I have no time for Radio Four’s dross

I switched the radio on in my car today and it went straight to the BBC World at One on Radio Four. I thought I’d tuned it to Radio Three but instead of a mellifluous tune I got Sarah Montague. I was on the bit of the A66 in Middlesbrough where it merges with the northbound A19 and it is a tricky interchange, with narrow lanes and huge growling lorries. I am mentioning all this as a means of explaining why I didn’t change channels straight away. I wanted to make sure I was on the Tees Viaduct and not headed to Teesport, you see. I needed to concentrate.

What I heard was an interview with a Palestinian bloke (described as a ‘playwright’) who lives in London but has family in Gaza. The point of the interview, according to Sarah, was: what is it like for the expat relatives of those Gazans, hearing about them being shelled all the time? So Sheikh Speare (I didn’t catch his real name) explained that it was awful or beyond awful. The word genocide was used a lot. At one point Mr Speare said he did not like being ‘genocided’. There was no meaningful challenge to what was, in the event, an emotional diatribe. Just a litany of despair. In context it might have been an interesting three minutes. But presented as it was, it just seemed like more anti-Israeli propaganda from the BBC. At the end Sarah said they had asked the IDF for a comment and they said they always tried to mitigate civilian casualties. But that’s not really balance, is it? A written statement from the IDF versus a screed of emoting from a self-described ‘victim’? Doesn’t quite do it for me. And yet this kind of thing happens quite regularly.