This was a ghastly programme from North Finchley last
night on BBC1 (5th February 2015 at 10.45pm).
I am truly no fan of George Galloway … quite the
opposite, in fact. I simply can’t bear
him but the behaviour of the Jewish members of the studio audience made me
squirm with embarrassment. I’m Jewish
and, given the venue of the programme, I was well aware that the subject of
anti-semitism would come up. It is a
great pity that some of the members of the audience didn’t comport themselves in
a more composed and productive fashion.
Galloway is horrid – that’s a given but, I agree with
him on one thing. In the wake of the
terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris last month, a great deal has been
said about freedom of speech and, if Galloway was on the Question Time panel,
he had as much right to respond to a question without any form of interruption
as any of the other panel members.
I think I also have to add that I believe the kid who
asked the initial question on anti-semitism asked the WRONG question. He wondered if Galloway was at all
responsible for the very frightening rise in this old, old prejudice in the
past 12 months. Galloway is a symptom of
poor media reporting about Israel and Zionism rather than the cause of it. The better question to have asked would have
been “Can the British media be held at all responsible for the rise in
anti-semitism in the past year?”. I fear
that the honest answer would be a resounding “Yes”. But the BBC and other UK broadcasters would
never admit to such.
In the past few weeks it has been a total dichotomy to
see the dignified and sympathetic way that the Liberation of Auschwitz and
Holocaust Memorial Day have been covered but then to have BBC News cocking up
really quite badly with the baby-faced Tim Willcox making a complete fool of
himself by saying to a Parisian Jewish lady that the attack on the Kosher
Supermarket could have been caused by there being Palestinian blood on JEWISH
hands. Jewish hands … not Israeli hands
but Jewish hands. Three soldiers were
stabbed in Nice whilst guarding a Jewish building on Tuesday (3rd
February 2015). BBC News editors saw fit
to publish this item on its website but both on the 6 and 10 o’clock TV News
that day Harry Redknapp’s resignation from QPR took precedence and not a word
about the attack was uttered.
I’m fairly sure that BBC News has had its wrists
slapped by the mere fact that the findings of The Balen Report were never
released. Jeremy Bowen, Orla Guerin and
Lyse Doucet have become somewhat less polemic since the report was completed in
2004 but until there are reporters on the Middle East who aren’t all Arabists
the situation is never going to change too much.
I worked at the BBC many years ago and, as an
employee, I never experienced even one iota of anti-semitism whilst I was there
but I very often felt uncomfortable as a listener and as a viewer during that period
and I continue to feel that way as an ex-employee. I know that when I worked there I had to
compartmentalise on many occasions … one of my bosses was the ex-Head of the
Arabic Service and my last job at the Corporation was organising seminars for
MPs (which were, regardless of the titles, all about securing a larger licence
fee). On one occasion I found myself
sandwiched between said ex-boss and an exuberant actor turned MP called Andrew
Faulds who was extremely and vociferously pro-Arab. I was asked how I felt. My response … “beleaguered” was said with a
slightly wry smile on my face. I didn’t feel threatened or afraid and I certainly
didn’t dislike my ex-boss nor Mr Faulds.
Only recently, I met with a friend who works at the
Corporation and we agreed that it would be better not to discuss the remarks
made by Joan Rivers prior to her demise regarding last summer’s war in Gaza. He’s a nice guy and neither he nor I have any
idea how to solve the situation in that part of the Middle East … so why
discuss? I can’t honestly say that I
know of ANY Jewish people in the UK who took any pleasure at all in seeing the
effects of (a) Palestinians attacking Israel from tunnels with rockets and the
kidnapping and murder of Jewish kids, (b) Israel’s response to such and (c) the
amount of death and destruction meted out on ordinary Palestinian men, women
and children … whether we believe that Hamas placed them in areas of weapons
storage or not.
I err on the side of pessimism and I believe
anti-semitism is cyclical. I feel less
comfortable in the UK now than I have ever done before and I’m not sure that
this is because of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
The current zeitgeist is yet another upsurge in fascism and
radicalisation in this country and I believe realistic pessimism is necessary
to keep ALL of us alert regardless of whether we’re Jewish, Christian, Indian,
Muslim or anything else.
Jewish people who take notice of what is going on the
world never do feel entirely comfortable in any country and with good
reason. In the past year there have
never been as many anti-semitic attacks since the Community Security Trust
started to keep records. But even before
records were kept, Jewish people had to contend with Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts
and, prior to that, during the duration of the Second World War, however much
Winston Churchill got Britain through the war he would not sanction the bombing
of train lines which led only to the Concentration Camps despite knowing
exactly what was going on in them.
In 1948, when the UN tabled a vote on whether the area
of Palestine (which was, at the time, 70% of Trans-Jordan) should become the
Jewish State of Israel, the UK voted in favour and then what did it do? The British troops armed Arabs living there
so they could fight the existing Jewish population and new immigrants who had
managed to survive the Holocaust. How on
earth can Jewish people in the Diaspora ever really feel at ease knowing that
regardless of most friendly rhetoric we always have been and always will be
just tolerated.
It isn’t the George Galloways of this world we have to
fear … for heaven’s sake he and his like are laughable. He is full of it and so are his
followers. Picture him crawling around
pretending to be a cat with Rula Lenska on Celebrity Big Brother not so many
years ago.
Know that the real enemy is a culture that receives
its news in badly phrased sound bites and the diminution of real news having
any impact either by not broadcasting it at all or by over-broadcasting it in the
rolling news that we are subjected to these days.
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