Yes, The BBC is a Deep State Organisation. Yes, It Is Propping Up Hamas.
We can no longer be naive about this.
DONNA RACHEL
The BBC was reported to the UK police earlier this week for possible terrorism offences after it admitted that Hoyo Films, the production company behind Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone, made payments to the family of the child narrator of the film, despite knowing he was the son of a member of the Hamas government. He is also the grandson of a founder of Hamas.
Caroline Caroline Turner, director of UK Lawyers for Israel, which filed the report, commented: “The BBC has either been duped by the Hamas propaganda machine or has co-operated with it – or both. While the BBC has been caught out on this occasion, we wonder how often this occurs.”
The short answer is: regularly. A report published by CAMERA-UK in September 2024, examining the BBC’s output on Israel/Gaza since the start of the current war, found numerous egregious examples of the BBC pushing pro-Hamas propaganda.
For example:
- On the day of the 7 October massacre, while the rest of Britain’s media were detailing the brutality of Hamas’s attack on Israel, the BBC led its coverage with a headline about “Israeli revenge attacks”.
- The BBC broadcast interviews in the immediate aftermath of the atrocity with Hamas apologists who used their platform to make comments which the BBC was forced to admit were “offensive”.
- The BBC refused to call Hamas “terrorists” because it would be seen as “taking sides”, only to back down following days of criticism from the outraged Jewish community and senior politicians from all sides.
- The BBC routinely quoted figures produced by the Hamas Health Ministry without highlighting it as a terrorist-run organisation, and routinely failed to stress in reporting that Hamas fatality figures are unverifiable and include thousands of Hamas terrorists.
And there are many more examples besides.
One can describe these examples as “lax journalistic standards and institutional bias”, as the report does, or one can see them for what they really are: firm evidence that the BBC is running propaganda for Britain’s Deep State, which is allied with Islamic terrorist entities.
That’s a bold claim, and I don’t make it lightly. But it’s an important statement to make as we need to understand what’s going on here.
In this essay I intend to demonstrate:
- That the BBC is the main propaganda arm for the British Deep State.
- That Britain’s Deep State works in concert with those of other countries.
- That Deep State organisations have given material aid to Hamas.
- That the BBC openly supports jihadist entities.
The Deep State: A Spider’s Web of NGOs and Quangos.
Let’s start with a simple question: what is the deep state? Ask AI and it will tell you something like ‘the term ‘deep state’ refers to a shadowy unelected cabal directing government from behind the scenes.’ But the deep state isn’t some Elders of Zion style conspiracy, a group of 12 powerful men who control the world’s leaders like puppets on string. In reality, it’s a complex web of non-governmental organisations, charities, agencies and quangos which work together and fund each other to wage soft power abroad, and, more recently, at home.
Everyone is aware that the CIA has long had a hand in directing coups, uprisings and election outcomes in places like Iran, Nicaragua, Italy, Indonesia. Fewer understand that, increasingly, those influence operations have been largely outsourced to NGOs and charities.
“The watershed that brought Ingos [International NGOs] to the forefront of global democracy-promotion was the Reagan administration’s decision to create the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983 to roll back Soviet influence. With a stated raison d’etre of “strengthening democratic institutions around the world through nongovernmental efforts”, NED was conceived as a quasi-governmental foundation that funnelled US government funding through Ingos like the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and Freedom House.
These Ingos in turn “targeted” authoritarian states through a plethora of programmatic activities. NED’s first president, Allen Weinstein, admitted openly that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” The organisation was a deus ex machina in the face of scandalous Congressional investigations into the CIA’s “soft side” operations to destabilise and topple unfriendly regimes that embarrassed the government in the late 1970s.
As William Blum writes: “An NGO helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have.” 97% of NED’s funding comes from the US state department (through USAID and before 1999, the USIA), the rest being allocations made by right-wing donors like the Bradley Foundation, the Whitehead Foundation and the Olin Foundation. Since its conception, and despite the bipartisan structure, “neoconservatives have held tight control over NED’s agenda and institutional structure.”
Excerpt from Democratisation, NGOs and “colour revolutions” published by openDemocracy
USAID: A Deep State Case Study
The Trump Administration’s defunding of USAID has lifted the lid on the whole network, giving us a clearer view of how the deep state operates.
Officially, USAID is the US government’s primary overseas aid agency. In 2023, it had a budget of $68bn (£55bn), and it employed 10,000 people, around two-thirds of whom worked overseas. The BBC bills it as a humanitarian taskforce: providing “food in countries where people are starving, it also operates the world’s gold-standard famine detection system”. And then there are the health programs, providing polio vaccines and preventing the next pandemic.
In reality it works alongside the CIA as an influence operation, funneling billions of dollars into programs and agencies in order to coerce and impel others into going along with American agendas. It does that in many ways; one of them is through the funding of journalism.
According to Reporters Without Borders (RWB), USAID was funding media operations across 30 countries. Citing a USAID fact sheet, RWB detailed that “in 2023, the agency funded training and support for 6,200 journalists, assisted 707 non-state news outlets, and supported 279 media-sector civil society organizations dedicated to strengthening independent media.”
Some of those outlets were being kept afloat solely by USAID. One Belarussian journalist told RWB “We have articles scheduled until the end of January, but after that, if we haven’t found solutions, we won’t be able to publish anymore.” In Ukraine, nine out of ten media outlets rely on subsidies and USAID is the primary donor, which means that Ukraine doesn’t have an independent media, it has a deep state media. Without funding cut off, many of those outlets are set to go under.
One of those 707 non-state news outlets is the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which gets half of its funding from the US government, including from USAID. Last year, Germany’s public broadcaster, NDR, made a now-censored documentary about the organisation (about half of which was later leaked). In it, Drew Sullivan, the co-founder and head of the OCCRP told NDR that his organization had “probably been responsible for five or six countries changing over from one government to another government… and getting prime ministers indicted or thrown out.”
According to Public, OCCRP played a significant role in the 2016 Russiagate hoax, and had a hand in Trump’s first impeachment. In their report on the matter, Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag wrote: “it appears that CIA, USAID, and OCCRP were all involved in the impeachment of President Trump in ways similar to the regime change operations that all three organizations engage in abroad.”
And then there’s USAID’s support for Hamas. USAID has funneled millions of dollars to the terrorist entity through NGOs and charities working in Gaza and the West Bank. In just one example, USAID handed $900,000 of American taxpayer money to the Bayader Association for Environment and Development. One payment was handed over on October 1st, less than a week before the October 7th massacre.
Focus on Western Islamism reports: “In February 2023, Bayader organized an event in the Gazan city of Khan Yunis, in collaboration with Western Islamist charity Islamic Relief. At the ceremony, Bayader staff embraced senior Hamas officials, who were there to launch Bayader’s latest project. Those present included Abdul Salam Haniyeh, the son of Ismail Haniyeh, and himself a leading figure in the terrorist organization.”
Meanwhile Islamic Relief, which is known to have provided several million euros to Hamas, received money from the European Commission which then tried to hide the payment from Members of the European Parliament.
Lack of accountability and refusal to face scrutiny by elected officials seems to be the norm across the deep state. The Washington Free Beacon published a remarkable report in February, detailing how USAID had gone so rogue that it was even working against the Biden Administration to push a harder anti-Israel, pro-Hamas line.
Ted Cruz described how USAID “refused to disclose what groups were getting money and gave tens of millions in American cash to be distributed without American supervision.
“Before and after Oct. 7, USAID flowed uncountable hundreds of millions of dollars toward Hamas that enabled it to launch the attack and keep battling Israel afterwards,” Cruz said. “The full story of USAID funding Hamas is vast and much of it was done in secret.”
The USAID case study demonstrates the deeply integrated nature of the deep state, working with and through countless entities, disguised as aid organisations and charities; the deep state’s willingness to subvert journalism to drive its agenda; the deep state’s alliance with jihadist entities, including Hamas. Now let’s turn back to the BBC.
The BBC Is A Deep State Entity
BBC Media Action is the BBC’s “charitable arm” (raise red flag here). How, precisely, does the BBC’s charitable wing serve people around the world?
“We use media and communication to help deliver stronger democracies, a safer, more habitable planet and inclusive societies.” they say on their website. Stronger democracies, eh? A little like those ‘stronger democracies’ the deep state ushered in by whipping up colour revolutions in places like Ukraine?
How do they do that?
“We create and support networks and coalitions of media and civil society organisations working to tackle information disorder, including fact-checking networks.”
“[We combat] the toxic combination of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation polluting our information environments”.
Malinformation, for those unfamiliar with the term, is information that is true but harmful to the state’s chosen narrative. Disinformation — I sh*t you not — is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “Deliberately misleading information announced publicly or leaked by a government or especially by an intelligence agency in order to influence public opinion or the government in another nation.” That must make it easy for them, all they have to do is turn to their colleagues! All of this ties in very neatly with the Government Communication Service’s own Counter-Disinformation Toolkit, first released in 2018, in which we learn that “the UK government has been working and learning alongside its international partners to take action against disinformation.”
BBC Media Action was launched as the BBC World Service Trust in 1999, emerging from a number of initiatives. (One of those was a charity called The Marshall Plan of the Mind which was set up in the 90s to promote high journalistic standards in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Make of that what you will.) In 2011 it changed its name to BBC Media Action, and now sits within the BBC’s World Service Group (BBC World Service, BBC World News, BBC Monitoring and BBC Media Action).
Although outwardly it claims to be wholly independent from the BBC, tucked away in its annual accounts it boasts of its “unique position at the heart of the BBC.” The organisation’s 85 London employees, over half of whom earn in excess of £60,000 a year, are based in offices situated within the BBC’s White City broadcasting complex, for which it pays not a jot of rent. And staff are encouraged to bounce between charity and broadcaster, “to give our London-based staff a chance to learn in other parts of the organisation”.
It draws its funding from a wide range of sources, including governments, UN organisations, and quasi-philanthropic organisations like Counterpart International.
Who are Counterpart International? According to Wikipedia: “The organization was established in 1965 as the Foundation of the People of the South Pacific (FSP) by an Australian Marist missionary priest [with a focus on] supporting communities in the remote and often-overlooked islands of the South Pacific. In 1968, the organization began receiving funding from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). […] In 1992, USAID tapped the organization to “go global” and help determine a role for U.S. non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the former Soviet Union. At this time, the organization’s name was changed to Counterpart International to better reflect an expanded mission.”
You’ll be absolutely astonished to learn that “Counterpart International currently has programs in governance and civil society, resilient food systems, women’s empowerment, and climate resiliency” and that “Gender equity and social inclusion have been guiding principles at Counterpart since its founding.” Shocker!
Another notable donor is the Gates Foundation, which has been sending money to BBC Media Action since 2006. In that time it has made 18 grants worth a total $56,367,647. And yes, USAID gave BBC Media Action £2.6 million (about $3.2 million) for the 2023/24 fiscal year, equivalent to about 8% of its funding.
Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted that, according to BBC Media Action’s own chart above, its top donor for 2024 was the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), which last year alone handed over more than £3 million.
In 2011, following the Arab Spring — those uprisings which were to the Middle East what the Colour Revolutions were to Eastern Europe — the FCO set up the Arab Partnership, as part of a G8 program called the Deauville Partnership. Funding for the Arab Partnership was £110 million over 4 years. The BBC picked up some of that money through the World Service Trust (i.e., BBC Media Action) and also BBC World Service Arabic, as shown in this graphic taken from a booklet titled The Arab Partnership:
That booklet was published by the FCO, but the cover shows two emblems – FCO’s and UK Aid. What is UK Aid? According to a government webpage dated 2015:
UK Aid Direct is the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office’s main centrally managed funding mechanism for small and medium sized civil society organisations, based in the UK and overseas, who are working to achieve the Global Goals.
Working to achieve the Global Goals? What are they?
Oh wait, I’ve seen that logo!
My my, we are going around in circles here, aren’t we? Who else is partnered with the Global Goals?
Well wouldn’t you know it, it’s a veritable who’s who of deep state NGOs, charities and organisations. The Scouts ffs! Unilever! Bloody Pot Noodle is “on a mission to create a better planet and society”!
I think we’re getting the picture here on what the deep state is, how all encompassing it is, and how the BBC sits right in among all of this. But what about support for jihad?
The British State Supports Jihad
In truth, the British deep state is so comfortable in its support for jihadist entities that it largely doesn’t bother to hide it. As there is no Trump figure in the UK to upset the deep state’s aims, it works perfectly contentedly and often quite openly with the current Labour Party government, and did with the Conservative government before it.
I’ve written previously in these pages about the UK government laundering money for Hamas through UNWRA.
UNWRA, the UN’s refugee organisation set up specifically for the Palestinians:
- Teaches young Palestinian children to hate Jews, indoctrinating them into a jihadist mindset. Children as young as 14 have been killed fighting jihad, thanks to the lessons they receive at UNWRA schools.
- Shares its infrastructure with Hamas high command.
- Employed Hamas members, including people who took part in the October 7th massacre.
- Gave large quantities of cash to Hamas.
In February, released British-Israeli hostage Emily Damari revealed that she had been held in an UNWRA camp. Following an outcry, on February 18 the Prime Minister’s Office told Israel’s Channel 12 that the government was reconsidering its payments to UNWRA. The following day, a Foreign Office source told Middle East Eye that the reports were false and that the government had doubled down on its support for the UN agency. Which of those reports is mis-, dis-, or mal-information?
As the state’s propaganda arm, the BBC plays its part.
BBC Media Action’s website boasts of co-producing two shows between 2012 and 2017, Voices From Palestine and Free to Speak, in partnership with the Palestinian Public Broadcasting Corporation (PBC). Voices from Palestine was also “co-hosted by BBC Arabic’s Nur Zorgui and the PBC’s Huda Kadoumi.”
This is the front page of the Palestinian Public Broadcasting Corporation’s website:
Note the menu across the top. There’s a whole section on the site dedicated to the “Freedom Tunnel Heroes”. Who are they? They’re six Palestinian prisoners who briefly escaped from Gilboa Prison in Israel in 2021. One was a member of Fatah, while the other five were members of Islamic Jihad. In 2022, the Palestinian Authority encouraged schoolgirls to hail them as heroes by inaugurating a garden at the Al-Adawiya High School for Girls in honour of the six terrorists.
According to Palestinian Media Watch, their crimes were as follows:
Zubeidi was head of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (Fatah’s military wing) in the Jenin area during the PA terror campaign (the second Intifada, 2000-2005), when he oversaw numerous lethal attacks, and he also carried out shooting attacks in 2018-2019.
Kamamji participated in the murder of 18-year-old Eliyahu Asheri on June 25, 2006, and planned to blow up a bus using an exploding car.
Muhammad Ardah participated in initiating and executing a suicide bombing on bus no. 823 on Nov. 29, 2001, in which 3 people were murdered and many others were wounded.
Mahmoud Ardah was involved in numerous attacks; the website of Islamic Jihad’s military wing defined him as the “commander” of the prison escape.
Qaderi committed a shooting attack on Sept. 18, 2002 with an accomplice in which Israeli Yosef Ajami was murdered and a foreign worker was wounded.
Nafiyat was being held in administrative detention.
The next item along on the Palestinian Public Broadcasting Corporation’s website menu is dedicated to “martyrs” who died fighting jihad against Israel, ie, they’re jihadists.
By the way, this website was linked to from BBC Media Watch’s own website — I didn’t have to go looking for it. That’s how comfortable the BBC is about supporting jihad and terrorism in the Palestinian territories. And as I said at the beginning, the BBC itself is quite comfortable running propaganda for Hamas, which is precisely what Gaza: How To Survive A War Zone was. Against this kind of backdrop, is it any wonder that the BBC thought it could get away with paying Hamas a few thousand pounds for a puff piece?
The CAMERA-UK report mentioned at the top of this essay details how fluently BBC Arabic speaks the language of Hamas. Hamas terrorists are referred to as “the resistance”; attacks are “resistance operations”; in one case, a terrorist who was killed fighting was a “martyr”; Jewish towns in the West Bank that date back to the 1800s are “settlements” and their residents are “settlers”.
In at least five cases, BBC staff showed support for the October 7th massacre on social media. The outcry forced the BBC to investigate, yet following that investigation the BBC’s Director General Tim Davie told MPs “The Arabic service, in terms of its output, we should be very proud of”. He excused the journalists, saying they were “under enormous pressure”.
Writing about the CAMERA-UK report for the Telegraph, former Director of BBC Television Danny Cohen (who also compiled and edited the report) said “Impartiality breaches have occurred so often at its Arabic channel that they almost look deliberate.”
Almost?! ALMOST?!! There’s nothing ‘almost’ about it! How many times must people be hit over the head by the BBC’s obvious and egregious support for Islamic terror before they start to realise that all of this is absolutely deliberate?!
Commenting on the report, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis demonstrated frankly suicidal levels of gullibility, saying: “Few institutions are as vital for our national cultural identity or for the health of our democracy as the BBC.”
As a nation, we cannot be this naive about our state and our state broadcaster anymore. This is not “something […] going badly wrong,” as Cohen thinks it is, this is the deliberate and directed subversion of the British state apparatus, weaponised against the British people.
Just as the American deep state turned its attention from influence operations abroad to influence operations at home in 2016, due to the election of Donald Trump, so did the British state due to Brexit. That’s why, since Brexit, immigration has raged out of control. Since 2018 (when figures were first collected), more than 150,000 people, mostly fighting-aged men, arrived in the UK on small boats alone. That’s double the British army’s regular full time personnel strength, which numbers around 75,000 — but that figure includes personnel in support roles. The actual fighting force consists of only about 18,000 soldiers.
On March 7th, the Home Office released a statement saying (in full): “We all want to end dangerous small boat crossings, which threaten lives and undermine our border security. The people-smuggling gangs do not care if the vulnerable people they exploit live or die, as long as they pay. We will stop at nothing to dismantle their business models and bring them to justice.”
By ‘threaten lives’, the Home Office is clearly referring here to the migrants’ lives, those poor vulnerable people who are being exploited by gangs. They say nothing about people like Rhiannon Skye Whyte, a 27-year-old British hotel worker, who was stabbed to death by Sudanese migrant Deng Chol Majek, 18. Majek had been staying at the Park Inn Hotel in Walsall, where she had worked. Or Thomas Roberts, a 21-year old from Bournemouth, was stabbed to death by Afghan migrant Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai who was already wanted for a double murder in Serbia.
So, no, the Home Office does not want to end dangerous small boat crossings. Again, we cannot be this naive. The failure to end boat crossings, like the BBC’s failure to deal with support for jihad in its ranks, is not accidental. It’s not incompetence. It’s purposeful, and it’s an existential threat to the people of this nation.
If we continue to make excuses for our public institutions and the grand array of NGOs, charities and quangos they — we — fund, we will be the victims of the next October 7th style massacre.
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