Global Research

A BBC reporter hit the free speech trip-wire this week, after making a comment which the Jewish lobby said was offensive and also “Anti-semitic”, before being forced to make a public apology – or lose his job as a BBC front-line reporter.

There were calls from certain corners, particularly in the US and Israel, after the BBC’s Tim Wilcox (photo, left) told the daughter of a Holocaust survivor during a live broadcast conversational exchange at Sunday’s massive “Anti-Terror” Charlie Hebdo rally in Paris:

“Many critics though of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well”.

So apparently, for any broadcaster to suggest that it’s possible that, ‘Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands’, could cost your job working in the mainstream media. His accuser’s full name was not given to the media, only that she is known as “Chava”, an Israeli national who says that she is the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors.

Critics immediately lashed-out at Wilcox and the BBC, claiming that in no way can 65 years of suffering endured by the Palestinian people, or this past summer’s slaughter of 2,200 civilians in Gaza by Israel’s IDF army – be mentioned in the same sentence (even indirectly, as Wilcox did), or even casually equated with the suffering of Jews in Europe with the Holocaust, under the German Nazi regime.

Afterwards, Wilcox lamented that he his comment was “poorly phrased”, and that, “it was entirely unintentional” (which is fairly obvious). The context in which it was said, was not out of the ordinary, as Wilcox was conducting a cross-conversation between himself, the woman of Jewish and of Israeli birth, and a French-Algerian man, “discussing a wide range of issues affecting both the Muslim and Jewish communities in France”, said the Express Newspaper.

The irony that this took place during a supposed “free speech” demonstration – is enough to leave any critical thinker speechless (literally).

In America, MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ host Joe Scarborough (above) attacked Wilcox, demanding he be fired for his remarks, and then went on to lambast the rest of “left-leaning media” for what Scarborough believed was a conspiracy to ‘hide antisemitism’ because “it doesn’t fit their political agenda.”

“I cannot believe the BBC is going to allow this man to stay on the BBC,” he said on his show, Morning Joe on air Tuesday, before ranting,“The fact that the BBC has a correspondent as insensitive and cold to the realities… this did not happen 300 years ago. This happened 60, 65 years ago, while Europe sat by and did nothing. They let six million Jews be exterminated.”

“This is why Israel exists and people need to get a hell of a lot more sensitive to it, even if they are left-leaning media members.”

An online petition was set-up to force Wilcox to apologize, resign or be fired, but it had only attracted a few hundred signatures. The petition demanded that BBC’s Willcox ‘personally apologise’, demanding ‘re-assurance that this constant anti-Semitic behaviour from the BBC will come to an end’.

Back in November, Wilcox had another scrape with the Jewish Lobby and media monitors, incredibly, for comments he hadn’t made on air, as well as comment he made which Jewish Lobby protesters construed as being ‘Antisemitic’.

Although Wilcox survived a second round of pressure from the lobby, his career appears to be very much in jeopardy.