The British Broadcasting Corporation, better known as the BBC, has come under fire after a televised panel conversation in which participants debated whether Jews could be considered an ethnic minority.
The debate on BBC 2’s Politics Live came after Scottish Labour party deputy leader Angela Rayner errantly tweeted in late-February that her party’s new leader was “the first ethnic minority leader of a political party leader anywhere in the UK,” leading to protests from some in the UK’s Jewish community that this phrasing erased their history of leading British political parties.
PinkNews CEO Benjamin Cohen responded on Twitter: “I guess Jews don’t count Angela? You were first elected in a general election fought by a Jewish Labour leader”, making reference to former Labour leader Ed Miliband.
It should have been an easy story to report upon; a clearly false, albeit inadvertent, statement by a leading politician that erased Jewish leaders from public view.
Instead, a BBC debate descended into farce as panelists were asked by BBC presenter Jo Coburn (herself a Jew) whether Jews should be defined as an ethnic minority. As the participants spoke, a banner stretched across the bottom of the screen read: “Should Jews Count As An Ethnic Minority?”
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PinkNews CEO Benjamin Cohen expressed his anger after the show, tweeting:
I’ve just been on the BBC’s Politics Live where the BBC literally just asked four non-Jews if they agreed with me that Jews are an ethnic minority. Imagine if I was Black and four white people were asked to judge if I was a member of an ethnic minority. It would be as offensive.”
The four panelists, all non-Jews, each offered their views on a range of subjects. Just before the end of the show, Cohen was brought on air to comment as a guest, after he had earlier objected to the problematic tweet by Rayner.
Instead of framing the conversation as “Why don’t Jews count?”, the BBC instead compelled the panelists to debate whether Jews really do constitute an ethnic minority, with Coburn suggesting that perhaps Jews don’t deserve “recognition in the same way as others,” as they have successfully integrated into British society and politics.
Cohen explained that “It’s not the case that Jews have reached such high positions in society they don’t face discrimination.”
He added that Jews “face antisemitism and racism very clearly. We’ve just seen that with the many years of racism and antisemitism within the Labour party.”
“So to suggest that Jews don’t face racism, and therefore we’ve reached such a high office that we’re not an ethnic minority is frankly ridiculous. Frankly, the notion of this debate is ridiculous,” he said.
To their credit, none of the panelists belittled the issue or dodged the issue, uniformly criticizing Rayner for her ill-advised tweet. That the panelists could do so, but the BBC couldn’t grasp how to properly frame the conversation, made for a striking juxtaposition.
Labour’s Jewish Problem
With the British Jewish community still smarting after years of attacks from the Corbyn-led Labour party and the attendant, repeated defenses of clearly antisemitic statements from public figures and lower-ranking officials in the Labour party, Rayner’s tweet immediately sparked a backlash from Jews upset at being sidelined once more.
In 2020, a former senior adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, Andrew Murray, pointed to the fact that Jews are “prosperous” as the reason why the former Labour leader had failed to empathize with the British Jewish community.
Indeed, as one of the participants in the debate, Lord Stewart Wood, said: “Precision is really important. If you’re speaking from a Labour standpoint, you have to realise that trust with the Jewish community has been broken over the past few years, and you have to speak with precision and sensitivity.”
BBC’s Inability to Simply Stand Against Antisemitism
With yet another senior Labour figure speaking out in a way that sidelines Jews, the BBC had ample opportunity to cover the statement and demonstrate why it is unacceptable and damaging to Labour’s already-fractured relationship with the local Jewish community.
Instead, the debate was framed in such a way that it legitimized Rayner’s statement. In posing the question of whether Jews qualify for ethnic minority status to the panelists, Coburn enabled the continued undermining of Jews by those who seek to position them as “insiders” who are unaffected by racism and discrimination by virtue of their success.
Indeed, a common antisemitic trope that Jews face is that Jews no longer count as an ‘oppressed minority’ due to their riches and social success. This trope ignores the very fact that Jews are vilified for their successful status, with claims sometimes attributing wild, unrestricted power to Jewish elites in total disproportion to their size relative to the general population.
No other ethnic minority faces such absurd, baseless claims, and no other ethnic group has to contend with the submission that its political success or social integration is reason for no longer being deserving of recognition as an ethnic minority. Jews alone face this double standard.
By having a panel of four non-Jews discuss whether they agreed with a Jew that Jews are indeed an ethnic minority, the BBC’s coverage of the incident served to further undermine the status of the Jewish community as one that deserves a degree of protection.
#UK Jews condemn @BBCPolitics after a panel of mostly non-Jews debates whether Jews are an ethnic minority:
'The fact that non-Jewish people are being asked to weigh in on this is the height of hypocrisy and an insult to the Jewish community,' @Algemeiner's Dovid @Efune says. pic.twitter.com/T48VTUO2AJ
— i24NEWS English (@i24NEWS_EN) March 3, 2021
For the record, an ethnic minority is defined thus by the following dictionaries:
people who belong to an ethnic group that is a relatively small part of a population”
(Merriam-Webster)
a group of people from a particular culture or of a particular race living in a country where the main group is of a different culture or race”
a group of people who differ in race or color or in national, religious, or cultural origin from the dominant group — often the majority population — of the country in which they live.”
Note that success, political influence, and wealth have nothing to do with any of these descriptions. Any group of a different culture, race, nationality or religion that is surrounded by a greater number of people of a different culture, race, nationality or religion, is defined as an ethnic minority. While it is true that many Jews have achieved great success in British society and indeed in politics, it nevertheless remains true that Jews are an ethnic minority, comprising roughly 0.5% of the country’s population.
That Jews should have to repeatedly face questions over a range of issues, from their support of Israel to their ability to grasp local humor, is tiring enough as it is. To then have their very obvious status as an ethnic minority challenged contributes even further to the insecurity of the British Jewish community.
