The BBC has been forced to apologize after at least four of its presenters used the phrase “six million people” to describe the victims remembered on Holocaust Memorial Day. The national broadcaster came under fire from the Jewish community on X and then in the wider press for not referring to the victims as Jews, erasing the specific nature of the Holocaust and universalizing Jewish suffering.
Unfortunately, however, this was not the only failure made by the BBC yesterday.
In an interview on Radio 4’s Today program, Nick Robinson made the inexplicable decision to question Dov Forman, the great-grandson of Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert MBE and an online Holocaust and antisemitism educator, on Gaza and how the war may cause people not to want to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
At the beginning of the segment Robinson acknowledged the shocking statistic that the number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has more than halved from over 2000 to just 854, according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Both of his guests, Dov Forman and Julia Kayes, the daughter of Holocaust Survivor Harry Olmer MBE, both obviously wanted to talk about Holocaust Education:
Forman: “The theme of Holocaust Memorial Day is bridging the generations, and it’s more important than ever, as you say, when the number of schools marking this has seemingly gone down, when clearly in the consciousness of the human mind, what led to the Holocaust, antisemitism, is being forgotten because we’re seeing that antisemitism resurgent in society again.”
Kayes: “(My father) was a particular advocate of going to schools and educating anywhere and everywhere in the country, and he’s been, he had been very involved over the last nine years with a project called Echo Eternal, which got to it, which got to children from all over the country, many of whom had never even met or seen a Jewish person before, to engage in the Holocaust through the medium of dance and music.”
But Robinson felt the important thing to do during the very short time slot allocated to these two guests was to give credence to the idea that Holocaust Memorial Day was a risk to community cohesion, and should only be talked about alongside Gaza:
Robinson: “The challenge is clearly the contemporary context. It is clear that there are schools cancelling this memorial because they fear exacerbating, the phrase that’s often used, community tensions. Speak, Dov, directly to people who might say, ‘Well, that was then, we don’t need to do it now, or if we do, we need to talk about Gaza, we need to talk to somewhere else.’ What is the universal message that you want to be heard on this Holocaust Memorial Day?”
The fact that schools in the UK are choosing not to commemorate the Holocaust because it is deemed controversial or inflammatory to do so, unless it can be reframed to include the war in Gaza, is an extremely worrying trend, and BBC journalists lending credibility to a position of Holocaust universalization is bad enough, but this question goes a step further. It suggests that the war in Gaza is a valid reason for people to stop memorializing the Holocaust: that Jews today no longer have a right to remember the unique, industrialized genocide from which their numbers still have not recovered because of the war in Gaza. Asking questions framed in this way is not neutral; it suggests that there is a valid argument to be made.
It is not the first time Nick Robinson has engaged in this kind of rhetoric. Just over a month ago Robinson appeared to reduce a Jewish man in London to tears when asking him if the attack on Bondi Beach was inevitable due to the war:
Robinson: “I want to ask you a difficult question. There’ll be some people looking in and they’ll go, look at what happened in Gaza and of course something was coming, what would you say to them?”
Paul: “We can’t be held accountable for Israel’s actions. We’re in the UK, we’re a community within the UK and we’re making sure that our community…” (at this point Paul trails off, apparently upset)
Robinson: “It’s tough isn’t it sir, this is tough, it’s emotional, can I wish you a happy Hannukah anyway?”
The idea that Jews are collectively responsible for the actions of Israel, or that Jews are ultimately responsible for bigotry that they experience, is not a position the BBC should be lending its considerable credibility to, on any day, let alone on Holocaust Memorial Day.
This post originally appeared at CAMERA UK.