11pt”>No doubt the settler movement is peopled by some unpleasant people with racist views. However the prospect of Theroux – or anyone at the BBC – doing an equivalent hit piece on Hamas, with its proud boast that it aims to kill all the Jews in the name of Islam, is of course somewhere round zero – though Hamas is a far more significant force, and represents Arab Palestinian opinion, I would guess, to a much greater extent than the settlers represent Israeli opinion. The Beeb, meanwhile, continues to report all Hamas stories, and all Hamas statistics, as fact – to be prominently displayed as main news. So finding some nasty Jews to interview, as representative of Israel, fits the BBC agenda very nicely.
Jake Wallis Simons at the JC – To demonstrate ‘impartiality’, the BBC shows the worst Jews they can find.
Overall, it was impossible to form a proper opinion on the people we met due to the baked-in bias. Here was the world according to the BBC, in which Theroux’s every encounter happened to support the conclusions with which he had left Heathrow.
Right at the end, he dispenses with his trademark light touch and treats us to a bit of raw dogma. “The settler dream shows no sign of abating, along with the dislocation, devastation and death that follows inevitably in its train,” he says. So here is the takeaway: the Jews are to blame for the bloodshed, not the Arabs, who tried to murder them from the start. Which is what we were supposed to think all along.
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