BBC slammed for offensive report on Holocaust and Zionism

The BBC was condemned for an inaccurate report claiming the State of Israel was founded because Holocaust survivors had settled there to the detriment of Muslims. 

The BBC has come under fire for stating in one of its articles, “The Holocaust is a sensitive topic for many Muslims because Jewish survivors settled in British-mandate Palestine, on land which later became the State of Israel.” It later retracted that sentence, which had caused an uproar.

The sentence appeared in an article about German Muslim schoolgirls who had visited concentration camps in Poland and suffered racist abuse from locals.

Following protest from the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), a British volunteer-led charity dedicated to exposing and countering anti-Semitism, the sentence was removed.

“The Holocaust is indeed a sensitive topic for many reasons, not least because six million Jews were systematically massacred. It should not be a sensitive topic to Muslims, or anybody else, because of the foundation of the State of Israel. Zionism, the movement to create the modern State of Israel, began decades before the Holocaust, and had the country existed at the time of the Holocaust, millions of innocent Jewish civilians may have lived,” the CAA stated.

“For the BBC to lend credence to the notion that it is legitimate to be “sensitive” about the Holocaust because of the existence of the State of Israel invokes anti-Semitic notions that the existence of the State of Israel is in some way racist, and it is offensive to tar “many Muslims” in this way,” the CAA underscored.

The international definition of Anti-Semitism includes denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination by claiming that the creation of the State of Israel was a racist endeavor, the CAA noted.

The BBC has been criticized on multiple occasions for its anti-Israel and even false reporting on events in Israel.

In June, the BBC reported that Israeli security forces killed three Palestinians, when in fact they were terrorists shot while committing an attack. The broadcaster later apologized after receiving complaints.

By: Aryeh Savir, World Israel News

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