Numbers don’t lie, it’s the people who do the lying….

Day 13.  When the horror of the news from the towns that border Gaza became know, we started seeing numbers.  How many had been murdered, how many injured, how many kidnapped.  The death toll initially was in the low hundreds, and then over the next few days, as bodies were counted and identified it climbed to over 1,300.  Still hard to fathom.

On the 17^th October (Day 11) reports came through of an explosion at a hospital in Gaza.  Within minutes Hamas had blamed Israeli rockets falling on the hospital and the Palestinian Health Ministry (controlled by Hamas) had declared there were 500 dead. Shortly afterwards the BBC simply repeated what Hamas had said, that the missile hit the hospital and there were 500 killed.

Swift and efficient reporting you might think.  Sadly not.  The BBC swallowed whole the lies put out by Hamas with the same speed as if they had come from the UK Government.  Astonishing.  Just over a week after the world learned of the atrocities committed by Hamas, the BBC decided to put that little incident behind them and accepted at face value what the terrorists had to say.  Never mind the murders, never mind the slaughter of 40 babies, never mind the war crime of kidnapping over 200 people.  No one is worse that Israel as far as the BBC is concerned.

This treatment of Hamas is disgusting.  The BBC are treating Hamas and Israel as somehow being equal, either as a result of some hideous idea that this is presenting balance, or what is more likely, an inbuilt hatred of Israel and a total disregard for Jews.  The suspicion the BBC has for Israel comes shining through over and over again.

Hamas have claimed – according to the BBC – that 471 people were killed.  The IDF have a different number and the BBC claim that the IDF won’t release it and in view of the lack of access to the site, the numbers cannot be verified. So why quote 471 at all?  Why quote a number which the BBC know is at best unreliable and worst a grossly over inflated figure?  And crucially why report a figure from a terrorist group which controls Gaza with a rod of iron and rigorously ensures that no information is given out other that which is approved or produced by Hamas.

Laziness is one reason.  Hamas controls which journalists enter Gaza and restrict what they see and who they speak to.  Much easier for the BBC just to go along and accept the figures as they come out.  Plenty of time later to pretend they tried to verify it.

This is not the first time that the BBC has taken the side of Hamas.  In 2015 when interviewing people in Gaza, showed the interview with the Palestinian using the word ‘Yahudi’ – meaning Jew – but translating it as ‘Israeli’.  Apparently they took expert advice which said the interviewees didn’t mean Jew when they said Jew, they meant something else.

This gives us a clue as to why the BBC behave as they do.  It is not laziness, it is worse than they. The BBC hates Israel and have little regard for Jews so printing unverifiable figures supplied by terrorists works well for them.  Now, this is bad enough but the impact on Jews in the UK has been significant.  Anti-Semitic incidents are running at a record high, and the BBC should bear some responsibility for this.  By portraying Israel almost constantly as the reason there is no peace with the Palestinians, and continually showing Gazans as victims of Israeli aggression (instead of victims of Hamas manipulation), there is little wonder that the attacks on British Jews are at an all-time high.  The numbers given out by Hamas are just that, numbers, it is the BBC which turns them into fact without caring whether they are correct or not and in doing so just make matters worse for British Jews, but then, for the BBC, we probably deserve it.