Patrick Christys: The BBC is supposed to be for everyone, but it appears to be working more for some than others

The BBC accused a bus full of Jewish children of essentially inciting a racist attack against themselves.

We all remember the horrific antisemitic incident that took place in Oxford Street, London where a bunch of thugs banged on the windows of a bus full of kids who had been out celebrating Chanukah .

Well, the BBC claimed that ‘an anti-Muslim slur’ can be heard in the footage.

Well, I don’t know about you but I couldn’t hear any anti-Muslim slurs there.

I tell you what I can hear and see, a group of fully grown racists abusing a bus full of terrified young Jewish children as they tried to go home after celebrating one of the key religious dates in their calendar.

Why has the BBC tripped over itself to try to blame the Jewish kids for inciting the racism?

The Jewish community was so enraged at this that they’ve lawyered-up. They’ve launched a legal complaint.

The BBC responded by saying that unless the children on that bus are named, they will be unable to proceed with the legal complaint.

The BBC wants the child victims of an anti-semitic attack to be identified…after it accused them of using an anti-Muslim slur.

Forgive me, but I hardly think that’s the safest thing in the world.

There wasn’t an anti-Muslim slur, by the way, but let’s just say there was - does that justify that behaviour does it?

One person amongst this bunch of 12-year-old children dropped an anti-Muslim slur and, well, naturally, that completely justifies a group of adults swearing and spitting at them.

Unfortunately for the BBC, the audio has been forensically analysed.

What they thought was a racial slur, ‘dirty muslims’ to be precise, was actually, get this, the Hebrew words for ‘Call someone, it’s urgent’.

Professor Ghil’ad Zuckermann, Chair of Linguistics and Endangered Languages as the University of Adelaide in South Australia, a chap who is fluent in 13 languages, trawled through the footage and concluded: ‘“I was unable to detect any anti-Muslim slur in particular, at any point in the footage, either in English or in Hebrew.”

D3 Forensics, a firm that specialises in digital investigations, also stated: “D3 Forensics unequivocally confirms that the audio does not contain any racial slur.”

Professor Zuckermann did say something very interesting - what he suspects is behind the BBC’s insistence that an anti-Muslim slur can be heard is something called the “Apollonian tendency” — the wish to make order of unfamiliar information by applying ideas that are already in the brain of the person listening.

Now that might explain a lot.

The BBC trips over itself to protect certain communities. It appears that the corporation goes out of its way to ensure that nobody is offended, especially the Muslim community.

Just take, for example, the BBC’s online coverage of the Telford grooming gang scandal.

At the time, the UK’s largest and one of the longest-running grooming gang scandals - more than 1000 vulnerable young, working class, mostly white girls systematically raped, beaten and tortured by a group of men of South Asian heritage.

Well there wasn’t really any coverage.

For the first 24 hours after the story broke I was waiting for the story to drop. And then all of a sudden, there it was, as a second story on their local Shropshire page.

Not on the home page. I know this, because I actually personally called the BBC to ask why it appeared that they cared more about preserving the sensitivities of the British Muslim community instead of reporting that fact that thousands of girls had been systematically abused.

The BBC is supposed to be for everyone, it’s the public broadcaster, but it appears to be working more for some than others.

Again, could it be the perception that one form of racism is more acceptable than another?

As I’ve previously alluded to, the BBC sometimes thinks it’s doing a public duty by protecting us from ourselves, and, in my opinion, deliberately underreporting things like grooming gang scandals because it doesn’t want to incite racism.

It likes to brand itself as standing up for the marginalised in society, victims, in a way…

Well, around six million Jews died in the Holocaust and anti-semitic incidents in the UK have hit record levels.

Perhaps they could start by sticking up for that community.

Look, if the BBC devoted as much attention to investigating and exposing child grooming gangs as it did, essentially, in my opinion, trying to find an excuse for why a group of men of Arab origin spat at a load of Jewish kids, then maybe the license fee would be better value for money.