BBC Whitewashes HR’s Jeremy Bowen Complaint

This past February we launched a complaint to the BBC backed by thousands of people who signed our petition. This was in response to a prime time BBC News report by Jeremy Bowen on the Ahed Tamimi trial that was taking place at the time.

In order to gauge Israeli public opinion, Bowen, out of 120 Knesset members, chose to interview a disgraced, provocative politician and well-known enfant terrible, Oren Hazan, who had been suspended from the Knesset for his behavior only one day prior to the broadcast.

We believed that Bowen, no stranger to Israel, knew exactly what sort of performance he would get from Hazan.

And Hazan didn’t disappoint.

Hazan was not introduced to viewers, except for a caption saying “Oren Hazan, Israeli Member of Parliament.”

We revisited the video of the report on the BBC’s YouTube channel. It appears that the BBC, without publicly acknowledging its actions, replaced the caption and added footage of Hazan briefly introducing himself:

My name is Oren Hazan. I’m the youngest member of the Knesset, actually member of the Israeli parliament.

This doesn’t necessarily change the general direction of the report. It does, however, show a lack of transparency on the part of the BBC, which appears to have attempted to address complaints about a lack of context concerning Hazan’s background. That the BBC never even made this clear during the complaints process to HonestReporting also indicates a lack of good faith as well as an attempt to retroactively and silently alter the parameters of the complaints process.

In addition, most people viewed the report when it was originally aired on BBC television news, not the altered online version.

Hazan Representative?

Why is Oren Hazan not representative of the Knesset, the Likud party or Israeli society at large? Here are some of the “highlights” that Bowen surely knew about:

• Threatening Palestinians visiting imprisoned relatives.
• Accepting a Jordanian lawmaker’s challenge to a fist fight(called off only by the personal intervention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu).
• Sparking the ire of Israelis and French Jews by endorsing far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen.
• Breaking protocol to take a selfie with President Donald Trump.
• Suspended from the Knesset for mocking another lawmaker’s disability.
• When Hazan sued Israeli Channel 2 for a report accusing him of pimping prostitutes and both using and dealing hard drugs while managing a casino in Bulgaria, the judge ruled there was sufficient evidence of the drug use and pimping, and that Channel 2’s only error was saying Hazan had dealt drugs.
•  Reacting to his suspension, Hazan called Knesset speaker and former refusenik Yuli Edelstein “Stalin.”

As for Hazan’s interview, he stated in typically extreme fashion, referring to Ahed Tamimi:

If I was there, she would finish in the hospital for sure. Nobody could stop me. I would kick, kick her face, believe me.

The BBC Complaints “Process”

We went through the rigmarole of the BBC complaints process, responding on multiple occasions to the BBC’s attempts to excuse a clear effort to take a useful idiot in order to embarrass Israel.

The BBC’s Editorial Complaints Unit has now issued its final ruling on the matter, some of which we republish here replete with the typos that are perhaps indicative of the BBC’s lack of care on the issue:

The nub of the matter seems to me well expressed in your email to us of 11 March, where you wrote that the choice of Oren Hazan as an interviewee “was not only unrepresentative of Israeli society at large but not even representative of those Israelis who wished to see the Tamimis punished for their activities” – a view for which you found some support in Stuart Webb’s response of 6 March, where he wrote “in retrospect we agree it would have been helpful to make clear that [Mr Hazan] has a track record of making outspoken statements so that viewers could put his comments more clearly into context”.

Having made further enquiries, however, I don’t believe introducing his contribution without such information was misleading to viewers. Mr Hazan was indeed suspended from the Knesset on the day of the broadcast – which was the day after his interview was recorded – but in relation to an issue unconnected with the case of Ahed Tamimi. You describe him as being “treated as a pariah not only with the Knesset but within much of his own party”, but I understand he is nevertheless the second most frequently interviewed politician in Israel and, according to opinion polls, the second most popular politician (the first in each category being Benjamin Netanyahu). Although Mr Hazan expressed his view in typically graphic terms, I don’t think it could be characterised as more extreme that Naftali Bennett’s call for a whole-life prison sentence (“The young women shown assaulting the soldiers should finish their lives in prison”), or Bezalel Smotrich’s demand for the IDC Chief of Staff to order “that every encounter or friction between the enemy and our troops ends with a painful and decisive outcome”, or much out of keeping with the views expressed by many mainstream politicians, opinion-formers and media commentators.

For these reasons, I support Jeremy Bown’s view that it was legitimate to introduce Mr Hazen’s contribution as illustrating the feeling of “most” Israelis that Ahed Tamimi “should be punished – and perhaps her family too”, and I don’t believe I have grounds for upholding your complaint.

It’s simply not good enough.

Even if Oren Hazan is the second most frequently interviewed politician in Israel (which is highly questionable), this is a result not of his being representative of mainstream Israel but precisely because he is regarded as a provocateur who makes for entertaining or controversial television. Rather than give a mainstream or measured opinion on the Tamimi case, the BBC went for the one person guaranteed to provide entertainment and controversy rather than sober analysis.

Claiming that Hazan was interviewed the day before his suspension is laughable given that not only was Bowen already aware of Hazan’s less than stellar reputation but the disciplinary case involving stalking and sexual harassment was already in the public domain even if the result was to be announced the following day.

It’s impossible to claim that Hazan is Israel’s “second most popular politician? He isn’t even the second most popular politician within his own Likud party and we are left to wonder exactly which polls the BBC relied on for this claim. After all, most political polls measure the success or otherwise of the political parties and their leaders. Hazan doesn’t feature in these.

In fact, Hazan is number 30 in the Likud’s Knesset candidate list from the last election and even then that position was reserved for a young candidate.

While the BBC might think that physically assaulting a teenage girl is no more extreme than a life prison sentence, the former could be regarded as a potentially criminal or vigilante act, the latter being the result of a legal investigation.  And most Israelis who wanted Tamimi punished envisioned this punishment coming about as a result of a proper trial not a beating.

The BBC’s response is quite frankly insulting. We aren’t prepared to give up and have lodged a formal complaint with Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, which, thanks to recent changes, has jurisdiction over BBC complaints that have reached the end of their internal journey.

We will keep you appraised of any developments in the case.

Featured image: Hadas Parush/Fash90; Hazan via YouTube/Oren Hazan; Bowen via YouTube/BBC News;