Has the BBC committed a criminal offence?
Perhaps that shameful Hamas propaganda documentary will prove more of a problem than executives think
Quite how the BBC can have got itself into this fix is hard to believe. Everybody knows that the Gaza Strip is run by Hamas, which exercises total control over every aspect of life, or as many as it can still reach in its depleted state.
Every media organisation operating in Gaza via proxy knows that permissions, information and access are granted by the jihadi group. Indeed, a captured spokesman called Tarek Abu Shaluf told Israeli authorities that this gives them leverage over the international media; report what we want or we’ll put you on a blacklist and your coverage will come to a swift end.
Therefore, when the prospect of splashing £40,000 of license-fee payers’ cash on creating a documentary in Gaza by paying people on the ground to gather the footage and directing them “remotely”, it should have been quite obvious that there was a significant danger that Hamas would be involved.
As the former Associated Press correspondent Matti Friedman remarked, “many other media organisations are sitting quietly right now and praying no one examines how they operate in Gaza”. As a previous member of the international press corps covering the Middle East, he should know.
Yet the naïveté is staggering. In blunders Auntie, merrily commissioning a cameraman without taking the time to look through his social media account — you guessed it, he has apparently celebrated the killing of Jews — and allowing its proxies to set up an ecosystem of propaganda that had very close links, if not direct involvement, of Hamas.
You’ve seen the headlines. All three of the children involved in narrating the documentary had links to Hamas, including a charismatic little boy called Zakaria, 11, who was later found pictured wearing a jihadi headband and clutching an automatic weapon as he was embraced by a hooded terrorist.
The main star of the programme, Abdullah Al-Yazouri, 14, was revealed by the researcher David Collier to be the son of a Hamas government minister, while the father of another child in the documentary had served in the Hamas police and been imprisoned in Israel for terrorism offences.
That this was a propaganda show was obvious from watching the thing. As I observed in the Telegraph, some of the scenes were transparently hammy. “Trying to get drinkable water is a very hard task,” Al-Yazouri told viewers, while clearly visible in the background were stalls selling bottled water, soft drinks, bread, vegetables, clothing and pet food.
Thereafter, we met 10-year old Ranat and are told that she had started an “online cooking show with her sister” to take her mind off the “constant pressure of this war”. We see her choosing vegetables in the shouk and shopping in a small supermaket bursting with abundance. “I love cooking and creating food content,” she said. There followed further scenes of people eating kebabs, buying sweets and pumping iron in a gym with bottles of iced water.
Talk about confirmation bias. After shamefully standing by the programme and trying to weather the storm, the BBC has finally capitulated and is conducting an investigation. But it seems safe to assume that the eagerness of staff to produce a documentary on the innocent suffering souls of Gaza, who are ground under the Zionist jackboot, might have had something to do with it.
As the Telegraph drily reported: “There are suggestions that within the BBC there was a sense that executives were so pleased to have managed to produce a film out of Gaza from the perspective of children that they were ‘blinded’ to any problems in the making of it.”
Which brings me to the point. The executives at our national broadcaster will surely be aware that under the Terrorism Act 2000, it is a criminal offence to provide “material support, such as the provision of money” to a proscribed terrorist organisation. Like, say, Hamas.
UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) has asked counter-terrorism police to urgently investigate whether any payments were made by the film production company to anybody connected to the terror group.
If it turns out that this did indeed occur, the BBC may find itself facing scrutiny of a different sort, one that brings with it the threat of imprisonment. I wouldn’t wish this on anybody, of course. But perhaps it would be exactly the wake-up call the broadcaster needs.