The BBC international editor’s portrayal of the elimination of Sinwar

On the afternoon of October 17th, a BBC News website live page began covering a breaking story:

One of the subsequent entries on that live page prompted criticism on social media.

That choice of narrative-driven terminology was not however an accidental slip: it was also found – twice – in an article written by Jeremy Bowen which appeared on the BBC News website on the evening of October 17th:

Bowen: Sinwar’s death is serious blow to Hamas, but not the end of the war”, Jeremy Bowen, 17/10/24 [emphasis added]

“His death is a serious blow for Hamas, the organisation he turned into a fighting force that inflicted the biggest defeat on the state of Israel in its history.”

“On 7 October last year, in a meticulously planned series of attacks, Sinwar and his men inflicted Israel’s worst-ever defeat – and a collective trauma that is still deeply felt.”

Bowen also made use of the same terminology in an item aired on the BBC’s ‘Newscast’ podcast on October 17th and in a televised report aired on the BBC News channel the following day.

Bowen: “On the 7th of October last year, in a meticulously planned series of attacks, Sinwar and his men inflicted Israel’s worst ever defeat…”

At the Telegraph, Charles Moore had this to say:

“Following Thursday’s news that Israeli troops had killed Yahya Sinwar, the BBC’s international editor, Jeremy Bowen, wrote an article. This was Israel’s “biggest victory so far in the war against Hamas”, he said: Sinwar had made Hamas the “fighting force that inflicted the biggest defeat on the state of Israel in its history”.

Interesting, Bowen’s deployment of that word “defeat”. It usually refers to battle – Nelson defeated the French at Trafalgar, Montgomery defeated the Germans at El Alamein. But Bowen was talking about the events of October 7, 2023.
On that day, what happened was no battle (though a few Israeli soldiers tried to rescue the situation). These were planned attacks by armed terrorists against civilian non-combatants in their own homes or at music festivals, in their own country. The terrorists raped those civilians, kidnapped or killed them (or, in some cases, did all three). Those civilians were not “collateral damage” in a war fought under rules: they were the targets of barbarians.

Were they “defeated”? Implied in that word, as in Bowen’s phrase “fighting force”, is state-of-war legitimacy. Would he say that Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen, during the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe, “defeated” the civilians (most commonly Jews) whom they lined up and shot in their tens of thousands over several years? Did Stalin’s men “defeat” the 22,000 Poles they shot in the Katyn forest in May 1940? Wouldn’t “murdered” be a more accurate word? No law of war sanctions murder.

Bowen’s words are those of a moral imbecile, and call into doubt his professional detachment, but I am almost glad he uttered them. His thinking accurately reflects Hamas thinking. When we understand that thinking, we can see just how right and how important is Israel’s killing of Sinwar.

If “defeat” of your enemy means the intentional, longed-for killing of civilians, and a “fighting force” means those who exult in killing the old, the women and the children because they were (with a few exceptions) of the Jewish race, then the world should be able to see what Hamas is. It is not an army engaged in a conventional conflict about borders, but a set of death squads explicitly trying to wipe out an entire state defined chiefly by its ethnicity. The accurate word for that is genocide.”

But the BBC’s multi-platform promotion of Bowen’s mainstreaming of the Hamas narrative of ‘defeat’ is not the only remarkable aspect of the corporation’s coverage of the news of Sinwar’s death. In Bowen’s written report, readers find uncritical amplification of additional disinformation:

“In the ruins of Khan Yunis, the birthplace of Sinwar, Palestinians interviewed for the BBC by local trusted freelancers were defiant. They said the war would go on.

“This war is not dependent on Sinwar, Haniyeh, or Mishal, nor on any leader or official,” said Dr Ramadan Faris.

“It’s a war of extermination against the Palestinian people, as we all know and understand. The issue is much bigger than Sinwar or anyone else.”

Adnan Ashour said some people were saddened, and others were indifferent about Sinwar.

“They’re not just after us. They want the entire Middle East. They’re fighting in Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen… This is a war between us and the Jews since 1919, over 100 years.”

He was asked whether the death of Sinwar would affect Hamas.

“I hope not, God willing. Let me explain: Hamas is not just Sinwar… It’s the cause of a people.””

Moreover, that disinformation was also uncritically promoted in another report published on the BBC News website on October 18th, on the same BBC News website live page and (from 04:18) in Bowen’s above filmed report for the BBC News Channel.

Israelis and Palestinians react to Hamas leader Sinwar’s death”, Maia Davies and Pia Harold, 18/10/24

“In Gaza, some Palestinians said they believed Sinwar’s death could open a path towards ending the war, saying it left Israel with “no reason to continue this genocide“.”

“Speaking in the city of Khan Younis, which has been largely left in ruins by a year of bombardment and fighting, Dr Ramadan Faris said the outcome of the war did not depend on any single person’s fate.

“It’s a war of extermination against the Palestinian people, as we all know and understand,” he said.”

The fact that the BBC’s still unidentified “local trusted freelancers” provide it with such vox pop interviews with Hamas supporters does not of course excuse the BBC’s failure to clarify to its audiences that there is no ‘genocide’ in progress in the Gaza Strip, that Israel is not trying to ‘exterminate’ the Palestinian people and that it certainly does not “want the entire Middle East”.

Another interesting aspect of Bowen’s recent reporting is his portrayal of casualty figures in the Gaza Strip. In his filmed report as well as in credited entries on the live page, Bowen presented unverified figures as fact, without clarifying that they were supplied by the terrorist organisation which began the war and that they do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Bowen: “Israel’s response to the 7th of October attacks has killed at least 42 thousand people in Gaza.”

Unfortunately for members of the BBC’s funding public, it is once again all too clear that the promotion of Hamas narratives and talking points in content produced by the BBC’s international editor and some of his colleagues are an obstacle to understanding of the story.

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2 Comments

  1. says: Grimey

    Another “big victory” for Israel would be to kick the IPC’s so-called “journalists” out of Jerusalem – for supporting Israel’s enemies.

  2. says: Helena Goldberg

    The BBC is entirely responsible for the ignorance and anti Israel sentiment s of their non Muslim viewers and even some uninformed Jewish viewers.
    They should be held to account.

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