The BBC has admitted to not properly vetting a guest on its show, just two days after inviting for an interview a Swedish academic who lauded the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel as “fundamentally an act of liberation.”
Bushra Shaikh, a former contestant on reality show The Apprentice, was invited last month on the BBC One’s “Sunday Morning Live” program to defend women’s right to wear burkas in public.
Among her series of antisemitic remarks are the labeling of Jews who immigrated to Israel from Europe as “lying scumbags” and “the biggest charlatans on this planet,” according to The Telegraph.
Hours after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, she wrote, “Palestinians have done more in 5 minutes than Zelensky has done with 75bn. Humiliation is an understatement,” per the British newspaper.
In the wake of the Manchester synagogue terrorist attack in October 2025 that left two people dead and three more severely wounded, Shaikh placed the blame on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “He has Jewish blood on his hands,” she wrote on X.
IDGAF. The Manchester attack is on Netanyahu. He has Jewish blood on his hands. pic.twitter.com/m4jACCfz4k
— Bushra Shaikh (@Bushra1Shaikh) October 2, 2025
On the thousands of Iranian protesters who took to the streets in January and were gunned down by the Iranian regime, she cynically invoked the Holocaust by responding to initial casualty figures, writing, “The real number is 6 million.”
The real number is 6 million https://t.co/OKjHtSYGDw
— Bushra Shaikh (@Bushra1Shaikh) January 11, 2026
The BBC has recently spoken to a member of parliament, saying that the woman’s social media posts were not checked in accordance with “the standards we expect” and that changes will be made, per The Telegraph.
Shaikh denies that her views are antisemitic, the report noted.
Oct. 7 massacre ‘a fundamentally beautiful liberation struggle’
On Oct. 30, BBC Radio 4 invited Andreas Malm, 49, to speak on the “Today” program about a recent decision to bar his entry into the United Kingdom.
Malm, a senior lecturer at Sweden’s Lund University—whose works include the 2021 book “How to Blow up a Pipeline” and the 2025 book “The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth”—was due to speak alongside the co-founder of the outlawed Palestine Action group, Huda Ammori. However, a letter from Britain’s Home Office notified him that his presence was “not conducive to the public good,” according to the BBC.
Malm delivered a lecture in Stockholm two months after the Hamas-led invasion into the northwestern Negev on Oct. 7 left roughly 1,200 people murdered and 251 more kidnapped into the Gaza Strip.
“I think that a few decades from now when we look back at what happened on the 7th of October... we will see the mass killing of civilians as the ugly deplorable lamentable tragic dimensions of a fundamentally beautiful liberation struggle,” the Daily Mail cited the Swedish lecturer as saying.
He also asserted that “[we] haven’t seen conclusive proof that Hamas actually ordered its fighters to kill civilians,” per the British daily.
“I think that if you live in a concentration camp and you’re absolutely unable to move anywhere out of it. Then finally you have this paraglider and you managed for the first time fly out of the concentration camp and you land among people who are dancing... You would probably in that moment express the anger that you have inside you with some unplanned destructive violence against civilians,” Malm went on to say.
He was referring to Hamas terrorists who used paragliders to cross the border and reached the Supernova music festival that took place near the Gaza border at the time of the surprise attack.
A total of 378 people were butchered at the festival, and 44 attendees were taken hostage.
BBC host Sean Farrington asked Malm only once if his statement about the Oct. 7 attack being an “act of liberation” was connected to his entry ban.
Throughout most of the interview, the academic was given apt time to express his complaints over Britain’s alleged clamping down on his views.
Alex Hearn, co-director of Labour Against Antisemitism was cited by The Daily Mail as saying, “Malm has repeatedly voiced support for Hamas’s actions on October 7. Barring him from entering the U.K. was the correct decision. It is therefore all the more troubling that the BBC gave him a platform on Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme, where his views went unchallenged. It is also not the first time extremist voices have been given airtime by the broadcaster our licence fee funds, with little scrutiny.”
Responding to the Daily Mail’s inquiry about the insufficient challenging of Malm’s views on the radio program, a BBC spokesman said, “This was clearly put to Professor Malm towards the beginning of the interview.”
