BBC cash crunch is too little punishment for 30 years of anti-Israel bias

Obsession, it turns out, is not just a 1980s Calvin Klein fragrance. It is what I have for the egregious, unashamed, long-standing anti-Israel bias of the BBC.

I was about to also express fury that the broadcaster has so far managed to evade punishment for the 30-something years of pro-Palestine partisanship that has been such a key driver of antisemitism in the UK and across the globe – perhaps even a factor in last week’s stabbings in Golders Green – but it seems not to have evaded punishment entirely.

It seems to have received some karmic retribution for its leading role in the epic inversion of reality on Israel-Palestine on behalf of, well, a series of bad actors, from Arab nationalists and the Soviet Union to Iran and Islamists – all ratcheted up to new heights following Oct 7. The karmic retribution takes the form of a big hole in the BBC’s budget after around 3.6 million UK households refused to pay for a license fee.

As those 3.6 m refuseniks represent slightly over one-eighth of all UK households, it also indicates that in addition to the UK Jews who are no longer prepared to tolerate the BBC’s outrageously biased Israel coverage (and presumably a number of households having a preference for streaming platforms), there are a significant numbers of UK citizens who are no longer willing to subsidize a BBC worldview they emphatically do not share.

Hopefully, such dissatisfaction will be kept in mind when BBC execs are considering cuts and redundancies across the BBC, and the departments which cause the most harm will receive the most savage cuts.

For its role in radicalizing its Arabic-speaking listeners, and inciting Jew-hate, BBC Arabic is obviously a front-runner for cuts. But an even better solution may be shutting it down altogether which, would at a stroke, not only save millions to reassign to, say, “Traitors” or “Just A Minute”  but would remove a part of BBC World that, as I said last November, is “a toxic embarrassment” thanks to its repeated failures to adhere to the corporation’s – admittedly now laughable – “impartiality” guidelines.

But far more deserving of savage cuts for its much more deadly role in inflaming anti-Zionism, exacerbating Israel-hate and ultimately helping to incite Jew-hate across the planet, is BBC News and Current Affairs.

It doesn’t go in for the crude slogans and street-mob language heard on BBC Arabic. Instead, this level of anti-Israelism, and accompanying Jew-hate has been contrived through omission and selectivity; by amplifying threat and harm to Palestinians (especially Palestinians in Gaza) and minimizing (or ignoring altogether) threat and harm to Israel. And not only is the bias hard to spot, but because of the broadcaster’s “reputation,” the biased reports with missing context are assumed by the average citizen to be “impartial”. The reality, of course, is that the BBC lost its impartiality on Israel-Palestine roughly three decades ago when it capitulated to that plausible but fake, Soviet-fabricated narrative which claimed that Jews displaced Arabs in “Arab Palestine” and that Jews or the Jewish state are responsible for all the subsequent ills of the Palestinians.

No matter how satisfying, therefore, it would be to see News hit with redundancies and savage budget cuts, and to hear that Lyse Doucet, Orla Guerin, Jeremy Bowen, et al (not forgetting Sarah Smith and Gary O’Donohue in Washington) had been culled due to the shortfall, it is at least 20 years too late to undo the damage and at least 20 years too late to dismantle the illusion that BBC News so enthusiastically helped to craft with its decades of pro-Palestine partisanship. The illusion, that is, that Palestinians are the “victims” of Israel when, as we all know, they are indeed victims, but of those who use them, rather than of Israel, which is the actual victim (of repeated attempts at its destruction and relentless terrorism) for daring to exist.

Perhaps if BBC Director-Generals in the 1990s had curbed the tendency to report Palestinian propaganda as “news”, or had insisted on the inclusion of all relevant context; or perhaps if the Balen Report had seen the light of day when it was compiled 20 years ago, or perhaps if the activities in the BBC’s Jerusalem Bureau had been monitored more closely, it might have been possible to halt the Israel-haters who have been so ably abetted by legions of believers in the plausible-but-fake narrative.

But none of that happened and on Oct 8 2023 – just one day after the brutal invasion, massacre, mass rape and hostage-taking – we saw the result. We saw the BBC begin whitewashing the perpetrators, by immediately dropping the phrase “proscribed terrorist group” for Hamas, the proscribed jihadist terrorist militia funded by the brutal, misogynist, murderous extremist Iranian regime, and switching to the jihadists’ preferred designation, “militant group”.

And when a tidal-wave of pro-terrorist, anti-Israel disinformation crashed across the globe even before Israel’s operation began in Gaza to free the hostages, halt the rockets (that had been raining down on Israel for a decade), and prevent the further atrocities promised by Hamas, the BBC could not have been more accommodating to the jihadists, with its laundering of them and their extremist, fundamentalist puppet-masters. Not only did they willingly report as “news” pretty much every allegation made by Hamas, but they happily broadcast reports and videos from Hamas operatives posing as journalists, while, their stringers and staffers delivered “reports” that could have been scripted by Hamas, inevitably ignoring totally or skimming over context, such as Hamas’s vast underground tunnel network, Hamas embedding in urban areas amid civilians and Hamas known to use schools and hospitals for weapons storage. These reports also unfailingly failed to challenge the very obvious lies about “shortages” of water, electricity and, of course food. And not only did the BBC fail to challenge the very obvious lies, but amplified them by giving air-time to every individual with a grievance and every hostile NGO, as well, of course, as airing undiluted Hamas propaganda as a “documentary.”

And we see the result again now, when the commentariat condemn antisemitism. Hardly anyone can help slipping in the “context” of “Gaza” – the fiction crafted by Israel’s enemies and embellished by the BBC.