While regularly censoring criticism of Islamic extremism (see, for example, my post yesterday), the BBC allows highly offensive slurs about Christians and even more so about Jews, to remain on its website for weeks at a time, points out the (London) Daily Mail.

But now, after a campaign by the Daily Mail and its sister newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, “The BBC has been forced to remove statements from its website referring to Jesus as a ‘bastard’.”

The remarks about Jesus were left as part of a discussion about the death of the Archbishop of Paris.

However, the BBC editors have allowed anti-Semitic comments posted by the same person who wrote the Jesus “bastard” remarks, to remain. Among those still up by him on the BBC’s publicly-funded, award-winning website are “The jews in much remembered concentration camps had even better qualitity of freedom that these palestinians have”.

The Daily Mail wanted to test whether the BBC would disallow remarks critical of Muslims, while allowing anti-Semitic remarks. So one Daily Mail reader posted: “No one can surpass the Muslims for denial of their role in Terrorism and Suicide bombing.” The post was “almost immediately deleted by the BBC,” reports the Mail.

The Mail points out that the BBC has, by contrast, allowed “anti-Semitic posts” to remain on its website for over a month now. Among these is: “Zionism is a racist ideology where jews are given supremacy over all other races and faiths. This is found in the Talmud… which allows jews to lie as long as its to non-jews.”

Even after the official Board of Deputies of British Jews wrote a polite letter to the BBC pointing out that the comment had been lifted from a notorious 19th Century anti-Semitic text, “The Talmud Unmasked,” which is still sold by neo-Nazi booksellers in London, the BBC has refused to remove it, citing freedom of speech.

The Daily Telegraph today runs a lead editorial criticizing the week-long refusal of the BBC to remove the Jesus “bastard” remark and says that the BBC’s continuing refusal to make public the independent Balen Report (which is widely rumored to reveal anti-Israel bias verging on anti-Semitism in some BBC Mideast coverage) is “disgraceful”.