BBC presenter Nasima Begum says ‘death to Zionist scum’

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BBC presenter, Nasima Begum, has been exposed by the same organization, HonestReporting, that first uncovered Tala Halawa’s remarks, as having put out the same kinds of atrocious antisemitic and anti-Israel remarks. A report on the deplorable Nasima Begum is here: “BBC Presenter Tweeted ‘Death to Zionist Scum,’ Accused Israel of Perpetrating Nazi-like Genocide”, writes Hugh Fitzgerald

Recently the BBC found itself compelled to discharge one of its “digital journalists” – Tala Halawa by name – for her antisemitic and genocidal statements. She declared on social media, among other blood-curdling sentiments, that Israel is “more Nazi than Hitler” and “Hitler was right.” Now another BBC presenter, Nasima Begum, has been exposed by the same organization, HonestReporting, that first uncovered Tala Halawa’s remarks, as having put out the same kinds of atrocious antisemitic and anti-Israel remarks. A report on the deplorable Nasima Begum is here: “BBC Presenter Tweeted ‘Death to Zionist Scum,’ Accused Israel of Perpetrating Nazi-like Genocide,” by Akiva Van Koningsveld, Algemeiner, November 12, 2021:

…Earlier this year, HonestReporting helped expose Tala Halawa — a BBC journalist who had made antisemitic and genocidal statements on social media….

Once again, HonestReporting has revealed a wealth of antisemitic and offensive posts on numerous social media platforms by Nasima Begum, an arts council-supported charity advocate and trustee who has also worked as a presenter for BBC Radio Manchester.

Many of Begum’s antisemitic tweets date back to 2011 and 2012, but her problematic social media activity continues to spill over.

For example, in May 2021, Begum invoked a modern version of a classic antisemitic trope by tweeting that Zionists have a “hold on mainstream media.”

Rich Jews “control the world’s media.” This antisemitic trope first made its appearance in The Protocols of The Elders of Zion (1903).

The same month, Begum took to Instagram, describing in a post that, somewhat ironically, she attended a protest against the BBC and accused it of favoring Israel — while ludicrously alleging that “mainstream news outlets were saying nothing” against Israel.

“Mainstream news outlets were saying nothing against Israel”? The world’s journalists were flooding the airwaves, the print pages, the television screens, and every kind of social media, with stories about the cruel Israelis deliberately bombing civilians in Gaza, where it seems there was scarcely a Hamas fighter to be found. The mad dogs of the IDF were attacking schools, hospitals, mosques, apartment buildings – there was seemingly no civilian target that the Israelis would spare. What else can one say other than what Nasima Begum did say, in a tweet: “Death To Zionist Scum.”

A month later, in June 2021, Begum characterized Israel as “killing innocent people and terrorizing them daily” in a tweet that also included the blatant lie that Israel was “bombing masjid alaqsa.”…

Israel strives always to minimize civilian casualties, both its own and those of its enemy. The May war in Gaza was no different. When a building was about to be targeted for an airstrike, the IDF telephoned, leafleted, emailed warnings to the inhabitants, and used its “knock-on-the-roof” technique, too, giving the residents anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours to flee. In the case of what became a cause celebre – the bombing of the so-called “AP building” in Gaza City, the Israelis gave a full two hours of warning. That building did indeed house AP offices, but the AP was not the target, as so many have insisted must have been the case, accusing Israel of trying to prevent the truth from getting out about its “war crimes” by bombing the offices of journalists, In fact, as the Israelis insisted (but by that time minds had been made up), the target was the main command-and-control center of Hamas, that had been deliberately placed by Hamas in the same building full of Western journalists.

As for Begum’s bizarre charge that Israel was “bombing masjid alaqsa,” one need only visit Al Aqsa to see the preposterousness of that claim.

In 2012, Begum also applauded threats by the hacker group Anonymous to seize “any and all websites deemed to be in Israeli cyberspace”; and the same year, she also expressed support for an imprisoned Palestinian on a hunger strike.

The man in question, Akram Rikhawi, was the subject of reports by the Associated Press and New York Times. He was serving a nine-year sentence after being convicted of transporting Palestinian suicide bombers….

The Palestinian hunger striker, Akram Rikhawi, for whom Nasim Begum expressed her public support, was not in prison for some petty crime; he was an accomplice in mass murder, who transported suicide bombers to their targets.

As HonestReporting repeatedly tagged Begum in a series of Twitter notifications, we discovered that she had changed her account settings to “protected.” This limited her account’s visibility so that only her followers could see her tweets, thus effectively preventing others from accessing problematic content.

Thereafter, Begum issued a lengthy apology on Twitter, in which she took “full responsibility for the utterly reprehensible and unacceptable language that I used.”

Once she realized she had been found out – that is, her history of antisemitic tweets going back a decade had been discovered and brought to light – her first move was to hide her tweets so that they could only be accessed by her followers, who presumably agreed with her, and to prevent others from discovering just how vile she had been. She only had to change her account settings to “protected.”

And her second move was to pretend that she had had a profound change of heart, that she was no longer “that person” who once held those terrible beliefs. She offered the usual preposterous apology, taking “full responsibility for the utterly reprehensible and unacceptable language that I used.” You know, such language as “Zionist scum” (a phrase she repeats endlessly) and denouncing in semi-literate fashion the state of Israel, which “is just the most vile ever [sic] thing to exist.”

By now these fake apologies, these sudden revelations that “that’s not who I am” that are designed to do only one thing – save the job of the antisemite who has been caught out – convince no one. If over a decade you have consistently denounced “Zionist scum” and called for the killing of Jews, why would anyone believe that just after your tweets have been exposed, you would suddenly have undergone a scarcely believable – indeed, unbelievable – sea change?

While the apology addressed “the referenced tweets over a decade ago,” it did not tackle her more recent posts, including the false allegations that Israel was “bombing” Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, or the insinuation that Jews control the media….

Nasima Begum claims she regrets tweets that are from her distant past (“tweets over a decade ago”), but passes over in silence her tweets from this very year. What shall we conclude from this? Perhaps she finds her “Zionist scum” posts of a decade ago sufficiently distant in time so that she can take “full responsibility yada yada” for that person she was once, a long time ago, but is “no longer that person.” What person, then, is she? She has tweeted this very year — – 2021 – the antisemitic charge that Jews “control the world media.” Does she wish to retract that statement? Apparently not. She accused Israel this past May of “bombing Al-Aqsa” – perhaps the most dangerous charge one can make against Israel, given the homicidal hysteria such a charge, If believed, can elicit in Muslim minds. It is a flat-out lie, and Nasima Begum knew that perfectly well when she made it.

Do your sullied reputation a favor, BBC. When it comes to anti-Israel personnel and programs, you are already out far and in deep. Try, just a bit, to make amends.

Fire her. She will not be missed.

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