Calling a terrorist a terrorist

Last night, after a suspected Islamist fanatic gunned down two Swedish football fans in Brussels to ‘avenge Muslims’, the BBC ran a headline calling it a ‘terror’ attack. This should seem entirely unremarkable. After all, it was a terror attack, so the language had the benefit of being accurate. The problem, of course, is that the corporation has a policy of refusing to describe the butchers of Hamas in the same terms. 

It is true that the BBC amended the headline pretty quickly after realising its error. The broadcaster has insisted in its guidelines that its journalists should use descriptive terms like ‘bomber’, ‘attacker’, ‘gunman’, ‘kidnapper’, ‘insurgent’ and ‘militant’ by default. As John Simpson argued last week, ‘it’s simply not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn – who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.’ But the Swedish affair was far from the only time the BBC has departed from this standard. When the corporation stumbles, it seems, it always falls in the same direction.

Islamic State, Al Qaeda, the IRA: all have been branded the T-word by our national broadcaster in recent years. The only time it has upheld its guidelines impeccably is when the Jews are the victims. These inconsistencies make it seem as though the BBC believes those who murder Jewish babies and rape and mutilate Jewish young women may have a point.

That is the problem: the air of legitimacy. Over the years, Jews have looked on open-mouthed while people on the left have cosied up to Hamas, as if it was some kind of Che Guevara outfit. Jeremy Corbyn famously called its leaders his ‘friends’ and argued that blacklisting it as a terror group was ‘a really big, big historical mistake’. Yet even after the latest massacres, the former Labour leader has declined to condemn the terror group. He is not alone. In recent days, we have seen tens of thousands marching on the streets of Britain, either in sympathy with, or at least in a spirit of equivocation towards, the jihadis. When the BBC refuses to call a terrorist a terrorist, it emboldens Hamas’s useful idiots. 

This may seem a petty matter in comparison with the butchery in Israel itself but the struggle over terminology has been an ugly dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute for years. The nomenclature of the conflict in general, and the language of human rights and international law in particular, has been persistently weaponised by those seeking to undermine the Jewish state, with essential security measures being routinely undermined as examples of ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘oppression’, ‘occupation’ and ‘apartheid’. I’m not saying this includes the BBC. But a small number of malicious jihadi supporters and activists have inspired many on the well-meaning left to join what has become a fashionable societal trend.

We have seen this clearly in recent days. The reason the border with Gaza has been ‘sealed’ for almost two decades has never been clearer. We have seen the gruesome scenes when it is breached. Yet the notion that the Israelis are somehow immoral in keeping the frontier closed, that defending their civilians constitutes the creation of an ‘open-air prison’, has become commonplace.

Even the UN’s special rapporteur has made this florid point. It is remarkable how few people have put two and two together. What do you want Israel to do? Open the border and accept regular massacres so that it doesn’t incur the criticism of the social justice movement? As Golda Meir said, ‘If we have to choose between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.’

A similar story plays out regarding the partition barrier on the West Bank. It has been repeatedly cited as an example of ‘apartheid’, including by the formerly respected NGO Amnesty International. What is the alternative? Before it was constructed, suicide bombs were almost a weekly occurrence, claiming hundreds of Israeli lives in cafés, on buses and in hotels. Once it was completed, the suicide bombs stopped. Nobody likes the barrier, but Israelis tend to like being blown to pieces rather less. I would wager that most Britons would feel the same way. 

In a subtler version of this phenomenon, sometimes a term is retained but its meaning is hijacked. Take the word ‘Zionism’. One of the great achievements of the anti-Israel movement has been to hollow out the word ‘Zionism’ and fill it instead with connotations of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘colonialism’. Jewdas, the hard-left group with which Jeremy Corbyn famously celebrated Passover in 2018, smears ‘Zionism’ as a ‘bankrupt ideology that exists by pillaging everything in Jewish life for the service of a settler colony’. (By the way, Jewdas has also called Israel a ‘steaming pile of sewage which must be properly disposed of’.) 

Let me correct this. ‘Zionism’ refers simply to the Jewish desire for self-determination in their homeland, after centuries of persecution in the diaspora. It was one expression of the nationalism that arose as the empires of the Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, Russians and eventually the western powers gave way to new nation-states from the end of the first world war. The Jewish nation state arose as one among many after the carve-up by the great powers, including Lebanon and Syria, India and Pakistan, Iraq and Ireland.

At least 34 territories were put forward as possible sanctuaries for the Jewish people, including Uganda, parts of South America, Angola, Libya, Iraq, Madagascar and Alaska. Efforts were even made to convert some of them into reality. In a move to capture Jewish national instincts within the Soviet project, Stalin tried to establish a Jewish ‘homeland’ in two different locations, Birobidzhan and Crimea. Both fizzled out, proving that it was not possible to fabricate a true sense of belonging.

In short, to align ‘Zionism’ with racism and white supremacy – despite the fact that more Israelis are non-white than white, including its two million Arab citizens – is an attempt to rewrite history to deprive Jews of their self-determination.

Which brings us back to the BBC. I have worked for the corporation in the past and I am certain that not a single journalist there goes to work intending to break the rules of impartiality. The problem is that it lacks diversity, not of race but of worldview. When you combine this with leftist theorising that is all too easily inhabited by jihadis, it leads to the shameful spectacle of our national broadcaster joining the ranks of the useful idiots.

‘Israelophobia: The newest version of the oldest hatred’, by Jake Wallis Simons (Constable, £12.99), is out now.