More On the BBC, If You Can Stand It

Ah, the BBC. What would we do without that grand panjandrum of the air? The BBC reporters no longer are required to have the plummy voices that were de rigueur when Lord Reith ruled the roost before the Second World War. Estuary English is good enough these days. But if you are a BBC reporter in the Middle East, there is one sine-qua-non that you must possess: you must be prepared to spread the nonsense and half-lies and lies about Israel and its neighbors, so that the anti-Israel animus remains in all BBC broadcasts through thick and thin. Think only of John Simpson, Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet (the reporter now covering Syria), Barbara Plett Ussher, Yolande Knell. It’s a Murderer’s Row of malevolence. Just a little item from a recent report on Damascus has caused a deserved stir. More on this contretemps can be found here: “BBC sparks outrage over ‘diverse’ Syrian Jewish population claim,” Jerusalem Post, December 11, 2024:

A BBC report from Wednesday received backlash after their coverage said that Jews are living amongst a diverse population in Damascus, Syria.

The BBC reporter, while covering Damascus, said, “You can see it here in the old city, the different quarters, Jewish, Muslim, Christian they’re all here.”

“They want to believe they have a space now as Syria embarks on this new chapter.”…

An unwary viewer would assume that when the reporter, Lyse Doucet, says that “you can see it here in the old city, the different quarters, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, they’re all here,” she also means that the people who belong in those quarters — “Jews, Muslims, Christians” — would also be there. But as Orly Goldschmidt, spokeswoman for the Israeli Embassy to the UK, tartly wrote on X, “Except they’re not. In the 1940s, Syria’s Jewish community was 40,000 strong. Today just an estimated 3 remain. Good luck finding a Jew in Syria for an interview.”

In fact, the three Jews believed to still be alive in all of Syria are in their eighties. Or by now, when you read this, possibly two, or one, or none remain.

What Lyse Doucet ought to have said to her worldwide BBC audience was this:

“While the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian quarters still remain as names, there are only three Jews left in all of Syria. In 1947, there were 30,000 Jews in Syria. They began to leave Syria after the anti-Jewish riots in Aleppo that year, in which 75 Jews were murdered and hundreds wounded. Many more left after the state of Israel was created, which was followed by the exodus of 850,000 Jews from Arab lands. The numbers of Jews in Syria has steadily decreased, especially after outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence that followed after every Israeli battlefield victory, in 1957 (the Suez campaign), 1967 (the Six Day War), and 1973 (the Yom Kippur War).”

Or what about a BBC special, to compensate in small part for the network’s decades of misreporting about Israel, on “the disappearing Jews of the Arab world”? One of the episodes could be devoted to the Jews of Syria. Someone other than Lyse Doucet should host such a program.

Here’s how it might begin:

“The Syrian government has been persecuting the country’s Jews ever since the country’s independence from France (which ruled the area as the holder of one of the League of Nations’ mandates) in 1944. The new government prohibited Jewish immigration to Palestine and restricted teaching Hebrew and Jewish culture in Jewish schools, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.

“In 1947, Arab mobs in Aleppo killed seventy-five Jews, wounded several hundred, and destroyed over 200 homes, shops, and synagogues. Half of Aleppo’s Jews left right away for Israel. By the early 1950s, 95% of Syrian Jews had left. And now only three elderly Jews, in their 80s, are all that remain of what was before 1947 a Jewish community of some 30,000 Jews, living in Damascus, Qamishli, and Aleppo.”

As this is being said, we would be shown hots of the three Last Jews of Syria.

Part of this episode on the Jews of Syria should include the story of Alois Brunner, a Nazi war criminal who worked for Adolf Eichmann, fled to Syria in the early 1950s, and eventually was employed by the Assad regime, advising the Syrian secret police, or Mukhabarat, on torture techniques he no doubt had used with great efficacy himself when he was still an S.S. man in the Vaterland and the Nazis were riding high. Brunner lived to the quite intolerable age of 89 (some say he lived to the age of 98), in Damascus, the Syrians having for decades rebuffed all foreigners trying to locate him. Late in life, Brunner gave an interview to a German celebrity gossip magazine  In that interview, he said that he regretted nothing, and that “all of the Jews deserved their fate.” In 1987, he gave an interview to the Chicago Sun-Times in which he said: “All of [the Jews] deserved to die because they were the Devil’s agents and human garbage. I have no regrets and would do it again.” He was a perfect fit for the Assad regime.

Interesting, isn’t it, that there are also three Jews left in Egypt, who are also in the eighties. In 1945, there were 85,000. In Yemen, there is one Jew left. In 1945 there were 70,000. In Iraq, there are now three Jews. In 1945 there were 135,000. In Libya, there are no Jews left. In 1945, there were 40,000. In Morocco, there were 350,000 Jews in 1950. Today there are 2,000. Und so weiter.

So BBC, why not give your worldwide audience a series on “What Happened to the Jews of Arab Lands”? And given the current misleading coverage from Damascus by Lyse Doucet and Jeremy Bowen, please start with Syria. Feel free to use any of the material I’ve provided above. After all, it’s in the public domain.