The BBC apologized on Wednesday for failing on several occasions to mention the Jewish identity of Holocaust victims in its coverage of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27.
In its coverage, the BBC repeatedly referred to the Nazis’ 6 million Jewish victims as merely “people.”
The apology followed criticism over the word choice of the BBC, which has faced mounting rebuke for its perceived hostility to Israel and, occasionally, to Jews.
“Some instances where we said ‘6 million people’ or ‘6 million mostly Jewish people’ had been murdered by the Nazi regime. These were incorrectly worded, for which we apologize. They should have referred to ‘six million Jewish people,” a BBC spokesperson wrote in a statement on Wednesday.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a prominent watchdog group, characterized the omission as symptomatic of a broader issue with the BBC’s coverage of Jewish-related affairs.
“Even on Holocaust Memorial Day, the BBC cannot bring itself to properly address antisemitism,” a CAS spokesperson posted on X, adding that “It is no wonder that an overwhelming” majority of British Jews distrust the media company. “This is absolutely disgraceful broadcasting,” the tweet added.
Separately, a municipal executive in the city of Birmingham in the northern United Kingdom also apologized for failing to mention Jews in a statement about the Holocaust on the memorial day.
The municipality had advertised a memorial ceremony led by Mayor Zafar Iqbal, which it said “commemorates the victims and survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecutions, as well as other genocides around the world.”
A reference to Jews was added to the online statement about the event after the Jewish Telegraph, a local newspaper, drew attention to the omission.
“We acknowledge concerns that our recent communications did not explicitly reference Jews, who were the primary victims of the Holocaust, and apologise for any offence this may have caused,” Jamie Tennant, the city government’s alderman for social justice, community safety and equality, told the Jewish Telegraph.
Attempts to disconnect Judaism from the Holocaust were documented even before the genocide was over, as Soviet media tried to universalize Nazi atrocities to deny arguments in favor of Zionism or acknowledge the role of ethnic diversity among the people of the USSR.
In recent years, some teachers and Holocaust survivors in Western Europe have reported new difficulties in teaching about the Holocaust in schools with many students who are Muslims, many of whom espouse a more antisemitic worldview than the one reflected in polling among native Europeans.
‘Pattern of bias and multiple breaches’
The media giant has a history of biased anti-Israel reporting.
In November, the BBC effectively allowed its employees to participate in a national day of action for Gaza, where Israel was fighting Hamas. “By saying nothing, the BBC is effectively abandoning its pretense of impartiality, allowing its Jewish employees to feel intimidated, and continuing its descent into becoming a battleground for political ideologies,” HonestReporting, a media watchdog, said of the BBC‘s silence.
In September, a report found that the BBC had violated its own editorial guidelines 1,553 times during the four-month period beginning Oct. 7, 2023, repeatedly downplaying Hamas terrorism and presenting Israel as an aggressor.
“The findings reveal a deeply worrying pattern of bias and multiple breaches by the BBC of its own editorial guidelines on impartiality, fairness and establishing the truth,” the report said.
Some journalists used by the BBC to cover the current Israel-Hamas war previously showed sympathy for Hamas and even celebrated its terrorism, the report said.
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s international editor, excused Hamas’s terrorist acts, and Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, downplayed the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, it said.
The report singled out the public broadcaster’s BBC Arabic channel, calling it one of the most biased of all international media in its coverage of the Gaza war.
It noted 11 cases in which BBC Arabic featured reporters who had previously made public statements in support of terrorism and specifically Hamas, without letting viewers know.
In December 2021, the BBC reported that a group of men who were seen harassing a busload of Jewish teenagers on Oxford Street in London, celebrating Chanukah, had been provoked by an anti-Muslim slur. Independent reviews of the footage found no evidence that any such comment was made.
After Ofcom, the British government’s regulator for media, determined that the report involved “significant editorial failings,” the BBC said in a statement, “While Ofcom has found that our reporting was not in breach of the Broadcasting Code, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit ruled in January this year that more could have been done sooner to acknowledge the differing views” about what happened.
