The BBC claimed that there was more than one Holocaust in a Sunday apology it issued after backlash from Jewish groups.
"There have been other holocausts," the BBC's statement read after it received complaints for using lowercase "h" to spell Holocaust in an article regarding a meeting between Jewish Holocaust survivors and the King and Queen of the United Kingdom, the Jewish News reported on Monday.
"Mala Tribich became the first holocaust survivor to address the cabinet,” the BBC wrote in its original article in late January.
The BBC reported that Tribich had asked, “How, 81 years after the holocaust, can these people once again be targeted in this way?” The misspelling was caught by a reader, who issued a complaint.
"This response was sent in error. All references to the Holocaust in this article should have been capitalized. We have updated it accordingly and added a correction note. We will be writing again to the original correspondent," a BBC spokesperson said in response to the matter.
However, the reader initially claimed to have received an official answer to his complaint from an experienced BBC broadcast journalist, who responded: “Historically, there have been other examples of holocausts elsewhere.”
In its first response to the situation, the BBC had said that its writing style is to refer to “Holocaust survivors” and “Holocaust Memorial Day” with capital letters.
However, the network allegedly rejected a first request to change its reference to Tribich, a Bergen-Belsen survivor, who was referred to as a "holocaust survivor", with no further explanation.
CAM accuses BBC of 'peddling softcore Holocaust denial'
The BBC's writing choices mobilized the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAM), which accused the news outlet of “peddling softcore Holocaust denial.”
"Why is the BBC effectively joining far-right, far-left, and Islamist propagandists and conspiracists in trying to downplay or deny the horror of the Holocaust? This is yet further evidence of an institutionalized dismissal or even hatred of Jews that permeates the BBC’s increasingly agenda-driven reporting," CAM wrote.
“The Nazi slaughter of the Jews was so extensive that the word genocide had to be invented to describe it. While that word has since been applied to other attempts to wipe out whole peoples, the older word ‘holocaust’ was newly adapted to this event, with which it is uniquely associated. The BBC is peddling softcore Holocaust denial by
trivializing the name of this horrific crime.”
This incident was not the first time the BBC had received backlash for its coverage of the Holocaust or Jewish news.
In this year's Holocaust Memorial Day article, the BBC only said that “six million people” were murdered by the Nazi regime, not that six million Jews were murdered.
After the incident, the BBC was forced to issue an apology.