Finally, the BBC’s News at Ten is covering the scourge of anti-Semitism in the UK. What is it focussing on? Those orgies of Israelophobia on our streets every weekend at which moneyed leftists and mad Islamists noisily clamour for the destruction of the Jewish State? The gross new trend for ‘pro-Palestine’ protests outside synagogues? The cruel banning of Israeli Jews from a football match in Birmingham that we now know was built on a litany of ‘false claims’? Nope – it’s focussing on what a 13-year-old boy might or might not have said in a school playground 50 years ago.
Yes, the BBC has finally clocked that anti-Semitism is a problem, but only if it’s anti-Semitism that allegedly occurred in a posh school attended by one Nigel Farage five literal decades ago in 1977. Forget those schoolkids at the Jewish Free School in London who just two years ago were given permission to remove their blazers on their way to and from school in order to avoid the attention of lowlife anti-Semites. Never mind the 16-year-old Jewish schoolgirl in East London who was hospitalised after having a glass bottle lobbed at her last year. Don’t worry about that Jewish schoolboy who was beaten up and threatened with a knife in a savage ‘racially aggravated assault’ on the London Tube just six months ago. No, the only schoolkid the BBC seems interested in is one who is now 61 years old and who is accused of having said anti-Semitic things on the quad half a century ago.
The BBC’s giddy embrace of the ‘Farage racist school days’ story is one of the most cynical and hypocritical things the corporation has done of late. And that’s saying something. No sooner had the Guardian published its reports – so many reports – on Farage’s allegedly racist antics at Dulwich College than the Beeb was prepping a full-on follow-up splash on the News at Ten. Did Farage say anti-Semitic things at school, wondered a pained-looking presenter? We don’t know, but I tell you what we do know – as recently as 2024 the Beeb was using a reporter in the Middle East who once told Jews, ‘We shall burn you as Hitler did’.
Honestly, who do these people think they are? You’re going to rub shoulders with a Hamas-supporting neo-Nazi POS who dreams of setting fire to Jews and then come over all shocked in response to unproven allegations about a 13-year-old boy’s behaviour in the pre-Thatcher era? Some old classmates of Farage’s have accused him of saying horrible things. One, a Jewish man, recalls him saying ‘Hitler was right’ and ‘gas them’. That is a truly dreadful remark. But three quick points. We have no proof Farage said it. He was 13 years old at the time. And the BBC mingles with people in the here and now who say the exact same thing. ‘Shoot the Jews, it fixes everything’, that BBC stringer also said. Not in 1977 but in 2022.
Am I going mad? In what moral universe does it make sense for the BBC to lecture anyone about anti-Semitism, far less a boy from the hazy, long-dead 1970s? This is the public broadcaster that spread so many Hamas lies about the Jewish State that it was forced to correct an average of two Gaza stories every week over the past two years. This is the corporation accused by 208 of its own staff and contractors of having ‘systemic problems of anti-Semitism and bias’. This is the media giant that broadcast Bob Vylan’s Glasto chant of ‘Death, death to the IDF’, which has since become the favoured chant of every plummy fascist in a keffyeh. This is the same BBC on which that Arab journalist who praised Hitler appeared 244 times, and on which another hack who called Jews ‘devils’ appeared 522 times. And the BBC now thinks it can get on its soapbox about alleged bikeshed racism from the last millennium? Motes and beams come to mind.
It’s not just the BBC. The Guardian, too, hasn’t got a leg to stand on when it comes to anti-Semitism. To be accused of Jew hatred by the Guardian is like being called fat by Giant Haystacks. This is the paper where two cartoonists have been reprimanded for anti-Semitism. One – Steve Bell – was sacked after depicting Benjamin Netanyahu seemingly cutting a Gaza-shaped ‘pound of flesh’ from his own stomach. That was in October 2023. The ‘pound of flesh’ trope in the 21st century! The other cartoonist – Martin Rowson – got a rap on the knuckles after depicting Richard Sharp, the Jewish former chairman of the BBC, with grossly exaggerated facial features, a box full of gold coins and a puppet of then PM Rishi Sunak. Jews love money and control politics, yeh? This cartoon ‘falls squarely in [the] anti-Semitic tradition’, said one Jewish group. When was this? Not 1977 – it was 2023.
It is my firm belief that the BBC and the Guardian, with their BS claims about the world’s only Jewish nation and their turning of a blind eye to Jew hatred in the here and now, have helped to stir up the crisis of anti-Semitism we are living through. That they now think they can imperiously lament the alleged making of anti-Semitic comments in a playground 50 years ago is extraordinary. It is a testament to how blinded they are by their own depthless moral vanity. So convinced are they of their own ethical perfection that they think they can bait Jews one day and then cry over the alleged baiting of Jews by a child in the 1970s. I’m here to tell them they can’t do that. I’m here to remind everyone that the BBC associates with people who say ‘gas them’ today.
The insanity of the Farage scandal was brought home by the intervention of Owen Jones. Britain’s chief pipsqueak loather of Israel made one of his wild-eyed YouTube vids about how Farage has been ‘OVERWHELMED’ by this scandal (his caps). Is this the same Owen Jones who spent his young adulthood feverishly editing Wikipedia entries about Israel, at one point writing that ‘the notion of Jewish ethnicity is a lie’? What a vile comment. Jones later retracted it, saying it was ‘entirely ill-informed’. He was 19 years old at the time. He called the people who later dredged it up ‘obsessive’ and ‘angry’. Okay. So what do you call people poring over what a 13-year-old boy allegedly said 50 years ago? And we don’t even have proof for Farage’s comments, unlike with Jones’s sick denial of Jewish ethnicity which he made not when he was at school but when he was at Oxford University.
Rarely have we had such a crystal-clear view of the cant and self-regard of the bourgeois media. Britain has been rocked by a surge in anti-Semitism these past two years. Schoolkids have been attacked, synagogues besieged. Mobs of the influential possessed by a curious hatred for the only Jewish nation have traipsed through the streets calling Jews ‘Nazis’. In such circumstances, to focus on things allegedly said at Dulwich College in the 1970s is not only ridiculous – it is a ruthless, unforgivable distraction from the truth of Jew hatred in modern Britain. The reason the Guardian and the BBC are finally talking about anti-Semitism is not because they care for Jews but because they fear the working classes and the possibility they’ll vote for Reform UK. It’s not the death of racial hatred they seek – it’s the death of populism.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.
