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The BBC's Warped View of the World and Israel's Place in It

(Sapir) Tom Gross - A few months before I graduated from Oxford, I was interviewed for the British Broadcasting Corporation's prestigious two-year journalist trainee course. A committee of five asked whether there was anything I would have changed about a recent edition of the BBC's "Nine O'Clock News." In a calm and reasoned way, I said that Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Iraqi Kurds at Halabja deserved to be much higher up than it had been. This horrific act was the largest use of chemical weapons against a civilian target since World War II. Some 3,000-5,000 Kurdish children and adults had been gassed to death. Yet the BBC had only mentioned it in passing about 20 minutes into its news bulletin, after a light-hearted item about Prince Charles. I added that the BBC's main news competitor in Britain at the time, ITN, had led its evening news with a five-minute report on the gassing of the Kurds. The chair of the panel then asked me, with a slight scowl, "Are you a Zionist?" Before I could answer, my interview came to an end. At no point in my interview had I mentioned Israelis, Palestinians, or Jews, and in the pre-Google era, my family background is not something that the BBC could easily have discovered. The BBC's misreporting about Israel derives from the same warped view of the world and Israel's place in it. For decades, the BBC has simultaneously castigated Israel while turning a blind eye to Palestinian terrorism. The writer is a British journalist, commentator, and human-rights campaigner specializing in the Middle East.
2024-03-27 00:00:00
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