You would have thought that when it came to the BBC’s axed Gaza documentary, the pro-Palestinian luvvie set might have
had the grace to sit this one out.
Don’t they always argue that they are absolutely, definitely not supporting Hamas in their protests against Israel’s “genocide”?
Until this week, I didn’t think former footballer Gary Lineker could look any more stupid in his quest to be the salt and vinegar of progressive politics from the comfort of his X feed.
But now he and his 500-strong squad of useful idiots have hit the numpty jackpot after begging the BBC to restore a programme that the national broadcaster itself has admitted contained “serious flaws” with counter terror police now assessing licence fee payers’ cash having been paid to a Hamas linked family.
“We have no plans to broadcast the programme again in its current form or return it to iPlayer,” confirmed a BBC spokesman following a meeting by the BBC Board on Thursday.
An investigation will now be carried out by BBC complaints director Peter Johnson. I’d have preferred an Ofcom probe to the BBC marking its own homework. Had GB News demonstrated this lack of due diligence, the entire channel would probably have been threatened with closure.
It wasn’t just that Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone had featured the son of a Hamas minister as narrator. Nor that a second child featured in the film had been pictured holding a gun and posing beside a Hamas fighter. Or even that a cameraman appeared to have posted tweets celebrating the October 7 massacre.
This wasn’t only a case of the BBC failing to ask basic questions about this documentary, made by production company Hoyo Films. As The Telegraph also revealed, the programme repeatedly mistranslated references to “the Jews” (changing it to “Israel” or “Israeli forces” in the subtitles) and omitted praise of “jihad” (again, translated as “fighting Israeli forces”) during an interview that revered Yahya Sinwar, the deceased Hamas leader.
The film was doctored to present the Palestinian subjects in a more favourable light. That’s not journalism – it’s propaganda.
Anyone with half an inquiring mind could see that and yet Lineker and a group of people grandly describing themselves as “industry professionals who craft stories for the British public” were seemingly too blinded by their desire to paint Israel as the villains and the Palestinians as the victims.
The signatories, who also included nine BBC staff, argued that the documentary was “an essential piece of journalism, offering an all too rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinians”.
A rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinians would have involved subjects who weren’t linked to Hamas. There are nearly 1.7 million of them in Gaza to choose from, including around 500,000 children.
Instead the documentary featured four “untold stories” that had actually been told countless times to Channel 4, ABC, Reuters, CBS, Al Jazeera and CNN – according to David Collier, the investigative journalist who originally broke this story. So well-rehearsed were the quartet’s tales of woe that a cub reporter on our graduate trainee scheme would have smelt a rat.
Yet the letter, addressed to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general sought to justify the use of 14-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri as narrator by arguing his father was only part of the Hamas government in “a civil service role concerned with food production”. Dr Ayman Al-Yazouri was in fact Gaza’s deputy minister of agriculture having held other posts in education and planning. He’s been photographed draped in a Hamas flag. In 2023, he praised the Hamas terrorists who murdered four Israelis.
Regardless, the righteous salvo added: “Conflating such governance roles in Gaza with terrorism is both factually incorrect and dehumanising.”
Luvvies, the clue is in the words “Hamas minister”. I’ll translate that, since the BBC seemingly cannot be trusted to do so. This means “working for a terrorist organisation proscribed by the UK”.
If you’re going to adopt this warped line of argument you may as well claim that Richard Walther Darré, the SS officer in charge of Adolf Hitler’s agriculture policy, bore no blame for the Holocaust. Yet he was found guilty of war crimes on three counts at Nuremberg, including “membership of a criminal organisation”.
You don’t get to be a minister in Gaza unless you support Hamas. Even if we assumed that Dr Al-Yazouri was somehow coerced by the terrorists into becoming a minister against his will, wouldn’t that have been worth mentioning. And if the good doctor really is just a harmless “civil servant” why the reluctance to reveal his paternal link to the narrator?
The letter hysterically claimed that any criticism amounted to “weaponisation of a child’s identity and the racist insinuation that Palestinian narratives must be scrutinised through a lens of suspicion”. The only people who weaponised a child here were the documentary makers. Why would you get a 14 year old to narrate such a film?
And how else, if not suspiciously, must the public view interviews with people hiding their links to Hamas? Moreover, imagine being so lacking in self-awareness that you would call for the protection of “vulnerable voices” and a “commitment to stories that hold power to account” without actually acknowledging Hamas’s abuses of power, let alone its self-proclaimed desire to exterminate all Jews.
Sadly, the only power these virtue signallers ever seem to hold to account is Israel, while gullibly spouting casualty figures from the terrorist-backed “Palestinian health authorities”, describing Hamas as “militants” and equating Palestinian prisoners with Israeli hostages.
Despite the difficulty in getting Western journalists into Gaza, there is plenty of non-Hamas data to probe if you really wanted to find out what Palestinians are thinking. Take the recent polling by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research think tank, which reveals that support for Hamas, which has ruled the territory since 2007, has decreased from 42 per cent shortly after October 7, 2023, to only 21 per cent in January 2025. Four in five Palestinians don’t support Hamas – this is the “untold story” of Gaza – if only the BBC had the guts to tell it.
As research by Nils Mallock and Jeremy Ginges, behavioural scientists based at the London School of Economics shows, fewer people in Gaza see Hamas winning the war or support attacks against Israel – contrary to the narrative constantly spun by the blinkered BBC and crisp eating armchair experts whose thinking is so warped they are willing to defend the indefensible.
The BBC staff and “industry professionals” who signed this letter should no longer be allowed to “craft stories for the British public” if they truly believe this hatchet job was “essential journalism”.
And as for the BBC? Amid an ongoing blame game and continued passing of the managerial buck, the broadcaster this week refused to answer questions posed by its own Radio 4 Media Show. If the BBC can’t even be accountable to itself, then what hope have we licence fee payers?
You would have thought that when it came to the BBC’s axed Gaza documentary, the pro-Palestinian luvvie set might have
had the grace to sit this one out.
Don’t they always argue that they are absolutely, definitely not supporting Hamas in their protests against Israel’s “genocide”?
Until this week, I didn’t think former footballer Gary Lineker could look any more stupid in his quest to be the salt and vinegar of progressive politics from the comfort of his X feed.
But now he and his 500-strong squad of useful idiots have hit the numpty jackpot after begging the BBC to restore a programme that the national broadcaster itself has admitted contained “serious flaws” with counter terror police now assessing licence fee payers’ cash having been paid to a Hamas linked family.
“We have no plans to broadcast the programme again in its current form or return it to iPlayer,” confirmed a BBC spokesman following a meeting by the BBC Board on Thursday.
An investigation will now be carried out by BBC complaints director Peter Johnson. I’d have preferred an Ofcom probe to the BBC marking its own homework. Had GB News demonstrated this lack of due diligence, the entire channel would probably have been threatened with closure.
It wasn’t just that Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone had featured the son of a Hamas minister as narrator. Nor that a second child featured in the film had been pictured holding a gun and posing beside a Hamas fighter. Or even that a cameraman appeared to have posted tweets celebrating the October 7 massacre.
This wasn’t only a case of the BBC failing to ask basic questions about this documentary, made by production company Hoyo Films. As The Telegraph also revealed, the programme repeatedly mistranslated references to “the Jews” (changing it to “Israel” or “Israeli forces” in the subtitles) and omitted praise of “jihad” (again, translated as “fighting Israeli forces”) during an interview that revered Yahya Sinwar, the deceased Hamas leader.
The film was doctored to present the Palestinian subjects in a more favourable light. That’s not journalism – it’s propaganda.
Anyone with half an inquiring mind could see that and yet Lineker and a group of people grandly describing themselves as “industry professionals who craft stories for the British public” were seemingly too blinded by their desire to paint Israel as the villains and the Palestinians as the victims.
The signatories, who also included nine BBC staff, argued that the documentary was “an essential piece of journalism, offering an all too rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinians”.
A rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinians would have involved subjects who weren’t linked to Hamas. There are nearly 1.7 million of them in Gaza to choose from, including around 500,000 children.
Instead the documentary featured four “untold stories” that had actually been told countless times to Channel 4, ABC, Reuters, CBS, Al Jazeera and CNN – according to David Collier, the investigative journalist who originally broke this story. So well-rehearsed were the quartet’s tales of woe that a cub reporter on our graduate trainee scheme would have smelt a rat.
Yet the letter, addressed to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general sought to justify the use of 14-year-old Abdullah Al-Yazouri as narrator by arguing his father was only part of the Hamas government in “a civil service role concerned with food production”. Dr Ayman Al-Yazouri was in fact Gaza’s deputy minister of agriculture having held other posts in education and planning. He’s been photographed draped in a Hamas flag. In 2023, he praised the Hamas terrorists who murdered four Israelis.
Regardless, the righteous salvo added: “Conflating such governance roles in Gaza with terrorism is both factually incorrect and dehumanising.”
Luvvies, the clue is in the words “Hamas minister”. I’ll translate that, since the BBC seemingly cannot be trusted to do so. This means “working for a terrorist organisation proscribed by the UK”.
If you’re going to adopt this warped line of argument you may as well claim that Richard Walther Darré, the SS officer in charge of Adolf Hitler’s agriculture policy, bore no blame for the Holocaust. Yet he was found guilty of war crimes on three counts at Nuremberg, including “membership of a criminal organisation”.
You don’t get to be a minister in Gaza unless you support Hamas. Even if we assumed that Dr Al-Yazouri was somehow coerced by the terrorists into becoming a minister against his will, wouldn’t that have been worth mentioning. And if the good doctor really is just a harmless “civil servant” why the reluctance to reveal his paternal link to the narrator?
The letter hysterically claimed that any criticism amounted to “weaponisation of a child’s identity and the racist insinuation that Palestinian narratives must be scrutinised through a lens of suspicion”. The only people who weaponised a child here were the documentary makers. Why would you get a 14 year old to narrate such a film?
And how else, if not suspiciously, must the public view interviews with people hiding their links to Hamas? Moreover, imagine being so lacking in self-awareness that you would call for the protection of “vulnerable voices” and a “commitment to stories that hold power to account” without actually acknowledging Hamas’s abuses of power, let alone its self-proclaimed desire to exterminate all Jews.
Sadly, the only power these virtue signallers ever seem to hold to account is Israel, while gullibly spouting casualty figures from the terrorist-backed “Palestinian health authorities”, describing Hamas as “militants” and equating Palestinian prisoners with Israeli hostages.
Despite the difficulty in getting Western journalists into Gaza, there is plenty of non-Hamas data to probe if you really wanted to find out what Palestinians are thinking. Take the recent polling by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research think tank, which reveals that support for Hamas, which has ruled the territory since 2007, has decreased from 42 per cent shortly after October 7, 2023, to only 21 per cent in January 2025. Four in five Palestinians don’t support Hamas – this is the “untold story” of Gaza – if only the BBC had the guts to tell it.
As research by Nils Mallock and Jeremy Ginges, behavioural scientists based at the London School of Economics shows, fewer people in Gaza see Hamas winning the war or support attacks against Israel – contrary to the narrative constantly spun by the blinkered BBC and crisp eating armchair experts whose thinking is so warped they are willing to defend the indefensible.
The BBC staff and “industry professionals” who signed this letter should no longer be allowed to “craft stories for the British public” if they truly believe this hatchet job was “essential journalism”.
And as for the BBC? Amid an ongoing blame game and continued passing of the managerial buck, the broadcaster this week refused to answer questions posed by its own Radio 4 Media Show. If the BBC can’t even be accountable to itself, then what hope have we licence fee payers?