Jewish activists and organizations in the UK quite often have to deal with the way BBC presents stories about Israel or Jews. See link https://www.hidabroot.com/br/article/193579/BBC-Anti-Semitism-Strikes-Again . But yesterday the BBC succeeded in angering both Jews and Muslims with one thoughtless sentence.
This cooperation between Muslim and Jewish organizations in the UK was prompted by a BBC report on teen age Muslim girls from a German school that went to visit the death camps in Poland. The girls said they were poorly treated by the locals in Poland and one even spit at them for wearing Muslim garb.
The writer was doing fine until he added the following sentence that earned the wrath of both Jews and Muslims: “The Holocaust is a sensitive issue for Muslims, because many of the survivors settled in Palestine afterwards, on lands that later became the state of Israel.”
Jewish organizations were furious for the portrayal of the Holocaust as a ‘sensitive issue’ for anyone. Unjust mass killing of Jews is not a sensitive issue; it’s a matter of remembering the wrong and evil for what it is. Similarly, the Muslim organizations were upset for being portrayed as people for whom the world’s largest genocide in history as a ‘sensitive issue’ for them.
In reaction to the foolish statement of this reporter, the Council of Jewish Organizations in Britain and the Fiaz Mughal the head of ‘Tell Mama’ which tracks anti-Muslim attacks issued a joint statement asking the BBC to fix the news article. Additionally, both organizations filed an official complaint about the wording of the article.
A short time later BBC indeed erased the offensive sentence from the article.
The organizations added that they expect an apology, but as of this writing no apology was given. Based on BBC’s track record, they shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for it.