The BBC's anti-Semitic past

Thanks to a contributor to Biased-BBC, I have found a fascinating article from The Independent. It's from 1993. The article is entitled 'Why the BBC ignored the Holocaust: Anti-Semitism in the top ranks of broadcasting and Foreign Office staff led to the news being suppressed, says Stephen Ward' and contains a huge amount of interesting material. Here are a few extracts:

'ANTI-SEMITISM in the higher ranks of the Foreign Office and the BBC during the Second World War led to a policy which suppressed news about Germany's attempt to exterminate European Jews, new research will show this week. 

...

... both Foreign Office and BBC officials held a low opinion of Jews, and believed this was shared by the public.

They deduced that saving millions of Jews would not be seen as a desirable war aim by the British. At other times they justified suppression of details of the atrocities by arguing that they would not be believed.

News reports could only be carried if, in the view of the BBC and the Foreign Office, they were well-sourced. If the sources were Jewish, they tended not to be believed.

...

The BBC accepted unquestioningly the Ministry of Information's advice that anti-Semitism was rife in Britain, and felt it was not its role to do anything. On 17 November 1943 the director-general, Robert Foot, issued a policy directive . . . 'that we should not promote ourselves or accept any propaganda in the way of talks, discussion, features with the object of trying to correct the undoubted anti-Semitic feeling which is held very largely throughout the country'.

...

At the very end of the war, Richard Dimbleby made his historic broadcasts from the concentration camp at Belsen. In the light of the BBC's wartime policy, it comes as no surprise that these broadcasts mention only in passing the Jewish identity of victims, or that Belsen's gas chambers and the sheer numbers of its dead so shocked the BBC newsroom that they refused to use Dimbleby's reports until they had seen them confirmed in newspapers.'

Shocking isn't it, but does the BBC's current attitude towards Israel have its roots in this anti-Semitic outlook?

Another matter that strikes me, and it is something that I have remarked upon before, is that the BBC's favourite left-wing 'comedians' (including Jeremy Hardy and Mark Steel) love to remind people that the Daily Mail once supported Hitler and so its views are not worthy of respect now. Since we can read that the BBC once supported the minimising of the coverage of Nazi Germay's anti-Semitism and killing of Jews, can we apply the same stricture to the BBC? If not, why not?