BBC agreed to air Nova festival massacre documentary only if Hamas not described as ‘terrorists’

The BBC has regularly received criticism for its policy of not referring to members of organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorists. 

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Yariv Mozer, director of the “We Will Dance Again” Nova music festival documentary, recounted how the BBC wouldn’t allow the film to be aired unless any reference to Hamas as terrorists was edited out.

The documentary, which combines interviews with survivors and actual footage, began as a project on Israeli documentary channel Hot8 in collaboration with MGM and eventually Paramount. It is being shown in the United States as a Paramount + documentary.

Mozer told the Hollywood Reporter, “Then, the BBC, the version they’ll air won’t describe Hamas as terrorists. It was a price I was willing to pay so that the British public will be able to see these atrocities and decide if this is a terrorist organization or not.”

He also discussed how often broadcasters hesitated about showing the Nova festival massacre because they considered the film political.

“I was pitching this to several U.S. streaming platforms and what I was told is that they’re afraid of touching this subject matter, the 7th of October, because of concerns about the political situation,” he said.

However, he insisted the film is not political but rather a testament to the victims of terrorism and a means of telling their stories.

“The film isn’t political. It’s told from the eyes of the survivors and from the eyes of Hamas. There is one truth about what happened,” he added.

The BBC has regularly received criticism for its policy of not referring to members of organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorists.

Not only did the BBC decline to call assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, one of the masterminds of the October 7th massacre, a terrorist, but a story on the terror leader after his death described him as “moderate and pragmatic.”

“Despite his tough rhetoric, analysts generally saw him as moderate and pragmatic, compared to the more hardline Gaza-based leaders,” the BBC report said.

In May, the then Foreign Secretary of the UK, David Cameron, was staunchly critical of the broadcasting company for declining to use the word “terrorist” in connection with Hamas.

“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?’”