‘Hezbollah are acting rationally’: The BBC’s Israel problem laid bare

What exactly is Hezbollah? The BBC does not seem to be 100 per cent sure, especially when it allows guests on its news programmes to claim unchallenged that the Iran-backed terrorist organisation is “rational” and “cautious”.

Given the widespread condemnation of the BBC for refusing to describe Hamas as “terrorists” in the wake of Oct 7 attacks on Israel, you would be forgiven for thinking its news team would have sought to avoid entering a similar storm over its reporting on Hezbollah (especially as those on the Left also often accuse it of being pro-Israel). But in the days since the deadly pager attacks on Hezbollah’s high command and the assassination of its leader Hassan Nasrallah, followed by Israel’s incursion into Lebanon and the subsequent Iranian missile attack, the BBC has exposed itself to similar criticism.

A BBC News article published on Monday reporting Israel’s ground attacks on Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon made no mention of the fact that Hezbollah is a terror group and formally proscribed as such in Britain. Neither did a subsequent article reporting Tehran’s rocket attack on Tuesday, “Iran launches more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel”, refer to Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation.

Critics believe that the BBC’s reporting on Hezbollah suggests that executives have failed to pay sufficient attention to the Asserson Report – and a separate report by former director of BBC TV Danny Cohen – that presented a litany of examples of how the corporation has allegedly reported the events of October 7 onwards with bias against Israel.

Lord Mann, the Labour peer and the Government’s independent adviser on anti-Semitism, says the report should have sent “shockwaves in the BBC.”

“Hezbollah is a terror organisation and should always be reported as such,” he says. “They almost treated them as an army rather than a terror organisation that is armed. Iran have just proved that it is a proxy for them, so there’s no ambiguity.”

The latest criticisms fall into two main categories. The first is that Hezbollah and its leaders are routinely described and discussed as if they were a legitimate political party or without reference to their motives or stated aims. One example of this, predating the past week’s hostilities, was when Hezbollah fired a rocket that hit a football pitch in the Golan Heights, killing 12 Druze children in July. The original headline read “Nine dead in attack on Israel-occupied Golan” while the report included Hezbollah’s denial of responsibility, despite the fact Hezbollah had claimed responsibility but retracted their statement after the victims was revealed as Druze, rather than Jewish. A BBC spokesman said of that incident: “This was a breaking news story that developed line by line as details were confirmed and new lines emerged. We routinely change headlines as more information becomes available. The BBC is committed to reporting the Israel-Gaza war impartially, with no agenda and to the highest standards of journalism.”

A Q&A piece on the BBC website refers to Hezbollah as a “heavily armed militant and political movement”. Hezbollah was proscribed as a terror group in Britain in 2019, a status that the article acknowledges with the later statement that “The group is designated as a terrorist organisation by Western states, Israel and Gulf Arab states”. As the BBC is a public service broadcaster, however, many would assume it was relevant to mention that the UK specifically designates Hezbollah this way, rather than just “the West”.

Similarly, the BBC’s refusal to routinely refer to Hezbollah as a terror organisation in its reporting leaves unanswered questions about the corporation’s stance on the group’s legitimacy and credibility, similar to the concerns raised about the corporation’s reporting on Hamas in the wake of the Oct 7 massacre.

A spokesman for the BBC said: “Where editorially relevant, we refer to Hezbollah as a proscribed terrorist organisation by governments including the UK government.”

BBC reports have referred to “the armed group Hezbollah” which “is also a strong ally of the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad”. That seemingly neutral phrase cuts to the heart of the criticism. Being a strong ally of the Syrian president meant being directly involved in a brutally oppressive regime that is responsible for vast numbers of deaths in the region. As British-Lebanese journalist and filmmaker Oz Katerji pointed out on X following the death of its Nasrallah:

A BBC profile of Nasrallah makes no mention of the violence and punitive repression of Hezbollah inside Lebanon – indeed it stresses Hezbollah’s role in the school and health system of southern Lebanon as if this was a legitimating factor for its existence – or its ideology or indeed that it has been complicit in the death of so many Syrians. Similarly, reports on the escalation of the conflict routinely leave out contextual facts such as the regularity with which it has fired rockets into Israel, estimated at 8,000 since Oct 7, not to mention the many thousands it has launched in the past two decades.

The Campaign Against Antisemitism, which monitors the BBC’s reporting, says: “The BBC is stubbornly failing to describe Hezbollah in legally accurate terms. Using any other descriptor risks legitimising or downplaying the actions and rhetoric of this and other terror groups. British Jews should be able to expect better from our national broadcaster.”

“This does damage to Britain and the BBC,” says Lord Mann. “There is a major crisis of leadership at the top of the BBC. In times of war across the world, BBC News has been a critical outlet for accurate reporting and what is coming across is damaging that significantly. We need to put the context of where Hezbollah has come from. Hezbollah hasn’t ‘just’ started figuring rockets into Israel or causing problems in Lebanon or Syria.”

The second theme of criticism of the BBC’s reporting is that it has provided a platform for strident pro-Hezbollah apologists without challenge in a “news” context rather than as part of a debate. The most glaring of these is the repeated appearances of the Iranian lecturer Mohammad Marandi, of the University of Tehran, who was interviewed from Beirut on the Today programme on Oct 1 – for which the BBC had to issue an apology after presenter Mishal Husain failed to challenge his rant claiming that Israel was carrying out a “holocaust” in Gaza and a separate “genocide” in Lebanon. Despite the BBC’s admission, he turned up again on the BBC News Channel saying, among other things, completely unchallenged: “The Israeli regime has been carrying out a genocide in Gaza. It has been carrying out genocidal attacks in Lebanon. The US and British governments are just as guilty of these war crimes as Netanyahu.”

Marandi then accused the newsreader of acting as a spokeswoman for the US and Israeli government. He said that the Iranians could “destroy” Israel, adding: “The Israelis had better know their place. It’s time to end the genocide. It’s time to end the Holocaust.”

The historian and author Simon Schama wrote on X: “BBC asked the same Iranian professor they habitually go to – actually a servile apologist for the misogynist-theocratic tyranny… got his standard exterminationist antisemitic abuse about ‘chosen people’.”

When asked about Marandi, a BBC spokesman said: “Mohammed Marandi was interviewed to gain an understanding of the view from Iran, and what their response is likely to be. This was a live interview and he was challenged during the course of the interview, and the Israeli position was reflected. However, we accept we should have continued to challenge his language throughout the interview.”

The problem the BBC faces is that if, as its head of news Deborah Turness said in a statement published this week, “So many have come to see impartial reporting as being somehow against them because it does not solely reflect their own view of the conflict” that should not include inviting an apparent apologist for the Iranian regime to complete an anti-Semitic rant on its platforms.

As Iranian rockets flew over and in one case crashed into Jordan on their way to Israel, BBC News was talking to author and Middle East analyst Dr Andreas Krieg, whose opinion that the conflict was Israel’s responsibility for attacking Hezbollah went unchallenged. His description of the war as a one-sided problem was never questioned, including when he said:  “The international community has to make sure Israel is not upending the international order as we know it. We’ve been in this course for 12 months now, with constantly red lines being crossed, mostly by the Israelis. Hezbollah and Iran have played it fairly rationally trying to be very cautious and leave off-ramps where they could.” (The dark irony of claiming Iran and Hezbollah have been rational is that in the past week an Iranian TV show claimed Israel used “genies” “cosmic science” and “demons” in war).

“The BBC should be an antidote to extremist opinion,” says Lord Mann. “By all means have heated debates about what should be done, but it should be boringly accurate in the news. I see a lack of understanding of anti-Semitism at the BBC which leads to bias.”

A BBC spokesman said: “The BBC is committed to reporting impartially and to featuring a wide range of different voices in its coverage of the complex political situation in the region. Dr Krieg is an academic who was analysing the military strategies of those involved in the conflict and we would encourage people to watch the interview in its entirety.

“The BBC holds itself to high standards of impartial reporting and rejects any suggestion that our reporting does not convey the true nature of the situation in the Middle East, and its past, present and potential impact on people in the region. This conflict is a challenging and polarising story to cover, and we are dedicated to providing impartial reporting for audiences in the UK and across the world.”

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