Radio Free Hamas

Radio Free Hamas

By Michael Posner

© Great Untold Stories Inc.

The BBC -- or, as we call it in my family, Radio Free Hamas -- has spent the last 24 hours — guess what? — demonizing Israel.

The principal thrust of its latest convulsion of defamation is Israel’s alleged refusal sufficiently to feed, clothe, house and play hop-scotch with Gazans.

The a priori assumption that Israel should succour a hostile population, be required to play the combined role of Mother Teresa and Florence Nightingale in wartime, is absurd.

Nevertheless, to keep the appeasement-oriented Biden administration at bay, and the American arms and ammunition pipeline flowing, Israel has diverted significant military resources to ensure the flow of food and medicine, opened new delivery corridors and facilitated distribution of polio vaccines.

In mid-October, the Biden administration had given Jerusalem an ultimatum — you have 30 days to augment humanitarian relief in Gaza or you will face a ban on U.S. weapon shipments.

This week, while urging Israel to do more, it waived the threat, noting that the Netanyahu government had reopened the Erez Crossing into northern Gaza, the Kissufim Crossing into central Gaza, opened new delivery routes elsewhere in Gaza, resumed aid deliveries to northern Gaza; expanded the coastal humanitarian zone, and instituted periodic humanitarian pauses in the fighting.

Predictably, none of this was remotely good enough for the chorus of United Nations and other international relief agencies, all of which have been complicit, actively or by default, in perpetuating the rule by terror of Hamas.

Hamas' 'humanitarian' accomplices have been sounding an alarm about imminent famine in Gaza for more than year. The famine never seems to arrive, but the BBC faithfully continues to parrot these antisemitic talking points.

What aid agency official's and the BBC never say is that Hamas terrorists have been routinely stealing much of the aid, and either appropriating it for themselves, or selling it at inflated prices to buy arms and supplies.

What they also never say is that, deliberately or through sheer incompetence, the aid agencies fail to actually deliver the food to those in need.

What they also never say is that Egypt, which shares Gaza’s western border, could easily be enlisted to provide further relief, but hasn't lifted a finger to help the Palestinians. The Egyptian view is this: better that Gazans should suffer, and Israel be blamed.

And most transparently, what they also never say is that if Hamas simply surrendered and released the 101 hostages that remain, the entire ordeal would end in a heartbeat.

Not content with perpetuating blood libel, the BBC (and the UN) also scorned the IDF's ongoing operation on the Syrian border to prevent infiltration by terrorists into Lebanon.

As described by the BBC, Israel is guilty of "severe violations" in constructing trenches and earth berms along the demilitarized buffer zone -- known as the Area of Separation -- established 50 years ago.

Of course, neither the BBC nor UN observers actually visited the border, and neither provided a single aerial or satellite photograph proving that Israel had violated a single inch of the buffer zone. But that didn't prevent the BBC from running the story about these "severe violations."

The word alleged never appeared. If a UN spokesperson mutters a phrase impugning Israel, it will be reported as a Koranic truth

At the tail end of the story, BBC Mideast Correspondent Lucy Williamson finally gots around to quoting IDF spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, who said the army is operating "on Israeli territory, making sure that a terror invasion is not possible, making sure we are defending our borders.”

Of course, the antisemitic rot has been festering inside the BBC for decades.

Calling it out yields nothing, though people occasionally try.

Last August, 208 British TV and film personalities signed a letter to the BBC board calling for an urgent investigation into what it called "systemic problems of antisemitism and bias" at the corporation.

In September, former BBC director of television Danny Cohen filed a 60-page report accusing the broadcaster of skewing its coverage against Israel.

That same month, a team of 40 researchers -- analyzing nine million words of news coverage -- found the BBC had breached its own editorial guidelines 1,533 times in early coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

In every instance -- there have been others -- BBC executives proceed to issue a pro-forma apologies, restate commitments to impartiality, and then proceed to double down on bias. Nothing changes.

Listening to the BBC, it’s entirely possible that you would never even know that Israel is actually fighting a war against Hamas in Gaza —that actual terrorists exist, and are hiding behind civilians in homes, hospitals, mosques, and schools.

The entire narrative depicts the IDF as engaged in deliberately bombing, starving, and forcibly exiling wholly innocent Gazas. Invariably, the victims are women and children. No terrorists ever seem to die, or are counted among the dead.

In Lebanon, the BBC is now recycling the tired Gaza war story line -- that 'nowhere is safe' from Israel's indiscriminate bombing campaign.

In a story describing this week's strike on a building in Beirut's Aramoun neighbourhood, it took journalist Carine Torbey 23 paragraphs to report, in a single sentence, that "the Israeli military has said many of those strikes have targeted Hezbollah infrastructure."

Not surprisingly, BBC correspondents were practically apoplectic delivering the list of vigorously pro-Israel appointments made by the incoming Trump administration -- Marco Rubio as secretary of state, Elise Stefanik as UN ambassador, Mike Huckabee as US ambassador to Israel, real-estate investor Steven Witkoff as special envoy to the Middle East, and former Democrat Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.

The BBC journalists I heard pontificating on BBC World Service were particularly appalled by the Huckabee nomination, because the former Arkansas governor is on record as denying that Israel illegally occupies the West Bank -- a foundational shibboleth of the prevailing anti-Zionist and antisemitic media narrative -- and has been brave enough to declare whatever everyone knows but dares not say —that there is “no such thing as a Palestinian.”

The larger issue, of course, isn't just that organizations like the BBC, CBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and others are completely out of touch with reality in characterizing the seven-front war Israel is waging. It's also that their steady drip-irrigation technique of demonization and delegitimization is pouring accelerant on the antisemitic flood now threatening to engulf our streets.