ng. Eighty year-old Inga Avramayan, who had been trying to assist her paralysed husband to a shelter, was killed in that attack. Yet as well as posing in front of the mural, Awadeyah promised more, writing: “Always rest assured that what is coming is more beautiful. God willing”.
Awadeyah’s social-media posts are publicly available for any journalist to see. Yet BBC Verify appears to have failed in the most basic of journalistic practices: checking one of their key sources. How could this have possibly happened?
The BBC has developed an apparent habit of accepting at face value what it is told by people presenting as Palestinian civilians or civic officials. It either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care that in too many cases these people turn out to be representatives of, or sympathetic towards, terrorist organisations.
It also appears to be increasingly the case that stories BBC reporters receive from Palestinian sources align with their negative assumptions about Israel, and that the corporation’s journalists don’t challenge or robustly investigate accounts that come from highly flawed and disreputable sources.
The failure of BBC Verify’s reporting on such a high-profile and emotive conflict is not just a profound journalistic failure. The stakes are regrettably much higher than that.
The BBC’s reporting is contributing to an atmosphere in the UK in which Jewish people feel unsafe, its flawed journalism adding fuel to the fire of anti-Semitism that is glowing ever more dangerously.
It is hard to think of a more damning indictment of the BBC. And yet, nothing changes. Senior BBC managers send emails about their commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, but words are meaningless to the Jewish community. Only actions matter, and the consistent anti-Israel bias of the BBC is a real and present danger to Jewish people.
It is time that the BBC’s senior leadership took accountability for this disastrous state of affairs.
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