In an interview on the BBC on Monday, the host of the British news channel appeared to agree with an activist’s false claim that the Jewish state was committing atrocities in the war in the Gaza Strip.
Tadhg Enright was interviewing Omar Shakir, the regional director of Human Rights Watch, on Israel’s decision to shut down the pro-Hamas Qatari-based channel Al-Jazeera‘s operations in the country.
When asked by Enright for his reaction, Shakir did not mince words. “This is an assault on the freedom of the press,” he stated. “Al-Jazeera is a critical source of information that many Palestinians and others in the region rely upon. Instead of trying to muzzle reporting on atrocities, the Israeli government should stop committing them.”
Enright then said, “Yeah, indeed,” presumably agreeing with the claim that Israel was carrying out atrocities. He then went on to ask Shakir, “I wonder what their claim, the Israeli government’s claim is that Al Jazeera has become a mouthpiece for Hamas.”
The Qatar-based network has vocally denied the charges that it has been pro-Hamas, but in recent weeks it has consistently sided with the terrorist group’s false claims of mass killings, including in cases where it was clear Hamas was using bodies as props and falsifying numbers.
This was the case even after Israel showed those claims to be false, as in the case of an aid truck being attacked by a mob, which caused deaths when people trampled on each other without Israel’s involvement, and the slander against Israel of supposedly creating mass graves in a hospital, where it turned out to be Hamas’s own creation.
This is not the first time the BBC has been accused of being slanted towards the Palestinian terrorist organization. Immediately after the war broke out in October, it refused to call the Islamic group a terrorist group. The BBC later said it would use that term to describe the organization as being a “proscribed terrorist group by the U.K.,” although presumably without claiming it was indeed such a group.
