Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television, warned that the BBC is at risk of becoming a "Hamas propaganda mouthpiece" with its biased coverage of the release of innocent hostages from Hamas captivity and terrorists from Israeli prisons, the Telegraph reported.
Cohen accused the BBC of engaging in an “appalling false equivalence” between the Israeli hostages and the freed terrorists by downplaying the tortures and starvation inflicted on them while emphasizing reports of mistreatment against Palestinian Arab prisoners. In addition, he accused the network of failing to note that many of the terrorists freed by Israel are guilty of violent acts, including murder and mass murder.
“In their rush to gloss over the undeniable torture, starvation, and beatings that hostages have endured and their determination to highlight claims of poor conditions in Israel’s jails, the BBC is repeatedly drawing offensive false equivalence between victims of war crimes and hundreds of convicted violent offenders," Cohen said.
He added. “The BBC is at risk of becoming a Hamas propaganda mouthpiece. They have repeatedly given a free pass to terrorists who have committed violent racist murder. It will be very hard for many in the Jewish community to ever forget it.”
Cohen, who served as director of BBC Television until 2015, has criticized his former network for its anti-Israel bias multiple times since the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023.
“I had not criticized BBC in any forum before the 7th of October, because I've been there myself and know that you can feel like it's coming from all sides," Cohen stated in an interview with the podcast UNHOLY last March. “Their refusal to use the word ‘terrorist’ to describe Hamas was misjudged and offensive, and then they doubled down.”
“Every large organization makes errors. When the errors keep coming, does that tell you it's just a sequence of bad luck, or is there more to it? In my view, this reveals institutional anti-Israel bias, and in some cases racism against Jews. I don't believe they take anti-Jewish racism as seriously as other forms of racism, because I don't think this would keep happening if they did. You get the same line over and over again - ‘BBC takes this very seriously’. I think the senior management is more focused on dealing with the crisis than rooting out racism against Jews."