If not this, then what?

Is anything "actually" anti-semitic to the BBC?

There's a subtle, but nonetheless important linguistic curiosity in the BBC's reportage of the anti-Semitic incident that took place in London on Sunday 16 May ('Four men arrested in anti-Semitism video investigation'). ‘Subtle’ because it involves just one word; ‘important’ because it affects how ‘we’ - that is, ‘we’ the complex, multicultural population of modern Britain - are able (or perhaps ‘are invited’ might be more appropriate) to process and categorise the events that took place.

The curiosity is this: the BBC insist throughout on using the modalising expression ‘appears’ whenever they refer to the epistemic status of the video in which the anti-Semitic incident is captured. The article's opening sentence, for instance, suggests that, ‘Police have arrested four men in connection with a video which appeared to show anti-Semitic abuse being shouted from a car in North London.’ A few sentences later they continue this representational strategy: ‘On Sunday, a video was posted on social media appearing to show a convoy of cars with Palestinian flags driving down a street with a man shouting anti-Semitic abuse from a megaphone.’

Why is this use of ‘appears’ important? Because it downgrades what a stylistician might call the ‘epistemic modality’ of the descriptive statement being made by the BBC. The veracity of the video's claim to show anti-Semitism is effectively being undercut before we've even seen it, or indeed read to the end of the article that purports to describe it. Let's be honest, if you were a journalist and you were epistemically certain about something you'd just watched you'd write something like, ‘This video shows X.’ In this type of formulation, X is captured so certainly, so obviously, that few who read your account could doubt that X had been captured by that video. Your formulation would have a strong epistemic modality. If, on the other hand, you really weren't sure what you'd watched you might write something like, ‘It's claimed by some that this video might show X.’ Here, the video of X might have been grainy, for instance, or it might have been hard to hear what's going on, or perhaps the events depicted might have been open to interpretation etc etc.

What the BBC are giving us with their ‘appears’ is more akin to the latter. It has a really weak epistemic modality: this X might ‘appear’ to be X, they seem to be telling us, but it's not necessarily going to be recognised as X by everyone. ‘Hey guys,’ one imagines the moronic junior staffers gurning away to themselves on the news desk, ‘Like, X is, like, whatever you want to think it is, if that's, like, cool with you, right?’ This is the kind of postmodern relativist nonsense we tend to find the woke commentariat spouting in defence of that intellectual titan Meghan Markle whenever she's been out hawking ‘her truth’ around for a few dollars sucky sucky GI.

So why might the BBC feel this video only ‘appears to show’ anti-semitism as opposed to ‘actually showing’ it? Is it perhaps because the video's content is more nuanced than it appears at first sight? Hardly. Although the BBC fail to provide us with a link to the video, or even to report the words that were actually uttered (points that I'll come back to in a minute), if you dig it up online you'll find that it's laced with statements like: ‘Fuck all Jews,’ ‘Rape their mothers,’ ‘Rape their daughters,’ and other such snappy bits of dialogue which, presumably, even the BBC would have to admit did more than ‘appear’ to contain anti-Semitic content.

So if it's not the video's content, then perhaps it's the credibility of the video that's caused the BBC's epistemic reticence; perhaps, for instance, they feel that something so shocking couldn't possibly have been captured in a country like the UK, and in a city like London, but must have taken place somewhere else in the world entirely. But hang on - that can't be it either. By their own admission it's now undeniable that the offence took place in North London: ‘In a statement,’ they note later in the article, ‘The Metropolitan Police said it deployed one of its helicopters to help trace the vehicle and officers stopped the car at approximately 18:30 BST on Sunday. Four men were arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated public order offences. They have been taken into custody at a West London police station where they remain.’

So what's going on here? Why are the BBC so keen to talk about appearances rather than realities? I ask because this is nothing like the representational strategy they deployed in the case of George Floyd. His death, just like the recent episode of anti-Semitism in London, was captured on video by a bystander. And yet everything in the case of George Floyd's video appeared to be clear cut to the BBC. On 16 July, 2020, for instance, they noted that,

‘Footage of the arrest [of George Floyd] on 25 May shows a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, kneeling on Mr Floyd's neck while he was pinned to the floor.’

That's an altogether more robust way of reporting what a video shows, isn't it? There's no ‘appears’ about it; no quibbling about the status of the footage. To read that ‘footage shows’ something is quite different to a statement that it ‘appears to show something.’ You read of footage that shows something and feel immediately that you're being told about an event that actually, unequivocally, 100% took place. The semantics offered up by that kind of statement makes the fact of a man being pinned to the ground and killed indisputable. But a video that ‘appears’ to show anti-Semitism opens up the possibility that some viewers might interpet the events recorded in other ways altogether. To read that a video ‘appears’ to show something is to be cued to find that there might be more going on there than you're being told - after all, if a reporter who's seen a video can't say anything stronger than ‘it appears to show X’ then, well... what are you supposed to do but examine it for yourself and draw your own conclusions as to what it does actually - as opposed to what it appears to - show? If a video only ‘appears’ to show anti-Semitism then we're being given a cue that this might not be a wholly accurate, or indeed even the only plausible, description of what it shows.

If this is so, then why might the BBC possibly want to offer up to its audience the potential for other interpretations of this ‘apparent’ anti-Semitism? Could it perhaps be because they know there's now an audience in the UK that's all too eager to construct just such an alternative explanation of what the video actually - as opposed to appears to - show?

In the case of the video of George Floyd's murder, for instance, there're probably only a few hundred weirdo, card-carrying members of the KKK who could watch what happened and believe the man wasn't unlawfully killed during Chauvin's attempted arrest. But in the case of this episode of anti-Semitism in North London, might the BBC perhaps be looking to pander to anti-Semites; that is, those left-wing intellectuals, cosseted, naive and idealistic students and hardline Muslims who now seem to form such a sizeable crowd in contemporary British society? The rhetoric of appearances is just subtle enough, just flexible enough, to pull this trick off without many people noticing: on the one hand, the average reader will barely notice the slight doubt cast by the BBC over the epistemic status of the events in question (and, in any case, would (one hopes) immediately see the video for what it is, namely, anti-Semitism in action); on the other hand, however, the anti-Semites amongst us, will be able to find precisely the cue they wanted to find (‘Appears! Aha! So what does it really show?!’), before immediately setting about interpreting the video as they feel it should be interpreted, namely, as depicting some rather plucky chaps dishing out a bit of political paypack to those warmongering Zionists, those filthy pig Jews (etc etc yawn) who deserve everything that's coming to them when the final... blah blah blah.

Am I going too far? I wonder. Look again at the description of what the video captured that the BBC so kindly provided in lieu of the actual video or the actual dialogue of what was actually said:

‘A video was posted on social media appearing to show a convoy of cars with Palestinian flags driving down a street with a man shouting anti-Semitic abuse from a megaphone.’

The thing you have to remember about professional writers is that they never leave anything hanging about in a published text that isn't meant to be there for some discursive, stylistic or rhetorical reason. In other words, there's nothing there in that extract that's found its way there simply by chance. So is it just me or do those references to ‘Palestinian flags’ allow an event which the BBC are only prepared to describe as ‘appearing’ like unjustifiable anti-Semitism to become readable to our anti-Semitic friends as a justifiable form of political demonstration against Israel, an oppressive occupying force in Palestine?

Don't get me wrong, by the way - it's not that the flags aren't visible in the video. It's not that other news outlets haven't mentioned them. It's simply a question of noting what a writer does, and does not, decide to make relevant to a description that he's hoping to pass off as a persuasive description to and for his audience. Think about it this way: if these same men had been captured on video raping an elderly woman on the bonnet of one of the cars they'd been driving, would the BBC have provided the extra descriptive detail about the Palestinian flags? No. Of course not. Why? Because it wouldn't have been relevant to the crime they'd been captured on video committing. But if that's the case, then why is it that the BBC felt a trivial detail like the Palestinian flags was relevant to their description of the ‘apparent’ crime of anti-semitism, yet the crucial detail of the anti-Semitic words that were actually uttered wasn't?

Would it be so hard to believe that part of the answer to this question was that we were being offered a cue to see these men as political demonstrators rather than anti-Semites?

After all, in the BBC's reference to the George Floyd video, cited above, they cue us rather cleverly to see racism as the most likely driver of Chauvin's actions thanks to their reference to what, in most circumstances, would be an utterly irrelevant detail, namely, his skin-colour: 'Footage of the arrest shows a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, kneeling on Mr Floyd's neck...'.

So is it too much of a stretch to see their reference to Palestinian flags as cueing some of us to see political oppression, rather than anti-Semitism, as the driver of our megaphone wielding friend's actions? That would indeed change how we related to him, would it not - from disgusting anti-Semite to understandable political protestor in the space of a few short sentential units.

Indeed, the very fact that the BBC choose not to report the words that this man uttered (‘Kill all Jews, rape their daughters, rape their mothers’), allows the reference to ‘Palestinian flags’ that they did choose to report, to take on a little more significance than it otherwise might have been able to in the eyes of what, in literary terms, we might call this article's ideal reader. Calling for specifically Jewish women to be raped is undeniably readable as an act of anti-Semitism; but brandishing Palestinian flags, in the absence of any other specific details about what was being said whilst those flags were being brandished, is undeniably readable as an act of political expression. ‘What's all the fuss about,’ we hear our fictional reader exclaim in this context, ‘Sounds like these chaps were only exercising their right to protest what's happening over in Gaza. And, after all, the right to protest is an inalienable right in this country, isn't it? Honestly, those bloody Jews. Always so thin skinned when anyone criticises their precious State of Israel.’ And so on and so forth.

It's all unprovable, of course, isn't it? But I'd be very surprised if this wasn't something like an answer to the question of why the BBC decided to insert ‘appeared,’ that curious linguistic marker, before every reference they made to a video that, I would argue, ‘actually showed’ what ‘actually’ happened.