Around 20 years ago I was booed in shul. It’s not a moment you forget. All the more so given that the context was that I was on a panel arguing (against my fellow panellists) that the BBC is not institutionally antisemitic.
How’s that for irony, eh? Today I’d not just say it is institutionally antisemitic but that the BBC is one of the most dangerously antisemitic organisations in the Western world, given its reach and global status, with 1.1 billion people looking at the BBC’s news site every month, making it the most widely read on the planet.
I look back now and wonder how I could have been so naïve back then? As the likes of Danny Cohen, the former controller of BBC1, have put it eloquently and with such deep regret, of course the BBC is intuitionally antisemitic. The evidence is so overwhelming – from its parroting of Hamas propaganda to its coverage of assaults and attacks on Jews in the UK and so much else – that you have to ignore reality to make the opposite case.
You don’t need me to list the many wilful distortions by the BBC in order to portray Jews and Israel in the worst possible light, such as last year’s “documentary”, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone, narrated by the son of a Hamas minister, and its coverage in 2021 of an attack by a gang of Muslim youths on a bus of Jewish children in Oxford Street, when it asserted that one of the Jews had said “dirty Muslims.” The Jewish child was in fact calling for help in Hebrew, but the BBC reported the slur as fact – as if it was desperate to find a way to blame the Jews and excuse the behaviour of their Muslim attackers. It persisted in this reporting for weeks even after incontrovertible proof of how wrong it was.
But for the sheer audacity of its blatant, calculated, deliberate decision to make its own contribution to wiping Jewish suffering from history – one of the foundations of the contemporary revival in Jew hate - yesterday’s BBC reporting of Holocaust Memorial Day surely tops everything.
As the Campaign for Media Standards highlighted with clips on social media, much of the BBC’s coverage omitted any mention of Jews from the Holocaust. Both the BBC1 breakfast programme and the news bulletins on the Radio 4 Today programme referred to “six million people” being murdered – a formulation then repeated throughout the day, which was clearly a deliberately constructed form of words to be used to reference the Holocaust.
Howard Jacobson has written extensively on how the Jews can never be forgiven for having been murdered, explaining the mindset thus: “Instead of learning compassion from what they endured, the Jews flaunt it as a badge of privilege, demanding limitless sympathy and exemption from all criticism on its account. The only lesson Jews can be said to have learnt from the Holocaust is how to start Holocausts of their own. Those who once suffered at the hands of Nazis have become Nazis themselves...’Never Again’ doesn’t work as a warning if there is no understanding of what happened in the first place. As Tanya Gold persuasively argues in a recent study of Shoah schlock in the Jewish Quarterly, the overwhelming effect of this literature is the ‘erasure” of real Jews from their own history.’” This is the fundamental point underlying the intellectual basis of modern Jew hate and how it has metamorphosed into “anti-Zionism”.
That has accelerated since the October 7 massacres, but the parallel with the Holocaust is instructive. Post-Holocaust, the imperative was to remove the potency of the murder of six million Jews. The Jews were but one group who suffered under the Nazis; they should not be allowed their moaning and the privilege it has given them. Post-October 7, the imperative has been to push this further. Push the word genocide onto the Jews themselves and not only do you wipe the events of October 7, 2023 clean, you remove any claim they may have to the Holocaust. You destroy the meaning and history of the Shoah. The Jews are the real murderers.
You can see this played out in the online attacks in recent weeks on Daniel Finkelstein, who appeared on an episode of Piers Morgan’s web programme when the latter interviewed the American neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, a man who proudly venerates Hitler and Stalin and who has a growing army of online (and offline) support. Finkelstein was there to explain what happened to his mother and father under Hitler and Stalin, the subject of his recent book.
Fuentes responded that he didn’t give a damn about Finkelstein’s mother, and later filmed a video about “Me mum dying in the Holly”. Finkelstein has since been bombarded with “humorous” songs about his mum dying in the Holly (as he has pointed out, she didn’t and went on to live in peace in Hendon) and comments such as “I hope you become a bar of soap”, “Your dad has become a lampshade, your mum is a pair of shoes”, “Holocaust fairytale pedlar.”
The rise of social media has changed the world. As this shows, much of that is for the worse. The BBC is part of the old world, social media the new. There is no comparison between a BBC decision to remove reference to Jews being murdered in the Holocaust and the way in which neo-Nazis gleefully treat the Holocaust and its victims as a cause for celebration.
But there is a spectrum. And if removing the salience and potency of the Holocaust from the Jews is the basis of contemporary Jew hate, the BBC’s removal of Jews from the Holocaust is at one end of that spectrum.
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