"Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail."
-Theodore Roosevelt
“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”
Hon. Alex Kozinski, dissent in Silveira v. Lockyer, 328 F.3d 567 (9th Circuit 2003).
The BBC’s coverage of Israel is now clearly part of a broader pattern in its coverage of Jews. In 2021, it covered an attack by a gang of Muslim youths on a bus of Jewish children in Oxford Street in London by asserting that one of the Jews had said “dirty Muslims.” The Jewish child was in fact calling for help in Hebrew, but the BBC reported the slur as fact—as if it was desperate to find a way to blame the Jews and excuse the behavior of their Muslim attackers.
At every stage in the coverage of this incident, the BBC behaved as if it regarded those who were angry with its reporting—Jews, that is—with pure contempt. When the boys’ lawyer wrote to the BBC, it demanded he hand over their names as a condition of engaging with the complaint—an astonishing and outrageous attempt to remove the anonymity of the minor victims of an assault. Then when the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit released its findings after a series of complaints, it said merely that “more could have been done” to “acknowledge the differing views…on what was said.” The difference between truth and fiction, that is.
Sometimes the BBC’s attitude is revealed in what it doesn’t say, as in its coverage of the Beth Israel synagogue siege in Texas in 2022, when a rabbi and three other Jews were taken hostage by a British Muslim named Malik Faisal Akram. Not once in the report on its flagship 10 p.m. news bulletin was anti-Sem-itism mentioned. Nor at any point did Ed Thomas, the BBC’s special correspondent, even hint that the gunman might possibly, perhaps, have had an issue of some kind with Jews. Thomas began his report by asking: “What made Malik Faisal Akram leave Blackburn, the place he called home, to travel to Texas, arm himself with a gun, and hold people hostage inside a synagogue?” A real mystery, that.
The entire broadcast was predicated on Malik Faisal Akram’s having mental-health problems, as if he was some kind of tortured soul for whom we should have had pity. Indeed, for the BBC reporter, the real outrage was that Akram was killed, and the report included a friend of Akram’s family attacking the police: “It’s the way he was killed, he was shot—that shouldn’t have happened.” Ed Thomas continued that this raised a series of questions, which he then itemized. Not one was about why Akram hated Jews so much that he flew from Britain to Texas to attack them.
The BBC’s bias against Israel and Jews is not merely clear; it is, it increasingly seems, its raison d’être. Given the huge reach of its coverage, this is a problem not just for the Brits who are forced by law to pay for it. The question that must be addressed, therefore, is what is to be done about it.
