For a genocide to occur, everything that people think is wrong has to first be turned on its head. There have been endless examples of this gruesome phenomenon in the past 21 months; Monday’s report on the BBC’s scrapped documentary about the plight of children in Gaza is just the latest instance.
Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone was a rare example of the unbearable experiences of Palestinians being properly investigated by Britain’s public broadcaster. But within the media, this documentary has become a bigger scandal than the suffering of Palestinian children.
When a researcher named David Collier, who has written widely in defence of Israel, discovered that the 13-year-old narrator of the film, Abdullah, was the son of the deputy agriculture minister in Hamas’s government, all hell broke loose. After a deafening chorus of condemnation from pro-Israel lobby groups, British newspapers and the government, the documentary was taken off iPlayer.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/15/bbc-alienated-everyone-gaza-bias
Monday’s review states that the failure to disclose this connection violated the BBC’s editorial guidelines, which stipulate that the corporation must “provide full transparency to its audience”. But it concludes that Hoyo Films, the indepehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/15/bbc-alienated-everyone-gaza-biasndent production company that made the film, did not intentionally mislead the BBC. It says Hoyo’s view had been – rightly – that Abdullah’s father had a “civilian or technocratic” position wihttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/15/bbc-alienated-everyone-gaza-biasthin Hamas as opposed to a political or military role, and that it had simply “made a mistake” in not informing the BBC.
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