Wild speculation

The British girl’s case (initial accusation, retraction and trial) about being gang-raped by 12 youthful  Israeli holidaymakers while she was working in Cyprus has taken a turn for the worse. 

On the upside, as far as the BBC is concerned, it gives the news channel an excuse to move on from the spate of antisemitic incidents it has been obliged to dwell on in recent days, even if it couldn’t bring itself to engage with some of the inconvenient facts involved until it had no other choice. 

After all, other media outlets had already published the images of the perpetrator being arrested, revealing something it was hard to miss. How can one put this? Let’s try ‘he had a bit of a funny tinge’. Several other reports ventured so far as to speculate about a possible motivation while the BBC refrained from making a disagreeable value judgement till they were absolutely positive that it wasn’t an unfortunate accident, for example, that multiple people tripped and fell into the arms of a Happy Hanukah-wisher who happened to be holding a sharpened machete.

Anyway, I feel like speculating. Would the BBC have gone to the trouble of putting the case for the girl’s defence quite so enthusiastically, had the alleged rapists been from another religion?

I do realise that this sounds harsh and unsympathetic, but it’s not the reliability or character of the girl herself I’m addressing. How would I know anything about that? It’s just that I think the BBC with the assistance of Kevin Connolly is making one helluva bigger deal about this because of the nationality of the alleged rapists. That’s it.