BBC must confront its long-held bias against Jews
When Corbyn’s Labour kept having trouble with antiSemitism, the Left seemed incapable of grasping why. The party stood for anti-racism, after all! What they couldn’t see, of course, was that anti-Semitic behaviour occurred because of a pervasive, deep-seated loathing of Israel – and the two are often linked. The anti-Israel stance itself stemmed from the political convictions of the 1970s far-Left, the circles from which Corbyn emerged.
A similar problem underpins the BBC’s inability to amend its behaviour towards Jews. It just doesn’t get it. The community was deeply wounded by its reporting of the attack by a group of Muslim men on a Hannukah bus carrying Jews in November. Instead of calling it what it was, an anti-Semitic attack, the BBC accused those in the bus of provoking the attack with an anti-Muslim slur. Yet when analysed externally, no such slur was found.
As Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies observed: “The supposed slur, which the BBC insists is there, is nothing but fiction. This raises serious questions about deep-seated biases within the BBC towards Israelis, and towards Jews in general.”
It is unimaginable, given all this, that it would take the BBC as long to apologise as it has for such grievous victim-blaming on any other beleaguered minority. And then, to add insult to injury, to issue a nonapology, as it did last week.
Only after their Executive Complaints Unit partially upheld complaints did it apologise, though the BBC rejected the characterisation of victim blaming, and upheld the use of “alleged” in describing the abuse.
There’s nothing new here. In October, Dreyfus was briefly described as “the notorious Jewish spy” in a blurb for the BBC’s Paris Police 1900. The recent synagogue hostage-taking in Texas was disappointingly reported with barely a mention of anti-Semitism.
The BBC’s problem with Jews goes back several generations, and, as with Corbyn’s Labour, the reason lies in the slow but sure percolation of the most toxic parts of left-wing culture of the 1970s. Only when the BBC confronts its anti-Israel bias will it find that it makes fewer slips in its handling of Jews.