OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: The Unbounded Anti-Semitism of the BBC.
Anyone who has seen the BBC’s coverage of Gaza and Israel since October 7—among them the 1.1 billion people who look at the BBC’s news site every month, making it the most widely read on the planet—will have seen how slanted its reporting is. But the problem began decades before October 7, and it is now difficult—impossible, really—to argue the case I tried to make on that panel. The evidence suggests that the problem with the BBC’s coverage of Israel is far broader and stems from its attitude to Jews themselves. Even Danny Cohen, former controller of BBC One, the corporation’s main broadcast channel, now says the organization is guilty of “systemic problems of antisemitism and bias.”
Whatever the history, it has come to a head in a documentary broadcast by the BBC in February called Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone. Though it was ostensibly a piece of independent journalism showing the impact of the Gaza war on its 13-year-old narrator, within hours of its transmission, it emerged that the boy was in fact the son of a minister in Gaza’s Hamas government. Equally egregious examples of the distortions in the program were uncovered subsequently.
The discovery that Abdullah al-Yazouri, the 13-year-old, was the son of Hamas official Ayman al-Yazouri was the work of David Collier, a retired businessman who has turned his attention in recent years to online research. He says it took him less than three hours to find out the boy’s background. The BBC now says it asked the film’s producers, Hoyo Films, whether there were anything of concern about the boy and was told there was nothing. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone at the world’s (self-proclaimed) leading news organization that it should and could check for itself. Not a single one of its 5,500 journalists was asked by managers or editors to take a look at the film to check its bona fides.
That seems unlikely to have been a mere oversight. Rather, it is a byproduct of the mindset that dominates the BBC’s thinking. If your worldview is that Israel is by definition evil and Gazans virtuous, you will always be ready to accept anything that seems to buttress such a view.
Related: ‘Reverts?’ The BBC is spouting Islamist talking points.
We have become accustomed to the BBC adopting the language of trans activists. ‘Gender care’ is how the UK’s supposedly impartial state broadcaster refers to the scandalous process of sterilising children who are confused about their sex. ‘Preferred pronouns’ are rigorously observed for men who claim to be women. Could we now be seeing something similar at the BBC where Islamic fundamentalists are concerned?
Whether wittingly or not, an article published on the BBC News website on Friday essentially declared Islam to be humanity’s one true faith. It was a fairly anodyne, magazine-style piece about how people who convert to Islam can sometimes feel lonely during Eid, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. Yet in the headline, and peppered throughout the piece, it referred to these converts as ‘reverts’ – a term loaded with Islamist ideology.
“Gender care?” “Preferred pronouns?” Islamic “reverts?” If, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” the Beep is functioning surprisingly well. But as Fraser Myers of Spiked wrote, “There’s been no Islamist takeover of the Beeb, of course. The problem is that in the BBC’s PC worldview, Muslims are seen as a perpetually oppressed group. The BBC then seeks to rectify this alleged oppression through ‘positive representation’ in its content, and by letting self-appointed activists have editorial influence. ”
