Friday 26 February 2016

Holding off


Remembering something else....


I watched Wednesday night's News at Ten and saw its coverage of the conviction of the Hussain brothers in Rotherham for raping and assaulting (non-Muslim) teenage girls. 

The story righly led the bulletin and dominated its first quarter of an hour.

The two featured BBC reporters mentioned, in passing, the criticisms that political correctness had stymied the investigations into the grooming of thousands of girls there but, astonishingly, didn't initially develop that point.

And it was a full 12 minutes into the bulletin before the BBC's own political correctness allowed even a hint of the story's racial/religious angle - i.e the first (brief) mention of the word 'Pakistani'.

(The word 'Muslim', of course, never featured once. Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation, who invariably appears at this point in the BBC's reporting of such stories, then duly appeared.) 

Frankly, the BBC is the last organisation to accuse others of political correctness when it comes to this kind of story and the irony of this particular bulletin doing that was beyond a joke.

Don't they see it?

5 comments:

  1. This is a really difficult issue from my perspective. As you probably know, Craig, I'll be the first one to call out caveman behavior when I see it, regardless of religion or skin color, and label it as such. But I am also the first one (back on B-BBC, anyway) to point out that these people were cavemen before Mohammed was a twinkle in his uncircumcised father's eye. So it's not entirely credible to blame Islam entirely, if you get my meaning.

    At the end of the millennium, though, fundamentalist Islam has both informed and been a dampening influence on the Pakistani culture these men come from. And it's that sort of caveman culture from which Mohammedamism originally derived, so it's dishonest to ignore that influence entirely.

    I could very easily make an intellectual case that a similarly shackling influence exists in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community. However, it obviously hasn't manifested itself in a similar assault (for lack of a better term) on the host community. And it won't be too difficult to explain why that is.

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  2. OT, but have you seen this:

    http://order-order.com/2016/02/26/newsnight-political-editor-runners-and-riders/

    Lots of people have speculated that Isabel Hardman's performance at the Spectator has been little more than an audition for a BBC job. A bit unfair, as she's more establishment Cameroon than BBC groupthink (identical on the EU and immigration, but you know what I mean). Maybe if the BBC thinks hiring her is some sort of proof that they're bringing in Tories as well as Labourites and Commies.

    Helen Lewis is a better fit, I think. Maybe Nick Watt, since he's available now, but he won't tick the diversity box. Janan Ganesh would tick the skin color box, but he's George Osborne's biographer, so no way for Newsnight.

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    Replies
    1. Given that Ian Katz keeps getting mocked for recruiting from the Guardian, surely he wouldn't dare go for Nick Watt? Picking Helen Lewis would get round that for him. I will, of course, keep my fingers crossed for Isabel Hardman. If it's Tom Newton Dunn I'll eat George Galloway's hat.

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    2. He would dare.

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  3. Does that explain why Isabel Hardman has been doing nothing on Spectator Coffee House but offer up observational banalities? Or is that a reflection of Fraser Nelson's erratic editorship - best seen in that infamous piece blaming the Police and Swedish media for allow a rise of the right wing via censorship of migrant crimes (but absolving the migrants' ideology of all guilt, as he has done in relation to Jihadi terror as well).

    Newsnight seems dead in the water to me. I watch it more out of habit than anything else and frequently switch off after five minutes. It's partly been killed by long running political correctness and the more recent Guardian makeover. Probably the notorious "Paddington Bear" interview of Farage was the final straw for me. But Trumpophobia isn't what I look for either.

    Sadly Newsnight has just become part of the Big Lie machine which amongst other things:

    1. Called the Arab Spring completely wrong misleading many into thinking it was a democratic revolt.

    2. Misdescribed the Syrian revolt as a popular revolt.

    3. Misrepresented the 2015 migrant invasion as one of refugees, principally made up of families with women and children.

    4. Obsesses about issues it is comfortable with e.g. Israel/Palestine or American gun control but does not tackle (or only very, very rarely) things like the ban on Jews and Christian Churches in Saudi Arabia, persecution of Christians and Hindus in Pakistan and other Muslim majority countries, Chinese and Japanese racism etc etc.

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