Cultures of fear; one exposed / one pending

It seems like an ominous coincidence that today’s blanket coverage of Dame Janet Smith’s review  of the BBC’s Savile scandal comes on the same day as reports on the Rotherham abuse trial:

Both cases involve people in authority turning a blind eye to the terrible abuse that was going on virtually before their very eyes.

Both cases involved  ‘cultures of fear’, and we’re now seeing remorse, regret and attempts to apologise to the victims, or ‘survivors’.

At the BBC potential whistleblowers were afraid to act in case doing so would damage their job prospects; in Rotherham everyone was afraid to speak out for fear of being found guilty of a crime more heinous than any other.... racism.     Yet several truly vile individuals were left, unhindered and unchallenged,  to carry out unimaginable crimes - in Rotherham with the collusion of corrupt members of the Police and Rotherham council ad in the BBC, where there undoubtedly was collusion, but by individuals as yet unnamed.

Rotherham - from the BBC website:

“This is the first trial to come to court since the revelation that 1,400 children in Rotherham were groomed and abused. Even more stunning was that the authorities had ignored repeated warnings.
They preferred instead to protect the reputation of the town, or to avoid rocking race relations in Rotherham but in doing so police officers and social workers missed many opportunities to investigate abuse on a huge scale. 

“A youth worker in the town, who wrote an unpublished report for the Home Office in 2002 on child sexual exploitation, said the men had considered themselves above the law.Adele Gladman said: "They were being allowed to do it completely unchallenged and I think that did definitely give them a feeling of invincibility."I don't think I have ever encountered the levels of sadism and torture and sheer cruelty that we were encountering against children."

At the BBC, back then, Savile and Hall, (and now perhaps assorted other “talent”)  were also considered beyond criticism. Their status bestowed infallibility upon them.

Tony Hall’s apology seems futile, like governments apologising to the descendants of victims of historic abuses by cultures gone by. All his promises not to let it happen again and his proposals about how to go about ensuring that it won’t, don’t seem enough, somehow. 

I’m sure others will have a lot more to say about this, but I would like to highlight a parallel problem, which I hope will one day be resolved.

It concerns the BBC’s arrogance, its overbearing certainty that it is right and you are wrong.  In the Q & A session following the prepared speeches, a question addressed to Tony Hall stressed that contemporaneous complaints about Savile and Hall had been dismissed and batted away by the BBC. Tony Hall duly batted it away; I don’t think the irony was missed.

The missing question most urgently begged concerns the BBC’s bias. What would Tony Hall have to say about that? 

The BBC’s political and cultural biases are well documented, as is the reflexive batting away of complaints and complainants.

Just as the levels of corruption and collusion in the cases of Rotherham and the BBC are finally coming to light, I hope one day the extent of the BBC’s antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism will be seem for what it is.

Many viewers have noticed the BBC’s systematic downplaying of the Islam factor in sex abuse and other cultural practices that contravene British cultural norms, and the insidious normalisation of Islamic religious rituals and superstitions that are superimposed on all genres of broadcasting.

No doubt the message surrounding the new mosque in Albert Square will eventually be one of good Islam triumphing over evil Islam. 

“There is a great opportunity here to dispel misconceptions about Muslims and their faith, and we know that EastEnders has done this in the past through its Muslim characters.  

“However, there is a worry if this set is built to pursue a particular storyline along the lines of extremism, which would in fact further denigrate the Islamic faith and play into the hands of negative stereotypes that are unrepresentative of the majority of Muslims living in Britain.”

I haven’t watched Eastenders since the Vic was run by Den and Angie, so I don’t know if the plot-lines have reflected the Rotherham issue. 

I have already mentioned the frequent guest appearances of well-known antisemites as panellists and experts on the BBC’s political, religious and ethical programmes. Abdel Bari Atwan, George Galloway, umpteen pro-Palestinian activists - nearly always without the health warning that accompanies individuals or bodies considered right-wing.

Then there’s the unexplored territory of antisemitism in the new left. Jeremy Corbyn has never been truly challenged by any of the BBC’s rottweiler-like attack dogs over his association with antisemites and supporters of terrorism. 

Douglas Murray.  “Britain’s New Mainstream Racists?”

“Of course the Labour party has responded in the usual way -- split between expressions of concern and those of outright denial. But the real question is: when did this type of behaviour break out into the open and become acceptable? The answer is obvious to me. From the accounts of those in the OULC and elsewhere, it is clear that anti-Semitism surfaced in the Labour party at exactly the moment the party started to be led by a man who, throughout his political life, had demonstrated extreme comfort with anti-Semites.”

and Tom Harris in the Telegraph:

There’s no shame in Zionism: we must reclaim the word from anti-Semites

“........ the onslaught against Israel from the broader Left of British politics is real, aggressive and worrying.
Michael Dugher, the former Shadow Culture Secretary who was recently sacked by Jeremy Corbyn, made a speech to a Labour Friends of Israel meeting last year in which he declared: “I am proud to call myself a friend of Israel. I am proud to call myself a Zionist.” 

“ Not only do we have a leader who can’t even bring himself to utter the word “Israel” when he’s attending a reception organised by Labour Friends of You Know Where. But we also have a leader who calls the terrorist, anti-semitic fanatics of Hamas his “friends”.”

At present the BBC overlooks antisemitism. Many of its employees are Islamophiles and Israelophobes.  Accusations of bias are there to be batted away. Antisemitism has become mainstream. 

As a whole the BBC supports Labour, is tolerant of the religion and culture of Islam, and hostile towards Israel accordingly. Its Middle East reporters and journalists are ignorant about Israel’s history and in denial about the similarities between Israel’s situation and our own, vis a vis Islamic terrorism. They tend to see ‘all Jews’ as capitalists; greedy, manipulative and self serving. This is the opposite of the truth, frightening and quite scandalous. 

So. One cover-up exposed, at least one more to go.