The BBC’s Corruption is Entrenched

Now less shocking; still endlessly demoralizing

t would seem that the BBC, Britain’s state broadcaster, has forgotten that Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organization in the UK. Its recent documentary, recently pulled from the BBC’s own online streaming platform, featured grotesque mistranslations of warlike sentiments uttered by interviewees: the words “Yahud” and “Yahudy” (“Jew” and “Jews”) were rendered “Israeli forces”, while the Arabic for “jihad against the Jews” was subtitled “fighting Israeli forces”. In case this evidence of the BBC’s partisanship was too subtle, the documentary starred a teenager who has turned out to be the son of Hamas’ deputy agricultural minister, Ayman al-Yazouri. The then-13-year-old Abdullah was the perfect star: young, diminutive, articulate, and emotive. He narrated and starred in the film with an air of perfect innocence. So suited to the camera is he that Channel 4 also featured footage of the boy, claiming that he was selling chocolate on the streets of Rafah in order to help support his family. The specific details of his family background were conveniently never addressed.

The extent of the corruption surrounding the film is still being revealed: a payment equaling about a month’s salary was deposited into the bank account of Abdullah’s sister from the production company, Hoyo Films. Perhaps even more bleak is the track record of the journalists and film crew hired to produce the documentary: in a series of social media posts, cameraman Hatem Rawagh reportedly celebrated the October 7th massacre as well as a car attack in Tel Aviv in April 2023. Similarly, the film’s chief producer, Yousef Hammash, hardly conceals his own motivations, posting frequently about the “Israeli killing machine” and describing Gaza as a “prison” with no mention of Hamas’ role in the hardship and endangerment of its own people. Naturally, the BBC are deflecting the blame to the company, an independent outfit they hired, for alleged insufficient transparency – never mind their own responsibility to vet the companies they hire for producing films about the most sensitive geopolitical subject in the modern age.

There has been an encouraging amount of backlash from the British public and certain members of Parliament, like Conservative MP Stewart Andrew: in his remarks on the BBC’s failings, he noted the cowardice of the Labour Party, who initially avoided the subject by claiming to be ignorant of the details of the case. The backlash has even driven Abdullah al-Yazouri to issue a statement about the debacle: in a grimly funny twist, he too has turned on the BBC, declaring that “I did not agree to the risk of me being targeted in any way before the documentary was broadcasted on the BBC. So [if] anything happens to me, the BBC is responsible for it.” The statement arguably mirrors a broader trend in the relationship between the British State’s posturing charity towards Muslim communities by means of propaganda (see the Labour government’s obsession with criminalizing “Islamophobia”) and the beneficiaries themselves. Instead of facilitating integration and harmony between diasporas and the native population, such policies only embolden the historic and geopolitical resentment of Middle Eastern Muslims towards their Western hosts. One only has to look at their own stated beliefs about Britain. As Conor Tomlinson has written for Courage, the polling is alarming:

“32% of British Muslims favor the implementation of Sharia Law, 52% want to criminalize depictions of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed, and only one in four British Muslims believe Hamas committed murder and rape in Israel on October 7th.”

Though we can find solace in the recent rise in anti-Labour, anti-Islamist sentiment among Britain’s growing Right, there is a risk that these incidents – because they are so frequent – are becoming increasingly forgettable and normal. The questions remain: how exactly were such gross oversights allowed to take place in the deployment of taxpayer money? Why was the BBC emboldened to do something which took investigative journalist David Collier only five hours to unearth? These might feel like more bemusing and jarring questions if Britain were not already implicated in an unending series of misuses of public funds for the sake of Islamists and activists. But this latest scandal feels less shocking than fatiguing and demoralizing for anyone invested in the integrity of British public life. After the so-called “Boriswave” of cataclysmic immigration in 2021, the domestic growth of Islamist extremism both violent and nonviolent, and the Labour government’s suppression of public anger following horrific terrorist attacks and industrial-scale rape by Muslims, this story is almost underwhelming. Crucially, it shouldn’t be: that the BBC is shilling for Hamas, and that nobody seems to have been fired yet, is an outrage. But when outrages accumulate and ossify in public institutions, they become the new norm.