BBC’s UK reporting hindered by its own record on Gaza casualties

The BBC promotes a PPC's statement but fails to supply context.

On November 4th the BBC News website published a report titled “Labour Coventry South candidate Zarah Sultana apologises for ‘celebrate deaths’ post” on its regional ‘Coventry & Warwickshire’ page and on its ‘Election 2019’ page.

Interestingly, although the article was apparently not deemed relevant for publication on the website’s ‘UK’ or ‘England’ pages, it did for some reason appear in the ‘updates’ section of its ‘Middle East’ page.

“A Labour general election candidate has apologised for saying she would “celebrate” the deaths of world leaders, including Tony Blair.

Zarah Sultana wrote on social media in 2015: “Try and stop me when the likes of Blair, Netanyahu and Bush die.””

Readers are told that:

“She [Sultana] told the BBC the tweets were from a “deleted account dating back several years from when I was a student”.

“This was written out of frustration rather than any malice,” she said in a statement, explaining that her anger had arisen “from decisions by political leaders, from the Iraq War to the killing of over 2,000 Palestinians in 2014, mostly civilians, which was condemned by the United Nations”.”

That reference to “the killing of over 2,000 Palestinians in 2014, mostly civilians” of course relates to Operation Protective Edge which began after Palestinian terrorists launched hundreds of missiles at Israeli civilians and dug tens of underground cross-border tunnels to facilitate terror attacks. Notably the BBC’s report made no effort to introduce that relevant context or to inform readers that the claim that the Palestinian casualties during that conflict were “mostly civilians” is questionable.

That will of course come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the BBC’s own track record on the subject. Over five years after that conflict there is still no evidence of the BBC having ever independently verified the civilian/combatant casualty ratios which it continues to promote.

Instead, as noted here in the past, the BBC quotes figures attributed to “the UN” which are in fact sourced from the controversial report commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council more than a month before the conflict ended (originally headed by William Schabas) that was published in June 2015. 

A close look at that report’s methodology shows that the Hamas-run “Ministry of Health in Gaza” is one source of the report’s data, together with the UNOCHA “Protection Cluster”. As has been noted here previously, that “Protection Cluster” includes political NGOs, some of which also have a financial relationship with UNOCHA.

And so, with the BBC having spent over five years amplifying casualty figures and debatable civilian/combatant casualty ratios supplied by Hamas and NGOs involved in ‘lawfare’ campaigning against Israel that were funnelled through a UN agency and subsequently promoted in a controversial and biased UNHRC report, it is hardly surprising that the corporation’s journalists are incapable of informing their domestic audiences that according to studies, a significant proportion of the Palestinians killed in Operation Protective Edge were terrorist operatives.

Also notable is the fact that although this BBC report is based on an article published by the Jewish Chronicle which notes Ms Sultana’s prior connections to the controversial advocacy group MEND (see p21 – 30 here), the BBC apparently did not consider it necessary to communicate that information to its ‘Coventry & Warwickshire’ audiences.

 

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