On May 1 the BBC Sport website published a filmed clip titled “Infantino attempts to orchestrate Israel-Palestine handshake,” with the following synopsis: “Fifa president Gianni Infantino tries to convince Palestinian and Israeli representatives to shake hands at the Fifa Congress in Vancouver.”
Roughly half of the unnarrated and edited video shows Infantino speaking from a podium. The rest of it shows him engaged in unheard conversation with one of the two unnamed people standing on the stage, who has a keffiyeh draped around his shoulders.
BBC does not disclose to its audiences that the man wearing the political symbol at a FIFA conference is the president of the Palestine Football Association, Fatah’s Jibril Rajoub, who is also the head of the PLO Supreme Council for Youth and Sports and the Palestine Olympic Committee. No mention is made of the fact that he was sanctioned by FIFA itself in 2018 for inciting hatred and violence.
Nor does the BBC report that the other man on the stage is the Israel Football Association’s vice president, Basem Suliman, who is one of several Arab Israeli members of its management.
Notably BBC withholds from audiences that the party that refused the “Israel-Palestine handshake” that is the topic of BBC Sport’s report was – according to the Palestine Football Association itself – Rajoub.
The fact that both BBC Sport and the BBC in general have in the past provided amplification for Rajoub’s longstanding exploitation of sport as a means of delegitimising Israel for political ends makes it all the more curious that BBC Sport failed to identify him in this latest report.
Instead, BBC Sport chose to promote the false notion that Infantino failed “to convince” both representatives “to shake hands” rather than telling the real story of a Palestinian representative who refused to acknowledge his Israeli counterpart.
This post originally appeared at CAMERA UK.