The BBC was absolutely right about the unbalanced Gaza charity ad

The Corporation has performed admirably during the conflict, says Rod Liddle. It is to Mark Thompson’s credit that he did not cave in to pressure on all sides to air the charity appeal

Forgive me for turning into Dr Pangloss all of a sudden, but doesn’t the furore created over the BBC’s decision not to run the film begging for charitable donations for Gaza sort of justify its original decision, at least in part?

The most voluble protestors have been drawn, in the main, from the anti-Israeli far left. On the radio phone-in shows the many callers demanding the BBC reverse its decision almost always gave the game away by screeching, at some point, ‘Genocide!’ and ‘Zionist oppressors!’, sort of involuntarily, rather in the manner of Dr Strangelove. George Galloway, with whom I was privileged to ‘debate’ the issue (there is no debate, of course), asserted that the BBC had shown long-standing and extreme pro-Israeli bias. Is it even remotely possible to believe such a thing without being quite mad? I also failed to debate the issue with a magnificently sententious and totalitarian Tony Benn (he wouldn’t debate with a hapless Zionist twat like me), who resorted to telling the interviewer that he made him puke, simply for asking a few salient questions. To be sure, there have been representations from a few clerics and front-bench politicians — but the majority of those making the noise are those possessed of a certain view of Israel, a certain view of Palestine. One shared by the PLO or Hamas, for the most part.

Meanwhile, from the pro-Israeli right the decision has been defended, but only up to a point. Melanie Phillips said that it was right that the film shouldn’t be shown but that the BBC continued to spray out pro-Palestinian propaganda whenever it covered the whole issue. I suspect my colleague Mel won’t be happy with the BBC’s coverage until it’s presented by the Stern Gang, in fatigues, but there we are.

In other words, the issue is sufficiently divisive and partisan domestically for the BBC to be extremely wary about handing over its editorial control for five minutes to a bunch of charities (which are also, in the main, somewhat parti pris). It is not comparable (as some have insisted) to the issue of Darfur and even less so to natural disasters (such as the 2004 tsunami) about which the BBC has welcomed films from the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) before. That said, you might hope that as a consequence the BBC will think more rigorously before signing itself up to begging letters which carry with them a certain political disposition. Demanding we give aid to Africa because Bono’n’Bob think we should is a case in point; there is growing evidence that the aid is actually making things worse, quite apart from any other reservations one might have about fascistic smugfests like Live Aid.

But in short, the director-general of the BBC, Mark Thompson, was absolutely right to insist that the Middle East issue had a certain contentious quality about it, that there were sensitivities on either side, even without having seen the film. And once he’d seen the film he must surely have been convinced by its manipulative images, and the lack of context, background and balance. Its blithe assumption that the wrong is entirely on one side, an assumption which the film-makers assume the rest of us share — a little like Jon Snow saying, on air, as President Bush departed office: ‘The nightmare is over.’

Further, the corporation’s chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, is also right when he worries about the political pressure being brought to bear on the BBC, given the speed with which the smarmy Ben Bradshaw and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg weighed into the attack. But then the BBC is put under pressure of one kind or another every week these days — it is seen, rightly or wrongly, as ill equipped to defend itself against attacks from any quarter, about anything. Partly this is a consequence of the declining legitimacy of the licence fee, itself a consequence of a rapidly changing broadcasting market. It is extremely difficult for the BBC to make a moral and intellectual case for paying Jonathan Ross 18 million quid, or paying the hopeless Russell Brand anything at all. Or indeed involving itself at all in cretinous ratings-chasing downmarket light ent. It is here, rather than with the refusal to show the DEC’s film, that the BBC will one day be holed below the waterline. I suppose it is a strange and paradoxical organisation which is more vulnerable to the fallout from the Brand–Ross business than it is to the serious stuff of geopolitics. But that is where we are.

Is the BBC pro-Palestinian, as Melanie Phillips and many others assert? Or does it carry the flag of Zion, as George Galloway and a good few Muslim commentators seem to think? The first proposition is surely a shade closer to the truth — and it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if a sort of tacit recognition among BBC executives about previous displays of pro-Palestinian fervour (that silly cow of a correspondent crying her eyes out at Yasser Arafat’s funeral, for example) led to them being particularly circumspect about the DEC advert, knowing that the people who work for those charities are from a similarly liberal social, educational and economic background to many of its own producers.

As it happens, I think the BBC has been pretty close to scrupulous throughout the current crisis; it has been the only broadcaster to regularly display those fairly small holes made in largely deserted bits of Israel by Hamas’s utterly useless rockets, despite the lack of drama inherent in so doing. It has also been the only broadcaster to highlight the marked lack of enthusiasm for a second intifada among the predominantly Al-Fatah enclaves of the West Bank. Perhaps this is what George Galloway means by a pro-Israeli bias, attempting to show both sides of the story. To be sure, one or two BBC correspondents have a slight tone in their voice when they’re talking about Israel, a sort of cross between a growl and a precursor to vomiting — but it is hard to make the case, this time around, that it has been relentlessly one sided. Hell, they’ve even given the awful Hamas politicians a rough ride on occasion.

It is to the BBC’s great credit, then, that it has not caved in to its multifarious enemies on this particular occasion (you can always tell an enemy of the BBC by the way they start every sentence with the words: ‘I’ve been a great supporter of the BBC’). And this might be a salutary lesson to the charities, too, given that Sky found the film similarly unpalatable. Simply because they work for a charity does not mean that the rest of us have to share their world view.