The BBC has apologized for not mentioning Jews during a Radio 4 broadcast about Holocaust Memorial Day this week.
During the January 27 BBC Radio 4 morning show, the host said: “Buildings will be illuminated to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the six million people murdered by the Nazi regime.”
The same omission with identical wording occurred in multiple other broadcasts throughout the day including in BBC Breakfast and in the BBC News Channel.
The BBC has now published on its corrections page that there were “some instances where we said ‘six million people’ or ‘six million mostly Jewish people’ had been murdered by the Nazi regime. These were incorrectly worded for which we apologize. They should have referred to ‘six million Jewish people.’”
“Even on Holocaust Memorial Day, the BBC cannot bring itself to properly address antisemitism,” said Campaign Against Antisemitism. “It is no wonder that an overwhelming 92% of British Jews rate the BBC’s coverage of matters of Jewish interest as unfavorable. This is absolutely disgraceful broadcasting.”
Attempting to dilute the Holocaust
Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said “The Holocaust was the murder of six million Jewish men, women and children” and “any attempt to dilute the Holocaust, strip it of its Jewish specificity or compare it to contemporary events is unacceptable on any day.”
“On Holocaust Memorial Day, it is especially hurtful, disrespectful and wrong.”
Danny Cohen, a former BBC director of television, told The Telegraph that it was “a new low point for the national broadcaster.”
“It is surely the bare minimum to expect the BBC to correctly identify that it was six million Jews killed during the Holocaust,” he said. “To say anything else is an insult to their memory and plays into the hands of extremists who have desperately sought to rewrite the historical truth of history’s greatest crime.”
Earlier this month, the BBC was forced to apologize for failing to mention Jews during an episode in its series The Repair Shop, which discussed the Kindertransport.
The Repair Shop is a BBC show about craftspeople bringing family heirlooms back to life. In the episode, renowned British actress Dame Helen Mirren took her cello, damaged during the Kindertransport, for restoration.
While the episode extensively detailed the story of the cello and the Kindertransport (for approximately a quarter of its 60-minute running time), it entirely failed to mention Jews.
The BBC subsequently added the following correction to the iPlayer page of the episode: “This program is subject to a clarification. The Kindertransport was the organized evacuation of approximately 10,000 children, the majority of whom were Jewish, from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia.”