Describing Hamas as terrorists is not a subjective act, but legal fact
Source - Daily Telegraph - 15/10/23
I admire John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor, for his expertise and for the courage he has shown reporting from war zones. For 30 years I have counted him as a friend. However, I simply cannot agree with the defence he has made of the Corporation’s decision not to call Hamas “terrorists” or to describe the savagery with which it butchered babies, elderly women and others as “terrorism”.
Parliament designated Hamas in its entirety as “a proscribed terrorist organisation” in November 2021. Its members or anyone recruiting for it in the UK risk up to 14 years in prison. Simpson notes that, in the Second World War BBC staff were told not to call the Nazis “evil or wicked”, but could call them “the enemy”. He makes my point for me. The Nazi regime was the enemy because we had declared war on it, legitimising the term. Hamas is proscribed in the UK – the country the BBC serves, and whose citizens fund it. That legitimises calling Hamas “terrorists”. Otherwise, we might as well debate whether the Pope should be called “Catholic”.
Simpson says that “we [the BBC] don’t take sides”; but they did when calling the Nazis “the enemy”. “They” can, equally, describe a legally proscribed terrorist group as terrorists – and unless the Corporation has decided to ignore Parliament, “they” should. His “enemy” point contradicts his assertion that, to call Hamas terrorists, compromises the “founding principles” of the BBC. These principles are evoked when it suits the BBC: otherwise they are ignored, violated and flouted. John Reith’s moral view was such that turning in his grave would be but the start of his reaction to much the BBC does today.
“Terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally,” Simpson says. That is a point of view. But terrorism also has a legal definition, which is why our democratically-elected parliament designated Hamas as a terrorist organisation. “It’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn – who are the good guys and who are the bad guys,” he continues. To do so, he says, would be “abandoning our duty to stay objective”.
Describing a group using a legally defined-term that our legislators have decided to apply to it does not instruct people whom to support and whom to condemn: it simply recognises a legal fact that is obvious to most of the BBC’s audience. It is the difference between nouns and adjectives. “Evil” and “wicked”, if applied to Hamas, would in the view of most decent people be accurate descriptions, but if the BBC were to deploy them it would be editorialising. Using a legally-verified noun such as “terrorists” is a statement of fact, not a subjective act.
I suspect that getting a man of Simpson’s distinction to defend this indefensible stance shows a state of moral or intellectual panic at the BBC. One suspects it has not called Hamas terrorists because it does not wish to aggrieve that section of opinion that believes Israel gets all it deserves, however bestial an atrocity it suffers, and that Hamas is simply responding to chronic provocation.
Such views merit no respect, any more than Mosley’s did in the 1930s. Would the BBC call it an act of terrorism if Hamas blew up women and children in a British shopping centre? I hope it never has to confront that question. If the BBC does not change its approach, any claim it makes to moral conduct is bogus; and any sane government would recall its shocking cowardice when considering a further renewal of its charter.
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