Pro-Palestine Legal Center Urges BBC to Drop Board Member Over Fake News

Date: 21 September 2024 - 22:46

News ID: ۱۳۱۵۲۷

LONDON (Dispatches) – A pro-Palestine legal advocacy group has called on the BBC to dismiss board member Robbie Gibb over his links to the Jewish Chronicle, which has been embroiled in a scandal of fake Gaza stories.
The International Center of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) accused Gibb of “failure to uphold editorial standards” while being the Jewish Chronicle’s director.
In an open letter, the London-based group said the recent scandal “casts significant doubt on his capabilities to uphold the BBC’s standards”.
“His continued tenure as a non-executive board member poses reputational damages for the BBC,” the ICJP said.
“Further, his partisan politics with regards to his well-documented pro-Israel sentiment makes him unsuitable to have input over editorial standards at the BBC at a time when coverage of the Israel-Hamas War is so contested.”
Earlier this month, the Jewish Chronicle was forced to retract a series of articles alleged to contain fabricated quotes from Zionist regime officials.
One of the articles, published by a freelance reporter named Elon Perry, included explosive revelations from a document supposedly discovered in Gaza.
It allegedly detailed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s plans to escape the Palestinian enclave with Israeli captives taken during the October 7 operation.
However, the Israeli army stated that it had no knowledge of such a document and several Israeli outlets began to question Perry’s identity and professional background.
The left-leaning +972 Magazine questioned his claims of having served as a commando during Operation Entebbe and being a professor at Tel Aviv University for 15 years, as there appear to be no records confirming these assertions.
A number of high-profile columnists, including the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland, announced that they would no longer write for the paper.
In response to the allegations, the Jewish Chronicle said in a statement that it had ended its association with Perry and withdrawn his articles from its website.