Theres a rather cryptically worded report in the Guardian about the BBC pulling a history documentary before it could be broadcast. It seems the documentary is all about Jerusalem:
The film-maker behind a BBC4 documentary about ancient Jewish history that was shelved last week has accused the corporation of a “mixture of incompetence” and “political naiveté”.
Ilan Ziv, the Israeli-born documentary maker behind Jerusalem: an Archaeological Mystery Story, which questions the scale of the exodus of the Jewish people from Jerusalem in AD70, also said the official reason given by the BBC for pulling it from the schedules contradicts the one made to him in private.
The Guardian report draws from the blog post of the film maker, Ilan Ziv, (linked).
It’s a longish report based on a long blog post and without seeing the film I have no real idea if the BBC dropped it for acurately showing how strong Jewish ties to Jerusalem are and (obviously) how tenuous the ties of Islam are to the city.
Any reasonable exploration of the history of Jerusalem will show how the city is overwhelmingly Jewish in origin, nature and character and that even during the times when Jews were physically excluded from living there, they still lived there in large numbers. In fact, it’s most likely that there has rarely been a time when Jerusalem didn’t have a Jewish majority.
The film may well be anti-Zionist in some senses but could it be that anything showing strong Jewish connections to Jerusalem is to tricky for the BBC?
But that’s not quite how the BBC would like to show things today is it?
Here’s a sample of the documentary:
http://vimeo.com/59105734
And one little note: if the documentary seeks to show peaceful co-existance with the Romans that’s all well and good. It’s 700 years before Muhammad showed up.
