Pro-Palestine legal centre urges BBC to drop Robbie Gibb over Jewish Chronicle scandal
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 Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) accused Gibb of “failure to uphold editorial standards” while being the Jewish Chronicle’s director.
In an open letter on Friday, 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.”
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Earlier this month, the Jewish Chronicle was forced to retract a series of articles alleged to contain fabricated quotes from Israeli 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 7 October attack.
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response to the allegations, the Jewish Chronicle said in a statement that it had ended its association with Perry and withdrawn his articles from its website.
It said: "The Jewish Chronicle maintains the highest journalistic standards in a highly contested information landscape and we deeply regret the chain of events that led to this point. We apologise to our loyal readers and have reviewed our internal processes so that this will not be repeated."
BBC pressured to act
However, the Jewish Chronicle, which is the oldest Jewish news source in the UK, has come under heavy scrutiny since the revelations.
Gibb, who was the sole owner and director of the Jewish Chronicle until recently, has been at the heart of the scandal.
The BBC has also faced questions about the link between Gibb, who is a member of its governing board, and the Jewish Chronicle.
In addition to being a non-executive board member, Gibb also currently chairs the BBC’s Remuneration Committee along with the England Committee and acts as a member of the Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, according to the ICJP.
Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of the Guardian who has previously investigated the Jewish Chronicle’s ownership, called into question Gibb's position on the BBC’s editorial standards committee.
“I can’t see how he can possibly sit on that committee and portray himself as a beacon of impartiality, sitting in judgment on BBC journalists,” Rusbridger told LBC radio.
That view was echoed by Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding (Caabu).
Doyle told MEE: “To have one of the most senior people at the BBC be a participant in the takeover of the Jewish Chronicle calls into question his impartiality.”
Doyle said the Jewish Chronicle had pushed a “very activist right-wing agenda” under its editor, Jake Wallis Simons, and his predecessor, Stephen Pollard, which marked a sharp break from its history as a paper that was far more reflective of the different positions taken by Britain’s Jewish community on Israel and Palestine.
On Wednesday, the Muslim Council of Britain said it had written to the BBC to express its own "deep concern" about Gibb's role and called on the corporation to consider whether it was appropriate for him to remain on the editorial standards committee.
"We believe that Sir Robbie Gibb cannot objectively judge the impartiality of the BBC on a highly sensitive subject such as the Israel-Gaza conflict while his role in a newspaper that has demonstrated clear bias against Palestinians remains opaque at best, and fully supportive at worst," Zara Mohammed, the MCB's secretary-general, wrote in a letter to Samir Shah, the BBC chair.
MEE previously approached Gibb for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.
A BBC spokesperson told MEE that Gibb had resigned as a director of the Jewish Chronicle in August.
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