A BBC documentary titled ‘Children of the Gaza War’ deliberately mistranslated the words of Palestinian children in Gaza, substituting their references to ‘Jews’ with those to ‘Israelis’, Ha’aretz reported Thursday.

In one such case a Gazan child says that the ‘yahud’ (Arabic for Jews) are massacring Palestinians, but the subtitles read “Israel is massacring us.”

The documentary was prepared by the BBC’s chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet, who defended her decision to use “Israeli” for the Arabic “Yahud,” since the children interviewed clearly meant Israelis when referring to their adversaries.

This isn’t the first time that the BBC has engaged in this practice. Two and a half years ago, the media watchdog BBC Watch noted:

The obvious attempt by the programme-makers to tone down and censor the type of propaganda with which children in the Gaza Strip are indoctrinated by Hamas in schools, summer camps or on television by replacing the word ‘Jew’ with ‘Israeli’ – thus making it more palatable for Western audiences sensitive to issues of racism – indicates the existence of a problem far greater than mistranslation – and one which apparently exists even in the highest echelons of the BBC.”

Following the latest episode BBC Watch added:

Two and a half years on, we see that the BBC is still shielding its audiences from the antisemitism which lies at the very heart of Hamas’ Islamist ideology (and from which other Palestinian factions are not exempt) and which shapes the indoctrination of Palestinian children from an early age.

That uncomfortable reality does not of course fit in with the BBC’s narrative on the topic of why the terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip continue their attacks on Israel despite the fact that it disengaged from the territory a decade ago and so – as we see above – the BBC allows itself to use ‘professional judgement’ in order to rewrite the story according to its own political views.

[Photo: BBC News / YouTube ]