Have German officials been watching Homeland? I have and so has Melanie Phillips. Times (£)
“The fifth series of the American TV show Homeland ended last month. The series dealt with the West’s Isis nightmare in startlingly pointed fashion. The plot involved an attempted sarin gas attack by Islamists on Berlin’s central train station, facilitated by the cynical Russians with the suggestion that they believe such an atrocity is the only way of opening the West’s eyes to the Islamist threat.Running through the series was the view that the West is refusing to take the draconian measures necessary to deal with the Islamist terrorists. In one episode the CIA hitman Peter Quinn tries to tell myopic CIA bigwigs the facts of life about Isis.Quinn: “They’re there for one reason and one reason only: to die for the caliphate and usher in a world without infidels. That’s their strategy and it’s been that way since the seventh century. So do you really think that a few special forces teams are going to put a dent in that?CIA official: “Well what would you do?”Quinn: “200,000 American troops on the ground indefinitely to provide security and support for for an equal number of doctors and elementary school teachers.”CIA official: “Well that’s not going to happen”
Try and read it all. Later Melanie says:
“For years many British intellectuals have been consumed by a lethal sense of national and western self-loathing. They subscribe to an impregnable consensus around utilitarian ethics in which all hierarchies of values have been abolished and demonised as prejudice. What rules instead is moral and cultural equivalence - through which, at the same time, core western values always lose out.”
That’s absolutely spot on.
Not that I’d immediately think of the BBC (collectively) as British intellectuals, but I certainly think of it (collectively) as part of the impregnable consensus, and the rest of that particular paragraph from Melanie's article perfectly describes the moral stance to which the BBC subscribes.
The BBC is one of the most influential sources people turn to, yes, for information education and entertainment. The BBC’s all consuming efforts to acclimatise the public to Islam and to persuade us that followers of Islam are “just like us, only more virtuous” is a theme that runs through all its output, from CBeebies, through news and current affairs, drama, soaps, to politics, Newsnight and religious broadcasting. It’s the thin edge of a very toxic wedge that will surely split us asunder.
If you believe that it’s only Isis that we need to worry about because it’s a perversion of Islam, (which is the religion of peace) the impregnable consensus has got to you. Remember, the averted terrorist attack on a German city was not just fiction.
