Last month we noted that the September 18th edition of BBC Two television’s ‘Newsnight’ programme included a contributor’s promotion of a false claim concerning the ICJ:
“If you look at that off the back of what’s gone on in Gaza – the arrest warrants requested at the International Criminal Court for starvation as a weapon of war, what the International Court of Justice has said is a plausible genocide – what this means for how war is conducted and Israel can get away with this raises a whole new set of questions.” [emphasis added]
BBC FRAMING OF HIZBALLAH COMMUNICATIONS DEVICES EXPLOSIONS
With that false claim having gone completely unchallenged by the programme’s presenter, CAMERA UK submitted a complaint to the BBC requesting an on-air correction, which we were informed on September 29th would take more time to address.
On October 10th we received the following communication from the BBC Complaints Team:
“Thanks for drawing our attention to the Newsnight interview with former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy who was invited onto the programme to talk about Israel’s new strategy against Hezbollah.
He was making a variety of points and within this fast-flowing sequence we missed a brief mention of the ICJ case which, as you rightly point out, harked back to a previous understanding of its decision. We’re sorry we didn’t challenge this unfortunate error.”
Despite the request included in our complaint, we are not aware of any on-air correction having been made and no relevant entry appears on the BBC’s ‘Corrections and Clarifications’ page.
That particular error has been the topic of several complaints submitted by CAMERA UK in recent months.
In late April the BBC aired an interview with the former president of the ICJ in which she clarified that the court had not ruled “that there’s a plausible case of genocide” in the Gaza Strip.
A BBC INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS MULTIPLE BBC MISREPRESENTATIONS OF ICJ RULING
In light of that clarification, CAMERA UK submitted a complaint in which we requested that the BBC correct its own misrepresentations of the ICJ’s decision and issue clarifications concerning its reporting on the misrepresentations by others in nine items of online content.
As noted here a month later, although CAMERA UK did not receive a response to that complaint, six of the nine items underwent amendment:
BBC UNABLE TO REPLY TO A COMPLAINT ABOUT ITEMS IT ALREADY AMENDED
In May we submitted a complaint concerning the appearance of the same error in a BBC Radio Scotland programme. By the time the BBC responded, that programme was no longer available online and so no on-air correction was made. An entry did however appear on the BBC’s ‘Corrections and Clarifications’ page.
BBC ISSUES BELATED CORRECTION ON INACCURATE ICJ CLAIM
In September CAMERA UK submitted a complaint on the same issue in relation to an edition of the BBC World Service radio programme ‘Newsday’ – to which we have not received any response whatsoever:
BBC WS RADIO PROMOTES ‘GENOCIDE’ MISINFORMATION YET AGAIN
As we noted in our complaint concerning the ‘Newsnight’ item:
“The BBC has previously corrected (in May and June) at least seven items promoting the same inaccurate portrayal of the ICJ’s decision. It is therefore difficult to comprehend why this disinformation keeps reappearing in BBC content. “
It is even more difficult to understand why, five months after the former president of the ICJ clarified the matter on one of the BBC’s own platforms, the corporation continues to fail to issue timely on-air corrections in order to quickly and effectively relieve audiences of the inaccurate impressions created by inadequately challenged politically motivated contributors. That lack of appropriate action and transparency raises serious concerns about the BBC’s commitment to portraying this topic in an accurate and impartial manner.
CAMERA UK has submitted a Stage 1b complaint requesting that a correction be issued.
Daniel Levy is the president of the U.S./Middle East Project and a former Israeli negotiator with the Palestinians at Taba under Prime Minister Ehud Barak and at Oslo B under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He got his job after daddy “lord” Michael Levy pulled strings – remember he was Blair’s mate and had a desk at the UK Foreign Office.
What is strange about Middle East Eye project of Levy is that whilst it is run out of the USA https://www.middleeasteye.net/users/daniel-levy the web page states “Only England and Wales jurisdiction apply in all legal matters.” This is akin to saying I live and work in the USA but don’t pay National Insurance there.
I fail to understand why no government or government minister, no royal body or no legal institution can take the BBC to task over their blatent antisemitic worldwide broadcasting. Surely this must be illegal as it encourages hatred and escalates the divide between Muslims and Jews. Even more galling is that UK citizens are forced to pay for this crap. crap which provides fuel to stoke the fire already raging in the UN in all departments which have been corrupted and now only have one purpose, to castigate the one and only Jewish State #defundthebbc #defundtheunitednations #defundunwra