Pounce, familyjaffa and Deegee (Open Thread and B-BBC COMMENTING thread) have highlighted the BBC’s clumsy and ill-informed picture show about Yom Kippur. It seems like a last minute attempt to address the imbalance between their blanket coverage of Muslim festivals and customs and their comparatively underwhelming coverage of Jewish ones.
The major difference is not in the quantity of the coverage, but in the treatment. With Islam, the BBC does all it can to normalise customs and practices most people consider abnormal. With Judaism, it does all it can to insinuate that all Jews are ‘other’
I know very little about religious practices – I tend to see them all as a form of slapstick – but as a staunch supporter of Israel I have great respect for Jewish festivals and celebrations. For information about what’s gone wrong with the BBC’s Yom Kippur article, please read Deegee’s post.
Weird Customs
Bookmark the permalink.
Good grief. I never heard of the whipping custom, and I went to school for this stuff for a while. Why not talk about why they’re all wearing white instead, or why observant Jews don’t wear leather on Yom Kippur? And why do they have to insert the settlements issue into everything? Surely they could have found some bushy-bearded Jew blowing a shofar elsewhere in the country.
Or, you know, found a Jew somehwere else on the planet besides Israel. Were there any Jews in Britain observing Yom Kippur?
I’m with Sue on this one in that I know very little about religious practices. (Something about me having very little to do with believing about a man in the sky) Anyway I couldn’t help but note how the bBCs coverage of Yom Kippur paints a picture of a very warped faith which whips men, pray around a paddling pool full of fish, allows children to cycle on main roads and pisses off the local Muslims by blowing trumpets outside a holy mosque.
And in Turkey during Ramadan men walk up and down the street at 3am banging a drum in which to wake everybody up. What happens if you are not a Muslim?
That so called holy Mosque also know by the jews as the Tomb of the Patriarch just happens to be the second most holy site for those of the Jewish faith. Something they venerated well before Islam was invented.
Lastly other than the first picture of children riding their bikes on an open road. (How dare they?) The image presented by the bBC is that all Jews are settlers and Ultra Orthodox.
If that was true, then Bin Laden and his crew could be said to represent all Muslims, but we don’t so why is the bBC allowed to present the image that all jews are nutters who can’t get on with themselves never mind the neighbours..
I am very glad Deegee and others have flagged this up.
I have rarely seen a more blatantly anti- Jewish bbc “product” than this sly, deliberately misleading piece of propaganda.
Wilfully ignoring the overwhelmingly vast majority of Israelis and Jews WORLDWIDE, this piece concentrates on the practices, (all it would seem, deliberately misrepresented) of small messianic fringe groups.
A conscious attempt to portray the Jews as “the other”, in a similar and more subliminal way to the deeply infamous nazi propaganda nasty, “The eternal Jew”
Was this travesty ok’ed by the islamic beeboid commissar of religious affairs?
Hopefully a large number of complaints have gone in.
Here BBC. Here is another way you could have marked Yom Kippur,
and here is the way the Guardian marked it! (As if you didn’t know)
Unlike the BBC, the Guardian credits the photographer. Menahem Kahana is a news photographer also very well known for his photographs of the Haredi life.
I’ve e-mailed him some questions and will relay the answers to the group when/if I receive an answer.
Many years ago, in fact during the Camp David negotiations, a cartoonist produced what he saw as the relations between Begin, Carter and Sadat. Begin and Sadat were runners at their blocks. Carter shot Sadat with his starting pistol.
Later I saw the same cartoon is a pro Palestinian publication. It was literally the same artwork photocopied but to make certain that the reader had no doubt about his Jewishness of Begin a broad hat, sidelocks and a beard had been drawn on his head. He looked like the photographs.
Haredi (ultra Orthodox) Jews are quaint and photogenic I guess but conflating them with Israel or Jews worldwide is about as accurate as conflating all British with Kilt wearing Scots and not more much more accurate as conflating all Scots with kilt wearers.
No D, Im afraid I got more than that from it. whipping, and fish and chicken abuse. The (not so) subliminal message in the shofar pic of settler “intruders” wheras the REVERSE is in fact historically true.
Left a bad taste.
The whipping might appeal to some beeboids though.
Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but is the ‘last minute attempt to address the imbalance’ a panic reaction to this story which was prominent in the sports pages on Friday:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/w/west_ham_utd/9002873.stm
West Ham boss Avram Grant insists his team will be “100% ready” to take on Stoke on Saturday despite his absence to observe Yom Kippur.
What have these photos got to do with the vast majority of world Jews’ observance of Yom Kippur, let alone those in Britain? This is a very peculiar piece and one that I find somewhat disturbing.
Exactly right. One would have thought that the official state broadcaster with a self-avowed mandate to promote Social Cohesion might see the benefits of showing Jews in Britain observing their holy day.
Apart from the concentration on the ultra-religious minority (subtext “weird”), the whipping (subtext “very weird”) the settlers being shown (subtext “Zionist invaders”) the blowing of the horn outside a mosque (subtext “racists and anti-muslim”) the other one that previous comments have missed is what is happening to the chickens (subtext “…and cruel to animals!”). I think in the selection of those pictures the BBC have shown they are not so much anti-Israel or anti-Zionist as they claim, but just outright, old-fashioned anti-semites. They would not dare, nor wish, to potray Muslims in this way.