Israel boycotts BBC to protest TV documentary on country's nuclear and WMD arsenal

Israel has severed ties with the British Broadcasting Corporation to protest what it calls the repeated 'demonization' of the country and today's showing of a documentary on Israel's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons arsenal, according to a report by the London Times.

Israel says interviews with official spokesmen will no longer be made available to BBC staff and visa restrictions will be put in place to force the BBC to rotate its bureau chief every few months. Israel will also no longer cooperate with requests for assistance with restrictions such as military road blocks in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. A discussion is still underway as to whether or not to expel all BBC correspondents.

''The BBC will discover that bureaucracy can be applied with goodwill or without it. And after the way that they have repeatedly tried to delegitimize the state of Israel, we, as hosts, have none left for them,'' Daniel Seaman, director of the government press office, told the Times.

''We see the well-known pro-Arab touch of the Foreign Office and the traditional anti-Semitism of parts of Britain's Establishment in the way they are acting against us, " Seaman added.

The first test comes today when the BBC asks Israeli officials to comment on the weekend visit of U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice who is in the Middle East to talk to Israeli and Palestinian leaders about the 'road map' to peace.

''We decided that we had to draw a red line rather than just complain about a consistent attitude in which successive BBC programs attempt to place us in the same context as totalitarian, axis-of-evil countries such as Iraq and Iran,'' Seaman told the Times.

Seaman says the attitude of the BBC is dangerous to the existence of the state of Israel because it demonizes the Israelis and gives terrorists reasons to attack. He says the sanctions were put in place due to what was seen as an overall BBC attitude towards Israel ''verging on the anti-Semitic."

The final straw was the BBC's promotion of the program ''Israel's Secret Weapon'', first shown in Britain in March.

The documentary features a series of questions flashed onscreen: "Which country in the Middle East has undeclared nuclear weapons? Which country in the Middle East has undeclared biological and chemical weapons capabilities? Which country in the Middle East has no outside inspections? Which country jailed its nuclear whistleblower for 18 years?"

Israel pressured the BBC not to re-broadcast the program, which Seaman says contains the false assertion Israel used nerve gas against the Palestinians. The documentary also compares Israel to Iraq and asks why the world demanded U.N. inspections in Iraq, but not similar inspections in Israel.

The BBC's Richard Sambrook told the Times: ''We regret that the Israelis felt the need to take this action but we stand behind the veracity of the film.''




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