Est-ce qu'il ya encore de doute?...
Oui, chez les esprits qui ont une « intelligence moyenne »...
The BBC has been up to its old tricks – again
I do a fair number of interviews these days – television, radio, podcasts, panels, my own interview series – across several countries and formats, mostly on subjects I also write about here or elsewhere. Back when old-fashioned media was king, more of that work was traditional broadcast, and the BBC was the king of kings. They used to call on me semi-regularly, usually to talk about Israel or about Jews. Then, almost exactly on 7 October 2023, it stopped. The very topics they had liked me for became the biggest international story in a generation, and the phone went quiet. No explanation was offered and none is owed. It is entirely their prerogative.
So when a BBC producer does ring these days, I take the call with a certain curiosity, partly because it has become a rare event, and partly because of how the last few have gone. Our national broadcaster seems to possess an inbuilt tendency to do the dirty on me. I am far too reasonable to call it a conspiracy, so I assume it is groupthink, or ideological monoculture, or simply something in the water at Portland Place and Salford. Whatever it is, it is administered with a haughtiness rather unearned by an organisation of such steadily dwindling importance in the information business.
The latest instalment arrived at the weekend. I had never been on Radio 4’s Sunday before, so I was glad to hear the programme had been reading this magazine and was taken with my piece on Britain’s multi-faith prayer rooms. Perfect for the show, the producer said. We spoke at length about what the discussion might cover: the collapse of Christian observance, the confidence of Muslim prayer, the plasterboard architecture of the anonymous little room. He then asked for a second long conversation because he hadn’t recorded it for his notes, and I went through the whole thing again. This was perhaps five times the preparation any other outlet asks of a casual guest, in the service of a slot billed at five or six minutes long. It seemed excessive. But the subject matters, and I wanted the discussion to be good, so I obliged, and set my alarm for earlier than I might on a normal Sunday.
What neither of those long, thorough, note-taking conversations found room to mention was that the programme had already been to the Muslim Council of Britain for a statement about me. I discovered this live on air, at about half past seven on a Sunday morning, when the presenter read it out. My column, it turned out, was “a wild distortion” and bore “all the hallmarks of intellectual rage baiting”: “taking an unremarkable issue, dressing it up as yet another example of a Muslim takeover and letting outrage do the rest.” I was also told, twice, that I “want to relabel them” – taking a rhetorical observation I made about the honesty of the sign on the door and promoting it to some sort of campaign so that somebody could be found to denounce it. It rather missed the point of the whole conversation.
It’s not like the Muslim Council of Britain is some neutral registry of British Muslim opinion, either. No government of either party has formally engaged with it for the best part of two decades, since its then deputy secretary-general signed the Istanbul Declaration in 2009, which the government took to endorse attacks on Royal Navy ships that tried to stop weapons reaching Hamas.
As Andrew Gilligan set out in these pages in June, it opposed the government’s ban on al-Qaeda – before 9/11, but after al-Qaeda had already committed three mass-casualty attacks – on the grounds that armed struggle was a way for some people to “claim their rights”; it later opposed the ban on al-Muhajiroun, whose leader Anjem Choudary, since denounced by the MCB, is now serving life for directing a terrorist organisation; and its current secretary-general wrote in 2022 that British Muslims should raise their children primarily as Muslim rather than as British. It also boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day between 2001 and 2007. That is the tribunal before which the BBC chose to arraign my piece about prayer rooms, without thinking to mention it to me in either of those long conversations.
There is by now a small archive of this sort of thing. Even back in the Covid era, the BBC’s Dateline London had me on to discuss vaccines, but couldn’t help making the programme about those ghastly Israelis betraying the Oslo Accords by shirking their responsibility for vaccinating Palestinians. I corrected them: Palestinian healthcare is explicitly the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority, whose own health ministry was at that moment applying to the WHO. No apology or admission of error, though, until some random viewer complained and then the BBC was forced to concede the point in writing (not on air, of course, and not to anybody who had actually heard the false version).
Then there was the World at One, after I wrote here about Nick Timothy’s remarks on Muslim prayer in Trafalgar Square. I was booked opposite a guest who announced that “Jonathan is one of those exact same types of people who are there using propaganda, using words, etc. to justify their own selves”, and who then demanded to know “the last time a non-Muslim country bombed a Muslim country” before setting off through the Iraq war. At which point my microphone was closed and never reopened, denying me any hope of answering the slur. I tried to interrupt but realised nobody else could hear me, least of all the listener (if there was one).
The same manoeuvre was performed on BBC Radio Berkshire, which invited me on after two Jewish men were stabbed in Golders Green and seemed genuinely startled when I mentioned the record on Jews of the BBC itself, of the far left and of the Green party. Off went the mic; on came a slightly apologetic homily about how proud they were to host a range of views (even unmentionable ones like mine).
Years ago they played a bit of b-roll under an interview I did on the BBC news channel, of a Palestinian casualty being carried off from a targeted Israeli air strike on a terrorist leader’s car in Gaza. In the next shots, the same guy appeared miraculously healed as he walked around unaided, scratching his balls. The clip went viral as an example of ‘Pallywood’ footage supposedly unintentionally used by the mainstream to project a specific agenda.
Which brings me back to where I started. The point of the prayer-room column was that the room tells the truth even when the sign on the door does not: shove the furniture against the walls and you can still see who knelt where. Broadcasting is no different. The invitation is charming, the pre-interview exhaustive, the tone impeccably neutral – and then the running order, the b-roll footage, the mic faders, all tell you precisely what the programme thinks it is for. Hours of preparation, six minutes of airtime, one hostile statement about me solicited in advance from an organisation the British state will not speak to, and nobody thought to mention it or even drop it altogether.
I’m not asking for pity – it’s water off a duck’s back. These things happen in interviews. It’s just they always seem to happen on the BBC.
