The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) puts too much emphasis on the “illegality” of Israeli settlements and omits to talk about the “illegality of terrorism,” said Ohad Tal, a member of the Religious Zionism party, in a letter he sent on Sunday to the director general of the British channel, Tim Davie.
In the letter, Tal calls on the BBC to reconsider its editorial line regarding reporting on Israel, settlements, and terrorism.
Currently, the British channel encourages its journalists to “include the context that ‘all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.'”
The guidelines for writing about terrorism also actively discourage the use of the words “terrorist” or “terrorism” if they are not used in a quote.
“Nothing is more ironic than the BBC insisting that settlements are illegal while refusing to stipulate that terrorism is illegal,” Tal wrote in his letter.
The Israeli MP added that “the incessant attribution of alleged lawlessness to the world’s only Jewish state by Britain’s national broadcaster can only create a sanctimonious tailwind in the UK, fanning latent prejudice against British Jews to overt and dangerous levels.”
At the end of his letter, the lawmaker listed BBC articles in which terrorist organizations such as Hamas have stated that terrorism is a “natural response to the crimes” of Israel. He then compared the BBC’s guidelines to terrorist rhetoric, saying that stories like the BBC’s feed the justifications of terrorist organizations with the same logic.
In November, the BBC apologized for the anti-Israel bias in its reporting and a month later launched an investigation into its reporting on Jews and Israel.
The BBC launched the investigation after the British newspaper The Jewish Chronicle launched a petition asking the channel to investigate its impartiality. –i24 News
