AT THE risk of stirring up a hornets’ nest, might I alert your readers to a disconcerting experience I had in Israel this summer?

There I found a general consensus that the BBC, which I had always assumed was a non-partisan source of information, was in fact biased against that country.

When I vehemently protested, I was asked why the BBC (which properly demands the publication of the 2009 Chilcot Inquiry) has spent more thanover £300,000 of licence-payers’ money suppressing the 2004 Balen Report (of which most readers will never have heard) written by the senior broadcasting journalist Malcolm Balen about the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

My attention was then directed to a website called bbcwatch.org which purports to monitor the BBC’s neutrality when covering Israel.

This website cited countless examples of bias.

To name but two: it claims that since January of this year there have been 812 terrorist attacks in Israel, of which only eight were reported by the BBC, (less than one per cent!) and that though the lamentable deaths of two Palestinians were reported, the deaths of three Israelis were ignored.

Jeremy Corbyn has explained his past dealings with such individuals as Holocaust-denier Paul Eisen, the Rev Stephen Sizer (promoter of 9/11: Israel Did It), Carlos Latuff (whose cartoons regularly compare Israelis with Nazis) and Hamas fundraiser Raed Salah, by asserting that it’s your enemies’ rather than your friends’ viewpoints with which you must engage.

If the probable future leader of the Labour Party is correct, then I would urge his supporters, and those interested in broadening their world-views, to impartially log on to bbcwatch.org Having raised my head above the parapet, I am expecting (hopefully civil) counter-arguments, but not before time is devoted to scrutinising the above-mentioned website.

Anthony Hentschel

Nailsworth