THE BBC has been applauded by people more used to criticising it after it aired an episode of Panorama detailing the institutional anti-Semitism which has gripped the Labour Party of late.
Testimony from eight Labour insiders revealed the party’s leadership to be turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism at every level, and the programme appears to have had an impact: deputy leader Tom Watson has declared himself ‘shocked, chilled and appalled’ at the revelations – prompting some raised eyebrows given that it hasn’t been too difficult to spot what’s been going on.
But while many of Britain’s Jews gave a sigh of relief that the problem is, apparently, finally being addressed, others have expressed disappointment that the programme failed to detail what anti-Semitism is, leaving the impression that it’s merely racism toward Jews.
Of course, if it were, that would be bad enough – it goes without saying (or ought to) that no one should face persecution or discrimination thanks to their ethnicity. But anti-Semitism isn’t just anti-Jewish racism, it’s a worldview, one which sees Jews as a powerful cabal, secretly controlling every aspect of our world from banking to culture to military theatres for its own personal gain.
Given that, however, it’s not surprising that the BBC failed to detail the finer points of anti-Semitism: it shares an ideology with those who propagate this sort of arrant nonsense. Nor is it surprising that many in the Labour Party still fail to recognise their own anti-Semitism; the party, by shifting Leftwards, has readily embraced the sort of worldview that fosters anti-Semitic sentiment.
One of the principal difficulties with eradicating anti-Semitism is that there is an element of truth buried within the charge that, for whatever (innocent) reason, Jews do excel in many fields and disciplines, and have a tendency, consequently, to rise to positions of power.
More than 20 per cent of Nobel Prize laureates are Jewish, even though Jews comprise less than 0.2 per cent of the world’s population. The southern Israeli city of Beersheva has the highest number of chess grandmasters per capita in the world. Israeli technologies fuel world markets across a range of fields, from IT and computing, to medicine, agriculture, water infrastructure and the military.
This success flies directly in the face of Marxist ideology, which is simple and straightforward: the only way to get rich is through unfair power and oppression, therefore anyone successful is necessarily an oppressor, while anyone who is poor is necessarily oppressed.
Admission that Israel and diaspora Jews are readily persecuted by their enemies and yet continue not only to survive but to flourish, therefore fatally undermines the Marxist ideology, and so must be denied at any cost.
Thus, the fact that the modern state of Israel was carved out of a desert scrubland under circumstances of continued persecution counts for nothing. Israel’s economy, currently valued at around $350billion, is larger than those of all its immediate neighbours combined – and that alone is enough to class Israel as ‘oppressor’ rather than ‘oppressed’.
Indeed, it is for this very reason that BBC reporting on the Middle Eastern conflict is almost always biased towards the Palestinian version of events. The BBC, as a socialist enterprise, has bought wholesale into the Marxist worldview, enthusiastically embracing initiatives such as quotas for Black and Ethnic Minority programme makers and actors, and endlessly pushing a ‘woke’ agenda on its audience.
And that’s why it can’t afford to detail what anti-Semitism really is.
