British foreign secretary David Cameron rips BBC over its refusal to describe Hamas as a terrorist organization.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
The UK’s foreign secretary blasted the BBC for its policy of not calling Hamas “terrorists” in its news coverage Sunday in an interview on the government-funded media conglomerate.
“When you see what Hamas are prepared to do, you just realize the terrible, dreadful, inhuman people, frankly, that we are dealing with,” Cameron told BBC anchor Laura Kuenssberg.
“If you kidnap grandmothers, kidnap babies, you rape people, you shoot children in front of their parents, what more do they need to do for the BBC to say, ‘Look, these are terrorists?’” Cameron asked when listing some of the horrific war crimes the Muslim extremists committed during their invasion of Israel on October 7th, setting off the current war in the Gaza Strip.
“They are terrorists.”
The minister, who was Britain’s premier from 2010-2016, aired his fierce criticism while talking of a ten-second, undated video that Hamas had released the day before of British-Israeli hostage Nadav Popplewell.
Sporting a black eye and looking emaciated, Popplewell had intimated that time was running out for the hostages.
After the video’s release, Hamas announced that the 51-year-old had died from injuries sustained in an Israeli airstrike.
Israel has questioned this claim, noting that Popplewell was a diabetic, a fact that has raised concerns over his health given Hamas’ refusal to provide hostages with their proper medication, in contradiction to international humanitarian law.
Cameron has met with Popplewell’s family in the past and watched the clip, he told Kuenssberg, “and you just think, what callous people they are to do that, to play with the family’s emotions in that way.”
BBC Director-General Tim Davie reportedly committed to Britain’s Board of Jewish Deputies in late October to stop describing Hamas as a “militant” group and instead refer to the rulers of the Gaza Strip as “a terrorist organization proscribed by the U.K. government.”
This had followed growing calls by legislators, including Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, for the BBC, whose budget mainly stems from a required license fee that all British households pay, to use the term.
Yet just last month, the BBC, which has been accused numerous times of producing slanted, anti-Israel news coverage, had merely called Hamas a “Palestinian group” in an explainer that it published about the ongoing war.
The outlet defended its policy after Cameron’s remarks, saying in a statement, “No one consuming BBC News can be left unaware of the horrific nature of Hamas’ acts. We’ve made our long-standing position on this matter very clear – we use the word terrorist when it is attributed to others, such as the UK Government.”
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