When it comes to reporting on Israeli (or American) military activities, one of the most egregious offenders in the mainstream Western press is the BBC, Britain’s public news outlet. A recently exposed incident of unprofessional anti-Israel bias has even elicited an apology from the network. But, writes Stephen Pollard, the BBC’s claim that the behavior in question “clearly falls well below our standards,” is mistaken. In fact, Pollard notes, the conduct “precisely met its standards.” And the problem goes far beyond a single mistake:

We are all familiar with the many egregious examples from the BBC’s reporting of the ongoing Gaza war. But there are recent examples of its attitude to Jews. The BBC’s coverage of an attack in 2021 by a gang of Muslim youths on a bus of Jewish children in Oxford Street in London was, for instance, so hideously flawed at every stage that I find it impossible to believe it was not based on a particular view of Jews.

The BBC reported that one of the Jewish children had said “dirty Muslims,” when they were in fact calling for help in Hebrew. Mistakes happen, yes. But at every stage of its handling of complaints around its reporting the BBC acted as if it regarded those who were angry with its reporting—Jews, that is—with contempt.

Which leads to the second point: this isn’t just a BBC issue. There is an understandable and entirely correct focus on the BBC as we are all forced by law to pay for it, but the real issue is far wider. The vast majority of the journalistic pool from which the BBC, Sky, ITV, and other news media draw their teams are left-liberal in outlook—and the default left-liberal attitude to Israel now is that it is a rogue state which kills Palestinians with impunity, with mainstream Israelis complicit. The BBC could introduce industry-leading, gold-standard editorial procedures but they would have no impact on this nor, obviously, on other news organizations.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.