Last Thursday, BBC Radio Four's religious homily slot, Thought for the Day, featured the Rev Dr John Bell, a Scottish cleric. By way of introducing some platitudes about peace in the Middle East, Dr Bell said the following:

'Two years ago, in a Lebanese restaurant in Vancouver, I talked to a
waiter called Adam who was an Arab Israeli. That means that he was of Palestinian Muslim stock, born in the State of Israel and, like his Jewish compatriots, he had been conscripted into the Israeli Army. There he had distinguished himself as a good soldier and was made a corporal. He was also imprisoned for refusing to shoot unarmed
schoolchildren. And one day, when off-duty, he saved many lives by
killing a suicide bomber who entered the bus on which he was
travelling'.

Thus in the space of a few seconds, the BBC had transmitted the libellous falsehood that the Israelis order their soldiers to kill unarmed schoolchildren, and had been resisted in this murderous and inhuman objective by a heroic Arab citizen (with the improbable name of Adam). And this in the religious slot,too, thus giving the libel the extra imprimatur of godliness and veracity. Yet Dr Bell was merely recycling something that had apparently been told to him by this self-styled Arab Israeli soldier as the truth, without having done anything to check its veracity. And despite the fact that this was likely to add to the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish venom now coursing through British veins, the BBC had put this poisonous piece of unsubstantiated and racially inflammatory saloon-bar gossip on air, complete with demonstrable errors of fact.

Now the BBC has made partial amends. After today's Thought for the Day, the Today presenter announced that the BBC had posted an apology for 'inaccuracies' in last Thursday's broadcast on its Ethics and Religion website. It says the following:

'We have talked to the Israeli authorities and we are unable to find any evidence to support the story told to Dr Bell and recounted by him on Thought for the Day. We also understand that Dr. Bell made two factual mistakes in his script. Those facts should have been checked before the broadcast. The Religion and Ethics Department apologises on behalf of the BBC and regrets the offence that was caused.

The Rev Dr John Bell has written to the BBC to express his own deep regret as follows:

"It is clear that I made two factual errors. The one was that he [the soldier] was 21 and not 19, thus he would have been of the age to be a corporal. The second is that he did not say he was conscripted. My presumption regarding conscription is wrong as regards Arab Israelis. The purpose of my contribution was to highlight the fact that in any peace process, the concordat is not the conclusion, but a stage in a process which will take centuries before peaceful co-existence is secured. It was my specific intention to avoid any bias against one of the two national communities. I perfectly understand that at a time when Jewish sensitivity in Britain is running high because of anti-Semitism that part of my remarks might have been interpreted as furtive racism. However, such a conjecture would be completely untrue. For any unintended dismay I may have caused, I apologise unreservedly." '

Well, that's ok as far as it goes. And one should not underestimate the significance of the BBC making such an apology. Nevertheless, as HonestReporting.com observes, Dr Bell and the BBC have not specifically apologised for the gravemen of the accusation, that the IDF orders its soldiers to shoot unarmed Palestinian children. Indeed, Dr Bell did not himself acknowledge that he had recycled an unsubstantiated claim without any evidence that it was true.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that Dr Bell -- and the BBC -- saw nothing wrong in recycling such an unsubstantiated claim because they assumed it was true. For this is the poison that has infected British society, and now seems to circulate in the very air we breathe.