Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein cuts his privileged ties with the BBC

Last week, after 30 years as a freelance broadcaster with the BBC, I wrote my letter of resignation.

The reason was an ugly anti-Semitic incident and the BBC’s coverage of it. It occurred this past Chanukah in London’s busiest shopping center, Oxford Street (home to the world-famous Harrods department store), as a group of chareidi teenagers left their tour bus and danced on the sidewalk, when they were surrounded by a group of Muslim men who threatened them. The Muslims screamed and spat anti-Semitic abuse at them, giving Nazi salutes and forcing them to flee back to the bus, which they then began to attack.

By the time the BBC reported the story, they alleged that it was the Jewish kids who had in fact shouted anti-Muslim slurs at their attackers.

The BBC then modified the word “slurs” (plural) to “slur” (singular), but they continued to allege that someone could be heard shouting, “dirty Muslims.”

An independent forensic voice expert was commissioned by the UK’s Jewish community who listened to the recordings from people’s cell phones. He found the BBC claim was a complete untruth. The BBC refused (and still refuses) to back down.

I cannot recall who said, “The definition of English anti-Semitism is hating Jews more than is absolutely necessary.”

This incident showed, though, that the BBC hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary. I canceled the six scripts I was scheduled to write and broadcast in February, and after three decades, I walked away.

Unless you have lived in the UK, you will find it hard to grasp how really huge radio is across the country. Americans in particular will not comprehend how enormous radio’s presence still is in Great Britain and how very different it is from America’s broadcast equivalents.

The majority of British people (80 percent) still get their news from the radio and almost always from the BBC’s national and local radio stations.

The largest news show is BBC Radio’s Today Program, with a listenership of roughly a sixth of the entire country. The country’s intelligentsia and so-called “thinking classes” listen to it, as do politicians, the prime minister, and Her Majesty the Queen.

It’s hardly the kind of place you would expect to hear a chareidi (the BBC prefer the term “ultra-Orthodox”) rabbi speaking regularly. How that happened goes back to 1986, when I returned to live in Manchester after ten years away, learning in the Gateshead yeshivah and the Liverpool kollel. My rosh yeshivah, Rav Leib Gurwicz ztz”l, took the responsibility of public speaking quite seriously, and every two weeks he invited the young married men of the yeshivah to his home on Shabbos in order for them to say a derashah in front of him. He would then offer constructive criticism to help them improve so they could convey Torah to the public in the best possible way.

I enjoyed these sessions enormously and took the message to heart — and they soon paid off. I soon found I was being invited to speak to a wide range of audiences, from yeshivah bochurim to baalei teshuvah.

And then, when I returned to Manchester, I was invited to speak on some local radio station.