'No impartiality between good and evil': Orange Order Grand Secretary Mervyn Gibson writes to BBC to complain about refusal to call Hamas 'terrorists'

In particular, the Presbyterian minister and former RUC officer was complaining about the refusal of the corporation to use the term “terrorist” to refer to Hamas.

Hamas was formed in the late 1980s, and its charter set out an extreme Islamist interpretation of Jewish-Muslim relations.

It set out a desire not just to re-conquer Israel itself by exclusively armed means (“so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement”) but also cast itself as “the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism... [and] the fight with the warmongering Jews”.

It has repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians down through the decades, running a campaign of suicide bombings from the mid-1990s to about 2004 which targeted Israeli buses, hotels, restaurants, and discos, costing hundreds of civilian lives in total.

However, its indiscriminate killings of October 7 this year marked a new low for the organisation.

Since then several thousand Palestinians, principally civilians, have been killed in Israeli bombings in Gaza.

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In his letter to the BBC in London, revealed in this month’s Orange Standard magazine, Rev Gibson stated: “As an organisation which has suffered disproportionately from the actions of terrorists, resulting in the death of 342 of our members, I write to record this Institution’s disappointment with the BBC decision to refer to Hamas as ‘militants’ as opposed to ‘terrorists’.

“The King, the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and a wide cross section of political and civic society have displayed moral conviction in describing this group in factual terms – yet once again, we see the BBC adopt a liberal, leftist agenda in order not to offend those who seek to excuse and justify the barbarous actions of terrorists.

“Hamas has been officially declared a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK since 2021 – it is hugely disappointing that the publicly funded, national broadcaster of the United Kingdom cannot bring itself to describe it as such.

“I have read the BBC ‘justification’ which cites impartiality and the need for the viewer/listener to be able to make up their own mind.

“Sadly, the BBC appears to have become an echo chamber for the woke and the current leadership increasingly turns away from the founding principles of the Corporation whose father figure, Lord Reith, stated that the BBC would not be impartial between good and evil.”

Responding to such calls last month, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson had said: “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...

" No-one can possibly defend the murder of civilians, especially children and even babies - nor attacks on innocent, peace-loving people who are attending a music festival.

“During the 50 years I've been reporting on events in the Middle East, I've seen for myself the aftermath of attacks like this one in Israel, and I've also seen the aftermath of Israeli bomb and artillery attacks on civilian targets in Lebanon and Gaza. The horror of things like that stay in your mind forever.

“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’.

"It was hard to keep that principle going when the IRA was bombing Britain and killing innocent civilians, but we did.

"There was huge pressure from the government of Margaret Thatcher on the BBC, and on individual reporters like me about this - especially after the Brighton bombing, where she just escaped death and so many other innocent people were killed and injured.

“But we held the line. And we still do, to this day.”