staff are encouraged to bounce between charity and broadcaster ‘to give our London-based staff a chance to learn in other parts of the organisation’.
It draws its funding from a wide range of sources, including governments, UN organisations, and quasi-philanthropic organisations.
One of those is Counterpart International, of which Wikipedia notes: ‘In 1992, USAID tapped the organisation to “go global” and help determine a role for US non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the former Soviet Union.’ Another is the Gates Foundation, which has made 18 grants since 2006 worth a total of $56,367,647. And USAID gave BBC Media Action £2.6million for the 2023/24 fiscal year, equivalent to about 8 per cent of its funding.
According to BBC Media Action, its top donor for 2024 was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), which last year alone handed over more than £3million.
In 2011, following the Arab Spring, the FCO set up the Arab Partnership as part of a G8 programme called the Deauville Partnership. Funding for the Arab Partnership was £110million over four years. The BBC picked up some of that money through the World Service Trust (ie, BBC Media Action) and BBC World Service Arabic.
Clearly, BBC Media Action and the BBC World Service, including BBC Arabic (one of the BBC’s largest foreign bureaux), are all deeply embedded within the deep state web. And they’re not shy about supporting jihad.
BBC Media Action worked in the Palestinian Territories between 2012 and 2017. Although that programme is now closed, the website still boasts of co-producing two shows in that time, Voices From Palestine and Free to Speak, in partnership with the Palestinian Public Broadcasting Corporation (PBC). Voices from Palestine was ‘co-hosted by BBC Arabic’s Nur Zorgui and the PBC’s Huda Kadoumi’.
At the foot of the BBC’s page is a link to the PBC’s website. That site lists in its main menu a section dedicated to the ‘Freedom Tunnel Heroes’ – the name commonly given by the Palestinian authorities to six Palestinian prisoners who briefly escaped from Gilboa Prison in Israel in 2021. One was the head of Fatah’s military wing in the Jenin area during the second Intifada, 2000-2005, during which time he oversaw numerous lethal attacks. He carried out shooting attacks himself in 2018-19. Another was a man who participated in the murder of an 18-year-old Israel and had plans to blow up a bus. A third participated in a bus bombing in 2001 which killed three people and wounded many others. All six were members Fatah and Islamic Jihad. In 2022, the Palestinian Authority encouraged schoolgirls to hail them as heroes by inaugurating a garden at the Al-Adawiya High School for Girls in honour of the six terrorists.
Another section of PBC’s website is dedicated to ‘martyrs’, ie Palestinians who have been killed while waging jihad against the Jews.
Then there’s BBC Arabic. The CAMERA-UK report details how fluently BBC Arabic speaks the language of Hamas: Hamas terrorists are referred to as ‘the resistance’; attacks are ‘resistance operations’; in one case, a terrorist who was killed fighting was a ‘martyr’; Jewish towns in the West Bank that date back to the 1800s are ‘settlements’ and their residents are ‘settlers’.
In at least five cases, BBC staff showed support for the October 7 massacre on social media. The outcry forced the BBC to investigate, yet following that investigation the BBC’s Director General Tim Davie told MPs that ‘the Arabic service, in terms of its output, we should be very proud of’. He excused the journalists, saying they were ‘under enormous pressure’.
Writing about the CAMERA-UK report for the Telegraph, former Director of BBC Television Danny Cohen (who also compiled and edited the report) said: ‘Impartiality breaches have occurred so often at its Arabic channel that they almost look deliberate.’
None of this should come as a surprise given the support for Hamas shown by the British state itself.
I have previously detailed how the UK government launders money for Hamas through UNWRA, the UN’s refugee organisation set up specifically for the Palestinians, which:
- teaches young Palestinian children to hate Jews, indoctrinating them into a jihadist mindset. Children as young as 14 have been killed fighting jihad, thanks to the lessons they receive at UNWRA schools;
- shares its infrastructure with Hamas high command;
- employed Hamas members;
- gave cash to Hamas.
Last month, released British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari revealed that she had been held in an UNWRA camp. Following an outcry, on February 18 the Prime Minister’s Office told Israel’s Channel 12 that the government was reconsidering its payments to UNWRA. The following day, a Foreign Office source told Middle East Eye that the reports were false and that the government had doubled down on its support for the UN agency. Which of those reports is mis-, dis-, or mal-information?
This is not ‘something […] going badly wrong’, as Cohen says it is: this is deliberate and directed subversion of the British state apparatus by the BBC. In light of the evidence it is naive to think otherwise.
This article was drawn from a longer essay which can be found on Donna’s substack, Freedom Radio.
