BBC journalist calls Israelis inhuman and Jews ‘devils’

BBC Arabic broadcaster Ahmed Alagha defended Hamas’ October 7 massacre, saying the victims deserved no sympathy.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

A BBC Arabic reporter was outed Saturday as an unapologetic antisemite as The Telegraph revealed a host of his online posts that defended Hamas atrocities, called Israelis inhuman and said that Jews were “devils.”

Ahmed Alagha defended Hamas’s slaughter of 1,200 Israeli men, women and children and taking of 251 hostages during the October 7, 2023, invasion that immediately sparked the ongoing war in the coastal enclave.

“Rip your sympathy out, no matter what ugly condition you see them in,” he posted to X with the tag #AlAqsa Flood, Hamas name for its attack, just one day later. “They are the corrupt side of this story, my friend. No spilled blood of theirs is honorable.”

Several days later, he wrote, “We also know that the ‘Israelis’ are not human beings at all, nor are they beasts. Perhaps they belong to a race for which no description can capture the extent of their lust and sadism.”

In other, antisemitic posts he wrote, “As for the Jews, they are the devils of the hypocrites” and retweeted diatribes that described Jews as the unbelievers, killers of Jesus, and those who “loved money more than God.”

Alagha has broadcast from the Gaza Strip several times on the Arabic language channel of the British media behemoth since the war began, most recently last Sunday.

The BBC excused its use of the prejudiced journalist in a statement saying, “Ahmed Alagha was a contributor; he is not a BBC member of staff or part of the BBC’s reporting team. In this instance, we were unaware of the contributor’s social media activity prior to hearing from him.”

“His views were not expressed on a BBC platform, his posts do not reflect the BBC’s view and we are absolutely clear that there is no place for antisemitism on our services,” the company concluded.

A quick perusal of his prewar online activity would have revealed his deep bias, as in January 2023, he praised a Palestinian terrorist who murdered seven Israelis near a synagogue, saying that “This martyr stole my heart, he alone killed eight Zionists.”

Last month, Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch wrote a letter to the BBC board demanding reform after a report by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) revealed that its Arabic language division was forced to make 80 corrections in the first five months of reporting on the Israel-Hamas war alone, an average of one every two days.

“A new report by CAMERA makes for shocking reading, even for those familiar with these problems,” she wrote. “It reveals flagrant and appalling antisemitism and anti-Israel bias. A public service broadcaster appears to have become a regular platform for race-hate extremism and the endorsement of terror.

“This has been going on for years… This is simply unacceptable and must stop,” she added.

The media watchdog’s analysis showed that the BBC World Service’s largest and most heavily funded foreign-language service, Arabic, put on the air those who praised the Hamas attack as if they were independent “experts,” repeated Hamas propaganda as fact, and did not fire several staff members who celebrated the October 7 massacre on social media, if not as vociferously as Alagha had done.