BBC Adds Insult to Injury by Erasing Jews From Holocaust — Then Claiming There Were ‘Other Holocausts’

Days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day coverage that failed to name Jews as the primary victims of Nazi genocide, the BBC escalated the controversy by claiming that “there have been other holocausts.”

The BBC made the remark in an email responding to a reader who challenged its use of a lowercase “h” when referring to the Holocaust. Earlier that week, critics challenged the BBC over its International Holocaust Remembrance Day coverage. The British public broadcaster stated that the Nazi regime murdered “six million people.” It did not specify that Jews were the explicit targets of a state-sponsored genocide designed to eradicate the Jewish people from Europe.

In an article about Jewish survivors meeting the King and Queen, the BBC described survivor Mala Tribich as a “holocaust survivor.” The article also quoted her asking, “How, 81 years after the holocaust, can these people once again be targeted in this way?”

When a reader challenged the lowercase usage, the BBC replied by asserting that “there have been other holocausts.” The response imposed false equivalence and stripped the Holocaust of its unique meaning as the Nazi genocide of six million Jews.

A Pattern of Holocaust Erasure

Only after Jewish News contacted the broadcaster did the BBC change its position. Editors updated the article. They capitalized references to the Holocaust and added a correction note.

Later, a BBC spokesperson admitted that staff had sent the email in error. “All references to the Holocaust in this article should have been capitalized,” the spokesperson said.

Jewish advocacy groups rejected the explanation. Th UK-based Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) accused the BBC of minimizing the Holocaust by denying its historical uniqueness. “The Nazi slaughter of the Jews was so extensive that the word genocide had to be invented to describe it,” the group said. “The word ‘holocaust’ later became uniquely associated with that crime.”

Tribich survived imprisonment in Bergen-Belsen. For decades, she has warned about antisemitism and Holocaust distortion. Critics said the BBC’s language weakened survivor testimony and erased Jewish specificity.

This is how Holocaust distortion enters the mainstream.

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