BBC headquarters
The Conservative MP Andrew Percy has accused the BBC of putting British Jews directly at risk through its coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Absolutely. The BBC’s relentless portrayal of the Israelis not as the victims of genocidal terror but as hard-hearted, vengeful and wanton killers of children and the innocent has channelled ancient antisemitic tropes of Jewish blood-lust and helped fuel an enormous increase in attacks on Jews.
As Percy said, the BBC’s double standards on Israel, treating patently absurd civilian casualty figures from Hamas as reliable while casting doubt on Israeli statements, present Israel rather than Hamas as the aggressor and rogue actor.
A principal offender has been the Today programme presenter, Mishal Husain. Interviewing the Defence Secretary Grant Shapps on Monday, she unleashed a barrage of distorted and out-of-context quotes to demonise Israel as a bloodthirsty aggressor.
Claiming that the IDF spokesman, Rear-Admiral Daniel Hagari, had said in October that “our focus is on creating damage not precision,” and that Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, had said “we will eliminate everything” in Gaza, Husain said these remarks suggested Israel wasn’t acting within international law and might be why “so many Palestinians have died”.
Yet as the Guardian acknowledged on 5 December, Hagari had been mistranslated. He had actually said: “While balancing accuracy with the scope of damage, right now we’re focused on what causes maximum damage”.
Gallant’s words have been taken out of context. He had said: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before, and Hamas will not exist. We will eliminate everything”. He meant eliminating Hamas, not Gaza’s civilians.
In any event, what matters is not what’s said but what Israel does. For the ratio of civilians to combatants killed by Israel is around two to one.
This is far fewer than the proportion of civilians killed in war by any other nation’s army — and when taking into account the Hamas rockets falling short into Gaza and killing its people, fewer still.
Most disgusting of all was how Husain twisted Benjamin Netanyahu’s reference to the ancient Israelites’ biblical foe, Amalek, when he said: “We remember, and we are fighting.”
Husain claimed that “Amalek” involved the injunction to spare no-one and destroy “every man, woman and child, sheep, camel and donkey”. And she suggested this was the cause of Israel’s rate of death and destruction in Gaza.
This was grotesque. Amalek was the genocidal enemy of the Jewish people, whose attack was so lethal that the Jews have a religious commitment to “remember” him in order to destroy any such enemy before it can wipe out the Jewish people again.
Yet Husain and other Israel-haters have abused this sacred duty to defend the Jewish people against genocide by claiming obscenely that it meant Israel intends to wipe out the Palestinians as an act of malign aggression.
The government has supported Israel over its show trial at the International Court of Justice. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Cameron, has said South Africa’s accusation against Israel of “genocide” is wrong because “genocide” involves an intention to wipe out an entire people whereas Israel is merely defending itself in Gaza.
Defending Israel, however, takes more than objecting to “when did you stop beating your wife” harassment. It involves calling out the murderous lies that are circulating about Israel’s behaviour, and stating the truth instead.
But instead, Cameron took aim at Israel with a few poisonous barbs of his own. He was “worried,” he told a parliamentary committee, that Israel “might be in breach of international law” in Gaza and that “on lots of occasions” its compliance was “under question”.
Since he offered no evidence of any such breaches, his remarks served merely as yet another smear against an Israel fighting for its life according to international law and yet being demonised for doing so.
The Jews find themselves in the hallucinatory situation of being under unprecedented physical and verbal assault by a western world determined to erase genocidal Jewish victimisation and instead delegitimise Israeli Jews as enemies of humanity.
This has been building up for years. Yet the community’s leadership has chosen not to call out publicly the enemies of the Jews in British society. Instead it has sought to appease, to genuflect and to grovel.
Last week the Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, indicated the desperate failure of that approach when he called for British Jews to be “brave” and challenge Muslims over Israel following the “deeply disappointing” Muslim attacks on the Jewish state since the October 7 pogrom.
Candidly, Mirvis regretted that he hadn’t always prioritised Israel in interfaith dialogue, which mostly “focused on what unites us”.
The community needs to start calling out the unique evil of the onslaught against Israel and the Jews from the unholy alliance between Muslim antisemites, the left and the political class.
Instead of responding with instantly forgettable rallies against antisemitism to the malevolent falsehoods raining down daily from the intelligentsia, the church and the Hamas Broadcasting Corporation, British Jews should start taking the fight in public and by name to those intent on destroying truth, justice and the Jewish people.
The BBC is a truly appalling organization, similar to The Guardian in its antisemitism and hatred of Israel. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve complained about their coverage of Israel, but whatever people try to do, the Beeb just ignores them and carries on their hate-filled propaganda. And to add insult to injury, we British residents are forced to pay for the “privilege” of watching television, even if we never watch the Beeb at all. Failure to buy an annual television licence carries a possible jail sentence!
The root of this hatred is the irrational, deep-rooted hatred of Jews and Christians promulgated by the “religion of peace”. As you know, Ted, Muslims are indoctrinated from their earliest years to believe that their deity wants them to kill Jews and Christians and to wipe out the State of Israel. Nothing will change until these schoolbooks are banned and peace is promoted through early education. Even then, I doubt the mullahs will stop preaching their hate.
In the UK, we now have about 3 million Muslims and a mere 250,000 Jews. Many Jews are thinking about aliyah, feeling there is no place for them there. I think this is desparately sad.
The BBC represents the political elite globalist viewpoint. Globalists tend to be antisemitic, because the history of the Jewish people is the story of freedom, and globalists are against freedom and freedom movements wherever they exist in the world.
Globalists pursue mass Muslim migration because Islamic fundamentalists are totalitarian in ideology, and have genocidal wishes and intentions towards Jews and Christians. There is not much difference between those with hateful attitudes towards Jews or Israel and those with genocidal intent towards Jews. The former begets the latter.
The British elite especially the political elites were antisemitic even during World War II, and certainly prior to World War II. According to one biographer, (Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny) Churchill got no support from the political establishment for his ideas about a Jewish homeland in part of Palestine. Another historian (Fransisco Gil-White) reports that Churchill himself was antisemitic. There is a long history of antisemitism in England, just as there is a long history of Jewish life in England. Many of the Irish sided with Hitler during World War II. Since then they have been strongly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel.
But at this period in time, the BBC, like NPR or the New York Times in the US, represents the interests of globalists and can be counted on for antisemitic/anti-Israel bias. That means the twisting and perverting of statements made by Jews to fit the narrative that Jews are the cause of Palestinian victimhood.
Before blaming Jews for the victimization of Palestinians, Jews were blamed for poisoning wells and using the blood of Christian children with which they baked Matzah, and Jews are also blamed for being in control of the financial world.
Jews have been blamed for having no country of their own (prior to 1948) and have been blamed for trying to have a country of their own (after 1948).
The fact that political elites are anti-semitic goes along with the current reality that political elites around the world are against the freedom of their people, and the people from many Western countries are tired of the political elites and the damage and destruction they have wrought throughout the west. There is a growth taking place all around the world of people who have decided it is time to put an end to the predatory power of the globalists and the political elites. Every day new people who were formerly left of center have discovered they can no longer trust those in positions of authority and power. The more the elites realize this is happening, the more they speak about the great need for more censorship, as they did during the recent WEF meetings.
There are even globalists in Israel who, while not openly admitting to hating Jews, often reveal in their critiques of those on the right, an intolerance to the religious Jews of Israel. These are the individuals who believe that Israel is the cause of Palestinian suffering and as a result, were and are incapable of recognizing national security problems that exist as a result of widespread Islamist indoctrination of the Palestinians. Their blindness to the danger the Palestinians represented to Jews was based upon blaming Jewish Israelis as the aggressors and seeing the Palestinians as innocent. These people should never have been allowed anywhere near the military or any branch of the Israeli Intelligence services. And in the future, the Israeli people should run them out of their positions and hold them responsible for their intelligence failures and the complete failure to provide for adequate defense of the homeland be it in the southern or northern command.