On Sunday, the BBC’s Paris correspondent, James Waterhouse, delivered his verdict on the weekend’s unrest across France. “They were mostly peaceful,” he informed viewers, before blaming the trouble on “an opportunistic minority” and observing that “few believe this was at the hands of the genuine protesters”. Behind him, a car blazed, masked men battled police and shops were being looted.
It all called to mind Comical Ali. Remember him? Saddam Hussein’s information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, who insisted that Iraqi forces were prevailing as American tanks rolled into Baghdad? Well, this was Comical BBC. It also reminded me of Omar Jimenez, the CNN correspondent who famously reported in front of a burning building in Kenosha in 2020, while captions described the Black Lives Matter protests as “fiery but mostly peaceful”. Comical CNN.
Only it’s not that funny any more. The “opportunistic minority” has managed to burn down most of Limoges City Hall, set fire to Lyon’s tourist office, storm Marseille’s town hall and injure hundreds of police officers, with thousands arrested. Moreover, they have waved the Palestinian flag – on Saturday, protesters raised it in place of the Tricolore on the Monument à la République in Paris – draped themselves in keffiyehs and daubed “Free Gaza” on shuttered storefronts. Those mostly peaceful scoundrels, bless.
That Jews have received a particularly heavy blow is another detail that the BBC finds infra dig to mention. On motzei shabbat, the Ohalei Yaakov synagogue in Paris’s 19th arrondissement was ransacked, its siddurim and tefillin strewn across the floor and the rabbi’s office vandalised.
In Marseille, Jewish-owned businesses were looted and set ablaze, and the head of the main Jewish umbrella group in the city called for a state of emergency to be declared. This took place, of course, against a backdrop of 1,320 antisemitic incidents last year, more than three times the number in 2022. Had a mosque been ransacked, does anybody believe the BBC would have neglected to mention it, or played down the venom of the attackers?
Indeed, one theatre of violence that the broadcaster is rather less keen to dilute is the West Bank. There have been more than a thousand incidents of unrest since the start of this year. Palestinians have been beaten, olive groves torched, livestock slaughtered and villages emptied. The IDF has condemned it (while sometimes turning a blind eye) and Israeli governments have been far too slow to stamp it out. All of this is true.
But the communities in Judea and Samaria are – literally – mostly peaceful. In January, the IDF and Shin Bet estimated that there were some 300 Jewish extremists involved in the violent attacks, 70 of whom were considered “hardcore” fanatics behind the worst violence. These 300 largely lived in 42 illegal outposts across the West Bank, they said, though as many as half were registered as living in Israel proper.
Now, how many Jews live beyond the green line again? Ah yes, around 480,000. Even if those figures of 300 and 70 were multiplied ten times, they would still represent 0.6 per cent of the total, with the “hardcore” fanatics accounting for just 0.1 per cent. Here, at last, is a scenario that would richly warrant the “mostly peaceful” line. Yet how does the BBC cover it?
You don’t need me to tell you. Every incident is a big story; every big story is framed as part of a grand narrative of dispossession, ethnic cleansing and impunity, which bears only a passing resemblance to the complicated historical truth.
Remember Louis Theroux’s insidious documentary about the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria last year? Safe to say the words “mostly peaceful” were not used. In fact, as I wrote at the time, Theroux “used his platform, access and budget to do nothing but reinforce the bigotry of the masses. Create propaganda, in other words. As if the world needed any more!”
Indeed. There was no “opportunistic minority” there either, even though that is precisely what the hilltop youth are: a cowardly fringe despised by most Israelis. A pattern emerges here. Whether in Kremlin-Bicêtre or Kenosha, the violent few are an aberration to be explained away; in Kafr Malik, Kur or Khirbet al-Maleh, meanwhile, they become the essence of the whole enterprise.
The BBC, in other words, operates on a sliding scale of outrage, calibrated not to the severity of the violence but to the identity of those committing it. When the perpetrators happen to be mostly peaceful Jews, the lens zooms in until every incident fills the screen. When they are mostly violent and march under a Palestinian flag, it zooms out, until the unrest becomes a footnote to a “genuine” grievance while the West burns.
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