Barbara Amiel

At 83 years old, Barbara Amiel physical status not available right now. We will update Barbara Amiel's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

After her return to London, from 1986 to 1999, Amiel was a columnist for The Times and, from 1991, a senior political columnist for The Sunday Times. In 1995, she moved to The Daily Telegraph, then owned by Conrad Black's company.

In December 2001, she alleged in The Spectator magazine that coarse and reputedly antisemitic remarks had been uttered by the ambassador of a "major EU country" at a party she hosted. The Times of London identified the individual as then-French ambassador to the UK, Daniel Bernard. Amiel said he had described Israel as "that shitty little country". Bernard, via a spokesman, did not deny making the comment.

Amiel's journalism became known, according to Andy McSmith in 2007, for her "ferocious" defence of Israel and as an opponent of the BBC. She wrote in September 2003 that while "it is too late to kill Arafat," the "conflict in the Middle East is not amenable to a peaceful solution and can only be solved by the total victory of one side" either by "the Arabs annihilating the Israelis or the Israelis being forced to use every means, not excluding nuclear power, to defend themselves." She was accused in 2002 by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, former editor of The Sunday Telegraph, of writing "enragingly narrow-minded and logic-choppingly unpersuasive apologies for Israel". After Amiel lost her Daily Telegraph column in May 2004, Worsthorne described her, of all Black's "neo-conservative columnists", as the "worst of the lot".

In a July 2003, Daily Telegraph article, she wrote that the BBC had been "a bad joke in its news and public affairs broadcasting for several decades" with its "relentless anti-Israel and anti-America biases". A few months earlier, in a March 26 Telegraph article, she said that the BBC Arabic Service had never analysed the power structures inside Iraq and how it merged into the interests of Saddam Hussein's family. The head of the World Service, Mark Byford, said the Arabic Service had covered these issues with "countless interviews and debates".

In a Telegraph article published on 3 March 2003, she compared the BBC's Arabic Service to "the controlled press in Arabic dictatorships" who are not allowed to publish any criticisms of their governments.

Amiel was criticized in 2004 by William Dalrymple in the New Statesman for writing articles that portray Arabs and Islam in a derogatory manner. In an early 2004 Telegraph article, Amiel made claims which greatly overestimated Muslim demographics in France and its potential growth, asserting it was "not impossible" for a majority of the French population to be Muslims by the end of the 2020s. Michèle Tribalat, a demographer at Institut national d'études démographiques (INED) said the figures Amiel suggested were "une sottise" ("a piece of foolishness"). Nick Cohen, in a January 2002 New Statesman article, accused Amiel of being one of the people who believe "objectively the anti-American is pro-Bin Laden". She had responded to a speech the dramatist Harold Pinter had delivered on 10 September 2001 calling for opposition to American foreign policies. According to Amiel, comments by Pinter on these lines had long "been an incitement to violence. No amount of bons mots can quite distance him morally from what took place the next day", meaning the September 11 attacks.

Duff McDonald in Vanity Fair wrote that "her fiery prose makes Ann Coulter's seem tame in comparison". According to McDonald, Amiel has used her outlets to "defend nonviolent sexual harassment" of the kind Anita Hill said she had endured from (then) Supreme Court justice nominee Clarence Thomas, to describe homosexuality as abominable, and to describe as "horrifying" the Princess of Wales' sympathy for AIDS sufferers.

In 2005, she rejoined Maclean's as a columnist under its new editor, Kenneth Whyte.

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