The Scandalous BBC Freelancers in Gaza 

The BBC has quite a stable of journalists consumed by a deep anti-Israel animus that frequently grades into naked antisemitism. Such English reporters as John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet (oops — she’s Canadian), Barbara Plett Usher (who wept over the fate of that “frail old man, Yasser Arafat” as he fled Beirut), and Yolande Knell constitute a long BBC tradition of calumniating Israel, and justifying Arab terrorists. But so, too, do the Arabs whom the BBC employs to report from inside Gaza. More about several of them, including the particularly odious Samer Elzaenen, can be found here.

BBC Arabic journalist Samer Elzaenen has called for Jews to be burned “as Hitler did,” The Telegraph quoted him as saying in a Saturday report.

Elzaenen, 33, who has been reporting from Gaza, has been posting a series of statements on social media that condemns Jewish people, and has also called for violence against them, the Telegraph added, noting that his social media activity in the past 10 years has endorsed and celebrated more than 30 attacks on Israeli Jewish civilians. The social media posts were originally unearthed by The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).

He has appeared on the Arabic-language branch of the UK public broadcaster more than a dozen times since Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023. He called the Hamas terrorists who entered Israel that day “resistance fighters.”

Elzaenen had also made similar statements in May 2011 on Facebook, the report added, quoting him saying: “My message to the Zionist Jews: We are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.” 11 years later, he wrote on the social media source, “When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything.”

The Telegraph noted a post the BBC contributor made over two years ago on a car ramming in Jerusalem that claimed the lives of two boys aged eight and six and a 20-year-old man, saying that the victims “will soon go to hell.”…

So these Arab “journalists” in Gaza were not regular members of the BBC staff, but contributed pieces as freelancers. Does that matter? They were still being allowed to have their reports appear on the BBC, still not being banned by the BBC even though they had extensive records of praising terrorist murderers and mocking their victims, and even calling for Hitler to be emulated for his genocide of Jews. Elzaenen wrote on social media that “we shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.” That was posted in 2010, and he has made similar statements, urging ever since that Jews — not Israelis, but Jews — be killed until there are none left. His posts on social media were surely known to people in the BBC in London — surely they vet those they hire, including freelancers, don’t they? — yet the BBC continued to carry this Hitler-lover’s reports as the work of a “trusted journalist.” Is there a better example of the BBC’s tolerance for murderous antisemitism?

The Telegraph also reported earlier this month that yet another of its journalists made antisemitic comments, with writer Ahmed Alagha comparing Jewish people to devils.

“And as we know, the ‘Israelis’ are not human beings to begin with; rather, they are not even beasts. Perhaps they belong to a race for which no description can capture the extent of their lust and sadism,” Alagha wrote.

For Ahmed Alagha, Israelis are not human, not even beasts. They are a special race of bestial beings; it’s not possible to describe the extent of their “lust and sadism.” But of course this is projection. The only “lust and sadism”in the Middle East that comes at once to mind is that exhibited by the 6,000 Hamas operatives who crashed into Israel from Gaza on October 7, 2023, and proceed to engage in rape, torture, mutilation, and murder. Girls were raped, repeatedly, in front of their parents, before being killed. Some were “raped” using various objects, including knives, stuck into their vaginas. Babies were burned alive, as were whole families whose members were first tied together with wire, then set alight. Women’s breasts were sliced off before they were killed. Men had their genitalia cut off, and their eyes gouged out and then they were murdered. There is much more in this vein, too ghoulish to recount. That’s the real “lust and sadism.” The Israelis don’t rape (in fact, they’ve been accused of being “racists” because they don’t rape Arab girls and women), don’t torture, don’t mutilate, and do their very best — see the testimonies of British Colonel Richard Kemp and West Point Professor John Spencer — to minimize the killing of civilians.

BBC Arabic has launched an investigation into several of its journalists after it came to light that they supported Hamas, according to a report from Jewish News, just over a week after the Hamas terrorist attacks occurred.

At the very least, one hopes that the BBC will conduct a thorough review of the reports, and the postings on social media, of every Arab journalist, whether on the permanent staff or a freelancer, whose reports the BBC now relies on, but will promptly cease to have anything to do with those who exhibit the kind of murderous hatred that Ahmed Alagha, Samer Elzaenen, and Ahmed Qannan, all reveal. And once the Arab reporters have been thoroughly vetted and those showing an extreme anti-Israel bias have been discharged, the BBC should investigate the British members of its staff who cover Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, to see about their anti-Israel biases. More heads should roll as, little by little, the BBC engages in a necessary cleansing of its Augean stables.