Melanie Phillips: The BBC has questions to answer
With the BBC having doubled down on its claim of “a slur about Muslims”, and with more and more people listening to the video and failing to hear any such slur or indeed make out any words at all, disgust and dismay in the Jewish community are growing. Parents of the teenagers have accused the BBC of “demonising” their children. The Board of Deputies has called on the BBC to apologise. It said:
The BBC thought that they heard a slur in English. What they were actually hearing was a distressed Jewish man speaking in Hebrew appealing for help.
Oh — and while the BBC website reported as fact
a slur about Muslims can also be heard from inside the bus
(which no-one else seems to have heard), it described the antisemitic attack itself (which everyone watching the video can clearly see) as merely
allegations [my emphasis] of antisemitic abuse directed at Jewish passengers on a bus.
Today, the ever-decent former Labour MP Lord Austin writes in the Telegraph:
I have always defended the BBC, but can’t imagine an incident involving any other group being reported in this way. It needs to listen to people from the Jewish community and look at this very carefully. We can’t have people thinking that incidents of racism are handled differently depending on who the perpetrators and victims might be.
The demonisation of Israel leads to racist attacks against Britain’s Jewish community. Our national broadcaster should be shining a spotlight on that, exposing the racists and standing up for the victims, not bending over backwards seemingly to find an equivalence where none exists.
As Ian Austin rightly says, the BBC (itself no slouch, alas, when it comes to demonising Israel) has questions to answer about this. If it persists in its claim of an anti-Muslim slur from within the bus, it must produce the evidence for this that everyone can hear for themselves. Otherwise it must take action — and be seen to take it — against those responsible for what looks horribly like an attempt at moral equivalence between Jewish victims and their attackers to diminish the reality of the antisemitism that continues so brazenly to cover Britain in shame and disgrace.
A week is ample time to correct its report and apologise to the victims. That it has not yet done so is irresponsible.
— Board of Deputies of British Jews (@BoardofDeputies) December 7, 2021
Our letter to the @bbc Chair, DG and Director of @BBCNews. @NadineDorries #tikralemishehuzedahof pic.twitter.com/p40I9YrMds
From Wiley to the Oxford St attacks, some people always think Jews deserve it
If there's one thing white supremacists and the far left agree on, it's hating Jews
Why did the BBC insist that Jews who were abused during Chanukah must have incited the violence?
The sad fact is that for most Jewish people the idea of being attacked in the street isn’t that outlandish
Yesterday ‘godfather of grime’ Wiley was back spouting off about his favourite hate subject; Jews. In a rambling YouTube video, the British star, who was thrown off of Twitter and YouTube for antisemitism, but is back on both, asked, as if he had come to some amazing new realisation: ‘Why did that happen between them and Hitler? Why? Why did Hitler hate you? Exactly.’
Antisemites always think Jews deserve to be hated. It is baked into Christian culture – the Jews killed Christ and deserve to be punished. We may be a largely secular society but that view persists in some quarters. Perhaps its clearest expression can be found in The Great Replacement theory being spread by white supremacists. Coined by the French writer Renaud Camus, who has been found guilty in his home country of inciting racial hatred, the theory posits that because Jews fought for more immigration rights, feminism and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, they want to replace white Christians. It was adherence to this warped ideology that led a white supremacist to kill 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018.
On much of the contemporary left, Jews are seen as fair game because of Israel. Only the ‘good Jews’ – the ones who openly denounce the only Jewish majority state in the world will be allowed to be part of their ‘progressive’ circles and even then, they will be viewed with suspicion. For the hard left in particular, Jews deserve to be punished for speaking up against the sainted Jeremy Corbyn’s antisemitism. Indeed, people with ‘anti-racist’ or ‘peace and love’ in their Twitter bios are still remarkably keen to tell me, a Jewish writer, that ‘the Jews deserve what is coming for attacking Jeremy Corbyn’.
So when a group of religious Jewish kids, who had been singing and handing out doughnuts in celebration of Chanukah, were attacked by a group of people in Oxford Street last week, while most people were simply outraged, some – including in a BBC newsroom – asked: ‘What did they do to deserve it?’.
*New*@metpolice published some grainy images of the suspects abusing Jews on Oxford St. We’ve extracted some clearer images from the video footage
— GnasherJew®????? (@GnasherJew) December 7, 2021
(Because of @Twitter new privacy rules, we can't post without risking our acc so pls click the link)https://t.co/nbLpTM4c6G
Over 1/3 of American Jews have experienced an anti-Semitic incident. This issue is not about Israel, nor is it a political issue. This is a civil rights issue. Jew-hatred has now become systemic in the United States and we must put an END TO IT.#EndJewHatred pic.twitter.com/2mg9ymLmhg
— BrookeGoldstein (@GoldsteinBrooke) December 6, 2021