The BBC’s hatred for Israel

In a recent European poll, Israel was chosen as the state most dangerous to world peace. Those who wonder why need only read or watch the European media. For example, the BBC’s recent film “Israel’s Secret Weapons”, part of an effort to delegitimize Bush’s invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, intimates that the US should focus instead on disarming Israel. The film was shown in the Jerusalem Cinematheque’s British film week sponsored by the British Council. Beware of Brits bearing gifts! This is not the first time that the BBC has taken on Israel in an effort to delegitimize it.

From the beginning of the Al-Aksa Intifada in 2000, the BBC’s reports were routinely skewed in favor of Arafat’s terrorist regime. The BBC regularly suggested that Israel was the prime instigator of “the cycle of violence”. It accused Israel of killing far more Arab children than even official PA numbers—known for their gross exaggeration—dared to claim.

In November 2000 the BBC sunk to the nadir of its pathological hatred for Israel, revealing the depth of its anti-Semitic bias. It opened a program about Palestinian children killed in the Intifada (many while being used as human shields) by presenting as fact, complete with shots of skulls, the ancient anti-Semitic calumny of “Herod’s massacre of the innocents”. Cutting straight from the skull-stuffed crypt (adult skulls, mind you) which the BBC describes as the actual location where an ancient “massacre” of children occurred to Manger Square where a funeral was taking place of an Arab boy “shot through the head” (gangster style) by Israeli troops, the BBC brazenly drew a straight line connecting an alleged attempt to kill the child Christ to Israel’s killing of Palestinian children.

Throughout the Intifada, the BBC repeated, with no collaborating evidence, the worst Arab fabrications and calumnies. In its expositions of the background to the conflict it always endorsed the Palestinian narrative, though it must be well aware that it is historically false. The many Arabs present on the BBC’s talk shows can spread any calumny about Israel and they will never be challenged by the BBC anchorpersons. Nor will the BBC allow a proper rebuttal by Israelis. For “balance” the BBC carefully chooses pro-Arab Israelis or some fumbling official from our pitiful foreign ministry. Anyone who is capable of mounting an effective rebuttal to the BBC distortions and lies will never be invited to speak.

Besides its news broadcasts, the BBC has been devoting several special programs to the task of delegitimizing Israel. A memorable hatchet job was the Panorama program framing Prime Minister Sharon as the real killer of innocent Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila massacre performed by Christian Lebanese troupes. Their whole “case” was woven from a tissue of lies, distortions, significant omissions, allegations lacking any factual basis and a sickening animus toward Sharon and Israel.

The same malevolent spirit animates “Israel’s Secret Weapon”. The film asks which state harbors the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction, refusing to let anyone inspect them. It portrays Israel as a police state that commits atrocities just like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a state that punished its virtuous whistleblower, Mordecai Vanunu (whom the film compares with Andrei Sacharov), in the most cruel and illegal manner. Everyone in the film condemns Israel except for Shimon Peres, whom the film’s director Olenka Frenkiel manipulates by asking him long leading questions and then cutting Peres’s responses to the bare minimum. When the dishonest Frenkiel asks Peres why Israel should not be treated just like Iraq and the outraged Peres responds with “how could you compare, when Saddam killed so many innocent people and used gas against the Iranians and the Kurds? Olenka’s response is: “Some do compare.” We soon find who: the film cuts to two sequences, the first showing the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, suggesting Sharon is the killer, and the second showing the alleged use by Israel of some mysterious gas against civilians in Gaza. Both sequences are based on falsehoods, but they establish the comparison between Israel and Iraq’s Saddam.

The film was followed by a panel discussion moderated by the IBA’s David Wiztum. It was heartening to hear how even those who generally criticize Israeli policies from the left were shocked by the BBC animus and bias. The generally cool Wiztum spoke in anger and even Ha’aretz’s Danny Rubinstein, who is sympathetic to the PA, pointed to the film’s gross errors and distortions. Another panelist, Ms. Lynda Grant, a writer for The Guardian, deplored the tendency of journalists to cast themselves as crusaders for a cause rather than report facts.

Prof. Wistrich, a Hebrew University expert on anti-Semitism, said that “the documentary tries to suggest that Israel is the real rogue regime in the Middle East, an axis of evil, a state more dangerous than Saddam’s Iraq. It tells us that Dimona, not Baghdad, should be the target, that Mordechai Vanunu was a hero and saint, unjustly prosecuted by a quasi-police state masquerading as a democracy.” Israel’s precarious position as the only state threatened with extinction was never mentioned in the film.

“Such a distorted documentary in the current British climate can only inflame anti-Israel feelings and antipathy to Jews still further,” Prof. Wistrich concluded.

But the BBC representative stonewalled. He though the film was a “cracking good yarn,” like soap opera stuff, and he refused to address any of the distortions and the lies it contained.

In the 1947-8 War of Independence British policemen and soldiers disarmed Haganah members and then left them among Arab crowds to be cut to pieces. The BBC is trying to do the same to Israel. By portraying it as the worst criminal state and by totally whitewashing Arab dictatorships, especially the gangster-ruled Palestinian Authority, which it casts in the role of the just underdog, fighting against oppression, the BBC tries to disarm Israel morally and politically. As the panel discussion indicated, it is no use to plead with the BBC for fairness, decency or justice. It is determined in its mission.

It is time for Israel to recognize who its enemies are, and to protect itself from them.