"Or perhaps Israel"

Hadar at BBC Watch has posted a full transcript of yesterday's Today interview between Sarah Montague and Baroness Warsi. 

The subject up for discussion was the persecution of Christians.

One of the questions put by Sarah Montague during the course of that interview has provoked a good deal of adverse criticism:

“But are you saying – can I just ask – countries like Pakistan that you refer to, or perhaps Israel or even Iraq where there is a functioning government – is it just down to the politicians in those countries to speak out and this problem could be solved?” 

Many listeners heard that as implying that Israel is one of those countries which persecutes Christians. 

That's the way I heard it too; and, indeed, by bracketing Pakistan, Israel and Iraq together in that way - especially when most Radio 4 listeners are aware that Christians most definitely are being persecuted in two of those countries (Pakistan and Iraq) - it's surely inevitable that such a connection would arise in the listener's mind. 

Given that (as many are pointing out) Israel is the only country in the region with a growing, safe Christian population, that implication is a wholly unwarranted one. Many find it deeply offensive too, and lots of complaints have been fired off to the BBC about it already. 

But what if everyone is misunderstanding what Sarah Montague was actually asking? That's what the Today programme is saying in response. 

BBC Watch has posted a reply to one of its readers sent by Dominic Groves, Assistant Editor of Today:

"Thank you for your email. Sarah Montague cited Israel not as an example of a country which persecutes Christians but of a country where there is a functioning Government. She did this in the context of asking what responsibility politicians should bear for promoting harmony between those of different faiths.

There is evidence of an outflow of Christians from the Middle East caused in part by the unresolved dispute between Israel and the Palestinians but more widely by social, economic and political concerns. But Sarah’s question did not seek to apportion blame onto one single country or group of countries. It is clearly a more complicated issue than that.

I hope this helps answer your concerns."

Hadar rejects his first point for precisely the reason I outlined above, saying that Sarah Montague was "clearly implying to listeners that similar problems of persecution of Christians exist in all three of the countries she named". She then rebuts his second point.  

My take on the first part of Mr Groves's response is that he seems to have been engaging in a panicky attempt to spin away Sarah's insinuation. 

Yes, she did say "where there is a functioning government", but I took that as referring specifically to Iraq ("or even Iraq where there is a functioning government"). 

After all, if she was merely linking Pakistan, Israel and Iraq together as countries with functioning government that need to speak out about the persecution of Christians, why would she have used "perhaps" in front of Israel ("or perhaps Israel"), as there's absolutely no "perhaps" about it when it comes to Israel having a functioning government?

No, Dominic Groves is clutching at straws, trying a linguistic dodge. 

It's clear what Sarah Montague meant. She meant that the governments of Pakistan, Israel and Iraq need to act to stop the persecution of Christians and, by implication, specifically the persecution of Christians in their own countries. 

Egypt has a functioning government, and a serious problem with the persecution of Christians? Why wasn't that mentioned? Why include Israel, where there's no persecution of Christians? 

Maybe, the deputy editor of Today should just have admitted that Sarah Montague got it wrong.

It's unlikely, however, that he would ever have admitted that she appears to have betrayed a deep bias against Israel with that question. 

Sarah Montague: "Misleading" over Israel

Talking about Today, here's an update on a story from last November. But first the story so far...

Hadar at BBC Watch highlighted a Today interview between Sarah Montague and Baroness Warsi concerning the persecution of Christians, during which Sarah Montague asked this question:

But are you saying – can I just ask – countries like Pakistan that you refer to, or perhaps Israel or even Iraq where there is a functioning government – is it just down to the politicians in those countries to speak out and this problem could be solved?

Many listeners took that to falsely imply that Israel is one of those countries which persecutes Christians. 

As I wrote at the time, "That's the way I heard it too; and, indeed, by bracketing Pakistan, Israel and Iraq together in that way - especially when most Radio 4 listeners are aware that Christians most definitely are being persecuted in two of those countries (Pakistan and Iraq) - it's surely inevitable that such a connection would arise in the listener's mind. "

Today's assistant editor Dominic Groves responded to complaints by saying that 

Sarah Montague cited Israel not as an example of a country which persecutes Christians but of a country where there is a functioning Government. She did this in the context of asking what responsibility politicians should bear for promoting harmony between those of different faiths.

I thought that was "a panicky attempt" to spin away Sarah Montague's insinuation against Israel, "a linguistic dodge":  

Yes, she did say "where there is a functioning government", but I took that as referring specifically to Iraq ("or even Iraq where there is a functioning government"). 

After all, if she was merely linking Pakistan, Israel and Iraq together as countries with functioning government that need to speak out about the persecution of Christians, why would she have used "perhaps" in front of Israel ("or perhaps Israel"), as there's absolutely no "perhaps" about it when it comes to Israel having a functioning government?

It's clear what Sarah Montague meant. She meant that the governments of Pakistan, Israel and Iraq need to act to stop the persecution of Christians and, by implication, specifically the persecution of Christians in their own countries. 

Well, lo and below, Hadar now informs us that her reader's complaint, taken further, has been upheld by the BBC's Head of Editorial Complaints. He writes:

While I take Dominic Groves’ point that the intention was to cite Israel as an example of a country with a functioning government, rather than a country which persecutes Christians, it seems to me that bracketing it with Pakistan and Iraq, in the context of an item arising from Baroness Warsi’s warning that Christians in some parts of the world face extinction because of violence against them, nevertheless tended to give the impression that Christians in Israel were suffering violence comparable to what had been experienced in the other countries named, and that this impression, however inadvertent, was misleading. 

I’m therefore proposing to uphold your complaint.  

As Hadar notes, "It of course remains to be seen how the BBC will deal with the issue of informing the ‘Today’ programme’s millions of listeners of that breach of Editorial Guidelines on accuracy and correcting the mistaken impression created by Sarah Montague."

This, again, shows that complaining to the BBC can pay off, if you persist with it. The BBC isn't always able simply to shrug off valid criticism if the complainant stands his or her ground, and if that ground is firm.

Wow!

There are two types of people whose testimony automatically has extra value when it comes to Israel and the Jews.

one: The non-Jew. The objective outsider.

two: The journalist. The insider (whistleblower) 

A while ago we highlighted Matti Friedman’s expose of Associated Press’s ‘institutional antisemitism’ by which I mean its bias against Israel.

Matti Friedman’s testimony counts for a lot because he is a journalist, but I guess some of that bonus will inevitably be forfeited in the eyes of the doubters because he’s an Israeli.

He gave a speech at a BICOM meeting in London which is featured Here and  Here. MUST READ.

One night several years ago, I came out of Bethlehem after a reporting assignment and crossed through the Israeli military checkpoint between that city and its neighbor, Jerusalem, where I live. With me were perhaps a dozen Palestinian men, mostly in their thirties – my age. No soldiers were visible at the entrance to the checkpoint, a precaution against suicide bombers. We saw only steel and concrete. I followed the other men through a metal detector into a stark corridor and followed instructions barked from a loudspeaker – Remove your belt! Lift up your shirt! The voice belonged to a soldier watching us on a closed-circuit camera. Exiting the checkpoint, adjusting my belt and clothing with the others, I felt like a being less than entirely human and understood, not for the first time, how a feeling like that would provoke someone to violence.

Consumers of news will recognize this scene as belonging to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which keeps the 2.5 million Palestinians in that territory under military rule, and has since 1967. The facts of this situation aren’t much in question. This should be an issue of concern to Israelis, whose democracy, military, and society are corroded by the inequality in the West Bank. This, too, isn’t much in question.

The question we must ask, as observers of the world, is why this conflict has come over time to draw more attention than any other, and why it is presented as it is. How have the doings in a country that constitutes 0.01 percent of the world’s surface become the focus of angst, loathing, and condemnation more than any other? We must ask how Israelis and Palestinians have become the stylized symbol of conflict, of strong and weak, the parallel bars upon which the intellectual Olympians of the West perform their tricks – not Turks and Kurds, not Han Chinese and Tibetans, not British soldiers and Iraqi Muslims, not Iraqi Muslims and Iraqi Christians, not Saudi sheikhs and Saudi women, not Indians and Kashmiris, not drug cartel thugs and Mexican villagers. Questioning why this is the case is in no way an attempt to evade or obscure reality, which is why I opened with the checkpoint leading from Bethlehem. On the contrary – anyone seeking a full understanding of reality can’t avoid this question. My experiences as a journalist provide part of the answer, and also raise pressing questions that go beyond the practice of journalism.

I have been writing from and about Israel for most of the past 20 years, since I moved there from Toronto at age 17. During the five and a half years I spent as part of the international press corps as a reporter for the American news agency The Associated Press, between 2006 and 2011, I gradually began to be aware of certain malfunctions in the coverage of the Israel story – recurring omissions, recurring inflations, decisions made according to considerations that were not journalistic but political, all in the context of a story staffed and reported more than any other international story on earth. When I worked in the AP’s Jerusalem bureau, the Israel story was covered by more AP news staff than China, or India, or all of the fifty-odd countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. This is representative of the industry as a whole.

In early 2009, to give one fairly routine example of an editorial decision of the kind I mean, I was instructed by my superiors to report a second-hand story taken from an Israeli newspaper about offensive T-shirts supposedly worn by Israeli soldiers. We had no confirmation of our own of the story’s veracity, and one doesn’t see much coverage of things US Marines or British infantrymen have tattooed on their chests or arms. And yet T-shirts worn by Israeli soldiers were newsworthy in the eyes of one of the world’s most powerful news organizations. This was because we sought to hint or say outright that Israeli soldiers were war criminals, and every detail supporting that portrayal was to be seized upon. Much of the international press corps covered the T-shirt story. At around the same time, several Israeli soldiers were quoted anonymously in a school newsletter speaking of abuses they had supposedly witnessed while fighting in Gaza; we wrote no fewer than three separate stories about this, although the use of sources whose identity isn’t known to reporters is banned for good reason by the AP’s own in-house rules. This story, too, was very much one that we wanted to tell. By the time the soldiers came forward to say they hadn’t actually witnessed the events they supposedly described, and were trying to make a point to young students about the horrors and moral challenges of warfare, it was, of course, too late.

Belated Observations

When this blog was a mere twinkle in the eye, Craig and I got stuck over what to call it. We wanted to have the words “BBC” and “bias” in there, but as someone once said somewhere online, the “Biased-BBC” blog had already bagged the best name ever. Also, we wanted the title to sound less strident than “Biased-BBC” to imply that there was at least some room for doubt. We decided on a question rather than a statement, hoping it would encourage debate rather than produce a straightforward litany of anti-BBC ‘gotchas’. 

However, that was then and this is now. It’s now more or less a given that the BBC is biased, so we are lagging behind with our redundant ‘question’. I suppose we could reposition the ‘IS’ past “the BBC”, but that would be a boring statement of the bleeding obvious - and it would make us even more “Biased-BBC-lite” than we already are. So, for now, we’ll just leave the “is” and the “?” where they are. The status quo rules ok. 

*******

There is only one topic dominating the discourse - imagine what life will be like in the post-Brexit era (will there still be life?) and we’ll be able to settle back in and address the ishoos that occupied us in the olden days. Meanwhile, here’s Charles Moore (£)

Behind the incident of Anna Soubry being called a Nazi by a small group of Leave yobs beside College Green lies a classic Brexit sequence of events. For many months now, Remain protestors have infested that area. Their numbers are small, but they are well trained to insert themselves and their banners into relevant live television interviews, and have been praised by the Guardian for doing so. Never have I seen the BBC trying to exclude them from its shots, even when the protestors’ interventions have made it quite difficult for those being interviewed.
Sometimes BBC interviewers have gestured on air towards the protestors as evidence of strong pro-Remain public feeling. Often BBC cameras have used cutaways of them to punctuate news items, to make the same point. Not surprisingly, the BBC’s behaviour has in turn provoked Leave protests, because the indulgence of the Remain stunts has helped skew the news. As soon as this one looked nasty, the BBC turned it into a major story about hate crime, involving the police, fanned by Mr Speaker Bercow. It is certainly unpleasant and stupid to call almost anyone a Nazi, but the rudeness to Ms Soubry does not reach the threshold of a threat to public order or incitement to violence — not as bad, for example, as John McDonnell’s famous encouragement of those who said they wanted to lynch Esther McVey, or what happens in demonstrations by the Socialist Workers Party.
The wider truth is that College Green interviews are a circus invented by television 30 years ago to make its broadcasts from Westminster seem less boring. Circuses need performing seals, clowns etc. The cause of Remain — via the BBC — is the ring-master.

Excellent points, but one of the btl commenters took issue with the word ‘yobs’, and I do think it was quite naughty of the writer to use that term here as it smacks of the lazy stereotyping that’s routinely bandied about willy-nilly to save the bother of engaging with the actuality.

I must say the BBC’s obsession with Anna Soubry-gate was typical mountain-out-of-a-molehill reporting. That particular incident might have represented a kind of last straw where raucous heckling is concerned, but let’s face it, Anna did not look at all perturbed throughout. She was smiling. As many people have pointed out, this kind of stunt is commonplace these days, and it comes from (the extreme fringes of) all directions. And as Mr Moore says, the media eggs it on something rotten. 

*******

Since when has it become the norm to use the term ‘right-wing” as an insult, let alone "far-right"? Well, not so long ago the term might have conjured up an image of your actual Nazi, mistakenly, since actual Nazism emanated from the opposite direction. But I do see what they mean. They’re picturing your old fashioned misogynist, homophobic, hang-‘em and flog-‘em, sexually repressed, self-righteous, heard-hearted chauvinist pig. Illiberal, intolerant and racist. 

Of course, hardly any of the figures to whom that epithet is addressed are anything like that. The opposite. It’s usually the harshest opponents of a belief system that espouses those particular qualities at which the terms ‘right-wing, far-right and fascist” are hurled. Ironic, eh?

In fact, even dismissing something as ‘right-wing’ is understood to be almost (but not quite) as insulting and damning as being a ‘Zionist’.  You can shut down debate with these terms. Simple as. 

The BBC is bigging up the threat from the far-right for all it’s worth. Did anyone see Wyre Davies do a hilarious report about the couple who named their baby Adolf? Please tell me it was a spoof. Surely. I know it was aired a while back, but I’ve been busy.

******

A friend came round for lunch a couple of weeks ago. We don’t usually talk about politics, but it had just been announced that the responsibility for investigating the persecution of Christians had been handed to the Bishop of Truro, (our patch) and so the topic came up.

“So, who do you think is doing all this persecuting?”  asked someone. (me) 

“Well,” said Mr friend, thoughtfully. “In the Middle East? Hmm, probably Israel.” 

“Oh,” said I, “and you know this, how?” 

“Well,” said he, “In the papers and on the BBC?”

“I think you’ll find,” said I, “that this is not quite the case. Israel is about the safest place that the Christian community can be anywhere in the Middle East” 

His expression revealed the finality and obduracy of his belief  - “I heard it on the BBC” - so I knew I had to let it go.

At the time I was thinking that although I wouldn’t put it past the Guardian, I rather doubted that the BBC has said, explicitly and in so many words, that Israel, in particular, is one of the countries where Christians are being persecuted. After all, facts and figures are available.  (Who needs them?)

No. In my opinion, the Beeb’s relentless demonisation of Israel in general corrals people into the opinion that Israel is inherently racist and malevolent and therefore conclude that Israel must be guilty of persecuting Christians. Say no more. “We’ll lay the foundations; your imagination will do the rest.” In other words, I assumed that accusations of that kind are implicit, not explicit.

But that was before I saw this on BBC Watch, and as one of the btl commenters asserts: “…Christians in Israel are about the safest that the Christian community can be anywhere in the Middle East…” I hadn’t known about Jonny Diamond on TWATO then, but I know now. 

*****

I’ll just mention another item, again very belatedly.  Before Christmas - (around 17th December) I thought I heard Frankie Boyle reporting from Lebanon. Of course, it was actually Martin Patience describing some mysterious digger activity that he could see taking place in the distance, over in Israel. 

It was Hezbollah’s tunnels of course, being de-activated by the IDF. You know, the tunnels? Hezbollah’s attack tunnels that the whole wide world, apart from Martin Patience in Lebanon, are aware of? 

“Israel says,” began Martin Patience - as if not quite sure of the veracity of anything Israel says, or, for that matter, the existence of the tunnels.  Ok, so maybe being physically in Lebanon, one wouldn’t get the full picture. But he’s a reporter. He’s supposed to know what’s going on. Oh well, it must be easy to go to Lebanon and see only the good things like our smiley friend Ade Adeptan of The Travel Show who went there and didn’t notice Hezbollah at all. He must have missed The Hezbollah Museum, a well-known Lebanese tourist attraction. You know, the place where Simon Reeve went the other day. Instead, Ade spent some considerable time admiring a tourist attraction called Moussa Castle. 

 “How long did it take your favah to build this hideous castle?“ Ade Adepitan enquired of Ziad al Maamari, son of Moussa al Maamari who built it all himself. A lifetime’s achievement. 

(I did paraphrase, obvs.)

*******

Talking of venerable Scottish comedians, I liked Billy Connolly’s programme Made in Scotland.

He has mellowed and, I don’t know, matured and gone all philosophical.  Sorry that he’s ill. I have to admit, I used to find his gratuitous swearing a massive turn-off. Also, I’m not that keen on ‘stand-up” where ‘standing up’ is literally off the agenda, and furious pacing up and down the stage is the order of the day. It gets on my nerves and it’s often not pretty. Please be still! 

Anyway, at a certain stage, Billy Connolly discovered that he didn’t need to say anything amusing other than “fuck” to get a laugh out of the audience, and he got lazy. Strutting around swearing is not worthy. Not creative. However - there was a section in his Made in Scotland programme where he said something perceptive about swearing, which I really do get. Swearing can be witty, creative and uniquely expressive. ‘Jesus suffering fuck’ was an example. It’s the word ‘suffering’ that brings the expression to life and lights it up somehow. I appreciate the subtlety of that; the difference between an almost poetic verbal ejaculation and merely startling the audience with an expletive for a cheap laugh.  Poetic swearing is the kind of swearing I applaud.

Sorry I’ve lumped all these topics under the same roof., but I’m in a hurry.

Two pariahs and problems with sound

Two things we’ve been saying for years on Biased-BBC and Is the BBC Biased? have suddenly become more obvious than ever. 

The first thing we’ve been saying for years concerns the BBC’s left-wing bias. 

Over the years interviewee and interviewer have come to find themselves corralled into a kind of ritualistic courtship pattern. If it’s a left-wing subject the tone is gentle and coaxing, perhaps with a spot of token feather-ruffling. 

If the subject is not left-wing, there is normally a hostile, badgering tone peppered with interruptions and adversarial rejoinders. The recent incontinent whooping and cheering from the audience of the BBC’s latest flying circus was something to behold. Never mind the irrelevant claims concerning ‘weighting’, the evidence was there before our very eyes. 

The second thing we’ve been saying for an equally long time concerns the BBC’s obsessional fascination, ostensibly supportive of ‘the Palestinians', but in reality it’s a surreptitious compulsion to demonise Jews and / or Israelis. This has become especially clear now that Christians are being persecuted (by Muslims) and Palestinians are being massacred by forces other than Israel. 

Yarmouk. No pictures of injured civilians

As Craig says, the BBC’s distinct fixation with the former and lack of interest in the latter highlights the bleedin’ obvious.

Incidentally, David Cameron’s recent interview in the Atlantic about antisemitism and the safety of British Jewry in the current climate is worth mentioning here because of the disparity between his intent and his actions.

Cameron says he’d be heartbroken if all the Jews fled.

“I don’t think in Britain we have all the answers, but we’ve been quick off the mark in stopping the hate preachers coming in.”

I mean, really? How so?

“We have to clear up the problems you find on campus, we’ve got to go after incitement and hatred and violence, we’ve got to do more work with the Jewish community to help them protect themselves. And we’ve been doing these things.”

Yes, “we’ve got to” and no, we haven’t been doing them.

“So I think in Britain we’re taking the right approach, tackling anti-Semitism, emphasizing the contributions of the Jewish community, and all the rest of it. It’s something that needs renewed attention.”

I can just hear him reeling off that list, as is his wont when in electioneering mode. Words; meaningless until they make it happen.

“People have every reason to be concerned because you’ve got several things happening at the same time. You’ve got the poisonous narrative of Islamist extremism, which is targeting Jews generally. You’ve got specific attacks in Europe. And you have the rise of anti-Semitism on campuses or in public life, including sadly in Britain in some cases. Plus, you’ve got the issue of delegitimization being pushed, the boycotts of the state of Israel by universities and the like, and soon you add all these things up and you can see why some in the Jewish community are very concerned.”

Yup. All that and more, but Islamist extremism isn’t the only kind of “Islamism” that engenders antisemitism. I’m afraid it’s endemic in the Muslim community. Mehdi Hasan even says so, and Mehdi even stuck his head above the parapet over Yarmouk, although he blotted his copybook with some dodgy references to Israel - conveniently confirming my previous point. 

I digressed slightly because what I set out to do is draw a comparison between two pariahs.

Nigel Farage and Israel!

Ukip is the new Israel, in that the BBC has succeeded in delegitimising both in a similar fashion.

For example they see both of them as racist, they discredit anyone who dares to support them or make an uncritical comment about them; then they set the gremlins on them.

I always used to complain that Israeli spokespersons were sabotaged by BBC technology. In this day and age surely someone could arrange a line with decent sound quality on the rare occasions that an Israeli spokesperson is allowed to get a word in. But no. They have to sound as though they’re trapped in a deep underground cave  talking through a woolly balaclava with no mouth-hole.

The same thing keeps happening to Nigel. How come there’s always something wrong with the line? When a youth group representing each party was being interviewed about their voting intentions the other day, whose sound link do you think stuttered to a standstill? 

When Nigel was interviewed by Andrew Neil this morning, was he speaking from outer Mongolia? No! he was somewhere in suburbia. In his own garden perhaps. Then why was there a humungous time delay on the line? It looked as though he was stumped by the question, each time. Not a good look.

The BBC must think we’re really really stupid, the lot of us.

Guest Post: THE BBC's OFFICIAL FESTIVE FIFTY BIAS TECHNIQUES...

Courtesy of Monkey Brains in the comments, here's MB's John Peel-style Festive Fifty which observers of BBC bias everywhere may enjoy this pre-Christmas weekend. 

So raise your mulled wine glasses please, ladies and gentlemen, and let the countdown begin...

(Be warned though. The Undertones won't be at Number One).

A seasonal message from Lord Hall, Director General of the BBC: 

In this era of fake news, Russian subversion of referenda to produce incorrect results and the installation of a fascist dictatorship in the USA, I thought it apposite and timely, to publish a list of our 50 top Bias Techniques, lest anyone should think we were being complacent about the challenges facing us in the contemporary media world. This list will act as a helpful guide for our staff but I hope it will also reassure the public at large that we have their best interests at heart. 

1. Bias by News Agenda Choice. The biggie. If we don’t report it, it’s not news. And we don’t like to report things like the Synagogue attack in Stockholm, no go areas in the UK or the New Year’s Eve events in Cologne a while back. 

2. Bias by News Prioritising. OK, sometimes we can’t avoid reporting something but we can certainly give it very low priority. It only needs to appear for a nanosecond for us to be able to say that we have done our journalistic duty. 

3. Bias in Perpetuity. If we like a story…”Tories racist says report”…we might leave it up on our website for months to make sure just about everyone gets to see it, even though we are allegedly a “news” organisation. Likewise we will return obsessively to stories we love like Grenfell Tower.

4. Bias by Burying. If we don’t like a story we will bury it away somewhere like “News from Leicester” which you get to by navigating four or five pages on our website. In terms of broadcasting you will have to live in the East Midlands to be informed of what happened. I am not going to say what happened, because that would defeat the objective of this particular technique. 

5. Bias by Headline Creep. Sometimes we know a story hasn’t really got legs but by using the headline ruse we can make it sound a lot better. So “Boris “racism” claim” on the front page of the website becomes…”Boris claims government is acting on racism”….becomes “Boris has rejected a UN report claiming that racism in the UK is rising at an alarming rate”.

6. Bias by Interruption. An old time favourite…if you don’t like what the interviewer is saying, interrupt them to hell and back, so that they can’t get their points across. Some right wing obsessives on the internet try to expose this bias by recording the number of such interruptions and comparing that number with interruptions of favoured guests, but such statistical exposure of this technique can be dismissed by a vague, airy “Notwithstanding this particular interview, we consider the programme, taken in the round, was balanced and impartial”. 

7. Bias by Misrepresentation. It’s important that we at the BBC control debate by ensuring we get to mispresent viewpoints. Under this approach, being worried about hardly ever hearing the English language spoken in your neighbourhood (a perfectly legitimate concern) obviously becomes “racist attitudes to migrants”. Of course we don’t simply assert that – to do so would be crass and far too obvious. Instead we imply it via other bias techniques e.g. “Bias by Question and Some Say”. 

8. Bias by Concept Merge. Sometimes it pays to be pedantically precise about definitions (a favourite of both Dimblebys on occasion). But with this technique, it is important to be vague and overlap differing concepts until the viewer or listener is taught, in Pavlovian fashion, to associate “Member of Conservative Party” with “Far Right Nut”. Thus we merge “Neo-Nazi” into “Far Right”, which in turn merges into “Right Wing” which then merges into “Nationalist” (as in “Bad Nationalist” – obviously does not apply to SNP, Sinn Fein and Plaid Cymru) and further blends with “Tory” and “Conservative”. By constant mixing and association Neo Nazis, Nationalists and Tories all become part of a dangerous amorphous group that like to persecute minorities. We find this approach very effective at the BBC.

9. Bias by Mirroring. Under this ruse we call extreme radicals like Iranian Mullahs or Chinese Communists “Conservatives” so as to make toxic the whole “conservative” brand. You have to admire our cheek in doing so! But the useless Tories never make any effective protests about this.

10. Bias by Intimidation. We tell our audience that we will report them to their employer or school if they voice opinions of which we disapprove. This can be more effective than you might think. Of course we have combined this with a sustained attack on the Have Your Say function on our website and also by turning the Feedback programme into a meaningless “complaints from both sides” exercise now stuffed full of disguised adverts for BBC programmes.

11. Bias by Mockery. The mockery is not just something for “comedy” panel shows or the Now Show. News presenters can also join in the mockery of anything the BBC doesn’t like. Eddie Mair and Jonny Diamond have I think done some excellent work in this area. But woe betide anyone who mocked say Stella Creasy or Chukka Umuna!!! (not that that would ever happen under my watch!) - that would be sexist and racist and would lead to instant dismissal. We of course produce an in-house list of who to mock and who not. Currently Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are top of the list. But such lists can of course change and staff should keep up with developments. 

12. Bias by Complaint Dismissal. As long as we keep batting away complaints in the face of the truth and the facts, we can maintain our absurd formal claim of impartiality. It is therefore important that the programmes we claim allow the viewer or listener a voice should be tightly controlled. I have of course instructed all editors and producers to hold the line and deny bias by claiming complaints from both sides and if they cannot defend something, claim a broader overall balance across the piece. 

13. Bias by Propaganda Tentacle. The BBC has a long reach. Our correspondents can use Twitter to voice more extreme anti-democratic, pro-Antifa opinions through re-tweeting. We are now going into schools as well to brainwash children with our “Fake News” agenda. Our tentacles can basically reach anywhere. 

14. Bias by Question Selection. What questions get asked is vital. If you think we pull the QT questions out of a hat then you are very, very naïve. 

15. Bias by Simple Fact Denial or Avoidance. For instance we will not admit even the possibility that the housing crisis might have something to do with mass immigration. It’s rather like that loose thread in a pullover. If you start pulling on it before long the whole thing will unravel. So we have to maintain “Complete Fact Denial” in those very sensitive areas touching on the central tenets of our PC Multiculturalist doctrine. 

16. Bias by Expert. We choose the experts. Our experts are guaranteed to support our views. That’s how and why we select them! 

17. Bias by Org-Labelling. For instance, that think tank is “right wing”, this think tank (the one we like) is “respected”! It’s not so difficult once you get the hang of it. 

18. Bias by Person Labelling. That person (someone standing up for beliefs that were uncontroversial 50 years ago) is “far right”, this person (a Marxist totalitarian) is the “conscience of the left” or a “revered academic and commentator”.

19. Bias by Tone of Voice. So important! When we are children we listen to our parents’ tone of voice before we understand the meaning of their words. Are our parents angry or pleased with us? We know this and so we play on these very human weaknesses. Our presenters sound surprised if a right wing person does a nice thing or somehow escapes justice when we have been looking forward to their downfall. Equally they make it sound like their mother has died if the PC Multicultarist liberal-left suffer a reversal, however minor. 

20. Bias by Atypical Person Choice. It may be true that most female followers of Islam in Bradford may wear a Hijab and rarely go outside the family home but we have the resources at our disposal to find one who doesn’t wear a head covering, uses make up, wears tight jeans and has set up her own business. Once we have found her we are going to give her the full PR treatment on your shows, eventually giving her her own series.

21. Bias by Drama and Soap. I can’t overemphasise the importance of this bias technique. This is how we really buttress the news and indoctrination agenda. We use drama and soap to signal approval or disapproval and to identify what issues the public should think are important. 

22. Bias by Lifestyle Show. We can make frightening things appear comforting all by the magic of lifestyle TV. Of course this has to be managed. It can be an area requiring sensitive handling. We didn’t show a Hijab for years. Big beard presenters are still out and the Burka is I am afraid still a big no-no. But this is a Long March we are on. Eventually we will be able to de-sensitive the backward segment of the British public on such matters by associating such features with nice things like baking, cooking, shopping and home décor. 

23. Bias by Over-representation of Minorities. You see a lot of this on TV adverts of course and we have to take our hat off to our commercial colleagues in that regard. The message of course is “resistance is useless”. It is supposed to deliver a jolt and acclimatise people to further volcanic demographic change. We are of course doing everything we can at the BBC to ensure that minorities (officially only 13% of the population) are over-represented in a number of key areas like news presentation. When it comes to drama, we are quite happy to provide misleading representations of classics from the Victorian period now, sacrificing accuracy to our PC Multiculturalist principles. Of course when we talk about ethnic minority representation we mean generally African-Caribbean, African and South Asian. At the BBC we don’t much care about how many Poles, Arabs, Romanians, Chinese, French or Latin Americans are on our screens despite there being very large communities from those ethnic groups in our country. I hope at some point to explain why that is but sadly time is limited and I must press on. (Ahem). 

24. Bias by Slow Information Release. We wouldn’t want you to run away with the idea there’s just been a terrorist incident carried out by an IS operative migrant who shouted Allahu Akbar…so we will slowly drip feed the news and then disappear the story altogether. Often we will use the “mental ill health” ploy to justify this. 

25. Bias by Local News as National News. Local news is a good way of extending the bias especially in areas where there are lots of Labour MPs and we can call on them to provide a steady drumbeat of public expenditure propaganda . We always favour local news with a national flavour…so expect lots of NHS cuts and not much about the County Show. 

26. Bias by Survey. Our opinion polls are frequently wrong. But they always seem to favour the left for some reason. Sometimes our levels of bias are off the scale as was the case with the Newsnight panel of “ordinary voters” that voted 9-1 to remain. BBC Staff should not be embarrassed by this, rather they should see polls as weapons in our hand not instruments of science. 

27. Bias by Decree. Here, the likes of John Simpson or David Dimbleby - once respected as cutting edge journalists - trot out the BBC narrative without appearing to have thought about what they are saying first. In our BBC world of bias, if they say so, it must be true. You might call this the “Hillary Good, Trump Bad” approach. 

28. Bias by Obfuscation. David Dimbleby is of the view that if he poses a smugly sceptical or irrelevant question "But we don't know that was an official Mosque letter, do we?" (irrelevant - it was clearly being handed out at the Mosque in full view) or "But do you have an example of the BBC saying "despite Brexit"? " (Answer: Guido Fawkes website had plenty of examples the next day!), he has neutralised the critique. Obviously he hasn’t genuinely neutralised the critique, but at the BBC we feel it is “the moment” that counts. As long as he appears to have raised legitimate doubts that is enough. It is my view this is an effective Bias technique as Dimbleby is sly enough to time his semi-rhetorical questions at just the right point so they don't get or can't be answered. They therefore serve our purpose. 

29. Bias by Yawn. Sadly this is a rare example of a technique that has been tried but proved unsuccessful. It was attempted in the run up to and during the early part of the EU Referendum campaign as we got nearly all our TV and radio presenters to imply that everyone was bored with the Referendum debate even though we now all know the opposite was true: family and friends often ended up having passionate debates on the subject (some are still continuing to this date!). But we at the BBC were trying to reduce the interest in the campaign, as we knew that was important in ensuring the anti-EU vote did not get mobilised. Frankly, we failed. Though we cannot be blamed for the decision to have a Referendum (we strongly opposed that), we were wrong to pursue that ineffective technique. We should have been much more pro-Remain from the outset. Eventually we realised the yawn technique was proving ineffective: the pretend yawns stopped and it was then we desperately tried "educating" everyone to vote remain. But sadly, it was too late. Personally I feel the Government should have given us more leeway to support the Remain campaign, even though we did our best to back their arguments and rubbish the Leave campaign. Clearly it wasn’t enough. 

30. Bias by False Friend. This is one we have been using a lot recently in relation to events in the US: "So let's go over to Washington to discuss Trump's latest tweet. We have leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives and the Republican Governor for Wyoming..." Our audience thinks this sounds balanced since it’s one Democrat and one Republican. But of course, we know something they don’t – this particular Republican Governor hates Trump as much as the Democrat. We see similar set ups with our domestic politics "Here to discuss the Government's proposals are Chukka Umuna, Labour MP and Ken Clarke, Conservative..." only Clarke is going bash the proposals almost as much as Chukka.

31. Bias by Herd Instinct. Human beings have a tendency to follow the herd or the “troop” (since we are primates!)…so we at the BBC do our best to create bandwagons for the campaigns we favour. Biased BBC Trending do a lot of good work in this area. 

32. Bias by Recruitment. This is what we at the BBC call the “Guardian readers only need apply” ploy. Don’t worry – I am a Guardian Reader!!! lol This is really a very important and self-fulfilling bias category. 

33. Bias by Vocabulary Choice. This is of course a huge area of bias. The “bread and butter” of bias you might call it. It covers many things but among my favourites are right wing think tanks "claim", "assert", things whereas left wing think tanks "point out", "conclude", "find evidence"...During the EU Referendum campaign pro-Remain agencies were always concluding, calculating, pointing our and finding...or projecting, predicting (never guessing!)...When Remain claims were criticised by the Leave side, we at the BBC always used the language of emotion and violence instead of cool consideration: the Leave side "angrily denied", "lashed out", "slammed" etc 

34. Bias by Paragraphing. We often leave the key information to the penultimate para of a long article (not the final paragraph because people sometimes skip to that). You can hope the punters have got bored by then and miss it...thinking the perpetrator was simply a "man" with known "mental health issues" not someone who visited Afghanistan last year and was carrying an IS flag.

35. Bias by Mandy Rice Davies. The point of this technique is to make the denial sound as thin as possible. I think Norman Smith is quite good at this. Norman is adept at telling us the unfavoured have "denied" something...but does so in a "well wouldn't you too if you'd been found out" sort of way...It's normally the right who get this treatment of course but there was a phase when the BBC when we were gunning for Corbyn and we gave him the same treatment (this was when we at the BBC thought Corbyn was a vote-loser who would keep the Tories in power for the next 20 years - now of course it's all Christmas jumpers with Jezza's face on it! – he’s forgiven, for the time being).

36. Bias by Uneven Standards. Of course at the BBC we believe in high standards, we just don’t believe in applying them consistently around the world. For instance we hold Israel to a much high standard than Saudi Arabia (which doesn’t even allow people to profess Christianity). We report obsessively about their “illegal occupation” of Arab land. But illegal occupation of land is a rather flexible concept. We never, or only very rarely, give Russia and China any grief about their huge empires and their occupation of territories against the people's will. We don’t ask representatives of countries like Australia, Brazil, Canada and Argentina about eradication of indigenous peoples. Romania's occupation of Magyar lands is of no interest to us at the BBC. Likewise, while we show an inordinate interest in civilian killings in the US by gunfire we have no interest in such killings in Mexico or Brazil, and absolutely no interest in the murder of thousands of white farmers in South Africa. While we at the BBC are willing to shed tears over a few thousand Palestinian Arabs losing their homes and being "forced" to flee some 70 years ago, we have no interest in the many millions of Europeans, Jews, Hindus and Christians forced to flee from the Middle East and South Asia and in reality not much interest in all the displaced persons in Sub-Saharan Africa.

37. Bias by Photo Choice. A picture tells a thousand words and picture bias tells a million. We can choose a nice one of Jeremy looking either messianic or avuncular, surrounded by happy smiling people, or we can choose one of Theresa looking very anxious (as though she's about to try swallowing something on I'm Celebrity) and isolated, with a dark sombre background. We had a nice example on the BBC News website recently: May looking worried and pensive, her frame apparently being squeezed between two EU flags that dominated the photo...and then there's Nicola Sturgeon smiling, looking very businesslike with one of her ministers carrying lots of impressive looking files...Chance choice? Of course not. Nothing happens by chance at the BBC! Photo bias is one of the easiest techniques to spot if you look for it but because people tend to take images on trust they rarely identify or comment on the bias. 

38. Bias by Placard Placement. I rather like this one. I used to use it a lot myself back in the day. We at the BBC know we are not going to get away with a newsreader saying "The Tory fascists have decided to dismantle the NHS." But there's nothing to stop us showing a placard in a protest that says something like that: "Tory fascist scum will kill the NHS". Nothing to stop the cameraman zooming in on that as a lingering image to underline a report. When , rarely, we cover right wing protests, the placards get far less prominence, unless of course we think we've found one that is an own goal. We are quite happy to feature old eccentric people covered in Union Jacks opposing the EU in robust terms. That’s an image we like to cultivate. 

39. Bias by Soft Interview. This is a technique I think is sometimes underestimate but all staff should appreciate its importance. We particularly make use of this technique when we want to put rocket boosters on a political position we approve of. So we saw recently Blair being given the softest (and longest) of rides by Mardell because Blair was proposing one of our favourites: a Brexit Reversal Policy. We can counter accusations of bias, by claiming these are serious, in-depth, “mission to explain” style interviews though we hardly ever accord such access to viewpoints we oppose. 

40. Bias by Celebrity Endorsement. No! This doesn’t refer to the celebrity endorsing a product but the BBC endorsing some celebrities over others. So Jim Davidson and Cliff Richard get the cold shoulder despite being very popular. People like Lily Allen know that BBC endorsement can be vital to prolonging their career lives way beyond their natural span and the we at the BBC know it is useful to have people like Lily Allen around to endorse otherwise somewhat difficult policies like "no borders". 

41. Bias by Reality Checking. We brought in BBC Reality Check to create a kind of alternative universe where matters of policy can be judged objectively by reference to "facts". Of course this universe does not exist in any shape or form but it is useful to our purposes to pretend it does and that we at the BBC (alone in the UK – butt out ITV and Sky!) can objectively arbtitrate such matters. Anyone who looks at BBC Reality Check can see instantly it has nothing to do with "reality" and everything to do with our policy preferences. This can be seen by (a) its choice of subject matter (Reality Check never investigate the dodgy social studies from groups like the Joseph Rowntree Trust we are so fond of quoting) (b) its concentration on "future outcomes" which by definition have not happened yet and cannot therefore form part of our "reality" and (c) its disregard for the initial starting question (you will often find the conclusion has little to do with the question!) (4) its frequent recourse to "argument from authority" - quoting their favoured sources. So, please staff, don’t think that Reality Check is going undermine your reports – you can rely on it as a solid backer of everything we at the BBC are trying to achieve. We just need to give it a spurious veneer of independence and objectivity – nothing to be scared of! 

42. Bias by Absent or Abbreviated Nomenclature. At the BBC we pride ourselves that Trump is more often Trump than President Trump whereas President Obama was nearly always President Obama, certainly for his first term - just as Thatcher was more often Thatcher than Lady Thatcher. Use of the "criminal" surname is often reserved for those perceived as "right wing" Tories. Jeremy Corbyn is much more likely to have the cosy "Jeremy" attached. Also by a kind of reverse law, titles are much inflated when the BBC wants to make use of them: so you get stuff like “Lord Shyster of Plain-Wrong, the ex Lord Chamberlain of High Office and current Chairman of the Lords Select Committee on Matters of Great Import has denounced the treatment of Calais migrants as "callous"...” Don’t worry, while we are ideological egalitarians, when it comes to pushing the agenda, a bit of peasant-like deference is on offer if it means we can push our ideas more effectively. 

43. Bias by Emotional Response. This is where we ensure the BBC acts as emotional gatekeeper to the nation. You can cry about your factory closing down but not about your neighbourhood being changed out of all recognition by mass immigration. If you are the victim of Islamic terrorism we prefer smiling defiance to tears. But other forms of terrorism may be treated differently depending on context.

44. Bias by Views as News. This is something we have always practised but these days we have expanded it into all areas. A classic recent example was James Cook's take on Trump (he doesn't like him - what a surprise!) - a virtually 100% opinion piece appearing under the BBC News banner. Of course a lot of our BBC bias involves smuggling views into news but this refers to those blatant examples where a piece should be labelled "A Personal View" if appropriate at all (doubtful).

45. Bias by Vox Pop. Never underestimate the Vox Pop. They are a really important bias tool which you will find used in nearly every national and local news programme. They can really put a nice spin on a story. And then there are the visuals which can add yet another layer of bias: we at the BBC are always very happy to have a pro-Brexit vox pop on our screen if it is delivered by an old pot-bellied bloke on a mobility scooter with a fag hanging out of his mouth, with the betting shop visible in the background. If we can encourage him to have a go at “migrants” all the better!

46. Bias by Newspaper Review. This is a specific technique we use to build a kind of Potemkin village of opinion out of MSM news. By using left-liberal reviewers, a left-liberal presenter and a selection of stories biased to the left-liberal view of the world, we are able create the erroneous impression that the BBC’s agenda is very much in line with that of the rest of the MSM. Where necessary the Review can be used to chastise heretical opinions deemed as offensive to PC Multiculturalist beliefs. 

47. Bias by Some-say. Let’s be honest, it is rare for an hour to go by without a BBC presenter or reporter having recourse to that well known family "The Somes". "But some say this belief in fundamental biologically-based differences between men and women is just petty-minded fascistic prejudice which will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history." The Somes come in very useful to us at the BBC when we want to advance the "progressive agenda" but realise we are on tricky ground. A non-specific "some" is a nice way of suggesting support is building for a "progressive" idea. It sounds a lot better than "that mad columnist from the Guardian". Given we live in a nation of nearly 70 million people, if you say "some" then most fair-minded people will think you mean a few hundred thousand or a few million at least, if not yet a majority, whereas it might only be that mad columnist from the Guardian, 12 people in Hampstead and five in Islington.

48. Bias by History. The past is not such a foreign country to us at the BBC. In order for the PC Multiculturalist Fantasy to be realised in the modern world the past needs to be tweaked or, worse, given the full Harvey Weinstein treatment. So, looking back at the past through our BBC-PC Telescope we see that slavery was something that was visited on Africans only by Europeans. Arabs did not enslave Africans in their millions and if they did, it wasn’t really slavery. Likewise only West Europeans have engaged in imperialism. Chinese imperialism is really of no note at all. Russian imperialism likewise of virtually no importance since the end of the Cold War. Through the PC lens of history we see that Islam is a universally benign and progressive force that invented the scientific method and brought the benefits of progress to Europe, India, Africa and elsewhere. The BBC History guide can’t help but be a little obsessive. So the history of the Levant 1917-1967 (no other time) is of great and enduring interest to all of us at the BBC. It is of course the time of the unjust creation and expansion of Israel as far as we are concerned. The history of Asia Minor during that same period is however of virtually no interest whatsoever to us! We have also to accept that the BBC’s history can be very sentimental when we want it to be. As far as the BBC are concerned Native Americans always lived on the Plains hunting buffalo on their horses. Likewise, the Zulus of South Africa never exterminated and drove out the San people of the area in the 1600s. Weirdly although we at the BBC have this highly “romantic” approach to history elsewhere, when it comes to the UK have absolutely no time for any romanticised version of “our island story”. No, then we cast a cold, callous, indifferent eye over the history of our forebears. Actually, I don’t think I should say “forebears” but you know what I mean. 

49. Bias by Counterintuitive Injury Reporting. At the BBC we use this mostly in the context of domestic or American demonstrations. So “An EDL march took place in Rotherham today [Note – don’t mention about what!]. The march was condemned by the local Mayor who said “This Far Right rally has nothing to with our community which is peaceful and harmonious.” There were 7 injuries and 5 arrests.” The set up makes the audience think the EDL caused the injuries and that EDL supporters were arrested, when the truth is the counter-demo mob caused the injuries and were the source of the arrests. Classic result! Just what we want!! This technique can also be used with terrorism in faraway places. “Terror attack – two Palestinians dead.” No – not an attack on Palestinians by Far Right Israelis…two Palestinian terrorists shot dead while trying to carry out a terror attack. “ Likewise “70 Muslim worshippers killed in Mosque attack” might make you think the religion of Islam was yet again being persecuted by Christians or Hindus. The fact’s it’s a Sunni-Shia thing is nicely obscured. 

50. Bias by Absorption. There are many cultural events or phenomena which we seek to make our own. Glastonbury, Turner Prize, MOBOs, Chelsea Flower Show, Women’s Football...we are like some giant amoeba, absorbing chunks of other DNA safe in the knowledge that it can replicate inside us and produce a yet more bloated version of the BBC itself. I think it’s what I would call cultural synergy. By absorbing these other cultural phenomena we make ourselves stronger and better project our cultural aims. 

I hope you have enjoyed our Festive Fifty and that you now understand better how we operate. The BBC believes in transparency and connecting with its staff and the public at large. Besides we think that you are so brainwashed by now you are probably quite happy that we are so biased. 

Seasonal greetings and a Happy New Year whatever calendar you choose, 

Yours ever, 

Tony

Kill the Christians

Jane Corbin was in super-superficial mode in last night’s programme Kill the Christians.

Corbin’s thrust appeared to be that the Christians are being persecuted and murdered by Islamic State, alongside the wrong kind of Muslims whom I.S. lunatics are presently slaughtering in droves. It made copious use of ‘old’ footage of Islamic State parading its victims, pre-beheading, in their orange jumpsuits.

The programme espoused the increasingly prevalent theory that Islamic countries were, after all, better off under the stabilising influence of tyrannical despotic leaders like Saddam and Assad. This is a distinctly credible theory, but as far as the current crisis concerning Christians in the Middle East is concerned it’s a distraction.

Jane Corbin was filmed striding hither and thither on mountain paths. She and her replenished hair were standing a mere stone’s throw from an Islamic State stronghold, she announced, pointing to smoke plumes billowing in the distance. 

Corbin visited beleaguered Christians sheltering in monasteries and spoke to Christian priests. All the while one of Corbin’s gravity-defying scarves was draped over her shoulders; never out of place, in sharp symbolic contrast to the displaced Christian families stripped of their churches, homes and livelihoods whose tales she was recounting. 

I don’t claim to be an expert on the topic of the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, but it was my understanding that this process began long before the comparatively recent rise of the IS.

Canon Andrew White, aka The Vicar of Baghdad,  was conspicuous by his absence in this programme. He is the real expert on the exodus of Christians from Iraq, and he has long been trying to tell the world of their plight. Corbin didn’t even mention his name.

Another glaring flaw in this hour-long un-investigative piece of journalism was the Bethlehem section. I didn’t hear Corbin explain that Bethlehem is run by the PA, or that the persecution of Christians is not really the fault of the IP conflict - it’s my understanding that it’s more a case of the Muslim Palestinians‘  long standing antipathy to Christians or any religious group that differs from their own. Corbin’s narrative gave the opposite impression. So what’s the truth?

I’d better leave that matter to the specialists, and I hope BBC Watch will elucidate in due course, but if Corbin intended to imply that Israel was guilty of something here, she was treading on dangerous ground. Remember Sarah Montague and Baroness Warsi?

Jane Corbin was off form this time.  Her hair seems to have purloined all her mojo; but is she worth it?  

Update: BBC Watch

The Story of the Jews

The reviews for Simon Schama's new landmark BBC series, The Story of the Jews, have been favourable so far - and rightly so, in my opinion. 

Eschewing all talk of hand gestures, background music and suits, what follows will be an extended paraphrase of Part One - and what I think is the essential element of the The Story of the Jews, namely the story of the Jews. 

It may have nothing to do with the topic of BBC bias (though I'm sure some anti-Semites will think otherwise), but hopefully you will find it interesting, even if you've already watched the programme. (Plus writing it up means I can remind myself of what it said for years to come, without having to buy the book. Ain't I a cheapskate?) 

********

The Story of the Jews began by posing the question, 'What, if anything, do all Jews have in common?' It's not skin colour, or language, or food, or music, or opinions, nor is it the way they pray (if they pray at all). No, it's a story, the story kept in their heads and hearts, "a story of suffering and resilience, endurance, creativity" - a story they've "told to survive" for over 3,000 years. "We are our story," said Simon Schama.

He began with Sigmund Freud who, having fled Nazi-occupied Vienna, settled in London and, in reaction to the anti-Semitic horrors beginning to unfold around him, and whilst dying from cancer, reflected on the story of the Jews, and on the very question Simon himself had just asked, and also on the question of why Jews have been persecuted so often. 

Freud's most treasured possession was an ancient Hanukkah lamp, a menorah, symbol of the temple light that kept burning. "The menorah is the most ancient and enduring symbol of Jewish identity, even for someone who called himself a 'godless Jew'", said Simon Schama. 

Freud applied his theories to the Jews, especially the story of Moses - the dominating father figure of psychoanalysis. Freud's "outrageous" theory was that the Jews had rebelled against Moses, and murdered him, but then adopted his laws out of guilt and remorse with "an obsessive devotion" that endured through millennia of suffering. A scandal ensued, but Simon said that the important point had been lost in the scandal: Freud's conviction that by preserving their religion, consciously or unconsciously, the Jews had given themselves the opportunity to endure not just as a faith but as a people when everything else had been lost. 

That was the meaning of Freud's travelling menorah and why he valued it. 

In that light, a Passover feast held by Simon for friends and family gave him the opportunity to express what Passover - the celebration of the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt - means to him. The Seder table, the Seder plates, the symbolic food, and the sacred text, the Haggadah, provide a chance to relive that "story of stories", by discussing it and applying it to the here and now - which is what we saw them doing. One reflection that stood out for me was one of Simon's guests saying, "The Jewish imagination is paranoia confirmed by history". 

The sacred landscape of Israel, which Moses never quite reached, prompted the thought that something remarkable happened there over 3,000 years ago, continued Simon. The first archaeologists to explore the area weren't Jewish though. They were Victorian evangelical Christians, determined to find the roots of their own faith through its roots in Judaism. Survey maps were drawn to try to pin down exactly where the events told of in the Bible actually occurred, but objectivity was swept away by romanticism amidst the awesome scenery of Sinai, and it was the Bible and its names which guided their work and their technology. Archaeologists since have been much more sober, said Simon, and no concrete historical evidence to prove the exodus has been discovered. 

The earliest extant solid Jewish artefacts come from the Iron Age and were found in Elah Valley, where Goliath is supposed to have been brought low by David, on the border between the ancient hill-dwelling Judeans and the coastal-dwelling Philistines. 

Simon talked to Yossi Garfinkel, the archaeologist who excavated the fortress there. He describes it as "a Biblical Pompeii". Carbon dating has placed the site at around 3,000 years old - the time traditionally associated with King David and, thus, a highly dramatic find. Yossi takes a less dismissive view of the Bible's relevance than many other archaeologists, because David and Goliath may never actually have fought but they nonetheless represent the conflict between the Philistines and the Judeans that was going on at that time. It's metaphors rather than literalism, the Bible as an echo of some sort of reality, said Simon. One find - a little altar and two model shrines ('arks') - was especially significant. Both shrines are empty, prefiguring the Holy of Holies in the High Temple, dwelling place on earth of "that extraordinary religious innovation - the faceless, formless god of Jewish monotheism."

That God was slow to emerge from the crowd of other gods in the region. It took centuries, Simon said, for the Jews to accept that their god was the only God. A god of many names. 

The early Jews used animal sacrifices, with smoke rising to heaven and nothing in between, but they also had the Hebrew bible, the Torah, the scrolls of The Law, the first five books of the Bible. These are still central to Judaism. The sacred book is still venerated, whether in Reform or Orthodox services. That reverence is common to all strains of Judaism. Simon Schama called it "the definition of worship through the sanctification of words" and finds it deeply beautiful. The words are read out loud and not directly touched. "And it is and was those words - read, remembered, perpetuated - that would ensure the survival of Jews and Judaism through the generations". 

The Bible began to be written down around 2,700 years ago. It contains so many great stories, Simon enthused, but these stories aren't museum pieces. They still mean something, here and now - such as to an Ethiopian Jew name Aviva Rahamim, who Simon talked to. She made her own gruelling exodus to Israel three decades ago, showing that relevance through her own experiences. She feels at one with her ancestors - those "who came up with Moses". 

That inspiring story, however, prompts Simon to say that many Bible stories are much more tragic. The Bible never "soft pedals" on the terrible fate of that "puny" little state crushed between imperial superpowers - Egypt, Assyria, Babylon - he said. 

The Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem - the first of the great disasters -, tearing down the great temple and exiling the Jewish elite. 

Still, the Jewish identity did not disappear - even in Babylon. Far from it. There, in exile, God's laws became tougher, fiercer, in response. When the Persians conquered Babylon and released the Jews, the exiles returned to a ruined Jerusalem with a Bible that "bound Jews ever more closely to its rules and commands". They began rebuilding, under Nehemiah, but the rebuilding of Jewish identity in those who had stayed behind was at least as urgent a priority. Torah, Law, was to be the heart of that identity. 

Ezra called the people together and told them to leave behind their non-Jewish and half-Jewish wives, husbands and children. "This is brutal - a hardline purge that elevates religious and ethnic purity at the expense of social reality", said Simon. 

That social reality, said Simon, was shown by exiles in Aswan, living at the same time as Ezra. He visited Elephantine in Upper Egypt, where many had lived in harmony with non-Jews since the Babylonian invasion. These Jews worshipped the Jewish god, but also his wife, the Queen of Heaven. They intermarried and their wives and husbands converted to Judaism. "They are ordinary, everyday Judeans", said Simon. "The documents [found in Elephantine] really are the first complete portrait we have of an entire community of Jews". They built a temple there too - breaking (or not knowing) the rule about the temple in Jerusalem being the only one where animal sacrifices were permitted. Unfortunately for the Elephantine Jews, the rams they sacrificed at that temple were sacred to the Egyptians who sacrificed at the temple next door. Guess what happened? The Egyptians got some Persian guards to destroy their temple. A petition to Jerusalem granted them the funds and the permission to rebuild, but on the strict condition that no animal sacrifices were to be carried out. "Hard Jerusalem rules had definitely won."

A new danger then emerged - the Greeks, led by Alexander the Great. With them came the threat of "annihilation through assimilation", thanks to the wave of Greek culture that followed. "The soft power of Hellenism" threatened to "submerge" Jewish identity "beneath its welcoming waters". A spectacular 2nd century palace for a rich Jewish family was used to show that seduction in action - some so much that they went through the "eye-watering" process of reverse circumcision (to look the part in Greek gymnasiums). Plus the Bible was translated into Greek. 

Jewish identity, however, could not be translated. No absolute fusion was possible. 

Loyalty to the "God of words" saved Judaism from being swallowed by Hellenism. Stubborn, orthodox resistance began and exploded when a Greek ruler [Antiochus IV Epiphanes] desecrated the temple and banned circumcision. The Maccabees (a family) led the rebellion and established an independent Israel run by priest-kings (the Hasmonean dynasty) which lasted for almost a century, until they were succeed by "the decidedly unpriestly Herod the Great", who owed his throne to the Romans, the new superpower on the block. Herod was a lavish builder, massively extending the High Temple, which became a "conveyor belt of continual sacrifice", presided over by (what some saw as) a "swaggering aristocracy", a clear expression (to many) "of what Judaism was about"...

...except that not everyone accepted that. 

Some pious Jews thought that the smoke of sacrifice was obscuring the word, the Law. They hurried away to safe places, reading their texts, awaiting the messiah. 

One such place was Qumran, birth place of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where pious mystics living "around the same time as the birth and death of a Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth" poured over the sacred texts, building a library of 850 separate manuscripts, including wisdom books and all sorts of "whacky", apocalyptic stuff alongside the Bible. Simon Schama visited a laboratory helping to preserve and investigate them.  

The big battle they envisioned because a "grim, bloody reality" soon after, in 66 AD. An immense anti-Roman rebellion began, requiring three Roman legions, under Vespasian and his son Titus, to crush it. [They became the Flavian emperors, along with Vespasian's other son, Domitian. As a wildly off-topic aside, I once fancied writing a Robert Graves-style play about mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Domitian.]

Only one written source remains, ' The Jewish War' by the Hellenistic Jew Josephus. Josephus was Vespasian's "in-house historian", someone who first took up arms against Rome, then surrendered and finally became an advisor to the soon-to-be Roman emperor, his "cheerleader and pet Jew". A turncoat to be despised? 

Simon is not so sure and attempted a rehabilitation.

Josephus was there outside Jerusalem as the zealots inside instigated a reign of terror to stop any talk of surrender, whilst the population (including his own mother) slowly and painfully starved to death. Josephus himself said his only concern was to spare his own people suffering, that he saw the Roman's as a punishment from God, and that the Jewish defenders had turned on each other like wild beasts. His point: "What was the point of going on?" The city walls finally fell, and a great disaster ensued, which Josephus (presumably aghast?) witnessed. The temple went up in smoke in flames, and the Romans pulled down what remained. 

The destruction of Jerusalem made the Flavians' fortune and Jewish loot and slaves paid for their Colosseum. Josephus was part of the "loot", and the Romans, who despised the Jews, made him despair of them. He wrote a book about Judaism - a defence of Judaism. Just like Sigmund Freud, he turned to Moses and stressed the Law. He "stands tall", said Simon Schama. "We have become the teachers of men in the greatest of things," says Josephus.

How are the Jews still here, after all those hammer blows? Words. Words beat swords, Simon says. The Roman Empire has come and gone but go into a synagogue any Saturday and you'll still hear those words. 

The dramatic final image was that of a postcard sent by Sigmund Freud in 1913. It was a picture of the Arch of Titus in Rome, that glorification of the conquest of Jerusalem. On it Freud wrote, "The Jew survives it".

I can't wait for Part Two.