I am not going to critique Louis Theroux’s documentary “The Settlers”. I have watched some of his documentaries in the past and I’m sure he’s done his due diligence and is not “making things up” and indeed this one is produced to his usual high standards. I have not watched it, and I’m not sure I’m going to. This is not because he will be telling me something I don’t want to hear or learn about, but because I rather suspect I already know what I will hear and won’t learn anything new from my investment in the time it takes to sit through it.
We all know that there are some mad Israelis with extreme views. Theroux is very good at identifying mad people and – as his his stock in trade – “letting them speak” and thereby condemning themselves in the eyes of the reasonable viewer without Theroux having to do much editorialising.
In the past he has interviewed the late Afrikaner neo-Nazi Eugene Terre’blanche, and the late American evangelist Fred Pheleps, of “God Hates Fags” infamy. Neither was in the slightest bit representative of, respectively, white South Africans or American Christians. I expect the audience understood and appreciated this.
In contrast, people are all to willing to believe that the titular “Settlers” are representative of Israeli society and that this programme is some sort of exposé. Certainly, that is the impression I’ve gotten from the most enthusiastic promoters of the show on social media platforms.
But nevertheless, the show is propaganda.
It is made with that journalistic sleight of hand where you interview the maddest and most hysterical minority on one side of the divide and then contrast this with the few sane people you’ve managed to find among the crazy majority other side. That perhaps exposes Theroux’s bias. But what of the BBC?
The BBC would not commission Theroux – or anyone else – to produce a similar programme on the extremists in Palestinian society. They exist in much larger numbers and have far more widespread support than the fringe of the Israeli settlers. Israelis – even these Settlers – do not ululate while parading the corpses of murdered Palestinians through the streets. There is no equivalent of Farfour The Mouse on Israeli children’s television. Even the craziest Israeli politicians are not throwing rivals off rooftops. I don’t need to catalogue the extremism and madness of the various Palestinian factions. We all know what we’re talking about.
Except the BBC rarely talks about it. Ironically, they did indeed have an opportunity to document the daily lives and activities of a Hamas-supporting family but the production company they commissioned chose instead to obscure these links to Hamas entirely and, by oversight, the BBC allowed a scripted-reality version to air instead of an authentic documentary. As we know, the BBC were forced to pull this programme from their network when the scandalous sham was exposed.
So there we have it. So far the BBC have produced these two high-profile documentaries; one – now withdrawn – showed the children of a Hamas-linked family as victims, while the other showed a fringe element of Israeli society as victimisers.
Sure these settlers are extremists who would like to re-establish the biblical land of Israel, but they don’t have millions of supporters around the world chanting “From the river to the sea….”. The Palestinians do. They can be found every weekend marching through London or disrupting campus events within earshot of BBC headquarters. We see no effort to document them either and “just let them speak” to expose their extremist desire to ethnically cleanse the Middle East of Jews.
At best it is moral cowardice and useful idiocy; at worst the BBC is actively colluding in the undermining of the one Jewish homeland.
