Rabbi Y Y Rubinstein lives in the US, but he used to be a regular on the BBC.
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| Rabbi Y Y Rubinstein |
He has written an article about the BBC’s attitude to the Jews and Israel - past and present, and I thought it would be worth reproducing it here. It’s quite lengthy so I’ll be using the fold again, which has become a habit of late.
Reproducing, like reTweeting, is not necessarily an endorsement. Some of his views I don’t necessarily share.
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DOES THE BBC HAVE A JEWISH PROBLEM?
The question of whether the BBC suffers from institutional anti-semitism is not a new one.
Historically, there is not the slightest doubt that it has been guilty in this regard. In fact the BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation) admitted it when radio 4, a BBC radio station aired a documentary years ago about the corporations’s role in promoting anti-Semitism in World War ll. It found itself clearly having suffered from “the world’s oldest hatred.”
It is not so willing today, however, to confront the question with nearly the same honesty. Rather, the BBC has resisted, with every trick it can muster, revealing the contents of its own commissioned report, completed on 2004 that judged whether the broadcaster fairly reports on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
A Daily Mail headline from February 2009 neatly summed up the matter: “The BBC spends £200,000 on legal fight to suppress report on anti-Israel ‘bias.’ “
But if critics of the BBC and its refusal to come clean have been denied the evidence they think they need, they are more than convinced that one of its journalists, Tim Willcox, has now settled the matter once and for all.
At the recent unity rally against terror in Paris - called after jihadists killed 17 innocent people, including four Jews at a kosher supermarket- Willcox, a BBC reporter and presenter interviewed a woman who explained that many Jews in France live in fear. She said that the situation in France was similar to that of Europe in the 1930s, when anti-semitism was rampant. She then said that French people must not be afraid to confront this anti-Jewish feeling in order to combat it. At which point, Willcox interrupted her and said: “Many many many critics though, of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.”
The woman was not an Israeli citizen, but a French Jew, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She was addressing the situation of French Jewry at a time when the community was mourning four of its members - who were executed by an ISIS supporter for simply being Jews. Willcox’s interruption was widely interpreted as a suggestion on his part that what happened to the Jews in that supermarket was their own fault.
The following day he apologized for his ‘poorly phrased” question.
NOT BUYING IT
For critics suspicious that a culture of antisemitism lies hidden just below the surface at the BBC - the largest broadcaster in the world, with 23,000 employees - this was unconvincing.
For those (like myself) who are still willing to defend ‘Auntie” (as the BBC is known in England) Willcox’s second on-air anti Jewish comment left us struggling.
On November 8, 2014, during a discussion on a proposed ‘mansion tax’ that would levy higher taxes on properties worth $3.5 million or more, Willcox suggested that the labour Party would lose funding from Jewish sources because a lot of “Jewish faces” would be against the proposed tax.
I have worked at the BBC as a freelance contributor for over 20 years. Apart from former Chief rabbi Jonathan sacks, I was the only Orthodox rabbi regularly appearing on numerous shows.
The question of whether I was working for an organization that harbors and even fosters anti-semitism was something that concerned me. I was challenged on it many times by those who knew I worked for the network. Even though Tim Willcox apologized for his most recent remark, I’m not buying it. Sorry, Tim. Not this time.
BELONGING AT THE BBC
My colleagues are good, kind, and hugely talented individuals, although everyone agreed that Auntie’s bureaucracy, favoritism, and (sometimes) pettiness drove them mad.
