Back in the 90s when I was much younger and still watched network news, it was routine for Peter Jennings, Christiane Amanpour or some other hideously biased journalist to air translated quotes with a ‘Palestinian’ in which he or she is saying “Yahood” or “Jew” in Arabic, but it’s translated as “Israeli” in English.
The obvious agenda there was to make it seem like the Arab Muslims hated ‘Israelis’ rather than ‘Jews’, that this was political rather than ethnic and religious hatred.
A generation later, even with the internet making it all too easy to fact check, the media is still doing this.
The BBC, which is in trouble for running undisclosed Hamas content as ‘documentaries’, this one featuring the son of a Hamas leader as an ordinary Gazan kid, without telling the audience, has been caught deliberately mistranslating a description of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader as engaging in “jihad against the Jews” as “fighting and resisting Israeli forces”.
The Telegraph can reveal that on at least five occasions the words Yahud or Yahudy – Arabic for “Jew” or “Jews” – were changed to “Israel” or “Israeli forces”, or were removed from the subtitles altogether…
Around four minutes in, a Gazan woman among a convoy fleeing from part of the besieged strip is asked by the cameraman: “What’s going on?” She replies: “The Jews invaded our [area].” However, the BBC subtitles quote her as saying: “The Israeli army invaded our area.”
Around a minute later, a woman is interviewed about the Oct 7 Hamas attacks and is quoted as saying that was the “first time we invaded Israel – it was always the other way round”. However, she actually says: “We were invading the Jews for the first time.”
Towards the end of the documentary, a Palestinian woman holds her phone as she shows the camera crew footage of Sinwar being killed. In the subtitles, she is quoted as saying that “his face was covered and his weapon was ready, prepared for battle”, but a translation reveals she says that he was “ready for jihad”.
Later, the participant is quoted as saying: “The video shows that he was fighting and resisting Israeli forces. He wasn’t hiding.” But according to Camera, the woman says: “He was engaging in resistance and jihad against the Jews. Not underground.”
The BBC has been doing this for a long time in the most egregious ways.
“The revolutionary songs, they excite you, they encourage you to rip a Jew’s head off.”
But the English translation of Saleh’s remarks offered by the BBC refers to an “Israeli”, not a “Jew”.
Following backlash, a BBC spokesperson said: “We sought expert advice on the translation before broadcast and we believe the translation of ‘Yehudi’ as ‘Israeli’ in this documentary is both accurate and true to the speakers’ intentions.”
That may give us more insight into the BBC than into the Islamic terrorists it’s coming up for.
There is no reason not to correctly translate Yahood, Yehudi in Hebrew, Judean or Ioudaios in Greek or Jew in English.
The only reason to mistranslate it as Israelis is to make bigotry sound like political opposition.
When Arab Muslims talk about ripping the heads off Jews, it goes to the underlying murderous antisemitism.
If a Muslim terrorist stated that he hated Christians, would the BBC mistranslate it as he hated the British Army?
The media lies because its radical ideology supports horrifying things that it wants to mislead the public about.