BBC Verify is promoted as BBC’s flagship ‘fact checking’ news service. But as you will see below – BBC Verify is a cheap, amateurish, propaganda device- that is driven by unacceptable bias, and publishes blatant lies worthy of a Russian Soviet era misinformation service.
BBC Verify ‘verifies’ the Iranian missile strike
On Tuesday evening, 1 October 2024, Iran fired approximately 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Many were intercepted, but several sites were hit. On Wednesday evening BBC Verify published a 1 minute 20 second video – titled ‘where Iran’s missiles struck in Israel’.
The BBC Verify team tells us they have been looking at ‘where Iran’s missiles have landed’ and the video is to counter ‘a lot of false imagery’ being circulated online. They say they managed to verify strikes in the vicinity of three key locations – all of them military sites:
This creates an immediate problem. Why only these three? For example, a verified strike by Ramat Gan shopping mall has not been included. The BBC had reported on this – and so were well aware of it – but for some reason, BBC Verify left the shopping mall strike out of their analysis.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that BBC Verify were deliberately pushing a pro-Iranian propaganda line that the missiles were fired only at military targets.
But it gets a lot, lot worse.
BBC Verify and the five mile miss
Having told us that the three targets verified were ‘in the vicinity’ of military targets, we are then shown the evidence. The first we see are several apparent strikes on Nevatim airbase, but it is when the journalist turns her attention to the attack on the Tel Nof base that things become surreal.
We find the base was not hit at all. This is the script:
Location two is the Tel Nof airbase. In this video you can see a crater where a missile has landed. It is not the airbase itself, but a school a few miles away”:
What? So the Iranian’s didn’t hit Tel Nof airbase with this missile – they hit a school. So why isn’t the school listed in the original map. How on earth can BBC Verify know that the intended target of this missile was an airbase? They can’t.
The school that was hit is the Shalhavot Chabad school in Gadera. About 5 miles from the place BBC verify tells us was the target.
To put this into context. Below on the map are two marks, Gaza City Centre and Jabalia camp. The distance between them is approximately the same distance as between the school and the airbase. Can you imagine Israel hitting a school in Jabalia camp and BBC Verify virtually forgiving them by suggesting it was a close call on a Hamas military target 5 miles away.
There is no excuse for this – and it appears to be a deliberate attempt to whitewash an Iranian ballistic missile strike on a school. Why on earth didn’t the BBC put the school as one of the verified strikes on the map at the start? We all know why. For the same reason they didn’t mention the strike on the shopping mall. It doesn’t fit the propaganda story they are seeking to tell.
The journalist – Nawal Al-Maghafi
The piece was presented by BBC Verify’s Nawal Al-Maghafi.
Nawal Al-Maghafi was born in Yemen – one of the countries that just happens to be firing ballistic missiles at Israel. She gives talks at the British Yemini Society.
Following her career path, she began with Al Jazeera – the Qatari state mouthpiece – and wrote for Middle East Eye – another pro-Qatari propaganda machine. Some of her MEE pieces – such as a 2015 video on a journey to ‘Al Aqsa Mosque’ – have (for whatever reason) been removed from the web.
More troublingly she has worked with PRESS TV – a state media outlet of Iran – the country that launched the 180 missiles that Maghafi is meant to be reporting on.
And in 2012 – she is tagged into a conference in Tehran, where the participants ‘held talks with Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Khamenei’ (his speech is here). Attendees also discussed topics covering the Islamic revolution and the victory of the ‘glorious’ resistance in Lebanon and Palestine against the Zionist regime. I cannot ‘verify’ her attendance at this Islamic youth event – but she is clearly tagged into this event.
And then there are things like this – several ‘free Palestine‘ posts on her social media. In this image she is even displaying classic pro-Palestinian stupidity – by implying the Neturei Karta cult (a tiny and very Iran friendly group) are somehow representative of British Jews:
This is the impartial, unbiased journalist fronting the BBC Verify propaganda piece.
Time for BBC Verify to call it a day
The report is fitting for PRESS TV – or Electronic Intifada – or RT Today. It should not – under any circumstances – have ever been funded by the British public.
The BBC has spent decades demonising Israel – but since Oct 7, the situation has become blatant and inexcusable (a few examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). Two damning reports have recently been published on BBC Bias (Asserson, Cohen)
The BBC has gone completely off the rails. It isn’t just that it is incapable of putting together proper impartial coverage of Israel’s conflict with its neighbours – it is that it doesn’t think it is doing anything wrong. The inability to even begin to identify the problem it has – means it cannot be salvaged in its current form. No public funds should ever be used to finance something so deeply and irredeemably flawed.
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Many thanks, David, for keeping us informed. Wishing you and yours good health, happiness, peace and prosperity in the year ahead.
PS Heard on Woman’s Hour on Radio 4 that tomorrow’s programme will include an interview with a Lebanese mother who has been displaced by Israel’s attack. Do you have any idea when the BBC will be broadcasting a programme about the 60,000+ Israeli citizens forced to leave their homes because of the Hezbollah rocket bombardment which started on 8th October last year in support of the Hamas atrocity og October 7th?
Oct 1938 Iron Dome
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Reading Eagle Oct 30, 1938, p. 5
https://books.google.com/books?id=Um4hAAAAIBAJ&pg=PA5
[Fifty-]Mile-Long Barbed Wire Barrier Erected on Northern Frontier Of Palestine to Bar Arabs.
By H. R. Knickerbocker.
INS Staff Correspondent.
Northern Palestine Frontier, Oct. 29, (INS) Jews are a game of the anti-Semite killers in great sections of Europe.
There is not even a game law to protect them, but in Palestine with their handicaps, they have at least some of the images of self-defence.
They have today completed the greatest piece of fortification that the Jews have ever constructed for Jews since they put up the wall around Jerusalem two thousand years ago….
Its further significance is that an extension clear down the Jordan to the Dead Sea would make of that sacred but meager stream an impenetrable barrier to keep out the gangs which still come across from Trans-Jordan to join their brothers in the war upon the Britsh and the Jews. The 400,000 Jews of Palestine believe that, given a free hand by the British, they could take care of the 900.000 Arabs in Palestine, if Arab gangsters from abroad could be excluded. It would only involve another 70 or 80 miles of wall. The confidence of the Jews may seem astonishing to those who have not seen the Jews of Palestine…
Both Jews and Arabs regard the Holy Land as their national home. Scene below shows Arab tribesman saluting Premier Mussolini as they pass a reviewing stand. Untamed and merciless, these tribesmen art determined to halt the Jewish “back to Palestine” movement….
“Hitler of Near East”
High upon a mountain crest in the Lebanon sits serenely his eminence, the chief of all the Arabsin Palestine, the paramount public enemy of the Jews in Zion, the Hitler of the Near East. He greeted me with all the simple dignity of an Arab fuehrer. Haj Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem, mufti of all the Muftis of Palestine, is in exile. Over the mere shooting of a British district commissioner, he had to leave Jerusalem a year ago.
… and win his way to kingship, that greater kingdom of a revived Caliphate might seem within his grasp.
Many Jews claim that 90 per cent of the fiercely violent Arab opposition to the British mandate, to the Balfour declaration, to Zion and the Jewish National Home springs from this one man.
Most Jews and many British admit that his eminence provides the leadership, and through him flows the money from Arab, German and Italian sources to inspire and feed the Arab terror in Palestine.
MSNBC isn’t much better than BBC.
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Ta-Nehisi appeared on NSNBC – Alex Wagner Tonight, Oct 9, 2024.
He tells of his trip to Hebron (which is a hot place with frictions usually after a radical mosque sermon or an Arab terror attack). That a soldier asked him for his religion, when he replied he didn’t have one, he asked him about his parents’, when he replied that they were Christian, he let him pass.
MSNBC’s Wagner plays dumb and asks him a leading question, ‘did you think this was racist?’ He replied, oh yes.
Obviously, he didn’t want to get what asking about his religion has anything to do with security, given Islamist terror. Worse, a TV anchor should have known better.
Do you mean, the one who wrote that nasty book about Israeli Jews?
Dehumanizing Israeli victims of radical Arab terror, A CBS thing now?
Oct 14, 2024.
Fresh after over 60 were wounded and 4 died from Iran backed Islanists (who like Gaza regime “health ministey” use its civilians to make sure they die), CBS had its journalist busy showing shocking hospital images of Arab kids in Lebanon.
Do Israeli Jewish injured have any pain, Mr CBS, you think?
David, how about a piece on Wikipedia’s hysterical antisemitism? It’s not as widely known as that of the BBC, HRW, C4, Amnesty, UNESCO …
David, as you know, I have been contributing to this comment section for 10 years now and always in a way that has been totally supportive and respectful of your work; work that I admire hugely. There have been times when I’ve questioned the value of this section and on more than one occasion endorsed your idea of removing it altogether. This almost always coincided with the presence of a particular ‘Troll of the Moment’ and you know the characters to whom I refer; posters that came in bad faith for the exclusive purpose of distraction and disruption and often just to poke at a few neurotic readers for a quick ‘gotcha’ moment. You finally determined that they offered nothing here, diluted sensible discussion and chose to moderate them from view.
That you maintain an active archive here means that anyone in the future can search this body of work and see their contributions from around 2014 onwards and see what vile and unconstrained online antisemitism looked like in the early part of the 21st century. As such it is a very useful trove of historical material in the public domain.
What I don’t understand is the appearance in the recent months of a new type of ‘contributor’ normally styled as Sally, Gina, Laura as above. The style and presentation of the posts is always aligned and a more cynical mind may suggest that the content owes more to Chat GPT than to authentic contribution. Moreover the substance is often wholly decontextualized from your articles, makes long and impenetrable points with obscure links and appears to add nothing of relevance to the point at hand. Now, I may be miles wide of the mark here and Sally, Gina and Laura may be delightful people with bona fide views. Conversely this may be a new approach which is part of the overall strategy of the site. However, I wonder whether the 5 scroller non-secateurs drafted in an odd style add any more or less to the value of the site than the old naysayers. At least the latter proved a point that as long as such extremists existed your work and that of your many active supporters remained crucial and highly relevant.
Anyway, please excuse the intrusion. As we have also agreed, we are fighting different battles against different protagonists. Both are hard fought and both require a very considered tactical approach. I have the utmost respect for you and yours. יחד ננצח
I totally agree with you about the BBC and I stand with Israel. Meanwhile, I ask you again to take down your false accusations of anti-Semitism against Sir John Leale with regard to his wartime leadership in Guernsey.