Gary Lineker, Riz Ahmed, Ken Loach Joins Hundreds In Signing Open Letter Condemning BBC “Censorship On Palestine” As Gaza Documentary Row Deepens

deadline.com:

The row over the BBC‘s Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone documentary has just deepened. Five hundred people from the entertainment world, including Match of the Day host Gary Lineker, Riz Ahmed, Ken Loach, Top Boy creator Ronan Bennett, and Game of Thrones actor Indira Varma, have put their names to a letter to BBC bosses calling on the corporation to “stop censorship on Palestine.” The letter comes after the BBC removed from iPlayer the doc after it emerged that it was narrated by the son of a Hamas minister, information that the BBC said the doc’s producers failed to relay.

The letter, which was also signed by actors Khalid Abdalla, India Amarteifio, Miriam Margolyes, Ruth Negga, and Juliet Stevenson, did not deny the narrator’s links to Hamas but said his father, Dr Ayman Al-Yazouri, served as Gaza’s Deputy Minister of Agriculture, a “civil service role concerned with food production.” “Conflating such governance roles in Gaza with terrorism is both factually incorrect and dehumanising,” read the letter, which can be viewed in full below. “This broad-brush rhetoric assumes that Palestinians holding administrative roles are inherently complicit in violence — a racist trope that denies individuals their humanity and right to share their lived experiences.” Sent to BBC Chair Samir Shah, Director General Tim Davie and content boss Charlotte Moore, the letter is titled ‘UK Media Industry to BBC: Stop Censorship on Palestine’ and has been signed by 500 industry figures.

It calls How to Survive a Warzone “an essential piece of journalism, offering an all-too-rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinian children living in unimaginable circumstances, which amplifies voices so often silenced.” The letter goes on to