BBC fails to recognize Israeli Jews as victims of Jihad

BBC News released a fascinating animated map on Wednesday showing the distribution of Jihadist attacks and the number of victims in each country for the month of November. Predictably, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan accounted for the vast majority of the 5,000+ deaths, but the Beeb also included countries with much lower death tolls like Libya (3 civilian deaths) and Cameroon (3 civilian deaths) and implied that the list was exhaustive.

Notably absent from the group was the nation of Israel, where on November 5, a Palestinian Hamas member ran over pedestrians with a van at a Jerusalem train station, ultimately resulting in 2 deaths in an attack which the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Jihadist group Hamas claimed responsibility for.

Then on November 18, two Palestinians wielding guns and hatchets attacked Jews at prayer in a Jerusalem synagogue resulting in 5 deaths including 4 rabbis, incidentally one of whom was a British national.

That’s a total of at least 7 dead civilians in Israel due to Jihadist terrorist attacks in November, yet the BBC didn’t include Israel among the 14 countries it identified as having been victimized.

Why did the BBC fail to mention the Jihadist murder of 7 Israeli Jewish civilians in Jihadist attacks that were reported on the BBC website itself?

Some possible reasons:

• The BBC editors and writers are incompetent and didn’t consult their own reportage when compiling the statistics
• The BBC values Jewish life less than non-Jewish life
• The BBC considers anti-Israel terrorism, even when carried out by internationally recognized Jihadist terrorist group like Hamas, to be legitimate acts of resistance against “occupation”

Regardless of the underlying reason, the absence of Israel from the list of Jihadist terror victims is disturbing and reflects a strong tendency within European discourse in general, and left-wing news outlets like the BBC in particular, to minimize Jewish suffering while amplifying Palestinian grievances.

The BBC can produce all of the interesting graphics it wants. It will not remove the moral stain of selective dehumanization of Jewish victims of Jihadist terror to further its political goals.