Top media professionals urge BBC to resist anti-Palestinian censorship
JVL Introduction
As reported in the Guardian today, hundreds of media professionals have joined the chorus of those calling on the BBC to resist anti-Palestinian censorship and reinstate the documentary film Gaza: How to survive a Warzone. Last week Director General Tim Davie received a letter, now signed by more than 600 British Jews including many eminent cultural and academic figures, protesting at the withdrawal from iPlayer of a film giving a rare insight into the lives of Palestinian youngsters navigating unparalleled horrors in their daily lives.
Sports personality Gary Lineker, journalists Gary Younge and Yasmin Alhibai-Brown and several BBC staff have joined over 500 film, TV, and media workers in condemning a politically motivated campaign seeking to discredit the boy narrating the programme on the grounds that his father served as Gaza’s Deputy Minister of Agriculture. Their letter says: “Conflating such governance roles in Gaza with terrorism is both factually incorrect and dehumanising. This broad-brush rhetoric assumes that Palestinians holding administrative roles are inherently complicit in violence—a racist trope that denies individuals their humanity and right to share their lived experiences.”
The letter, which appears in full here and below, goes on to “condemn the weaponisation of a child’s identity and the racist insinuation that Palestinian narratives must be scrutinised through a lens of suspicion. We urge you to reject these tactics, protect vulnerable voices, and reaffirm your commitment to stories that hold power to account.”
It adds: “As programme-makers, we are extremely alarmed by the intervention of partisan political actors on this issue, and what this means for the future of broadcasting in this country.”
This point is particularly important following attacks on the BBC from Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch, using the row about the Gaza film to call into question funding for public service broadcasting. Badenoch, who apparently inhabits a different universe from most people, accused the BBC of systemic bias against Israel, claiming that “Israeli interlocutors are robustly interrogated, and Palestinian officials can speak with little challenge”. She said the Conservatives could not support the BBC’s licence fee system “without serious action”. Labour’s culture secretary Lisa Nandy has expressed her “deep concern” – not about the censorship but about the film that is under attack.
Much as we despair at the BBC’s cowardly capitulation to pro-Israel zealots such as those who initiated the current campaign over the Gaza film, when its programme makers produce valuable work they deserve to be defended against ludicrous attacks. The so-called Campaign Against Antisemitism plumbed the depths of absurdity outside the corporation’s London HQ last night, waving banners accusing the BBC of being “spokespeople for terrorists”.
Follow the media professionals story at artistsforpalestine.org.uk
If you are a British Jew and have not yet signed the Jewish letter to Tim Davie you can do so here.
Palestine Solidarity Campaign is gathering signatures for an e-petition. Sign here.
This article was originally published by Artists for Palestine UK on Wed 26 Feb 2025. Read the original here.
500 programme-makers condemn censorship and racism after BBC pulls Gaza documentary
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It does seem and not for the first time that the BBC has applied collective guilt to the subject featuring in the centre of the Gaza documentary. Surely, it goes without saying, a child experiencing the horrors of civilian bombing should not be held accountable for political alignment or actions of a relative. The wars against the people of the middle-east from Iraq onwards were spun upon a similar collective guilt narrative – ‘Muslim’. Not only is that racist and long held as an immoral illegitimate tactic but the illusion that western wars were fighting extremism was finally shattered, when the US and its allies armed Islamic fundamentalists to bring down a non-western-aligned secular autocracy in Syria.
These are genuine Palestinian victims here, regardless of how severely or not other members of their communities are responding to colonial conquest and suppression of indigenous populations.
There can be no justification for the Israeli Government’s deliberate strategy to slaughter, maim and inflict such suffering and trauma on innocents, especially children.
The BBC must not participate in Israel’s propaganda of dehumanising Palestinians in order to make the ongoing genocide somehow more palatable for British viewers. The BBC once more, with this politically motivated censorship, plays into this appalling narrative of anti-Palestinian racism which facilitates continued war crimes.
What further proof is required to show the extent the depth the BBC has sunk to in I’its aim to strangle “Free Speech”. Just note the number from that “Pit” who have had to sign as Anonymous.