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It is time to take another look at how BBC News coverage of Israel’s war on three fronts is going. Sadly, over a year on from October 7 and the beginning of the conflict between Israel and

Hamas and Hezbollah, both supplied and funded by Iran, BBC News remains as biased in its coverage of Israel as it was then when leading BBC reporters and presenters refused to call Hamas “a

terrorist organisation”.   Nothing has changed. There has been the Asserson Report which has documented the extent of the anti-Israel bias of BBC News and according to _ The Jewish Chronicle

_ on 4 October this year, a report by former BBC director of television Danny Cohen, which accused the BBC of  “false and damaging claims about Israel’s conduct of this war” and led “the

Chief Rabbi and the UK’s three most prominent Jewish organisations” to call “for an independent inquiry into impartiality at the BBC”. The Board of Deputies, the Jewish leadership Council

and the Community Security Trust, which has documented the appalling rise in antisemitic attacks over the past year, had all joined a call for an independent inquiry and said that the BBC’s

coverage has ”led many British Jews to conclude that the BBC has become, in practical terms, institutionally hostile to Israel… Inaccurate media reporting on the conflict contributes to the

deligitimisation of Israel in the public sphere, which in turn fuels anti-Jewish hatred.” The BBC has consistently rejected all accusations of anti-Israel bias, but has not defended itself

against particular examples of bias provided by its critics.  Let’s begin with Radio 4’s _ The Media Show _ , presented by Ros Atkins and Katie Razzall, and how they marked the anniversary

of October 7. In the 36 minutes dedicated to the conflict between Israel and Hamas there was not a single reference to accusations of BBC bias. Not one. You might think that a programme

dedicated to the British media might have thought these were issues worth raising, given recent accusations by two reports, and that very week by the Chief Rabbi and the three most prominent

Jewish organisations in Britain. But _ The Media Show _ ignored the issue. I have written to Ros Atkins several times asking him whether he would be addressing the question of BBC bias, and

the BBC’s director-general about the larger issue, as well as contacting a number of BBC flagship programmes about specific cases of bias, but not one of them has replied, though the

Director-General’s office acknowledged receipt of my complaint, without responding to any of its detailed complaints.  Here are some current examples of anti-Israel bias on BBC News. During

the last few days, one of the BBC’s main news stories has been Israel’s attack on southern Lebanon, in particular attacks on UNIFIL troops, condemned by the UN and numerous leading European

and North American politicians. That’s the story according to the BBC.  What has not been asked is why have UNIFIL done so little, if anything at all, to prevent Hezbollah firing tens of

thousands of missiles at civilians in northern Israel, forcing so many of them to flee their homes for almost a year? It has just emerged that Hezbollah dug a tunnel 100 metres or so from a

UNIFIL post on the Lebanon/Israel border and either UNIFIL were unaware of this or chose to ignore it. UNIFIL have not yet responded to images of this tunnel and its proximity to their post

and at the time of writing, BBC News has not shown these images. Nor have they shown images of the arms and missiles found by IDF troops in Hezbollah hideouts near the border but not found

by UNIFIL peacekeeping troops (see video footage shown by @VividProwess and Open Source Intel on X on 13 October). For footage of the tunnel showing its proximity to a UNIFIL post see

@Doron_Kadosh on X.  The larger question is not whether these tunnels and armaments should have been discovered now, but whether UNIFIL should have known about these arms and tunnels for

years as Hezbollah amassed a huge missile arsenal, larger than those of many nations’ armies, right under UNIFIL’s nose. This is not a question I have heard raised on a single major BBC news

programme.  The related issue is why UNIFIL insists upon staying where they are based in order, they argue, to keep the peace on the Lebanon-Israel border, when Israel is urging them to

evacuate from terror-infested areas so that the IDF can remove Hezbollah from Israel’s northern border to put an end to threats of attacks similar to October 7 and more than 30,000 missile

attacks on Israeli civilians so that they can return to their homes after having been forced to evacuate up to a year ago.  In the meantime, according to _ The _ Times _ of Israel, _ more

than 300 missiles were launched by Hezbollah at Israeli civilian targets during Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Isn’t that what peace-keeping troops are there for? And if

they are not doing that job, why should they be exposed to danger, caught between Hezbollah and the IDF?  Part of the problem is that BBC news programmes see a coalition of spokesmen and

women for the UN, UNWRA and now UNIFIL, NGOs and international medical charities, the Lebanese government and Palestinian doctors in Gaza, as neutral observers and therefore reliable

sources, without asking helpful questions about how reliable any of them actually are. In the same way, Palestinians in Gaza critical of Hamas rarely appear on BBC News programmes, whereas

those who angrily accuse Israel of war crimes frequently do. Dissenting voices tend to be excluded. Of course, there have been interviews with spokesmen for Israel or the IDF, for example

Colonel Peter Lerner and Danny Danon, now Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, and in the past with spokesmen for the Israeli government such as Mark Regev and Eylon Levy, but not with UN Watch,

which regularly monitors the partiality of UN organisations, Honest Reporting, which documents anti-Israel bias in the media, or Never Again, and there have been remarkably few interviews on

BBC News programmes with supporters of Israel such as Douglas Murray, Natasha Hausdorff from UK Lawyers for Israel, former Sandhurst lecturer Andrew Fox, Colonel Richard Kemp, who served in

the First Gulf War and in Aghanistan, or Lord Wolfson KC.  UNIFIL vehicle with a Hezbollah flag on it, photographed on 1 April 2024 posted on X by Never_Again2020 How often has the BBC

shown images of terrible destruction wrought by the IDF in Gaza and now in Lebanon, such as this photo posted by the BBC News website on 13 October, accompanied by the headline, “Inside

Israel’s combat zone in southern Lebanon”. Alternatively, how often has the BBC shown images or footage of Hezbollah missiles, armaments or tunnels with the headline, “Inside Hezbollah’s

combat zone in southern Lebanon”? On the same day as this picture was posted by BBC News, Israel’s defence minister said, “Hezbollah has only a third of its short and medium-range missiles

remaining.” This was not quoted by BBC News.  Then there are those news stories which rightly hit the headlines for a day or so, but then disappear, such as Iran’s missile attacks on Israel

on October 1, just before Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year). Or news stories which the BBC never covered because they didn’t happen, but were potentially important stories, such as this

from Israel, “Found intelligence in Gaza that reveals Hamas planned a 9/11 attack on Israel — targeting skyscrapers in Tel Aviv.” Hamas failed, but such stories in Israel all add to an

atmosphere of fear which is rarely reported properly by BBC News.  In 1988 Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman (no relation) published a book called _ Manufacturing Consent _ . Its greatest

insight was about how biased media news was in America. This wasn’t called propaganda and yet in many subtle ways it operated in the same ways as propaganda. Dissenting voices were excluded,

a consensus was established and rarely questioned. Anti-Israel bias in BBC News, Channel 4 News and Sky News matters whether or not you care about Israel. It matters because it shows that

news organisations who are meant to be impartial, and often are, sometimes are really not and this works in all kinds of ways, some subtle, some not. If this is not called out whenever it

happens, with as much evidence as we can find, it may next happen concerning an issue that really matters to you.    A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed

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