By inviting Ahmadienjad to deliver its alternative Christmas message Channel 4 has forfeited its right to be a public service broadcaster

Channel 4, the so-called public-service station that brings you Big Brother and other culturally uplifting events, has really scrapped the barrel. It has a record of bringing controversial alternatives to the screen to match the Queen’s annual Christmas message on the BBC and ITV but this year it has taken leave of its senses.
 
On the day Christians commemorate as the birth of their Saviour — a Jew called Jesus — Channel 4 has chosen to broadcast an “alternative” Christmas message from an anti-Semite who thinks Israel and the Jews should be swept into the sea and who sponsors conferences designed to “prove” the Holocaust is a Jewish myth.
 
Yes, though it beggars belief, Channel 4 asked Iran’s President Ahmadinejad to give this year’s alternative Christmas message. Sorry, this is not an early, bad taste April fool: a man who hates Jews, persecutes Christians in his own land and who denies the greatest crime against humanity ever happened has seven uninterrupted and unchallenged minutes on prime-time British network TV on Christmas Day to himself. Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad — then put them in charge of Channel 4. No doubt if Hitler was still around they’d have him broadcast a Happy Hanukah message.
 
Channel 4 prides itself on being an upmarket public-service broadcaster. It is financed by advertising but is wholly owned by the British government and pays nothing for the valuable broadcasting spectrum it uses (or pollutes). The metropolitan, secular, left-wing tossers who run it probably think it’s all a jolly jape — one in the eye for the Christians and the Jews on an important religious holiday.
 
Well here’s a way to take the smile off their faces: any advertiser worth his or her salt should immediately withdraw their advertising from Channel 4 and boycott the station — and it should be privatised forthwith. Ordinary shareholders would never put up with such an outrage.