Its radio service alone attracts over 163 million listeners. It pours forth its worldview in almost every language of the Middle East: Pashto, Persian, Arabic and Turkish.
It is not just that the supposed crimes of Israel are completely overplayed, but the fact that this is a two-sided war (started, of course, by Hizbullah) is all but obscured. As a result, in spite of hundreds of hours of broadcast by dozens of BBC reporters and studio anchors, you wouldn't really know that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been living in bomb shelters for weeks now, tired, afraid, but resilient; that a grandmother and her seven-year old grandson were killed by a Katyusha during a Sabbath dinner; that several other Israeli children have died.
You wouldn't have any real understanding of what it is like to have over 2000 Iranian and Syrian rockets rain down indiscriminately on towns, villages and farms across one third of your country, aimed at killing civilians.
You wouldn't really appreciate that Hizbullah, far from being some rag-tag militia, is in effect a division in the Iranian revolutionary guards, with relatively advanced weapons (UAVs that have flown over northern Israel, extended-range artillery rockets, anti-ship cruise missiles), and that it has a global terror reach, having already killed 114 people in Argentina.
The BBC and others have carried report after report on the damaged Lebanese tourist industry, but none on the damaged Israeli one, even though at least one hotel in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, was hit by a Hizbullah rocket. There are reports on Lebanese children who don't know where they will be going to school, but none on Israeli ones.
The relentless broadcast attacks on Israel have led to some in the print media indulging in explicit anti-Semitism.
Many have grown accustomed to left-wing papers like the Guardian allowing their Mideast coverage to spill over into something akin to anti-Semitism. For example, last month a cartoon by the Guardian's Martin Rowson depicted Stars of David being used as knuckle dusters on a bloody fist.
Now the Conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph, Britain's best-selling quality daily, and previously one of the only papers in Europe to give Israel a fair hearing, has got in on the act. The cartoon at the top of the Telegraph comment page last Saturday showed two identical scenes of devastation, exactly the same in every detail. One was labeled: "Warsaw 1943"; the other: "Tyre, 2006."
A politician had already given the cue for this horrendous libel. Conservative MP Sir Peter Tapsell told the House of Commons that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was "colluding" with US President George Bush in giving Israel the okay to wage a war crime "gravely reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter of Warsaw."
THE PICTURE isn't entirely bleak. Some British and European politicians, on both left and right, have been supportive of Israel. So have some magazines, such as the Spectator. So have a number of individual newspaper commentators.
But meanwhile anti-Semitic coverage and cartoons are spreading across the globe. Norway's third largest paper, the Oslo daily Dagbladet, ran a cartoon comparing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to the infamous Nazi commander SS Major Amon Goeth who indiscriminately murdered Jews by firing at them from his balcony and was depicted by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List. (A month earlier Dagbladet published an article, "The Third Tower," which questioned whether Muslims were really responsible for the September 11 attacks.)
Antonio Neri Licon of Mexico's El Economista drew what appeared to be a Nazi soldier with stars of David on his uniform. The "soldier" was surrounded by eyes that he had apparently gouged out.
A cartoon in the South African Sunday Times depicted Ehud Olmert with a butchers knife covered in blood. In the leading Australian daily The Age, a cartoon showed a wine glass full of blood being drunk in a scene reminiscent of a medieval blood libel. In New Zealand, veteran cartoonist Tom Stott came up with a drawing which equated Israel with al-Qaida.
At least one leading European politician has also vented his prejudice through visual symbolism. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero wore an Arab scarf during an event at which he condemned Israel, but not Hizbullah, who he presumably thinks should not be stopped from killing Israelis.
It's entirely predictable that all this violent media distortion should lead to Jews being attacked and even murdered, as happened at a Seattle Jewish center last week.
When live Jews can't be found, dead ones are targeted. In Belgium last week, the urn that contained ashes from Auschwitz was desecrated at the Brussels memorial to the 25,411 Belgian Jews deported to Nazi death camps. It was smashed and excrement smeared over it. The silence from Belgian leaders following this desecration was deafening.
Others Jews continued to be killed in Israel itself without it being mentioned in the media abroad. Last Thursday, for example, 60-year-old Dr. Daniel Ya'akovi was murdered by the Aqsa Martyrs‚ Brigade, the terrorist group within Fatah that Yasser Arafat set up five years ago using European Union aid money. But this is far from being an exclusively Jewish issue. Some international journalists seem to find it amusing or exciting to bait the Jews. They don't understand yet that Hizbullah is part of a worldwide radical Islamist movement that has plans, and not pleasant ones, for all those - Muslim, Christian, Hindu and Jew - who don't abide by its wishes.
The writer is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph.
www.tomgrossmedia.com
