BBC Accused Of Covering Up Palestinian Anti-Semitism
BBC New Broadcasting House, Manchester Image by Andrew Bowden/Creative Commons 2.0
(JTA) — The BBC is being accused of covering up Palestinian anti-Semitism after it mistranslated in subtitles the word for “Jew” to “Israeli” several times in one documentary.
The film “One Day in Gaza,” about last year’s Gaza border protests against the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, aired Monday night on the BBC Two channel.
Among the quotes that were mistranslated was one in an interview with Bader Saleh, 24, who said that during the protests, “The revolutionary songs, they excite you, they encourage you to rip a Jew’s head off.”
The BBC translated his word, Yahud, as Israeli. It was one of at least five times that the word was mistranslated as Israeli, critics charge, the UK Jewish News reported.
Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt criticized the translation.
“Yet another blatant example of the failure to take the scourge of antisemitism seriously,” she tweeted.
The North West Friends of Israel in the UK also tweeted its criticism.
“When Palestinians use the word ‘Yahud’ they mean ‘Jew.’ It does NOT mean ‘Israeli,’” the group wrote. “Why do you mistranslate ‘Yahud’? Are you scared of showing that Palestinians want to kill JEWS?!”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
