Having been caught consistently working with terrorist supporters to create BBC News articles, you would have thought that BBC journalists would have learnt by now to conduct basic checks before holding hands with local journalists. Yesterday’s BBC News article on Syria proves that whatever the problems may be – these issues are far greater than just incompetence, laziness or stupidity.

When Lucy met Mayar

Last night BBC News published a piece on Syria. I say it was about Syria, but in fact it was just another anti-Israel hit piece. The article, written by Lucy Williamson, was all about how Israel is ‘taking advantage of the political vacuum to extend its reach’. As usual it was one-sided, deliberately misleading, and written to demonise the Jewish state. It also contains glaring omissions that if they had been addressed – would contradict the article’s anti-Israel slant. But that is all normal for the BBC, and not what I am here to focus on.

As I have discussed before, people like Lucy Williamson have an agency problem on the ground. And turning to people who can help – means relying on the local BBC Arabic network. So when an article such as the Syrian one is put together, Lucy is not the one doing all the work. And the BBC often need to credit the input of other journalists. They also do it at the bottom of the article in the hope that nobody will notice. And sure enough, at the bottom of the article on Syria, we are given three additional names:

Yousef Shomali is a BBC Middle East Producer. Charlotte Scarr is a relative newbie at BBC radio 4 and completely irrelevant to this. It is the third name, Mayar Mohanna who is the local Syrian based journalist. The pecking order becomes clear. A local journalist, an Arabic speaking BBC professional, and only then the BBC’s pro, Lucy Williamson – who gets to put her name to all the information the two Arabic speakers are handing her.

And a quick check lets us know that Lucy and Mayar have worked together before. Two days ago Lucy Williamson wrote a piece about those looking for family who went missing in Assad’s Syria. And those who helped write that piece – were Radio 4’s newbie Charlotte Scarr, and none other than the local Syrian journo Mayar Mohanna:

And this is how it works. Lucy has met Mayar and built a working relationship with her. Mayar becomes a key person that Lucy uses to ‘find out the truth’ about what is happening in Syria. She makes Lucy’s life easier. They soon become ‘besties’ and follow each other on Instagram:

The terrorist supporter

If only Lucy Williamson had bothered to check Mayar Mohanna’s FB page. It is not a common name and took me about 4 minutes to find the account – and another 5 to authenticate the profile (to make sure it was the right person). I then did exactly what any decent journalist should have done – and checked to see what Mayar Mohanna had been posting. How else can you possibly know if this journalist is professional, impartial, and trustable? These celebratory posts (glorifying the Oct 7 atrocities) were posted by Mayar Mohanna posted on Oct 7 and Oct 8:

This celebration was posted when Iran launched 100s of ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1:

And this is what Mayar Mohanna posted after Nasrallah was killed – that she stands with the resistance for ever:

This is the journalist that helped the BBC put together the article that demonised Israel. The one Lucy Williamson felt could be relued upon. This is what your license fee is paying for.

The real problem

This latest nightmare can be added to a long and growing list (a few other examples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 12) of problems I found with BBC articles.

The mistake however is to think this can be addressed by tinkering around and making minor changes or talking to the BBC nicely. If you want to understand the depth of the problem, then consider this: Lucy Williamson has happily turned to Mayar Mohanna for help in putting together articles. It is just one in a long line of unforgivable connections BBC journalists have. Yet those same journalists would consider me (and those like me) impossible to touch.

I am a liberal, democracy supporting, free speech adherent, who stands near the political centre, abhors violence, and thinks almost the only thing we should not tolerate is the intolerant. Yet my politics are considered extreme in BBC circles. Too extreme to touch even. Yet they happily mix and mingle with people who support the violence of radical Islamic terror groups and worship the regimes behind them.

Which is why the BBC is lost. This elitist, BBC supremacist mindset – that looks down on the rest of us – has built a rabbit hole so deep for itself – that their journalists have actually managed to rationalised this behaviour. They think all this is okay and people like us are the problem. And given that reality – there really is no way back from there.

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