France24’s Gavin Lee, Oct. 7 Denier of the Year

By: Tamar Sternthal January 19, 2025

Several editors notorious for their introduction of antisemitic rhetoric and misinformation about Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and recently reportedly banned from Wikipedia would find themselves at home at France24, where Oct. 7 denial is alive and well.

In a Jan. 17 panel discussion on the impending Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal, France24 “World of the Week” presenter Gavin Lee interjected about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “this is the person who triggered the conflict in the first place.”

Gavin, a former BBC reporter of 20 years, was honored as news journalist of the year in 2009 by the Sony Radio Academy Awards, the highest accolade in British radio journalism. But his statement Friday blaming Netanyahu — as opposed to the Hamas terror organization which invaded southern Israel in a terror frenzy of mass murder, kinocide, rape, kidnapping, torture and maiming — may mark him as Oct. 7 denier of the year.

Lee’s erasure of Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities — and blaming Israel for the war which it did not want and did not start — places him alongside the likes of white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who opined on Telegram:

Lots of talk about the “intelligence failure” that IDF/Mossad were caught off guard by an attack on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War and after telegraphing from Ayatollah.

I think this is a little suspicious in light of how the Likud government will benefit politically from this crisis both domestically and internationally.

None of Lee’s esteemed guests — Richard Werly, correspondent for the Blick; Agnès Poirier, London correspondent for L’Express; journalist and author Dalal Mawad; and Judah Grunstein, editor-in-chief of World Politics Review — challenged their host on his outrageous Oct. 7 denial.

Perhaps they had already read the tea leaves on France24, a publicly-funded network which formally ruled that a woman whose social media activity is studded with extreme anti-Jewish bigotry, vitriolic anti-Israeli hostility and appalling ignorance is fit to serve as the Arabic service’s main on-site source covering Israeli and Palestinian affairs.

Apparently, however, France24’s employment of journalists whose Arabic-language social media posts glorify terrorism was merely warm-up for the main act: an English-language host on a France24 program engaging in denial of Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities, the most deadly massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

To what further depths can the publicly-funded French network possibly sink from here?

Comments are closed.