It’s happened again. Earlier this year, HonestReporting helped expose Tala Halawa, a BBC journalist who had made antisemitic and genocidal statements on social media. After the GnasherJew Twitter account unveiled a number of offensive tweets, including ones that called Israel “more #Nazi than #Hitler” and using the hashtag “#HitlerWasRight,” we shared the screenshots on social media and called on the public to contact the BBC.
Many media outlets — including The Daily Telegraph, Fox News and The Independent — cited our work. In response to our campaign, the BBC opened an investigation that ultimately led to Halawa being fired.
But it seems that the BBC has not learned its lesson.
Once again, HonestReporting has revealed a wealth of antisemitic and offensive posts on numerous social media platforms by Nasima Begum, an arts council-supported charity advocate and trustee who has also worked as a presenter for BBC Radio Manchester. Our work comes after GnasherJew once more found a number of problematic tweets by Begum, including one calling for “Death to Zionist Scum” and others making reference to a new “Holocaust” whose “perpetrators are you Zionist scum.”
Many of Begum’s antisemitic tweets date back to 2011 and 2012, but bigoted and deeply prejudiced social media posts have continued into this year.
For example, in May 2021, Begum invoked a modern version of a classical antisemitic trope by tweeting that Zionists have a “hold on mainstream media.”
The same month she took to Instagram, describing in a post that, somewhat ironically, she attended a protest against the BBC and accused it of favoring Israel while ludicrously alleging that “mainstream news outlets were saying nothing” against Israel.
A month later, in June 2021, Begum characterized Israel as “killing innocent people and terrorizing them daily” in a tweet that also included the blatant lie that Israel was “bombing masjid alaqsa.” This was apparently a reference to the events of the previous month, during which Palestinians rioted on the Temple Mount. After cries of “Bomb, bomb Tel Aviv” were heard, rioters barricaded themselves in the Al Aqsa mosque, hurled bricks and Molotov cocktails, and used fireworks as weapons.
At one stage a firework set the Temple Mount alight when a tree caught fire.
Our investigation revealed plenty more, such as the attempted justification of the murder of Israeli civilians in a 2017 Facebook comment in which Begum wrote: “Innocent Israeli deaths? How can you be innocent and Israeli when you’ve settled on someone else’s land and kicked them out. Nah.”
In 2012, Begum also applauded threats by the hacker group Anonymous to seize “any and all websites deemed to be in Israeli cyberspace”; and the same year she also expressed support for an imprisoned Palestinian on hunger strike. The man in question, Akram Rikhawi, was the subject of reports by the Associated Press and New York Times: He was serving a nine-year sentence after being convicted of transporting Palestinian suicide bombers.
Just to be clear, he was an accomplice in either murder or attempted murder, and Begum publicly expressed support for his cause.
In other tweets, Begum repeatedly posted about Jews and Israel in disparaging and antisemitic terms. For example, in 2011 she said that “the Jewish population” has “implemented the same [genocide] on Palestine for years.”
In another post, she made clear that her animus extends beyond Israeli policy decisions, but against Israel itself, posting on Twitter that, “Israel is just the most vile ever thing to exist.”
This was no aberration. Another tweet unveiled by GnasherJew shows that Begum wrote: “exiling a people from their own land justifies anything. It’s the holocaust all over again except this time it’s innocent Palestinians and ironically the perpetrators are you Zionist scum.”
Repeatedly, she disparagingly referred to “Zionist scum,” and even openly called for their death.
As HonestReporting repeatedly tagged Begum in a series of Twitter notifications, we discovered that she had changed her account settings to “protected.” This limited her account’s viewability so that only her followers could see her tweets, thus effectively preventing others from accessing problematic content.
Thereafter, Begum issued a lengthy apology on Twitter, in which she took “full responsibility for the utterly reprehensible and unacceptable language that I used.”
This statement is to address a recent article and tweets that were written about me on Sunday 7th November 2021. pic.twitter.com/eX7wePN4lK
— viva viva falasteena 🇵🇸 (@nasimabee) November 9, 2021
While the apology addressed “the referenced tweets over a decade ago,” it did not tackle her more recent posts, including the false allegations that Israel was “bombing” Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque, or the insinuation that Jews control the media.
Ultimately, the facts speak for themselves. This is an individual with years of unacceptable social media posts, some of which condone violence.
That the BBC ever gave her a platform is mind-boggling.
