"Long-term house policy"

I couldn't agree more with James Delingpole about this morning's Today, which after some glimmers of hope in recent months, found the BBC firmly back where they clearly feel most comfortable - and deflecting attention away from the real problem: 

Here is the news: in Australia, a plot by Islamic State sympathisers to capture random members of the public and chop their heads off has been foiled by security services; in Syria, two Americans and a British hostage have been beheaded by an Islamist nicknamed Jihadi John - and another innocent Briton (a taxi driver captured while working for an aid convoy) has been told he is next on the list; across Britain, in the aftermath of the Rotherham enquiry, more and more evidence is emerging that in towns and cities all over the country mostly underage white girls have been systematically groomed, raped and trafficked by organised Muslim gangs, with the complicity of local government authorities, charity workers, police officers and the broader Muslim community.

Luckily, thanks to the BBC, we know what the real problem is here. It is, of course, our old friends, "Islamophobia" and "the spectre of a far right" backlash.

Both of these alleged threats featured prominently on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning, including an interview with a former, self-confessed "far right" thug who revealed - presumably to no listener's especial surprise - that the organisation to which he had belonged was racist, prone to violence, and likely to react strongly to issues like the Rotherham rape gangs.

Today also ran an interview with Tell Mama - the one-man activist organisation run by Fiyaz Mughal which has long since been exposed for its exaggerations and its threadbare methodology in cooking up an alleged spate of "anti-Muslim" hate crimes.

When, for example, last year Tell Mama reported that there had been 212 anti-Muslim incidents, it turned out that 57 per cent of these comprised disobliging comments on Twitter or Facebook, many of them emanating from outside Britain.

And the BBC Today show rounded off with a Muslim spokeswoman who was given space to assure listeners that mosques around Britain were already doing a great deal to combat extremism but hadn't been given credit for it.

Phew. So that's all right then.

Except, of course, it's really not all right.

Perhaps it wouldn't matter so much if this BBC feature were a rare aberration. But it's not. It's long-term house policy. Barely were the bodies of the 52 victims of the 7/7 London bus and tube suicide bombings cold than the BBC's reporters were out pounding the streets looking for evidence of the real issue of concern - not Islamist extremism and its numerous fellow-travellers, of course, but yes, for the spectre of Islamophobia and an anti-Muslim backlash by "the far right." It responded in the same way after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby - complete, of course, with an interview about the "cycle of violence against Muslims" and the "underlying Islamophobia in our society" by our friend Fiyaz Mughal of Tell Mama.

Read more here.