BBC is Really Spooky

"Spooks" is a BBC spy drama series.

Eric Lee blogs about it:-

October 16, 2006

"Spooks" and the Jews: The BBC crosses a red line
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The BBC has just aired a special two-part episode of the hit television series "Spooks" in which the villains -- a team of terrorists -- turn out to be agents of the Israeli government.

In the episode, the Israelis (who are Mossad agents) pose as Al Qa'eda terrorists, and seize control of a Saudi Arabian building in London, taking hostages, several of whom they murder in cold blood. One of their confederates, a British agent whose Israeli wife was killed in a terrorist blast in Tel-Aviv years before, stabs to death a female, blonde MI5 officer who suspected that he was helping terrorists.

In scenes in which the top MI5 boss, Harry, confronts his Mossad counterpart in London, it is made clear that this is no "rogue" outfit, but an official (albeit deniable) Mossad operation.

Now, I don't know if anyone else has a problem with this, but a couple of things come to mind.

October 24, 2006

Once more on the subject of "Spooks"

Following a special double episode of the hit BBC television series "Spooks" in which the bad guys turned out to be the Israeli Mossad (see my previous article) you'd think they would take a break. But instead, the episode aired last night on BBC3 (next week on BBC 1) in which the bad guys are initially fanatical Christian fundamentalists also turns out to have an Israeli angle.

The really bad guys in last night's episode manage to trick the Mossad into thinking that the show's hero, an MI5 agent, is some kind of anti-Semite, so the Mossad sends in a crack assassination team of around six men armed with easily-identifiable Israeli pistols. ("Ooo! Jerichos - they must be Israelis!" declares one of the crack MI5 team.)

Fortunately, the tall blonde heroine this season (who in the previous episode snarls out the phrase 'Yemenite Jew') uses her martial arts skills to disarm most of them, while unarmed hero Adam deals with the rest. The one surviving member of this "elite" unite of bumbling Jewish terrorists is called off following a phone call made by MI5 boss Harry to his Israeli counterpart, the cultural attache at the Israeli embassy. (Harry threatens to have all the Mossad agents in London deported if they don't stop shooting at MI5 officers right now. And no, I'm not making this up.)

You would think that the Mossad would be running out of trained (albeit rather inept) assassins, having lost an entire squad last week to MI5, but there seems to be a limitless supply of these types floating around London, ready to be picked off by MI5 each week. This is now three weeks in a row that Spooks is staying focussed on the Mossad theme.

The writer of some (all?) of the most recent episodes is a Lebanese-born author named Raymond Khoury. I wonder if he has a political agenda that we're not aware of.

(kippah tip: Melanie Phillips)