British public broadcaster BBC over the weekend rebuked one of its top hosts for breaching editorial guidelines with a "misleading" claim that Israel had killed "lots of Palestinian kids."
On April 8, Andrew Marr, the star of the eponymous "The Andrew Marr Show," concluded a discussion of the Syrian regime's chemical weapons attack on civilians by saying, "And the Middle East is aflame again. I mean there's lots of Palestinian kids being killed further south as well by Israeli forces."
His comments referred to clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinian rioters in the Gaza border.
British media said the BBC's extraordinary ruling against one of its top personalities is almost unprecedented.
It follows a complaint by anti-Semitism campaigner Jonathan Sacerdoti.
"When talking about a story on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, Andrew Marr for some reason decided to talk about Israel (which was unrelated anyway). He stated there's a lot of Palestinian kids being killed further south by Israeli forces," he wrote in his complaint to the BBC.
"This is completely incorrect and is made up. This was irrelevant to the conversation on Syria … and also actually completely false."
The Daily Mail said that BBC producers initially tried to defend Marr's comments, saying that several Palestinian youths and children were killed in the week following the broadcast, but Sacerdoti argued that "later events could not be used to justify" Marr's comments.
BBC Head of Editorial Complaints Fraser Steel wrote to Sacerdoti, saying, "The BBC's guidelines require that output is well-sourced and based on sound evidence.
"In the absence of any evidence to support the reference to 'lots' of children being killed at the time of transmission, it seems to us to have risked misleading audiences on a material point. We therefore propose to uphold this part of your complaint."
