BBC Rejects ‘Moneybags Rothschilds’ as Antisemitic Slur: Ruling Denounced as ‘Beyond Comprehension’

The determination by the British Broadcasting Service that the phrase “moneybags Rothschilds” is not antisemitic because the “Jewishness of the Rothschild family was not referred to” explicitly delivers a stunning conclusion to an investigation by the broadcaster believed by many to harbor anti-Jewish bias.The reference to the famous Jewish banking family was made on air in a February episode of the venerable Radio Four program, “Gardeners’ Question Time.” The episode is still available on BBC Sounds. The ruling that the comment was not antisemitic, reported first by the Jewish Chronicle this week, was handed down by the Beeb’s Editorial Complaints Unit, the broadcaster’s highest complaint body.The Rothschilds were invoked by a horticulturalist, Bunny Guinness, when another panelist, Bob Flowerdew, insisted that he would purchase a plant from a store rather than propagate one at home. Ms. Guinness responded to that plan by exclaiming, “Moneybags Rothschild! He’ll go and buy them.” That drew the complaint of a Jewish listener. The BBC’s initial response in February was that it was “unable to agree that it was in any way antisemitic.”The listener appealed to the ECU, which now says that the comment is unlikely to “perpetuate prejudice” because there is no reference to the religion of the Rothschilds. That is unconvincing to the co-chairman of the United Kingdom’s Holocaust Memorial Foundation, Lord Eric Pickles. He declared in a statement that the BBC’s refusal to apologize is “beyond comprehension” and that the Rothschild remark was “inappropriate and antisemitic, almost comically so.”Lord Pickles, who also serves as the parliamentary chair of Conservative Friends of Israel in the House of Lords, explained that the “Rothschilds have been used for over a century as the archetype for a warped world view that views Jews as operating a global conspiracy to hoard wealth and oppress the masses.” Amid a resurgence in Britain of the world’s oldest prejudice, he cited the BBC’s “disturbing stubbornness over the issue of antisemitism.”The corporation, however, reckons that there is a “clear distinction between a comment about a named family — one who were famed for the extent of their private fortune — and one about Jewish people more generally. There was no sense in which the comment relied on antisemitic ideas more generally.” The BBC operates under a royal charter and is funded by a licensing fee assessed to every British household. For centuries, the Rothschilds — the most famous European banking dynasty of the modern age — have stood at the center of some of the most florid and persistent antisemitic conspiracies. Long before Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed “Jewish space lasers” built by the Rothschilds for deadly forest fires, the dynasty founded by Frankfurt-born Mayer Amschel Rothschild has been accused of sinister machinations.The conspiracy theories date back to a French pamphlet of 1846 titled, “The Edifying and Curious History of Rothschild I, King of the Jews,” which alleged manipulation of the stock market by Nathan Rothschild following the Battle of Waterloo three decades earlier. The author, one Mathieu Georges Dairnvaell, signed his screed “Satan.” The Rothschilds were also an obsession of the 19th century antisemitic daily newspaper, La Libre Parole, which directed its venom against the family as well as the French Army captain Alfred Dreyfus.The Nazis were no less taken with the Rothschilds, casting them as the avatars of an international conspiracy of Jewish financiers. In 1940 the Third Reich produced a movie, “Die Rothschilds,” which took in 2.5 million Reichsmarks, the equivalent today of some $24 million. The Nazis looted Rothschild collections, including the vast Palais Rothschild at Vienna. Hitler himself earmarked the family’s treasures for his planned Führermuseum at Linz. The BBC’s refusal to repudiate the reference to the Rothschilds comes as British Jews are facing a renewed wave of hate. Earlier this week a man who in July stabbed a Jewish building superintendent was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. An antisemitism watchdog, Community Service Trust, reports a 21 percent increase in reported antisemitic incidents — for a total of around 2,000 — in the first half of 2026 over the same time period last year.In April, two Jewish men were stabbed at the Golder’s Green suburb of London. That came shortly after four Hatzola community ambulances were set on fire and destroyed during an arson attack in that same neighborhood the month before. Last Yom Kippur, two Jewish men were killed when a terrorist, Jihad Al-Shamie, attacked the Manchester synagogue where they were praying. In April, King Charles — who also serves as the royal patron of the Community Service Trust — visited Golder’s Green to show solidarity with the beleaguered Jews of his realm. The British Jewish actor Elliot Levey, who won an Olivier Award for his role in the West End production of “Giant,” told The New York Sun in May that “at home in England the jury is back in and have made their decision when it comes to Israel and it is no longer up for debate. The final nails have been hit into the coffin.” A study published last year by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis analyzed 2,500 BBC headlines to find that those headlines were “three times as likely to vilify Israel over Hamas.”

BBC Rejects ‘Moneybags Rothschilds’ as Antisemitic Slur: Ruling Denounced as ‘Beyond Comprehension’

BBC Rejects ‘Moneybags Rothschilds’ as Antisemitic Slur: Ruling Denounced as ‘Beyond Comprehension’

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