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BBC Show Asks “Is the Time Coming To Lay the Holocaust To Rest?”

by TheTower.org Staff |

To commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, a BBC show called The Big Question, which purports to deal with moral questions, asked on Sunday “Is the time coming to lay the Holocaust to rest?”

Some of the panelists rejected the question. The Times of Israel reports:

Rabbi Yaakov Wise countered that the Nazis didn’t just want to physically annihilate the Jews, but sought the “annihilation of Judaism as a religion, as a philosophy, as a civilization.”

Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner said it would be “obscene” to lay the Holocaust to rest.

But BBCWatch, a media monitoring website, noted that aside from the troubling nature of the question, the program lent itself to anti-Israel propaganda.

In fact, the provocative question posed in that promotion was not the “one big question” discussed in the edition of the programme broadcast on the same day as readers unable to access BBC iPlayer can see for themselves below. No less contentious than the wording of that tweet was the fact that the programme’s subject matter was allowed to be exploited for opportunistic promotion of political propaganda by Nira Yuval-Davis of the University of East London.

“And part of the problem that we see is that on the one hand we see how Israel is using – very cynically unfortunately – this very important memory of the Holocaust. […]

[…] the fact [is] that the prime minister of Israel, whenever there is a diplomatic visit, he’s taking people to Yad Vashem – the memorial museum – and in order to show them this [is] what happened to Jews in the Holocaust as a preventative measure for any critique of Israeli policies.”

To be clear, the people sitting on the front row are invited guests and like all panel members appearing on ‘The Big Questions’ they would have been ‘vetted’ by the production team before their appearance on live television. That means that Nicky Campbell and his team must have known full well that they had invited an anti-Zionist, BDS-supporting proponent of the notion of the establishment of Israel as a project of “settler-colonialism” to appear on the panel of the edition of their programme advertised as part of the BBC’s Holocaust Memorial Season.

Earlier this month, polls showed both a growth in anti-Semitism in Britain and a rise in concern among British Jewry. Last month, Danny Cohen, the director of the BBC, stated that he had “never felt so uncomfortable being a Jew in the UK as … in the last 12 months.”

[Photo: We Are All Africans / YouTube ]

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