The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen’s Viciously Biased Coverage of Israel

No international media outlet — save the deplorable and comical Al Jazeera — can compete with the BBC in its anti-Israel bias. More on how the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen reports on Israel can be found here: “BBC’s Bowen states the obvious – but fails to explain,” by Hadar Sela, CAMERA UK, January 20, 2025:

As he has been doing for months, Bowen then goes on to laud “Palestinian journalists” in the Gaza Strip, without clarifying that some of those killed had ties to terrorist organisations while others – including at least one hired by the BBC – have made their ‘professional’ loyalties abundantly clear.

“Israel does not allow international journalists to enter Gaza to report freely, so the BBC and other news organisations rely on valiant Palestinian journalists to gather news for us. Reporting of the last 15 months of war would have been impossible without them. Israel has killed more than 200 Palestinian journalists in Gaza.”…

Most of these “valiant journalists” — Palestinians reporting from Gaza — whom Jeremy Bowen praises are, in fact, acting simply as conduits for Hamas propaganda: they repeat Hamas’ unverified claims as to dead civilians, warn about the “impending mass starvation” in Gaza that never materializes, and repeat incessantly the claim of “deliberate attacks by the IDF on schools and hospitals” without noting that those schools and hospitals were being used as hideouts for weapons and fighters. For Bowen, however, these are not propagandists, but brave souls risking their lives to tell the world the truth about the “war crimes” of the IDF.

Bowen also only gives the figures on casualties that are provided by the Gazan Health Ministry, which gets its figures from Hamas, which Bowen knows, but fails to note. He doesn’t say that the figures he provides are those given out by Hamas, letting his readers believe that there really is an independent body in Gaza that has calculated the number of casualties.

He writes that “Israel has killed almost 50,000 people at least,” giving a figure even larger than the 46,000 now claimed by Hamas. Furthermore, he omits entirely any mention of the IDF’s claim that it has killed 20,000 Hamas fighters. Nor does he mention that in the years preceding this latest war in Gaza, about 800 people died in Gaza each month from diseases and accidents. That would mean that in the last 15 months of war, about 12,000 of those 26,000 who died did so as a result of non-combat-related causes.

Bowen likewise claims that Israel “has left Gaza in ruins.” If much of Gaza is “in ruins,” that is a result of Hamas’ policy of embedding its fighters, and hiding its weapons, in civilian areas and buildings, including apartment houses, office blocks, schools, and hospitals. Bowen ought to have pointed that out; he did not.

Bowen also refers to the “prisoners” freed by Israel in exchange for a handful of hostages. Among the nearly 2,000 prisoners to be released by Israel, several hundred are terrorist murderers who were serving multiple life sentences. They are being traded for Israelis who are overwhelmingly civilians. Why not describe the ceasefire deal as what it is: trading innocent civilians for criminals, including many murderers?

Bowen doesn’t note that many more of those he calls “prisoners” will be released by Israel than the number of hostages that will be released by Hamas. This information on the lopsidedness of the exchange would have been simple for Bowen to include, but instead, he left it out.

Bowen does mention that the Houthis have been attacking ships to discourage the use of the Red Sea route. But he fails to mention that is being done in order to force ships that deliver imports to, and take exports from, Israel to avoid the Red Sea and to take the much longer, and more expensive, route around the Cape of Good Hope to Israel’s ports on the Mediterranean.

What keeps the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians (not just those in Hamas) going is not the “death and destruction” in Gaza, as Bowen claims. He should have told his readers that although Israel pulled completely out of Gaza 20 years ago, that did not stop Hamas from sending 6,000 of its members into Israel on October 7, 2023 to rape, torture, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis and kidnap 251 others, including babies and octogenarians. The Palestinians are overwhelmingly against accepting the existence of the Jewish state, no matter how much reduced in size it may become if the “two states solution” is ever imposed, and Israel is squeezed back within the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea.

The conflict continues, and will continue no matter what idiotic “two-state solution” may be imposed, because for the Palestinians and other Arabs, any territory that was ever possessed by Muslims in the past must remain forever Muslim. The Palestinians may differ among themselves on such matters as the tactics and timing of their continuing war against Israel, but not on the goal allowing them to claim Israel delenda est.

Bowen doesn’t want to investigate what is in the Qur’an, a curious lapse for someone who has spent decades reporting from the Middle East. If he were to do so, he would find the source of Muslim rage at “the Jews” who have against all odds managed to hold onto territory that “does not belong to them”— let’s forget 3500 years of the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel — but to Muslims.