The BBC has unveiled its compulsory training course for all staff on how not to be racist to Jews. I completed the online module and found it laughable, feeble and entirely beside the point.
This isn’t education. It’s parody. A cartoonish exercise in HR-driven pseudo-virtue, dressed up as moral instruction. I have written before that if one were writing a sitcom about the modern BBC, and wanted to script a scene satirising its institutional absurdities, one might invent a plotline in which a woke producer commissions a documentary about the children of Gaza and secretly casts the 13-year-old son of a Hamas minister as its narrator. As we know, that’s exactly what the BBC did. Its anti-Semitism module, recently unveiled by the BBC Academy, manages to go one better: a satirical training course, Once again not made in jest but in earnest. Never let it be said the BBC doesn’t produce good comedy any more, it does. But these days it does it through the news and HR departments.
The module is pitched at an intellectual level one might generously describe as sub-teenage. It feels less like a serious attempt to address anti-Semitism than a garishly illustrated PSA for a local primary school where no one has ever met or heard of this strange species: ‘the Jew’. Which might be forgivable if it weren’t compulsory training for every employee at Britain’s national broadcaster.
The visual tone is infantile: faceless vector cartoons, each character a sketchy, inclusive blob designed by DEI compliant groupthink. There are Jews and non-Jews in wheelchairs, Jews with purple hair, Jews with enormous stars of David slung around their necks like medallions. There is even one in an electric mobility scooter, in case the demographic was under-represented. Shtreimels? Of course. A man with a kippah on a television screen? Naturally. Each faceless character is given a slightly different skin colour. Diversity, as ever, must be signalled not with substance, but iconography.
The examples are even more infantilising. Consider this moment of BBC wisdom, presented as a quiz, complete with the block colour graphics and speech bubbles of a CBBC skit. Three colleagues, one black woman with dreadlocks, one olive-skinned woman with wavy brown hair, and one white man, are gathered at a watercooler. ‘Leo’ tells a colleague who is going on a safari trip: ‘Of course you can afford it – you’re Jewish.’ What follows is a multiple-choice question which asks the reader why Leo’s comment is inappropriate.
This is what the Orwellian BBC of 2025 believes is required to deprogramme its staff from racism. One imagines the board congratulating themselves on this progressive masterstroke, oblivious to the fact they are insulting both their Jewish employees and their non-Jewish ones, assuming the former are so delicate they need clipart protection, and the latter so stupid they need moral guidance at the level of children’s television on how to navigate basic human interactions.
The BBC parades this training module as evidence of institutional responsibility, yet it only exposes the depth of its institutional evasion
The training gives no meaningful account of what anti-Semitism might look like inside the actual, real-life BBC, where the three dimensional people have actual faces and deliberate agendas. Not the anti-Semitism that gets whispered in corridors or flung at watercoolers, but the sort embedded in editorial practice, in coverage norms, in the production culture itself. It does not address the deep institutional bias that so many have identified in the Corporation’s output. It does not explore how Jewish staff may feel unable to raise objections when they see slanted reporting on Israel, or how they may fear being branded reactionary, tribal or politically suspect for pointing out that repeatedly using journalists who have publicly declared that Jews ‘should burn like Hitler did’ is, in fact, a problem.
While the anti-Semitism module is already mandatory, the ‘Islamophobia’ module has mysteriously been delayed. One suspects this is not a logistical matter, but a presentational one: to avoid appearing as though the Jewish training were only introduced to balance a Muslim one, or vice versa (which is almost certainly the case).
In truth, the disparity reveals another institutional failure. The BBC module incorporates the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, grounding its approach in a widely accepted, internationally recognised standard. No such consensus exists for Islamophobia. Efforts to define it have repeatedly unravelled, not due to lack of concern, but because any serious attempt must grapple with a fundamental tension: whether to classify criticism of Islamic doctrine, history, or religious figures as a form of bigotry. To enshrine such criticism as hate speech would not merely chill debate, it would criminalise dissent. And unlike Judaism, whose sacred texts and patriarchs are routinely and openly interrogated, even by believers, Islam is often protected from scrutiny through fear of violent retribution. This, ultimately, is the impasse.
The BBC’s treatment of Zionism is similarly incoherent. One slide offers a definition taken, bizarrely, from Dictionary.com. But nowhere does the course clarify why common slogans like ‘Zionism is racism’ are deemed anti-Semitic. It makes no effort to engage with the actual religious and historical foundations of Jewish attachment to Zion: the daily prayers, the Psalms, the daily grace after meals, the lamentations of Tisha B’Av, the High Holy Day liturgy – centuries of devotion saturated with longing for Jerusalem and Zion, not as metaphor, but as sacred geography and spiritual, historical centre.
Instead, we are offered feel-good sentences like ‘you are seen, your identity matters, you belong here’. It’s as if the problem were a lack of woke affirmation, rather than an entrenched editorial hostility towards Jews and Israel that regularly violates the Corporation’s own declared standards.
The real scandal is not that the BBC made a training module to address anti-Semitism. It is that this is all they did. No overhaul of editorial guidelines. No meaningful accountability for repeated breaches of impartiality. No willingness to confront how anti-Semitism can be structural, systemic and broadcast live in high definition.
What this training entirely fails to address is the deeper climate within the Corporation which we on the outside can all see clearly; one in which Jewish or non-Jewish staff may hesitate to challenge biased coverage of Israel for fear of professional consequences. The real concern is not whether a colleague might make an offhand remark at the watercooler, but whether speaking up in an editorial meeting risks being marked as suspect, unfashionable, or worse, partisan.
When a Labour MP publicly cast suspicion on a BBC board member for his association with a Jewish newspaper, the implication was clear enough: ties to Jewish institutions could be seen as compromising impartiality. The accusation came from outside the Corporation, but it underscored the kind of atmosphere the BBC must be willing to resist. A public service broadcaster that claims to stand against discrimination should be alert to how such narratives take root – and ensure that its own staff, particularly Jewish staff, do not feel that speaking up about bias or prejudice carries a professional risk.
The BBC parades this training module as evidence of institutional responsibility, yet it only exposes the depth of its institutional evasion. A broadcaster willing to confront anti-Semitism would start with its own output. Instead, it offers a caricature of concern: sanitised, superficial and unserious.
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