David Collier is an independent investigative journalist.
Make no mistake - BBC News is openly deceiving its audience. It is happening day after day, and article after article. Sometimes we can put the problem down to laziness, ineptitude, or an 'agency problem' (the fact most BBC articles on the Middle East are dependent to some degree on toxic BBC Arabic journalists and their networks). But often, the problem is clearly more sinister than mere incompetence.
We know for a fact that there are numerous BBC journalists who spend almost all their time ONLY looking for new ways to demonize Israel - and there are far too many occasions where a piece has been deliberately worked to hide a central truth from a reader. The only logical conclusion - is that there are BBC journos out there who are deliberately skewing the news.
BBC News deceiving readers - example 1
This heartbreaking article was published late Sunday night, 01 December. It is the story of a poor, innocent Lebanese family, who paid a devastating price during the conflict. Having already moved several times to get away from the fighting, the woman in the image - Rihab Faour - eventually lost both her children and her husband to a massive IDF strike. A devastating story with a crushing headline...so of course, the article went viral.
Hezbollah - the aliens from outer space
The article on Rihab Faour is a great example of a primary disinformation campaign the BBC has been running since Oct 7. The BBC completely misleads readers about the culture and make-up of the societies being discussed. The truth is that Hezbollah is even more embedded into Shia Muslim Lebanese society, than Hamas is into Gaza - but this truth does not suit the narrative the BBC journalists want to spread around.
Instead, the BBC describe a fictitious landscape, which suggests 99% of the local population has nothing at all to do with the terrorist groups (that most of them voted for!). What this does is create a completely false illusion - as if Hamas and Hezbollah are aliens that have invaded these lands, and have forced themselves on all these poor, innocent, locals. This is a blatant misrepresentation of the truth and places the IDF in an impossible war.
But a very different story is hidden away behind the words in the article - or in some cases omitted all together. For example, even though it can be found easily online, the original village Rihab Faour came from is (strangely) not mentioned in the BBC article. I found it on the FB page of her husband's workplace. It was Bint Jbeil. Which means that the BBC journo did not have to go far, to give some colour and context to the piece, because BBC News has previously referred to Bint Jbeil as 'Hezbollah heartland'. For whatever reason - this information - that the family lived in a Hezbollah heartland, was left out.
Then the article tells us the family left 'their unnamed village' - and headed to a suburb of Beirut -
"The Israeli bombs fell close enough to Rihab’s village that the 33-year-old and her husband Saeed, an employee of the municipal water company, gathered their daughters Tia, eight, and Naya, six, and fled to Rihab’s parents’ house in Dahieh, a suburb of the capital Beirut."
A responsible journalist would probably have added here that the Beirut suburb of Dahieh - is the capital of Hezbollah's 'state-within-a-state', which is WHY the suburb was being specifically targeted. But the BBC is not publishing this article to INFORM readers - it is being written to MISINFORM. So nowhere in the article is that vitally important fact mentioned either. The family left one Hezbollah outpost - and headed to another. (There are other places to move to if you are not Hezbollah, ed.)
And it gets worse. The family moves again, and is tragically struck (and children being killed is always a tragedy), during an Israeli attempt to kill Wafiq Safa, the head of Hezbollah’s co-ordination and liaison unit. Which means (whether it was successful or not) that the third place we know the family had set up home inside, was in, or next to, a building being used by Hezbollah's leadership.
And then there is this from Saiid Kabalan - Rihab Faour's husband. Posted on his timeline 11 years ago. A statement that he is proud to be considered a terrorist, and is 'at the service' of Hezbollah:
Whatever the truth, the death of the two children is a tragedy. But it is not the whole story. While the article is a one-sided demonization piece full of unverifiable tales, five vitally important and easily checked facts were completely missing:
- The family lived in a Hezbollah stronghold
- The family moved to another Hezbollah stronghold
- The family moved again - and again it was to a place used by Hezbollah leadership
- Shia from the south overwhelmingly support Hezbollah
- The husband had publicly signalled support for Hezbollah and willingness to be a terrorist.
These things certainly change the entire tone of the story - and they clearly do raise questions (that the journo never based to ask, like why did they take their children to Hezbollah strongholds when they knew Israel is bombing them?) They are also five crucial facts that the BBC did not want its audience to know.
BBC News deceiving readers - example 2
This next example was from a few days earlier. I start with a report from an article on events in Syria. This is important, because when the BBC journos and editors are not butchering the story to demonise Israel - the truth can sometimes slip out. This article was written by David Gritten, and published by the BBC on the 28 November, as Syrian rebels launched an offensive on Aleppo. Looking at the reasons for the timing of the offensive, Gritten rightly draws linkage with the damage that Israel did to Hezbollah. The article even uses the word 'devastated'to describe it:
We can see that the BBC journos know the truth. In the months in which Israel turned its firepower onto Hezbollah - Israel had 'devastated' the Iranian backed Shia terror group. So now we take ourselves back to a day before. It is the 27th November and as the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah went into effect, the BBC ran one of its skewed live events pages.
Suddenly such clear analysis disappears completely. Instead, in the updates was a detailed analysis from a BBC Arabic journalist in Beirut - Carine Torbey. If you read the piece - (especially the highlighted extracts) - you would be left thinking that Israel had lost the war against Hezbollah. It describes an Israel that had 'suffered on the ground', talks up Hezbollah's 'rocket capability', tells us that Hezbollah had 'extended' their attacks into Israel, before letting us know that Israel had suffered 'rising casualties', had been unable to return to the north, and that Israel's army 'was exhausted'.
Whoever wrote that ridiculous, one-sided, fantasy piece, hates Israel so much she has become a Hezbollah fan-girl. Given BBC journos and editors clearly knew by this time that Israel had devastated Hezbollah (destroyed 80% of its arms arsenals and eliminated its leadership,ed.) - they are caught here deliberately publishing fake news that deceives the BBC audience. This isn't new - (a few other examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11).
BBC News deceiving readers - example 3
The third example comes from a BBC 'in-depth' piece published Dec 3 titled 'why these Israeli men volunteered to fight - but now refuse to return to Gaza'. Written by Israel hating Fergal Keane, it relies on three Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza after October 7 but have refused to go back in on moral conscience grounds. This type of story is the perfect mechanism for the BBC to unleash a whole load of demonising accusations against the Jewish state- and even better - to use Israeli soldiers to do it. Two of the soldiers are named (Yuval Green, Michael Ofer-Ziv), one chooses to remain anonymous 'because he feared repercussions', which only adds to the tale of the vengeful and bloodthirsty citizens inside the demonic state of Israel.
Nowhere in the 'in-depth' article are dates given, so it appears to be a fresh tale.
But it is not a new story at all. The radical leftist Israel-hating Ha'aretz newspaper ran a piece on three Israelis soldiers who refused to go back into Gaza on June 27th - over FIVE months ago.
Two of the three soldiers are Yuval Green and Michael Ofer-Ziv, the same two who are named in the December 3 BBC article published five months later. We cannot know if the third soldier is the same one (Tal Vardi), because in the BBC piece, the third person chose to remain anonymous. But it is still the same story. Look - ABC News ran it on the 19 July:
This makes it old news - an unoriginal hit piece - student journalism at its worst. And why is BBC News simply copying and repackaging a five-month-old Ha'aretz story which the ABC says represents three of only a few soldiers? Because their journos are working hard to find any means they can to attack the Jewish state.
The method of the article is simple. It is always easy to distort the truth (to misinform) by finding outliers and making the story all about them. This is exactly how Jewish Voice for Labour were used by antisemites as cover throughout the Corbyn years. And how the small fringe cult Neturei Karta are welcome visitors to every anti-Israel demonstration.
Fergal Keane has done exactly the same here. He has found a few left-wing activists (both of those named in the article are hard-left activists) and used their words to say what he always wanted to say himself. This is one of the two named, Michael Ofer-Ziv, talking up the hard-left group 'Breaking the Silence' over three years ago:
Ofer-Ziv isn't fringe. He is fringe of a fringe.
Fergal Keane is choosing to misinform the BBC audience by relying on these fringe outliers without telling the audience exactly how fringe they are in [democratic] Israeli society. He is in effect using them to amplify his own discontent. In Fergal's head - Israel would be a far nicer state if only there were more of these people.
And if you look closely that truth is hidden away in the article's words once again. Keane writes of the 'deepening struggle over the future character of the Jewish state'... between the secularists and the 'religious right'.
This is the truth of Fergal Keane. One dimensional, binary, black or white poppycock. How this man is allowed to write endlessly about a state he does not understand is beyond me.
Israel is not a left-wing Ashkenazi state - it represents the spectrum of the Jewish people. Half of Israeli jews come from the Mizrahi communities. there is a large and growing haredi contingent, growing religious-Zionist Orthodox groups, many shades in between all of this - and let us not forget, Israel's large and growing Arab, Druze and Bedouin populations. The part of the spectrum covered by these hard-left secular activists is tiny - and shrinking. In political terms, it does not even exist. Israel's mainstream lives proudly with its Jewish identity and the reality of Israel's neighbourhood.
Fergal is just identifying the only part of the Israeli spectrum he is willing to accept. Hard-left wing, very secular, and Ashkenazi. The type of good 'white' Jew he might have as a neighbour in the UK somewhere. Someone he can share a full English breakfast with. Forget the Orthodox, Keane clearly has no time at all for the traditional Sephardi Jewish communities who are actually the powerbase of the Likud either. His is a supremacist and ultimately racist view that will only accommodate a world of people just like him.
Which is why he fits in so well at the BBC.
Addition from a reader: Note the photo below which gives the impression of joyous Syrian women. Then look at the store behind the women. Its sign is in Hebrew, so the photo must have been taken in Israel - perhaps they are Israeli Druze women - but few readers would know or notice that and the editor does not enlighten them.
