A prominent media watchdog last week accused BBC Arabic of being “sloppy, reckless” and lacking in judgment after it platformed a Palestinian pundit who the broadcaster knew had celebrated Adolf Hitler and the killing of Jews.
The Telegraph on Saturday quoted a spokesperson for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) saying this in connection with a July broadcast on BBC Arabic where the journalist, Samer Elzaenen, was quoted as an eyewitness from Gaza.
He is quoted as saying that Israel has a “starvation” policy aimed at “genocide and takeover,” according to the report.
A BBC spokesperson told the Telegraph that the BBC “should not have used” Elzaenen as a source.
The platforming of Elzaenen came several months after BBC Chairman Samir Shah was asked in an interview about Elzaenen, telling Radio 3 in May: “The Arabic service, we are looking at it. We’ve been examining it.”
Shah’s comment followed revelations in April about comments about Jews on Alzaenen’s social media accounts that he is believed to have made.
“In April, the BBC said it ‘was not aware’ of his antisemitic record. By July, that excuse was gone. … CAMERA made his history headline news. And yet, they still chose to platform him. That isn’t just sloppy. It’s reckless,” CAMERA UK, the group’s department that deals with the United Kingdom, wrote on X Sunday. “Once someone has publicly called to ‘burn Jews like Hitler,’ their reporting on Israel obviously cannot be trusted.”
In a Facebook post from 2011, Elzaenen addressed “Zionist Jews”: “We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.” In 2022, he posted: “When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything.”
Elzaenen has endorsed more than 30 attacks against Jewish civilians in Israel over the past decade, often celebrating the deaths. After a 2023 Jerusalem attack that killed two young boys and a 20-year-old man, he commented that the victims “will soon go to hell.” He has also referred to Hamas gunmen who massacred concertgoers at the Supernova music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, as “resistance fighters.”
That the BBC quoted him as an eyewitness months after this became known “is deeply alarming, and speaks volumes about the corporation’s own judgment and credibility,” a CAMERA spokesperson told the Telegraph.
A BBC spokesman told the Telegraph: “There is no place for antisemitism on our services. We strongly condemn the hateful views expressed by this individual in 2011. Although he is not a BBC journalist, and quoting him does not mean we endorse his views, we should not have used him in this way.”
The revelations come amid growing scrutiny of BBC Arabic’s coverage and allegations of systemic anti-Israel bias within the service.
Another freelance contributor, Ahmed Qannan, who has also appeared on BBC Arabic, praised Palestinian terrorists and expressed hope that wounded Israeli civilians would die.
Ahmed Alagha, who has reported for the British public broadcaster since early 2023, described the Israeli army as “the embodiment of filth” and referred to Jews as “the devils of the hypocrites,” according to a Telegraph report from April.
CAMERA issued a report on BBC Arabic in March, which it noted is the “largest, most heavily funded and most influential foreign-language service” of the BBC.
CAMERA found BBC Arabic had “become synonymous with toxic hostility against Israel and, at times, anti-Jewish racism. It has given a platform to murderous terrorists, presented apologists for terror as independent ‘experts,’ allowed extreme views to go unchallenged in interviews and echoed the language of Hamas.”
