Israel Lobby EXPOSED: What REALLY Happened at the BBC
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0:00Whatever you think of the BBC, make no mistake, the resignations of the director general and the head of news at the BBC is a triumph above all for the
0:088 secondsIsrael lobby. It's a triumph for Donald Trump and it's a triumph generally for the forces of the right. You look at the debate, does the BBC have an anti-Israel bias. It's just so utterly laughable.
0:1919 secondsIt's quite bizarre. And yet, that appears to be the debate that the political media class is prepared to have.
0:2525 secondsLet's talk about the BBC. It's never a good thing when we're talking about the BBC, is it? They have been so anti-Israel it hurts.
0:3232 secondsIt is still an organization that is, I mean, let's face it, institutionally anti-Semitic.
0:3737 secondsThe question has to be asked, why does the BBC have this deeply worrying pattern of bias against Israel? One of the great ironies about the whole BBC
0:4646 secondsstory is on the same day that Tim Davyy and the head of news resign, you get this video emerges of Rafi Berg who was
0:5353 secondshead of the Middle East desk at BBC online where he's talking about a book he's written about Mossad. You know, it's a wonderful thing to I mean, how
1:011 minute, 1 secondoften do you get to be accepted into a circle of trust among the people who
1:081 minute, 8 secondsbelonged to some of who still work for the Mossad and learn the most incredible
1:141 minute, 14 secondsstories of motor operandi tactics and subtifuge.
1:191 minute, 19 secondsHe comes across as a sort of gushing fanboy. You can feel his adolescent over excitement seeping out at you from the
1:271 minute, 27 secondsscreen. as a Jewish person and an admirer of the state of Israel, then you know to to know that these these people
1:351 minute, 35 secondscarry out these kinds of fantastic operations. I mean it's really it's what makes you tremendously proud.
1:441 minute, 44 secondsAbsolutely. You know talking about it uh you know still gives me goosebumps.
1:491 minute, 49 secondsMossad has this sort of speurious glamour. In fact, it's an organization that is notorious for having carried out extrajudicial murders all around the
1:571 minute, 57 secondsworld. In a photo of Rafi Berg where he's showing off his book about Wasad, if you look on the wall behind him actually, you can see firstly a picture
2:052 minutes, 5 secondsof himself with Mark Regger who used to be the Israeli ambassador to London and a signed letter from Benjamin Netanyahu to Rafi Burke. You would think that
2:142 minutes, 14 secondswould have huge significance to the story not reported anywhere. That video is also relevant because Rafy Berg is
2:212 minutes, 21 secondssuing Owen Jones. Owen Jones had done a very long piece for drop site analyzing the impact of Rafy Berg at BBC online.
2:302 minutes, 30 secondsRaffyberg might say, "Look, yes, I have my views and so on. Everyone at the BBC, we're all intelligent adults. We inevitably have political views. The
2:372 minutes, 37 secondsquestion is, does it affect the way we do our jobs?" Owen Jones presented huge amounts of information that suggested it
2:442 minutes, 44 secondsdefinitely was affecting the way he did his job. Raffy Berg is now personally suing Owen Jones, which is a particularly vindictive thing to do.
2:542 minutes, 54 secondsObviously risks ruining Owen Jones. Now, if Owen Jones loses that case, we are effectively being told not only do we
3:033 minutes, 3 secondshave to put up with this dreadful coverage from the BBC of Israel, if we point out it's dreadful, we're then in danger of being sued. And that really is
3:113 minutes, 11 secondsextremely disturbing. The resignations at the BBC actually to a degree reveal just why the BBC has been so appalling
3:203 minutes, 20 secondsin its coverage of Israel because you become aware of the enormous pressures that are at work on these people.
3:263 minutes, 26 secondsThey've lost their jobs now. So, you can see why it is they feel intimidated, their right to feel intimidated. The BBC's coverage of Israel has been appalling in the wake of these
3:343 minutes, 34 secondsresignations is likely to get even worse. Now, why is Western media and in particular the BBC like this? I think there are two things at play here. One
3:433 minutes, 43 secondsis the power of the Israel lobby. The Israel lobby is enormously powerful, well funded, particularly in America and people are scared of it. I mean the BBC, you can actually feel the fear. Bend
3:523 minutes, 52 secondsDepair who made the film about medics in Gaza, which eventually had to be broadcast by Channel 4, read him in the Observer and listen to him speak if you
4:004 minutescan. And the sheer naked fear there is at the BBC of the Israel lobby is quite extraordinary. They were constantly
4:074 minutes, 7 secondsworried what the Israeli lobby might say. But I'm a great defender of the BBC. I I think it's a wonderful institution, but I just think it's lost
4:154 minutes, 15 secondsits way on Gaza terribly. And that's because it's facing undue pressure and I don't know whether it's aware it's facing that undue pressure and is caving
4:244 minutes, 24 secondsin deliberately or whether um it just doesn't have the capability to withstand that pressure. There are also clearly
4:324 minutes, 32 secondsmassive vested interests that want to break up the BBC's monopoly. Rupert Murdoch and the people who dominate the Conservative party want to break up the BBC and that's been the case for years.
4:414 minutes, 41 secondsSo let's pick apart what actually happened here. The whole fraor is kicked off by a memo being leaked to the Telegraph. This memo is written by somebody called Michael Prescott.
4:504 minutes, 50 secondsMichael Prescott is an external independent adviser to what is called the editorial guidelines and standards committee of the BBC whose job is to
4:594 minutes, 59 secondscheck that the BBC is in compliance with its editorial standards. Michael Prescott in this memo is largely drawing on the work of somebody called David
5:075 minutes, 7 secondsGman, a long-standing BBC journalist who is the senior editorial adviser to the editorial guidelines and standards
5:155 minutes, 15 secondscommittee. The non-executive director of that committee is Robbie Gibb. Robbie Gibb used to be the head of comms, the head of communications for Theresa May.
5:255 minutes, 25 secondsHe later led a consortium in 2020 which took over the Jewish chronicle. He took it over with funds the source of which
5:325 minutes, 32 secondshas never been disclosed. I think it would be fair to characterize the Jewish Chronicle as being an aggressively
5:405 minutes, 40 secondspro-Israeli newspaper. But it is quite striking that here you have at the heart of the allimportant editorial guidelines
5:475 minutes, 47 secondsand standards committee these three individuals who reportedly are all very close to each other and work together
5:545 minutes, 54 secondsand very clearly come from a particular political perspective particularly on Israel. Michael Prescott who wrote this
6:026 minutes, 2 seconds5,000word memo says at the beginning of it I have no political ax to grind. I have no position on the Middle East which seems very unlikely. Very few
6:096 minutes, 9 secondspeople these days don't have a position on the Middle East, but I think it's really worth just forensically picking apart that memo. Prescott says he has
6:176 minutes, 17 secondsexposed stark differences between BBC Arabic and BBC English on the subject of Gaza. The English language website had
6:256 minutes, 25 secondsthree times as many stories that primarily dealt with the suffering of Israelis. It is hard to conclude anything other than the BBC Arabic's
6:346 minutes, 34 secondsstory treatment was designed to paint Israel as the aggressor. Now, you know, I think at that point it's it's pretty
6:416 minutes, 41 secondsclear this is somebody who's coming from a very particular perspective and one of the great faults of the BBC is it
6:486 minutes, 48 secondsimposes a false equivalence. For example, on a news broadcast, you might have a story about the family of a hostage in Gaza and the anguish they're
6:576 minutes, 57 secondssuffering and so on. Set against that, you might have a story about a bombing in Gaza where perhaps 40 people have been killed, 15, 20 of them children. If
7:057 minutes, 5 secondsyou are imposing an equivalence between those two things, you are indulging in a fundamentally racist arithmetic.
7:127 minutes, 12 secondsPrescott's objection to BBC Arabic appears to be that it does not engage in that fundamentally racist arithmetic, which most of us would see as a virtue.
7:227 minutes, 22 secondsPrescott says there was a problem with BBC stories about starvation in Gaza because they weren't telling audiences that the person highlighted had
7:297 minutes, 29 secondspre-existing medical conditions that might explain their emaciated appearance. In every famine, the first
7:377 minutes, 37 secondspeople who die are the people who are already weak. Obviously, that doesn't undermine the fact that there is a famine going on. And it's quite extraordinary that a professional
7:457 minutes, 45 secondsjournalist should come out with [snorts] a point as fatuous as that, particularly if he's trying to claim it's evidence of BBC bias. He talks about stories the BBC
7:547 minutes, 54 secondsdid on the Israeli assault on the NASA hospital in KHN unice. The BBC article did not cover the evidence Israel had
8:038 minutes, 3 secondsuncovered of Hamas operating there, that is at the NASA hospital. Having made a
8:098 minutes, 9 secondsvery long film about Gaza, I can tell you if you are still buying Israeli claims that Hamas places bases inside
8:188 minutes, 18 secondshospitals, then you have absolutely no right whatsoever to be lecturing other journalists. These claims by the
8:268 minutes, 26 secondsIsraelis are absolutely discredited. And if Michael Prescott is still buying these claims, then it says everything about his own journalism. Incredibly, an
8:358 minutes, 35 secondsaudience survey revealed BBC Arabic was almost as trusted as Al Jazzer. Is Al Jazer the new gold standard the BBC
8:438 minutes, 43 secondswants to aspire to? Well, if only one would say Alazer has enormous respect in the Arab world and it's actually enormously to the credit of BBC Arabic
8:528 minutes, 52 secondsthat it's actually placed up there on a par with Alazer. If you actually forensically analyze this memo, this is not a forensic intelligent insightful
9:019 minutes, 1 secondanalysis of the BBC's journalism. It's a litany of fairly conventional right-wing talking points. There is nothing here that he's really exposing. What's
9:099 minutes, 9 secondsextraordinary in Prescott's memo is he doesn't once refer to the enormously authoritative study done by the Center
9:169 minutes, 16 secondsfor Media Monitoring, which did a huge empirical study of the BBC's output about Palestine. The BBC attaches 33
9:249 minutes, 24 secondstimes more weight to the life of an Israeli than to an Palestinian. and it is 11 times more likely to give the
9:319 minutes, 31 secondsIsraeli perspective on something than the Palestinian perspective. Now, by any rational criteria, if you're purely looking at it analytically and
9:409 minutes, 40 secondsjournalistically, the issue clearly is whether the BBC has an anti-Palestinian bias. But that's not now the public debate that will take place. And make no
9:499 minutes, 49 secondsmistake, this is definitely a victory for the Israel lobby. The BBC will now be even more intimidated in its coverage
9:569 minutes, 56 secondsof Israel. And BBC Arabic, which was a rare little beacon of excellence within the BBC, tragically will now also
10:0310 minutes, 3 secondsdoubtless be intimidated and bullied into watering down its excellent coverage. All of the reporting around
10:1110 minutes, 11 secondsthis memo focused on the misediting of that Donald Trump quote. The edit of the Trump speech in the BBC documentary is
10:1910 minutes, 19 secondsbad. It's bad journalism. You spend your whole life in an edit suite splicing together different things people have said. It's absolute cardinal rule that
10:2710 minutes, 27 secondsyou cannot distort meaning and that clearly distorted the meaning. But let's put this in context. It happened a year ago. The point that was being made which
10:3510 minutes, 35 secondswas that Trump stoked people up on January the 6th and played his own part in inciting it. In broad terms that was right. Which is why no one really spotted that that quote was inaccurate.
10:4610 minutes, 46 secondsAnd also this is one editorial error.
10:4910 minutes, 49 secondsThe idea that that should result in the resignation of the director general and the head of news at the BBC is absolutely absurd and it's a reflection
10:5810 minutes, 58 secondsof the fact that they're clearly terrified of Donald Trump. So what's extraordinary here is the contrast. This is a single mistake in one documentary.
11:0411 minutes, 4 secondsIn 2022 at Alazera, we did an analysis of the infamous 2019 panorama about
11:1211 minutes, 12 secondsJeremy Corbin and anti-semitism. We identified four really fundamental, really glaring and journalistic problems with that film. We showed that one
11:2111 minutes, 21 secondscrucial email had been so ruthlessly edited as to distort its meaning.
11:2511 minutes, 25 secondsThe anti-semitic abuse I received was what I was subjected to every single [music] day.
11:3111 minutes, 31 secondsTelling me Hitler was right, telling me Hitler did not go far enough.
11:3411 minutes, 34 secondsThe BBC admitted that the Izzy Linga story, Hitler was right, Hitler didn't go far enough, was wrong. Other than that, you just got that the program met
11:4311 minutes, 43 secondsthe editorial standards of the BBC. No one else in media picked it up at all.
11:4811 minutes, 48 secondsAnd to this day, no one else in mainstream media picks that up at all.
11:5111 minutes, 51 secondsWhat's extraordinary about that panorama is far from exciting any controversy or criticism, it was actually nominated for a BAFTA. The reaction depends entirely
12:0012 minutesnot on the merits of the journalism, but on the power of the person you're attacking, which is why a criticism of Donald Trump has led to the beheading of
12:0812 minutes, 8 secondsthe BBC. Whereas their absolutely shocking film about Jeremy Corbyn had no consequences whatsoever. All of these
12:1512 minutes, 15 secondsdebates capture a really profound truth around debates in British public life.
12:2012 minutes, 20 secondsThe merits of the argument, the actual evidence is secondary. Far more important is the power and the reach of
12:2712 minutes, 27 secondsthe people putting the argument and the frequency and the fervor with which they put that argument. It's the old thing
12:3412 minutes, 34 secondsthat if you repeat a lie often enough, people in the end will sort of be bludgeoned into half believing it. I think the problem they have with
12:4212 minutes, 42 secondsPalestine in Israel is that the weight of evidence to the contrary is now so enormous that the Labour Party and the
12:5012 minutes, 50 secondsBBC are just losing the public. The public has stopped listening to them on this issue and is forming their own opinions.
12:5812 minutes, 58 secondsThis whole story illustrates that the BBC, whose coverage of a number of issues was already very poor, is now being bullied into making that coverage
13:0613 minutes, 6 secondseven worse. It highlights more than ever the need for independent media and independent media that caters to the millions of people who already feel
13:1513 minutes, 15 secondsalienated from the BBC and other mainstream outlets. I would strongly recommend that you donate to Double Dandies on Patreon.
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