Auntie, you’ve got a real problem with Jews and saying sorry isn’t enough - The Jewish Chronicle

How do you tell your Auntie that she has a problem and she needs to get help? You love her, you’ve grown up with her, but really the periodic lapses are becoming a systemic issue which needs an outside professional to correct. She may be very apologetic every time she falters but these aren’t isolated incidents – there’s a pattern. It’s not an act of kindness to hope that things will get better unaided. You need to get her to face up to the fact that she just can’t cope on her own.

So it is with the BBC. “Auntie Beeb” has a special place in my heart. I worked for the Corporation for five years – and loved almost every minute. I learnt so much from great professionals such as John Humphrys, Jonathan Dimbleby and Sue MacGregor. I admire hugely those colleagues with whom I worked like Martha Kearney, Nick Robinson and Kirsty Wark. I find the idea of life without Petroc Trelawnay, Claudia Winkleman and Katie Derham difficult to contemplate. But, and it’s a big but, the BBC has a problem. With the Jews. Literally.

Last month the BBC broadcast a “documentary” on life in Gaza. To say it was a problematic piece of journalism would be like suggesting arsenic was not a perfect mixer for cocktails. The narrator of the film, the hero of the show, was the son of a Hamas official. A fact withheld not just from the viewer but, it would appear, one not even properly acknowledged by the BBC execs who commissioned the programme. The boy’s mother was paid for his participation. That’s BBC cash – licence fee payers’ money – going to fund a family at the heart of a terrorist enterprise. If anyone’s got a better description of Hamas do let me know. And no, militant won’t cut it.

But, hard though it may be to relate, that wasn’t the worst thing about the Gaza doc. It is possible, just possible, if I put the most charitable gloss on events, that the BBC execs involved were merely careless, slipshod and amateurish in the exercise of journalistic oversight, didn’t realise that the star of their show had already appeared on Channel Four news, weren’t aware that had been identified subsequently by them and others as the son of a Hamas leader and didn’t bother to ask if anyone with any terrorist links had been paid out of the licence fee. We can all make mistakes.

What, however, defies belief is that the BBC would broadcast their show with the Arabic word “Yahud” consistently translated as “Israeli” or “Israeli forces”. Let’s be clear. “Yahud” means “Jew”. Look it up in any Arabic dictionary, ask any student of the region, question any journalist who’s spent more than half an hour covering the conflict in the Middle East and they will tell you what that word means. And yet the BBC broadcast their programme with a deliberate, mendacious, mistranslation.

They would never regard “Muslim” and “Palestinian” as inter-changeable. It would be quite wrong to do so. There are Christian Palestinians and those of no faith.

So how could they allow themselves to mix up “Jew” and “Israeli”. It is not just a matter of journalistic accuracy and linguistic integrity – although one would have thought that might have mattered to the BBC – it’s obscuring the reality of the antisemitism which is at Hamas’s core and suffuses Gaza’s culture.

Israel is a society with Arab and Jew, Christian and Muslim, Druze and Falasha, strictly Orthodox and happily irreligious – but for Hamas none of that matters. Israel must be erased because it is the national home of the “Yahud”. Hamas are not seeking to fight a war of resistance against another nation but a war of elimination against Jewish existence. It’s there in their constitution. It was there in the gleeful messages their fighters sent home on October 7 when they gloried in the spilling of – specifically – Jewish blood.

The BBC have, of course, apologised for their mistake in broadcasting the documentary as it was. Which should be gracefully acknowledged. But this one programme was not broadcast in isolation. And the use of “Yahud” in this way was not a one off. Again and again the BBC, and its Arabic service, cover conflict in the Middle East in a manner not so much one-sided as wilfully morally blind. Every time they are found to have made a mistake – whether it’s over who bombed a hospital or who produces reliable statistics on casualties they apologise. Which is good. But what they have not done – yet – is acknowledge that all these errors, omissions, mistranslations, gullible repetitions and propaganda-relating is consistently anti-Israel.

I can’t think of a single occasion where the BBC, let alone its Arabic service, has made an identifiable editorial error by being too trusting of Israeli sources or too indulgent to pro-Israel voices. There’s a pattern here. Auntie needs to acknowledge it. Repeated sorries are not enough. Professional help needs to be called in.

Topics:

BBC