Israel Matzav

The Beeb 'forgets' Israel's capital

You may recall that a couple of months ago the State Department had a little trouble deciding where Israel's capital is. The BBC has contracted the same form of dementia.

On perusing the BBC Sport website, The Commentator was disgusted to see the inherent anti-Israel bias shine through even when it comes to something as trivial as country profiles on their Olympics website.

Every other nation represented on the BBC website has a profile of the country which lists ‘Key Facts’. For instance, Djibouti’s top medal sport is athletics, its population is 879,100 and its capital is Djibouti. In case you were unsure, Iranians are good at wrestling, their capital is Tehran and there are just over 75 million people living there.

But if you’re interested in the state of Israel, you’ll have a hard time obtaining a certain bit of information from the BBC website. Sure, Israel shines at sailing and judo (no Mavi Marmara or IDF jokes, please) and it has a population of 7.3million. But we were interested to know where the BBC placed Israel’s capital.

It seems… nowhere.

Israel is the only country listed, correct at the time of writing, that has no capital according to the BBC. Yet they bestow the honour of having East Jerusalem as a capital on the country of ‘Palestine’.

The British establishment’s ongoing problem with the state of Israel manifests itself in many places. Most recently we have seen the Olympic committee reject a massively popular campaign for a one minute silence to commemorate the lives of murdered Israeli athletes. Now the BBC won’t even acknowledge Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel, let alone Jerusalem.

I wonder what the Balen Report says on this issue. Unfortunately, we're unlikely to ever find out. If I lived in Britain, I'd try to avoid paying my BBC tax.

Labels: BBC bias, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, London Olympics

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:23 PM