Lance Forman

Here's my @spectator column about the BBC's payout to @imluciekon, 'The BBC can no longer ignore its antisemitism problem' spectator.com/article/the-bb… I don’t think I’ve ever been more wrong than when I was booed in a synagogue around twenty years ago. The occasion was a panel on media bias against Israel. One of the audience had asked a question about the BBC’s ‘institutional antisemitism’ and I responded – I shudder now to think how wrong I was – that while it was obviously biased against Israel, that reflected the left-liberal mindset of the overwhelming majority of its newsroom rather than antisemitism as such. The years since the Hamas massacre on 7 October 2023 have been an object lesson in how wrong I was. The BBC’s reports have consistently repeated Hamas propaganda as fact, as with its international editor Jeremy Bowen’s coverage of the alleged bombing of a hospital in Gaza on 17 October that year. Hamas claimed an Israeli airstrike led to the blast, which it said killed at least 500 people. Bowen reported on BBC One’s News at Ten that: “The missile hit the hospital not long after dark. You can hear the impact. The explosion destroyed Al-Ahli hospital. It was already damaged from a smaller attack at the weekend. The building was flattened.” In fact, the blast was caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the hospital was entirely untouched and the damage was to a nearby car park. Bowen later accepted that he was “wrong” but “doesn’t regret one thing” about his reporting. Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC television, has said that its repeated broadcasts of false reports mean that something deeper is at work than poor journalism: “Mistakes happen once, perhaps twice, but when they keep happening, you have to ask why. I think there are institutional biases.” But those of us who are forced to pay for the BBC’s bias through the licence fee only see one side of this institutional antisemitism: its reporting. We don’t see the inner workings of its newsroom, the comments behind the scenes or – given that we are talking about institutional antisemitism – the way its Jewish employees are treated. That changed today with the revelation that the BBC has paid out £400,000 to Lucie Kon. She is one of the most lauded documentary makers of her generation and an Emmy and Oscar winner – and also happens to be Jewish. Kon’s account of her time at the BBC after the 7 October massacre is a devastating indictment. After she suggested making a film about the massacre, she was told that "if you want to call Hamas terrorists then you have to call Israel terrorists, too" and that she should "think about what drove Hamas to do what they did". The proposed film should "contextualise" the terrorist attack and empathise with what had driven the perpetrators. Then she was told that she should not oversee it because, as a Jew, she was "too partial" – in relation to a film about the murder, rape and mutilation of Israelis. Colleagues told her that Zionists such as her are "evil". Kon says that after 7 October, "It was like having Jew stamped on my forehead". She says that a colleague told her it was "disgusting" that the then prime minister Rishi Sunak was visiting a Jewish school as prime minister to offer support and reassurance to the Jewish community. As she puts it: "I was open about being a Zionist. The BBC says, bring your authentic self to work. And I did. And I lost my job as a result." After making a formal complaint, Kon was ordered to stay at home for months and then made redundant. The BBC has now paid her £400,000, although it has not admitted liability, apologised or accepted that she was the victim of antisemitism. The problems with the BBC’s on-screen reporting do not come out of nowhere. Kon’s case is instructive because it is the first concrete example of what lies behind the bias in the BBC’s reporting: Jew hate. Much of the BBC’s output shows that its default position is that Israel is the real problem in the Middle East. It is hardly a surprise that behind the scenes, the view that Zionists are evil is considered uncontroversial. One of the characteristics of antisemites is that they believe they are privy to the reality of the world – that Jews are the key to everything that is wrong. So they think they are merely stating the obvious when they say that Zionists are evil or that a Jew should not oversee a programme about a massacre of Jews. Kon was a jewel in the BBC’s crown but was attacked by colleagues because she is a Jew. I have heard similar stories from other Jews who, for entirely understandable reasons, have decided to keep their head down, accept they work for an organisation in which open Jew hate flourishes, and get on with their job. But now that Lucie Kon has taken the courageous step of fighting the BBC’s institutional antisemitism, never again can it pretend the problem is not real – and raging.

Here's my @Spectator column, 'What’s really causing anti-Semitism in British schools' spectator.com/article/whats-… Sir David Bell’s report into anti-Semitism in schools (which will be published this afternoon but has been widely trailed) is an important document with a series of worthwhile recommendations. He finds that three in five Jewish students have experienced anti-Semitism – a statistic that should be profoundly shocking but is now entirely unsurprising – and that fewer than half think that there is any point reporting it, given that schools have consistently refused to take serious action when it is reported. In that context, Sir David’s recommendation that schools and colleges should be forced to recognise anti-Semitism as a specific category of harm – as opposed to the general requirement to tackle racism – and to take explicit action to tackle it is eminently sensible. But for all Sir David’s good intentions, his report suffers from the same fundamental flaw as almost all such official analyses of anti-Semitism: his terms of reference did not allow him to examine the causes of the Jew hate he found, only its extent. Which begs so many questions. None of those questions will even be asked by Lucy Powell, the Education Secretary, in her response to the report in the Commons this afternoon, let alone answered. She will doubtless make a big deal of the fact that Labour commissioned the report and will – as all politicians always do – tell MPs that anti-Semitism has no place in schools. It’s the line we always hear whenever there is a major incident – demonstrating in reality that the opposite is true and that there is a very large place for anti-Semitism in Britain today. Any analysis of the growth of anti-Semitism in the years since Israel began its military operation in Gaza in response to the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023 would have to include the words and actions of Labour ministers who have deliberately turned on Israel, in an attempt to appease the sectarian Muslim voters who started to desert Labour in the last general election. Ministers’ rhetoric – such as Ed Miliband speaking last month of Israeli war crimes and ethnic cleansing – has the effect of licensing Jew hate. The government cannot even bring itself to condemn the regular hate marches – sending the message that Jew hate on the streets is entirely legitimate. Add to that the obsession of so many Labour backbenchers with Israel and you have a recipe for the spread of anti-Semitism. Then there is the elephant in the room which few are willing to identify: that much of the problem in schools lies with Muslim children (see this report from Parents Against Anti-Semitism). All too often, this is swept under carpet in fear of accusations of Islamophobia.A typical incident was reported earlier this year, in which two Muslim girls approached a child and stated: ‘We will send our family to behead yours like Jews deserve.’ The incident was reported to the Metropolitan Police but their response was that the girls involved were considered exemplary students and no substantive action would be taken, except talking to them via Police Community Support Officers. Islamophobia and right-wing extremism are often seen as a more significant concern than anti-Semitism. When it comes to having a clear-sighted approach to the issues around anti-Semitism it is difficult to think of a worse possible education secretary than Lucy Powell. Infamously, she claimed that the Manchester Arena suicide bombing which killed 22 people had nothing to do with Islam. Asked on the BBC after the murders, ‘How serious is the problem of Islamist radicalisation in Manchester?’ she replied: ‘I’m not sure that this is the right moment to totally go into that, because I don’t even want to ascribe what has happened to the Islam faith.’ Powell also denied the evidence of links between the bomber, Islamist radicalism and certain mosques, telling the Manchester Evening News: ‘I’m particularly worried about that kind of narrative that somehow there’s areas or hotspots of Manchester that are hotbeds of radicalisation.’ She also, of course, described concern over the rape scandal as a right-wing ‘dog-whistle’. Sir David is to be commended for his report. It is not his fault that it was limited to the extent of school anti-Semitism rather than the causes. But we already know what will happen now, because it always happens. Instead of dealing with the facts of Jew hatred in Britain in 2016, the report’s findings will be attacked with reference to the Gaza war – as if Jewish children at school in Britain are soldiers in the IDF, which itself demonstrates the problem of anti-Semitism.