Irish born Orla Guerin is an antisemitic journalist and a BBC News reporter. This week, on National Holocaust Remembrance Day, she had the audacity to spew anti-Israel rhetoric while standing in Yad Vashem - a Holocaust Remembrance Museum in Jerusalem, Israel.
In the highly criticized segment, Guerin implies that although Jews overcame the horrors of the Holocaust to now having their own powerful state, they are still playing the victim - "In Yad Vashem’s Hall of Names, images of the dead. Young soldiers troop in to share the binding tragedy of the Jewish people. The State of Israel is now a regional power; for decades it has occupied Palestinian territories."
Guerin’s comment was profoundly antisemitic as she portrayed the Jewish nation as clinging onto the trauma of the Holocaust while taking over someone else’s land. These types of comments have no place in a segment about Holocaust commemoration streamed from Yad Vashem.
The report was criticized by many, including former BBC executives who said, “The attempt to link the horrors of the Holocaust to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply offensive and upsetting [...] Adding insult to injury, the report uses pictures of Holocaust victims in Yad Veshem during the sequence in which this link is made. This is inexplicably and unjustifiably offensive.”
The British Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women asserted that the report would “only serve to feed and fuel antisemitism.”
The BBC has shamefully defended Guerin’s report, claiming that her “brief reference in our Holocaust report to Israel’s position today did not imply any comparison between the two.”
Guerin has a long record of spreading her antisemitism and anti-Israel bias.
In 2004, Guerin portrayed Israel's arrest of suicide bomber Hussam Abdu, captured with explosives strapped to his chest, as "cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes". Guerin's public attempt to defend a suicide bomber prompted a rare Israeli government complaint to the BBC.
In 2015, her reporting on the surge of Palestinian terror attacks prompted a former BBC chairman to accuse her of inexcusable bias and misleading audiences by failing to acknowledge the involvement of Palestinian terror groups in the attacks.
Despite her record, the BBC network chose to send Guerin out of all of its reporters to Israel to cover the sensitive topic of Holocaust commemoration.
Guerin’s broadcast is a clear example of why news agencies should adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. It is also imperative that the Jewish community deserves an apology from BBC for allowing such hateful propaganda to be inserted in the commemoration of one of the biggest atrocities in human history - the Holocaust.