The BCC took third place on an annual anti-semitism list produced by an American watchdog group.
Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization based in Los Angeles, California, released its Global Antisemitism 2021 Top Ten List on Dec. 28.
The British broadcast network fell behind Iran and Hamas.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, the center’s founder and head, said the decision came after “months of intense debate and discussion” and that the BBC was “guilty of several incidences of anti-Semitism.”
“People might assume we would put neo-Nazi groups on our list but ... when a globally recognized organization allows anti-Semitism to creep into its reporting, it makes it all the more insidious and dangerous,” he said.
Hier cited a 1993 report “of the BBC during the Nazi Holocaust” from the British newspaper The Independent that the rabbi said was “not complimentary at all.”
“The BBC policy was talk about anything but Jews,” said Hier. “And now, in our lifetime, this particular year, we find the BBC going in the same direction as the old BBC. And that’s why we listed them on our top 10.”
“The report condemned former BBC reporter Tala Halawa who posted a series of tweets including ‘Hitler was right’ and ‘Zionists can’t get enough of our blood’ in 2014,” reports The Daily Mail. “Ms. Halawa no longer works for the BBC.”
The Center’s 2021 list also “ includes ‘social media giants’ (for permitting hate speech) and the Unilever corporation, whose Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream brand courted controversy after a sales boycott of East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” per RT.
Anuradha Mittal, who is the head of the ice cream company’s Board of Directors and the vice president of Ben & Jerry’s Foundation Inc., was named the 2021 anti-Semite of the year by stopantisemitism.org.
The list also included “Covid’s latest deviant strains” in fourth place, noting “the wholesale use of Nazi images and icons by elements of the anti-vaxxer movement.”
