It's simply not the BBC's job to tell people who to support and who to condemn, writes the BBC's World Affairs editor. //

Government ministers, newspaper columnists, ordinary people - they're all asking why the BBC doesn't say the Hamas gunmen who carried out appalling atrocities in southern Israel are terrorists.

The answer goes right back to the BBC's founding principles.

Terrorism is a loaded word, which people use about an outfit they disapprove of morally. 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.

We regularly point out that the British and other governments have condemned Hamas as a terrorist organisation, but that's their business. We also run interviews with guests and quote contributors who describe Hamas as terrorists.

The key point is that we don't say it in our voice. Our business is to present our audiences with the facts, and let them make up their own minds.

As it happens, of course, many of the people who've attacked us for not using the word terrorist have seen our pictures, heard our audio or read our stories, and made up their minds on the basis of our reporting, so it's not as though we're hiding the truth in any way - far from it.

Any reasonable person would be appalled by the kind of thing we've seen. It's perfectly reasonable to call the incidents that have occurred "atrocities", because that's exactly what they are. //

But this doesn't mean that we should start saying that the organisation whose supporters have carried them out is a terrorist organisation, because that would mean we were abandoning our duty to stay objective.

And it's always been like this in the BBC. During World War Two, BBC broadcasters were expressly told not to call the Nazis evil or wicked, even though we could and did call them "the enemy".

"Above all," said a BBC document about all this, "there must be no room for ranting". Our tone had to be calm and collected. //

We don't take sides. We don't use loaded words like "evil" or "cowardly". We don't talk about "terrorists". And we're not the only ones to follow this line. Some of the world's most respected news organisations have exactly the same policy.

The United States made recent concessions to Iran, potentially in violation of the Iranian Nuclear Review Act (INARA). These concessions occurred as Mr. Malley—the Administration’s top negotiator with Iran—is under investigation for the alleged mishandling of classified material. Mr. Malley already had a history of appeasing United States’ adversaries, including meeting with the terrorist group Hamas. The ongoing investigation into Mr. Malley’s security violations are so serious that he was suspended from his position without pay. Further, the investigation was initially hidden from Congress, the American people, and even his fellow State Department officials. //

Gabriel Noronha @GLNoronha
·
The Tehran Times - an Iranian state media outlet - has published a “Sensitive But Unclassified” memo to Iran Envoy Rob Malley explaining why his clearance was suspended.

The letter looks authentic to me. Indicates Malley also lied about not knowing why his clearance was pulled.
6:42 PM · Aug 27, 2023

Note the date on that - August 2023, long after the suspension, and while the State Department was actively stonewalling Congress' inquiries about the situation.