The Media is the Message > BBC apologizes for woefully antisemitic Gaza documentary; BMJ rebuked for quality of Covid_19 report

 

BBC Apologizes for its Gaza Documentary

Mar 3, 2025 10:00 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

The BBC has been forced to publicly apologize for showing Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, a so-called “documentary” about how children are faring in Gaza. The film is full of carefully chosen, and even some deliberately staged, views of children trying to survive amidst the rubble. The film-whitewashes Hamas as a brave “resistance” movement and presents the IDF as a group of killers bombing schools and houses indiscriminately — no mention is made of the tremendous efforts made by the IDF to warn civilians away from sites about to be targeted — and engaging, we are supposed to believe, in “ethnic cleansing” or even “genocide.” It was revealed that the 13-year-old Arab boy who narrated the film, Abdullah al-Yazouri, is the son of the deputy minister of agriculture in the Hamas-run government, and another member of the family was one of the founders of Hamas.

When this link to Hamas was discovered, the BBC pulled the documentary off the air. It has also apologized to the public. It was then further discovered that the documentary filmmaker Hoyo Films had paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to the mother of the boy for his appearance as narrator of the documentary. This money ultimately came from British taxpayers, who, through mandatory license fees, support the BBC, and thus those taxpayers indirectly paid Hoyo Films for, among other things, the huge amounts it a Hamas-linked family. It’s a major scandal, and more about it can be found here: 

BBC Apologizes for ‘Unacceptable’ Mistakes With Gaza Documentary, Admits Palestinian Interviewees’ Ties to Hamas

by Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner, February 28, 2025:

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on Thursday apologized for “unacceptable” and “serious flaws” during the filming of a documentary about Palestinian children living in the Gaza Strip.

The admission came after the BBC removed the documentary, titled “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone,” from its iPlayer streaming platform on Feb. 21 when it was discovered that the film’s 13-year-old Palestinian narrator (now 14), Abdullah Al-Yazouri, was the son of a senior Hamas official.

The documentary was also taken down after it was revealed that two of the cameramen who worked on the BBC documentary had voiced support for Hamas, and following revelations about inaccurate translations in the film that masked the antisemitism of some participants. Examples of the latter issue include mistranslations in the film that refer to Hamas terrorists as an “army” and “jihad against the Jews” as “resistance against the Israelis,” according to Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), a British volunteer-based charity. The Telegraph cited at least five instances in the film where the Arabic word for “Jew”— “Yahud” or “Yahudy” — was mistranslated as “Israel” or “Israeli forces,” or removed altogether.

You can imagine how those two Hamas-supporting cameramen could choose views that would be most heart-rending, of collapsed buildings and just outside hospitals where wounded children are being rushed in, held in the arms of their parents or civilians moving in and out of Gazan cities on trucks piled high with families’ meager belongings, in search of safety, but also views of Hamas operatives shown as bravely resisting, though greatly outgunned and outnumbered, the Israeli war machine.

Then there is the effect of deliberate mistranslations in the English subtitles. For example, a sweet-faced boy’s Arabic is translated as “our army needs to resist the Israeli forces,” when what he actually said was “Hamas must kill the Jews.”

The BBC has also now admitted that licensing fee payments were given to the family of Al-Yazouri, who is the son of Hamas’s Deputy Minister of Agriculture Dr. Ayman Al-Yazouri. Pro-Israel researcher David Collier said the father and son come from the same family as Hamas founder Ibrahim Al-Yazouri. Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization by both the United Kingdom and United States.

The BBC, via Hoyo Films, gave British taxpayers’ money to a family deeply linked to Hamas, that in the UK (and the US) is a designated terrorist organization. There cannot be many of these British license-fee payers who, if they only had known, would have approved of such use of their money. The BBC will not be allowed to investigate itself. That will be done by an independent commission. Complaints about anti-Israel animus at the BBC have been made, and brushed off, for decades. This time, at long last, heads — even some very powerful heads — will roll. Fiat Justitia ruat caelum.

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BMJ rebuked over coverage of US gov COVID report that revealed we were right about nearly everything Raphael Lataster (BPharm, PhD) Mar 13   READ IN APP   Be better, BMJ. Source. Late last year, while Biden was still (apparently) the President, the US government put out a report that somehow didn’t get much attention, a report that vindicated just about every thought we ‘COVID skeptics’ had about the scamdemic. Nothing too major, just that the lockdowns, school closures, face mask mandates, and vaccine mandates all didn’t help, and probably did more harm than good; the worth of the jabs was very much exaggerated; there was hella corruption involved; oh, and the virus probably leaked from a Chinese lab. Source. Okay then. Wait, what?! This is absolutely freaking huge, and will no doubt feature in many a lawsuit going forward (hi there!), how wasn’t this on the front page for every news outlet, all day, every day, for months? Russiagate dominated the news during President Trump’s first term, for years, and that was total bullshit. One reason why this didn’t get much public attention is how it has been covered by the media and the medical journals. I’ll have more to say on the report and its coverage soon, and it does align nicely with human rights organisations finally acknowledging our rights were infringed, but for now I’ll focus on how the BMJ (British Medical Journal) - one of the world’s top medical journals - reported on it. Source. Their coverage led to a rebuke (by yours truly) which they sportingly published, though only as a ‘rapid’ response, and after several months of waiting. Source. Highlights: Writing for the News section of the BMJ, Dyer begins by claiming that Democrats and Republicans published “competing reports”. This is misinformation, potentially outright disinformation. There is one offical report put out by the subcommittee. Bipartisan. Passed unanimously. And effectively critical of the policies of both parties. If some of the Democrats decided to put together a much smaller, obviously partisan, and unofficial report, goody for them. You would think one of the top medical journals could get this basic fact right… Oh, and how dare they question the government! What are they, COnSPiRacY tHeoRisTs?! They state that there was “no new evidence” for the lab leak hypothesis, but there was, it just wasn’t ‘direct evidence’. Dyer notes that the Democrats (via the non-official, and actually partisan, report) wonder if a hybrid scenario could be true. I note that is quite pointless as a hybrid scenario still involves a lab leak, and I remind everyone that this is all a big change from the situation early on where even thinking of a potential lab leak would see your reputation destroyed. All the stuff mentioned above about how the report vindicates so many of our once unpopular opinions, which is supported by much scientific evidence, some even published/mentioned in the BMJ, is seemingly brushed off by Dyer who briefly mentions this under the heading “Politicised investigations”. Classy. They make no attempt to engage with or even mention the evidence, like the Cochrane study discussing face masks, the Johns Hopkins study on lockdowns, or the JECP4 articles on the effectiveness and safety of the jabs likely being very much exaggerated. The claim that the CIA found the question over COVID’s origins “unanswerable” aged very poorly, as very soon after the “CIA acknowledged that the lab leak hypothesis is the more likely one”. Reminding the BMJ of the infamous comment about COVID’s “fatality rate [being] on par with Ebola”, I hope going forward that the fine journal will report on such matters “with due care”.

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