The anti-Israel bias of the BBC - Al Beeb as it's consequently often dubbed - needs no introduction from me. It has been systematically documented - in a series of reports by the lawyer Trevor Asserson, who runs the website BBC Watch, by Honest Reporting, by Tom Gross, and by the Biased BBC blog, for example. It has also, presumably, been proven in a report the BBC commissioned from employee Malcolm Balen - why else would the licence-funded "national broadcaster" suppress Balen's findings and furiously fight attempts via legal channels to force it to release his report? No doubt Al Beeb hoped Balen would exonerate it from charges of bias against Israel, and didn't like what he had to say.
Al Beeb's Barbara Plett, who shed on-air tears for Arafat upon his impending death; Alan Johnston, the Gaza correspondent kidnapped by "militants" in 2007 and awarded an Amnesty International prize, immediately following his release, for his pro-Palestinian radio reports; the repugnant Orla Guerin; the seemingly incorrigible Jeremy Bowen (pictured, near Johnston's photo on a placard, during a show of solidarity by BBC staff with their kidnapped colleague) - these have been or are among the worst offenders. Their partisan reportage (together with such prejudiced online items as Bowen's "diary", which he posted on the BBC News website during Operation Cast Lead) is truly despicable in an organisation which is obliged, by its Charter and its Producers' Guidelines, to be strictly neutral. Yet BBC employees have been judges on journalistic awards given out by Amnesty International (a controversial organisation these days, and certainly one not particularly enamoured of Israel). Even if the BBC employees concerned have the best of motives, in my view this involvement is not in keeping with impartiality.
Usually, Al Beeb disdainfully dismisses complaints by members of the public regarding its bias. It doesn't always bother to respond, even if a response has been specifically requested. So long as there is no independent body to arbitrate complaints, it will continue to behave in this unacceptable manner, for - shockingly - it handles all complaints itself. Last April, however, the BBC Trust rebuked Bowen for aspects of his coverage. But when accepting a journalism award in London in June he declared: "The BBC Trust accused me, wrongly in my view, of some inaccuracies in my reporting. They did that because of a rather nasty campaign group in the United States and some highly politically-motivated individuals in this country who were in fact the enemies of impartiality, but they got their thoughts through." In other words, folks, "The Lobby". And he's proved since that it's business as usual - did you catch his insinuating reference to "rich Jews" the other day in a broadcast, by the way? (hat tip: Biased BBC).
We're all pretty familiar with BBC bias. But when did the BBC let slip the scrupulous objectivity demanded of it, and which once made it a respected organisation trusted round the world? Being an historically minded gal I decided to try to find out. And I believe I may have discovered the individual who began the BBC's downward spiral into biased reporting, at least as far as news about Israel and the Middle East is concerned.
Step forward the shade of Keith Kyle (1925-2007), a Liberal-turned-Labourite who later joined the SDP, and stood unsuccessfully for Parliament several times. Kyle seems to have been the first BBC broadcaster to flout the neutrality incumbent upon the BBC when, during the tension leading up to the Six Day War, he opined that "fundamentally in this dispute the Arabs are completely in the right. There can be no question about this at all." These words were also printed in the 1 June 1967 issue of
The Listener, a BBC publication.
Shortly after Israel's stunning victory, the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) was set up in London in order to coordinate Arab and pro-Arab opinion in the UK. Its leading parliamentary supporters were Tory MP and Suez rebel Anthony Nutting (in 1956, when Nutting was Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden had mentioned "the anti-Jewish spleen of you people in the Foreign Office") and Labour MP Christopher Mayhew, both inveterate foes of Israel. Funded by Arab governments, CAABU could afford a secretariat, and its director was Michael Adams, who had worked for the BBC early in his career but had later joined the
Guardian. It was owing to his articles in that paper that a columnist in the
Jewish Chronicle (30 June 1967) observed: "It is with a sinking feeling and eventually turning stomach that one examines the
Guardian each morning." (That writer would certainly vomit daily if he read the
Guardian nowadays!)
One of CAABU's first actions had been to send Adams, while he was still employed by the
Guardian, on a funded trip to the Middle East, from whence he sent a series of articles biased against Israel. The
Guardian had printed them without explaining that they had been subsidised by Arab money. There was also a despatch from Cairo which talked of the "forcible expulsion across the burning desert of Palestinian Arabs to Gaza". In fact, those deportees were members of the Palestine Liberation Army and a threat to Israel's security, as the
Guardian grudgingly acknowledged the next day. Adams also used the offensive term "final solution" to describe Israeli policy.
It was shortly after this that Adams became CAABU's director. The
Guardian continued to offend. In August it carried an advertisement from an Arab source that made "untrue and repulsive allegations about Israel's treatment of Arab civilians in the occupied territories" and in a report alleged the "collective shooting of civilians" by Israeli troops in the occupied territories as well as the discovery of "mass graves". Yet overall it seems that with Adams's departure, and that of leader writer Frank Edmead, the
Guardian's coverage of Israel became more evenhanded - until it descended again into the travesty of truth and fair play that is its hallmark today.
The BBC's Keith Kyle was not slow to identify openly with CAABU. He was a keynote speaker at one of its first major rallies. The
Jewish Chronicle (29 November 1968) noted "the intense anti-Jewish feeling generated in the CAABU audience - and among some of the speakers - by the very existence of the Jewish State, referred to as the Zionist State" as well as the way pro-Israel Jewish questioners were mocked and shouted down.
One of the worst features of Kyle's pro-Arab stance (apart from its infringement of the BBC Charter, of course) concerned the hijacking of an El Al aircraft at Zurich in February 1969. Through his Arab contacts he had learned of the plan, but had not disclosed the information "to avoid Israeli retaliation against it".
In the same year he presented a series of programmes on the Middle East highly slanted against Israel and replete with gratuitous comments of his own. Aghast, a
Jewish Chronicle columnist (9 May 1969) observed: "The casual viewer will doubtless have been fooled into believing that the Israeli occupation of Arab territories is barbaric and ruthless."
And that summer, on the BBC's
Panorama, Michael Adams spewed out vitriol about "nation-wide and even world-wide Jewish pressure" - in other words, a certain lobby.
In one of his platform appearances Adams - foreshadowing the avoidance by Al Beeb and the
Guardian of the T-word - rhetorically enquired why the British press referred to "Arab terrorists": 'I can't remember calling members of the resistance in Nazi-occupied France "terrorists"', he continued. (In 1999 his son, the BBC's Middle East correspondent Paul Adams, used the prescribed Al Beeb term "Islamic militants" of suicide bombers. It was Paul Adams, when diplomatic correspondent, who in 2007 appeared to admit to BBC bias when he described Alan Johnston's job as "to bring us day after day reports of the Palestinian predicament in the Gaza Strip".)
As for Kyle, he became prominently associated with the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA; Chatham House) and wrote tendentious books on Suez and on Israel. In 1983, when membership secretary of the RIIA, he invited as speaker Dr Israel Shahak, chairman of the so-called (and miniscule) Israel League for Human and Civil Rights, who had authored a book containing this odious assertion: "In the Jewish State, only the Jews are considered human. Non-Jews have the status of beasts."
Perhaps we should not be too surprised that Kyle's obituary in the
Guardian (27 February 2007) declared that Kyle "would have made a wise foreign secretary".
