Posted on 03/03/2024 6:19:04 PM PST by Conservat1
On Friday (1 March), BBC News published the latest findings from their ‘fact-checking’ flagship ‘BBC Verify’ – looking at the 100+ deaths that occurred during the chaos surrounding the aid convoy in Gaza.
BBC launched BBC Verify last year – a unit comprising of 60 journalists to help fact-check, verify video, and counter disinformation. Intended to be a gold standard in the age of fake news, BBC Verify has just ended up being another obsessive anti-Israel propaganda outfit.
While BBC Verify do not actually come to any conclusions over the aid convoy deaths, the piece is heavily slanted to blame the Israeli army for the deaths.
This latest ‘fact checking’ story rested heavily on one key eyewitness – a Palestinian journalist called Mahmoud Awadeyah. This is what he told the BBC:
This eyewitness account provides the backdrop for BBC Verify to imply that ‘Israel did it’. BBC News then rely on one other witness – the interim hospital manager at al-Awda hospital, to drive home the claim.
But there is a larger problem. BBC Verify don’t actually verify anything here. They just take these people at their word and publish these statements without question.
Anyone who follows my work knows that I always check Journalists where I can. Research has shown that 50% of the journos in Gaza appear to work directly for Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Who exactly is Mahmoud Awadeyah that the BBC relied on to create their BBC Verify headline?
Mahmoud Al Awadeyah posted an account on his FB from the scene. He has an IG account as well and uses both Awadia and Al Awadia on his social media.
He works for Al Quds Today and the Tasnim News Agency. Tasnim is an Iranian news agency set up and controlled by the IRGC.
Perhaps the pro-IRGC affiliation explains why his likes on the ‘X’ platform include a post about Hamas honouring the IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani.
But the problem goes way beyond liking posts. On 27 January 2023, as seven Israelis lay dead following a terror attack outside of a synagogue – Awadeyah posted these celebrations on Facebook:
In summer of 2023 Awadeyah stood in front of a mural that celebrated the murder of 82-year-old Inga Avramyan who was killed by an Islamic Jihad rocket when it hit her apartment in Rehovot. Awadeyah celebrated the killing, and promised more:
His timelines across social media are full of pro-terrorist imagery and support for violence:
There were also several posts on his FB that mourned for ‘Abu Hadi’ or Khalil Al Bahtini – a leader of the milItary wing of Islamic Jihad. Al Bahtini was killed in a targeted strike by Israel in May 2023:
And here they are together in this photo, with Awadeyah posting about how close they were:
This is the BBC’s key source for the BBC Verify article.
How can the BBC possibly consider this man’s evidence as reliable? He dances when Jewish civilians are murdered, and sits and breaks bread with the leaders of proscribed terrorist groups. Is there a sane person alive who believes this terrorist supporter would not lie for his cause?
Did nobody at ‘BBC Verify’ bother to look at his social media account?
The answer of course is no, of course they didn’t. BBC Verify consists of amateurish hacks, who have a supremacist attitude, and who don’t even bother to do the most basic of checks. This is not journalism – it is activism – driven by a bunch of privileged nobodies with limited intelligence and grossly inflated egos. Angry? You bet I am. The BBC anti-Israel drumbeat helps to spread antisemitism and it is all funded by the taxpayer. This is absolutely disgraceful.
But then this is just what BBC News do all the time.
On Tuesday 27 February, BBC News ran live coverage so Gazans could ‘share their daily lives’ with the world. It turned out to be another day of relentless anti-Israel propaganda dutifully funded by the British taxpayer.
Have no doubt, the BBC has mobilised against Israel and are using almost every dirty trick in the book to demonise the Jewish state. There is no attempt at balance, there is no quality to the output, and there is no truth in the final picture. BBC News coverage of the war is akin to a civil service version of Electronic Intifada.
Still don’t believe me? Just carry on reading.
Almost every day the BBC front page news covers an aspect of the war in an attempt to demonise Israel. The piece is always on the front page – and invariably negative. A simple browse through the BBC headlines captured in the wayback machine easily highlights this.
On 27 February the BBC decided to run a whole day with updates from Gazans telling everyone about the lives they are leading now. For example, one of the first out of the block at 7:40am was Dr Haya Hijazi. We are told she is living in a tent and the headline tells us she starts each day with a search for clean water:
Except this does not seem to be true. Haya Hijazi is a social media propagandist who runs constant campaigns for donations. She is quite successful and has 576,000 followers on Instagram. It is impossible to know how much money she receives, but her IG is full of videos of herself handing out produce. She clearly has no shortage herself. In fact, just before she told BBC she needed to ‘search for water’, she was busy filming herself handing out cash. This post from her own Instagram account on Monday:
Not your average Gazan then.
And so it went on. The first entry of the day was from Yahya Hussen – who used to live in the exclusive Al-Zahra neighbourhood. The next was from Samira Noorallah who used to live in a house ‘of 300 square meters’. These are not your average Gazans either. Then came this one – a ‘journalist’ called Aseel Mousa:
In simply referring to Mousa as a journalist, the BBC neglect to inform readers that Aseel Mousa writes for hate magazines like Electronic Intifada. She openly saluted Oct 7 on her X account. This is a celebratory post from Mousa on January 27 2023 at 19:07 – as seven Israelis were slaughtered in a terrorist attack:
These are the people BBC is giving voice to. Does nobody check anything? Or do they just not care?
A BBC News headline the following day was more subtle. It was about Biden’s primary victory in Michigan
This is the problem with bias – it often works like a magician’s assistant – most people look the wrong way, and if they do catch on, they end up down a rabbit hole arguing over semantics. But the real bias is not contained in the words – it is contained in the intent, design and process – it is institutional.
This is no surprise because the BBC’s pool of journalists is turning into a sewer full of anti-Zionist and/or woke activists. The journalist behind last Wednesday’s piece on Biden is Brandon Denon. Before taking up this position with the BBC he was the ‘Racial Justice and Equity Reporter‘ at the Indianapolis Star. He is married to Daliyah Assil (Dalyah Shaheera Drenon on FB), a ‘Syrian Palestinian’.
Assil’s family is active, and her sister Reem Assil has the ‘honour’ of having her own page on the Canary Mission website. She is listed for her glorification of terrorism and her pro BDS activities:
No, Brandon is not responsible for the pro-terrorist sympathies of his sister-in-law, or the ‘free Palestine’ posts of his wife. But anyone who thinks that a racial justice and equity reporter who is married into a Palestinian Syrian activist family is going to write impartial articles about Israel is simply deluded. But this is the reality of the BBC employee pool these days – more fit for Novara media or the Canary, than the British public service broadcaster.
And the BBC anti-Israel propaganda coverage is relentless. It is not just a few skewed headlines or dodgy journalists – it is as if the BBC turned its entire arsenal on the Jewish state.
Take a recent BBC Verify video featuring journalist Merlyn Thomas on the events in Nasser Hospital in Gaza.
The piece is all speculation, and Thomas does not actually verify anything at all in this ‘BBC Verify’ video. Worse still, she pushes statements such as “Doctors say a number of people there have been killed by Israeli snipers in recent days” – which is surely exactly the type of unverified propaganda rubbish that BBC Verify was created to address.
This is the result of nothing more than a few obsessives at the BBC finding another excuse to demonise Israel. Check Thomas’ social media. It is all one way traffic.
There are plenty of such examples from BBC Verify. Jake Horton & Daniele Palumbo looked at work taking place in Egypt near the Gaza border. Their speculation relied on an anonymous conspiratorial suggestion from an ‘aid worker’, and a quote from Andreas Krieg ‘an academic at KCL’. Andreas Krieg literally worked with the Qatari military (Qatar hosts key elements of the Hamas leadership). How can BBC Verify not mention this in an article related to Israel?
And Andreas Krieg seems to be a BBC Verify favourite – as Merlyn Thomas and co used him again just a few days ago when they tried to support Hamas claims over the numbers of civilian dead (BBC Verify’s attempts to pretend they can address this in the middle of a conflict just underlines how amateurish this all is).
But the bottom line is this: BBC Verify only engage in verifying things that try to undermine Israeli actions and statements. Could you imagine them addressing the fake narrative of the Gazan journalists? They never would – nor do they ever address anything that undermines the Palestinian propaganda campaign.
It is ALL one way traffic. That’s the bias.
And they know there is nothing we can do. The BBC is untouchable and the BBC Journalists truly believe they are of a superior breed.
To test the ground, I recently raised three official complaints with the BBC. Important note: I didn’t complain about bias because that can lead to an argument of subjectivity. I researched and found three items produced by the BBC that contained serious ethical failings.
I submitted complaints against all three. In all three cases I had to wait several weeks before receiving the same dismissive response.
They do not care – and we cannot touch them. I did refer the three cases to OFCOM as instructed in those BBC emails – but I am not hopeful there either. The BBC Journalists are unaccountable. The more I dig into the BBC’s institutional hatred of Israel, the more I come to the obvious conclusion that no fair minded person should be helping to fund them. They all help to spread antisemitism.
My research is unique and hard hitting. It also depends on community support.
I battle back against those who seek to revise history, demonise Israel – and I expose antisemitism wherever it is found. I fight when others don’t. The results speak for themselves and for ten years I have been exposing hate and creating headlines.
Possible other sources used to fact check:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4221546/posts
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4221257/posts
Lying SOBs!
A walk in a Northern English city is sufficient fact checking for the BBC.
Bbc=NPR,
Both biased liberal crappola.
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