by Danny Cohen, Telegraph
Some Jewish employees ‘fear that speaking out will only end one way: the end of their BBC careers’
Over the last three years it has become clear that the BBC has been poisoned by anti-Semitism.
In what are by no means isolated incidents, BBC journalists who are still employed by the corporation have shown support for the Oct 7 attacks, BBC Arabic has given a platform to men who seek the mass murder of Jewish people, and a primetime documentary has been narrated by the son of a Hamas official.
Yet until now the experience of Jewish people working for the BBC since the Hamas atrocities has remained hidden from view. The experience of Lucie Kon, an award-winning programme executive, has drawn back the curtain.
It seems reasonable to assume that BBC management has made a compensatory payment to Ms Kon and reedited the programmes her credit was removed from because they knew the corporation had failed her very badly. They will have feared the alternative: that an employment tribunal in which more details of the anti-Semitism Ms Kon faced – and management’s failure to deal with it – would have been highly damaging.
As a Jewish employee of the BBC, Ms Kon faced a hostile environment in which she was told that the genocidal murder of Oct 7 should be seen “in context” and that she should “think about what drove Hamas to do what they did”. This is nothing less than a BBC manager seeking to justify Jewish babies being shot in the head, families being burned alive in their homes, and mass rape and sexual torture. It is stomach-turning, and yet it took place not at an extremist political rally but at our national broadcaster.