What’s the problem with BBC Arabic?

It’s easy to forget that your BBC licence fee does not only fund content that you and your family consumes. In addition to the output aimed at domestic audiences, your annual payment of £157.50 funds a host of foreign language services aimed at projecting British impartiality and soft power overseas. The largest of these is BBC Arabic. Launched as a radio station in 1938, it was the first of the BBC’s non-English experiments, and the most successful. Today encompassing television, radio and online, the channel reaches more than 40 million people every week.

That’s both an influential audience and a shedload of British money. So it should come as a cause for concern – if not necessarily surprise – that a Jewish Chronicle investigation has uncovered evidence of shameful and systematic bias at the channel.

The idea for the investigation came after a conversation with an Australian-born Israeli called Arnold Roth, 69, whose teenage daughter Malki was one of 15 people killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber in 2001.