The BBC has disgraced itself with the Gaza documentary

Telegraph

06-03-2025

If you wanted to inflame popular fears that the police and the courts are dolling out different levels of punishment to citizens according to their ethnicity or political views you could do no better than what the Sentencing Council has just done.
The shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick revealed yesterday that courts have been told that they should 'normally consider' ordering a pre-sentence report on an offender if they came from 'an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community' or 'are transgender'.
This constitutes such a clear conflict with the principle of equality before the law that the Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has pledged to have the guidance rewritten rather than waste her time digging a hole for herself and the Government by defending it.
But a similar capture by extreme elements has succeeded in another of our vital institutions.The BBC may just have come up with the perfect master plan to convince people to stop paying the licence fee.
Look at their decision to broadcast and then remove from iPlayer the documentary about the Israel-Gaza conflict: Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone.
It has emerged that about £400,000 of licence payers' money may have been paid to the independent production company, Hoyo Films, for the making of the documentary. The production company paid £790 to the mother of the young boy who fronted the programme, Abdullah Ayman Eliyazouri, who featured in a Channel 4 news report last year in which his uncle was mistakenly described as his father.
Abdullah's real father, however, is Ayman al-Yazouri. He is the deputy agriculture minister in Gaza's Hamas-run government. Four months before the October 7 pogrom, al-Yazouri appeared to praise in an online post Hamas terrorists who had murdered four Israelis.
Abdullah's sister, meanwhile, appeared to welcome the October 7 atrocities in southern Israel in a Facebook post. One of the cameramen hired to film the documentary, Amjad Al Fayoumi, similarly used a Facebook post to seemingly welcome the massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7 as 'the flood'.
The investigative journalist David Collier was instrumental in persuading the BBC to remove the content from its online streaming services. The corporation has come under pressure from supporters of both sides in the conflict. One for commissioning and broadcasting the documentary, the other side for removing it. This fact reassures some observers that it 'must be doing something right' to earn the opprobrium of both Israel and Hamas supporters.
But that is hardly the point. Hamas is a legally-recognised terrorist organisation. It is no different in ideological outlook from the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Its members have orchestrated the murder, kidnapping, torture and rape of thousands of Israelis for the crime of being Jewish.
No direct payments to Hamas from either the BBC or from Hoyo Films have been uncovered. But to use a young presenter with such close familial links to Hamas is a dereliction of duty.
Where was the oversight? Where was the editorial principle that ensures balanced coverage? Did producers in London seriously believe that such a film, given the personnel involved in producing it, could possibly aspire to a neutral and objective representation of the conflict?
Radical change needs to sweep through the corporation. The campus Trots and Marxists who gravitated towards the corridors of power in Broadcasting House after graduation must be removed or have their wings clipped by the adults in the room. If there are any still left.