Israel the only country with no capital according to the Beeb

In just nine days the Olympics in London will commence with a now shorter than planned opening ceremony, a questionable representation from those chosen to secure the Games and growing public disquiet over the hardline sponsorship rights which restrict local sellers from serving chips (only the McDonald’s overlords may sell you potato-based goods!)

But these serious and less serious faux pas aside, a new shame for Britain now rears its ugly head – and one with potentially catastrophic diplomatic ramifications.

On perusing the BBC Sport website, The Commentator was disgusted to see the inherent anti-Israel bias shine through even when it comes to something as trivial as country profiles on their Olympics website.

Every other nation represented on the BBC website has a profile of the country which lists ‘Key Facts’. For instance, Djibouti’s top medal sport is athletics, its population is 879,100 and its capital is Djibouti. In case you were unsure, Iranians are good at wrestling, their capital is Tehran and there are just over 75 million people living there.

But if you’re interested in the state of Israel, you’ll have a hard time obtaining a certain bit of information from the BBC website. Sure, Israel shines at sailing and judo (no Mavi Marmara or IDF jokes, please) and it has a population of 7.3million. But we were interested to know where the BBC placed Israel’s capital.

It seems… nowhere.

Israel is the only country listed, correct at the time of writing, that has no capital according to the BBC. Yet they bestow the honour of having East Jerusalem as a capital on the country of ‘Palestine’.

The British establishment’s ongoing problem with the state of Israel manifests itself in many places. Most recently we have seen the Olympic committee reject a massively popular campaign for a one minute silence to commemorate the lives of murdered Israeli athletes. Now the BBC won’t even acknowledge Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel, let alone Jerusalem.

The goalposts in the debate are once again being shifted - as anti-Israel as they possibly can be. This tactic is often used by negotiators to end up with a far more pleasing solution to them than they originally could have hoped for. In denying Israel a capital city, they are trying to shift the debate away from Jerusalem and try to get us to get them to acknowledge Tel Aviv. This is a delegitimisation tactic and nothing more - though we're sure they'll excuse it away by claiming it was an 'oversight' or similar.

Once again the BBC has overstepped the mark and must be held to account. As if the public wasn’t peeved enough about its tax avoidance over recent days – here’s yet another reason to hit the ‘complain’ link and tell them what you really think.