Blistering article by Tom Gross in National Review on the BBC’s relentless and venomous bias in its Israel coverage. Gross draws attention to its coverage of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, from Saudi Arabia, who opened London’s biggest mosque last Friday. Gross tells us:

‘He is the preacher at the Grand Al-Haraam mosque - the most important mosque in Mecca, the very heart of Islam. “Read history,” implored al-Sudais to his massed ranks of followers in another of his sermons, on February 1, 2004, “and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels … calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers…the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs…. These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption….”

Al-Sudais has repeated these words, or close variations of them, at several other sermons in recent years. It is because of these and other calls for violence against Christians, Hindus, and Americans, that the Canadian government last month denied al-Sudais a visa to enter Canada. But none of this seems to have penetrated the BBC bubble. In its reports last weekend on TV, radio, and online, on Sheikh al-Sudais’s visit to Britain, in which he lead 15,000 worshippers at prayer at the opening of the enormous new six-story Islamic center in east London, the BBC mentioned none of this. BBC Online for example, last Saturday, gave the impression that al-Sudais was nothing but a benign, kindly cleric promoting (to quote the BBC) “community cohesion” between Muslims and their neighbors.’

Now scroll on to the BBC’s TV coverage on sunday of the Tel Aviv bombing, in which five people died and 49 were injured. Using a clip entitled ‘A family in mourning’, the family it showed was not one of the Israeli dead but of the human bomb terrorist instead.

BBC panjandrums are embarrassed enough to put their hands up to this one. In what it coyly calls a ‘correction’, the Beeb has posted up the following comment by Roger Mosey, head of TV news:

‘The programme editors and I agree it was inappropriate to begin the report with footage of the suicide bomber’s family in mourning.It was also inappropriate to include this footage without coverage of the suffering of the victims’ families. Using this picture sequence in this way was a mistake. However, the report’s coverage of the political ramifications of the bombing and this week’s London conference was balanced and fair - and we did, of course, report fully the events in Tel Aviv in our bulletins on Friday night and Saturday.’

No, Mr Mosey, it was not ‘inappropriate’. It was grotesque, outrageous and despicable. And a ‘correction’ just won’t do. It does not begin to address the moral deformity of BBC journalists who, when Israelis are murdered, automatically direct their compassion instead at the family of the bomber. For BBC journalists, Jewish victims, Jewish dead and Jewish grief just don’t seem to exist.

The BBC’s chairman of governors, Michael Grade, is doubtless heavily occupied trying to protect the corporation from the slash and burn predations of Lords Burns and Birt. But unless he tackles head-on the vicious and endemic prejudices of the BBC’s journalism, the BBC will simply not be worth defending.