Story teller masquerading as historian

One of hundreds of Jewish members of the French resistance Denise Gamzon of the E.I.F. (Jewish Scouts of France)

Edouard Drumont – leading French anti-Semite and anti-Dreyfusard – friend of Herzl

Simon Schama – Story teller masquerading as historian

Tonight we saw as good an example as one is likely to get of the BBC’s institutionalised Zionist bias.

Simon Schama’s History of the Jews was a travesty of history.  Faction not factual.

By his own admission Schama is a Zionist, one of whose central tenets is that anti-Semitism cannot be fought.  Schama thus made the facts of the Dreyfus Affair fit into a preconceived mould and botched them all.

Theodor Herzl – founder of Political Zionism and an opponent of combating anti-Semisim

Schama dwelt at some length on Herzl’s apparent reaction to the conviction and exile of Captain Alfred Dreyfus without even mentioning his exoneration still less the massive campaign in his support led by Emile Zola and his famous article J’Accuse.

Schama did mention the leader of the anti-Dreyfusards, Edouard Drumont but ‘forgot’ to mention that Herzl befriended him and went out of his way to seek a favourable review of his pamphlet ‘The Jewish State’ (Der Judenstaat) in the anti-Semitic newspaper ‘La Libre Parole’ which Drumont duly praised. 

Captain Alfred Dreyfuss whose exoneration Schama ‘forgot’ to mention.

Nor is there the slightest evidence that Herzl was even interested in the Dreyfus Affair nor did he ever write about it. Bernard Lazarre, author of Anti-semitism, its History and Causes, resigned from the first Zionist Actions committee, because of Herzl’s attitude to Dreyfus.

Schama did not attempt to place the Dreyfus Affair in the context of French politics and the attempt by the clerical-military caste to reverse the French Revolution and its Emancipation of the Jews.   As Clermont-Tonnerre said in the Constituent Assembly in 1789 ‘To the Jews as individuals everything, as a nation nothing.’

The fact that over 75% of French Jews survived the Nazi occupation was the legacy of the Dreyfus Affair. 

I wonder whether we will see a history of Palestine written by a Palestinian historian  such as Walid Khalidi?   Or would that be a breach of  BBC neutrality?

BBC ‘neutrality’ prevents any mention of the expulsion of the Palestinians