UK regulator reviewing TV station’s licence after new evidence of antisemitic output
Pressure on Ofcom to act against parent company of LuaLua, an IRGC-affiliated online broadcaster, mounts following UK’s intended ban on Iran’s Revolutionary Guards
The UK’s television watchdog is understood to be reviewing whether an online TV station’s owner should retain its broadcasting licence following new evidence of antisemitic output.
Ofcom has previously declined to take action against the parent compnay of LuaLua TV because the offending content, including social media posts, was on the internet rather than on broadcast television, but it is now reviewing that decision.
A licence was issued to LuaLua’s parent company in 2011 subject to the operators being deemed fit and proper persons to broadcast.
LuaLua praised, glorified and invited support for proscribed terror groups and their leaders in dozens of posts between 2020 and 2025 in apparent contravention of the Terrorism Act. One tweet protested against the “Judaisation” of Bahrain following the Abraham Accords, which normalised that country’s relations with Israel; another cited an edict from a religious leader prohibiting the sale of property to Jews.
The channel, which is run by the anti-monarchy Bahraini opposition in London, is a subsidiary of Shells for Media Productions, a UK company based on an industrial estate in Park Royal, west London. The parent company is affiliated to the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps), which has played a role in the violent suppression of the recent uprising, and which the UK is intending to proscribe. LuaLua’s content shows support for Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which are already proscribed in the UK.
Tweets translated from Arabic show a veneration of the former IRGC-Quds Brigade commander Qassem Soleimani following his assassination in January 2020 by the US; praise for Hamas during its attacks of 7 October; a relationship with Hamas’s leadership in Lebanon demonstrated by interviews with its officers; and veneration of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2024.
One tweet in a series praising Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, following his death in October 2024 uses the Arabic honorifc “batal”, which means hero or champion.
LuaLua TV, which is also registered as a corporate entity in Cyprus, had its US website seized by the Biden government in 2021 because of alleged links to the IRGC-Quds-controlled Islamic Radios and Television Union (IRTVU), which is based in Tehran. Those links have now been proven: the website of IRTVU lists LuaLua as one of its members and publishes statements from the channel commemorating Hezbollah operators working in its media division, Al-Manar (‘The Lighthouse’).
An Ofcom spokesperson said: “LuaLua TV is available in the UK only as an online streaming service. Online streams of TV channels are not covered by Ofcom’s broadcasting rules unless the service is also listed on a regulated TV guide, such as Sky, Virgin, Freeview or Freesat.”
The regulator told Jewish News: “Shells for Media Productions Ltd is the licensee for LuaLua TV, but this licence is not used. However, Ofcom has an ongoing duty to be satisfied that all broadcast licensees are fit and proper to hold their licences, and we’ll consider carefully any new evidence available on whether existing licensees remain fit and proper.”
LuaLua TV has been contacted for comment.
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