 |
| Martine Croxall, on her high horse again |
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you must have missed Martine Croxall doing the papers late last night. Her comments about Trevor Phillips’s “What Muslims really think” articles were pure BBC. Denial is absolutely not just a river in Egypt.
Yep.
Martine Croxall's BBC News Channel paper reviewers were describing the Trevor Phillips/'What British Muslims Really Think' story in the Daily Mail last night, when Martine decided she had a point to make and went on to mount her high horse (in a very animated fashion):
Martine Croxall: But to say 'all Muslims are the same' is quite ridiculous, isn't it?
Yeah, and there's a hashtag #WhatBritishMuslimsReallyThink - really, really caught people's imagination on Twitter. Things...saying things like "This is so tiresome and passé. Can't we just be treated like everybody else?".
And some of the stuff is very funny, some of the comments that they're saying...you know, "Shall I put my cream on my jam or my jam on my cream? #WhatDoMuslimsReallyThink", you know, from a Muslim in Devon.
I mean, it's making light of it because it's saying not all Muslims are the type that [starts laughing] this article's talking about.
Talk about erecting a straw man!
As if Trevor Phillips actually said that 'all Muslims are the same' or wrote in his article that "all Muslims" are of one "type"!
It was an truly ridiculous outburst from a supposedly impartial BBC presenter.
The whole tenor of the discussion changed as a result. Her guests (hitherto neutral-sounding) started saying things like, "Yeah", "Well, it's like saying all Christians are the same", "There's the danger it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy as well if you try to put Muslims in a box", surveys can be "skewed", etc.
What is it with BBC journalists and this kind of story? Impartiality really does seem to fly out the window all round.
Trevor Phillips's Daily Mail article is a considerably shorter read than his Sunday Times piece. Its points are, therefore, easier to digest.
Here's something from it that Martine Croxall could have raised instead:
*******
Trevor Phillips's Daily Mail article is a considerably shorter read than his Sunday Times piece. Its points are, therefore, easier to digest.
Here's something from it that Martine Croxall could have raised instead:
Finally, there’s the small matter of the Jews: 35 per cent of British Muslims – compared to 8 per cent of others – believe Jewish people have too much power in Britain.
Now that's a statistic that points to a very important story.
Tricky stuff, DNA. Especially if unique.
ReplyDeleteI still haven't been able to find that old John Reith comment telling us to shut up because we're messing up the BBCs' attempts at Social Cohesion. One of these days I will dig it up. We also have Mark Easton's statement that the BBC has a duty to it and they take a different interpretation of it from OMGtDM. These are both from several years ago, and nothing has changed, even with new management. It's the personnel.
ReplyDeleteThanks Craig. Good for you for expanding on the Martine Croxall reference.
ReplyDeleteWhat with Owen Bennett-Jones’s Deobandis, (tomorrow radio 4; 9am) and Trevor Phillips’s C4 documentary “What Muslims Really Think” (10 pm Wednesday 13th April) about that ‘in-depth’ ICM poll, plus the corruption in Tower Hamlets, sexual grooming in Rochdale, Luton, Oxford and Sheffield, sexual assaults cropping up throughout Europe, how long can the BBC bubble keep drifting along before it pops?
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/04/trevor-phillips-is-finally-discovering-the-pitfalls-of-the-term-islamophobia/
See Douglas Murray, Spectator, above.
Ah yes, "the self fulfilling prophecy" - yep, I blame that Winston Churchill for WW2. If it wasn't for him and his dire prophecies the Narzees would all have been knitting scarves and making paper doilies rather than rampaging across Europe. But when you think about it, it's basically saying all these peaceful folk are actually barely keep a lid on their violent emotions and one false move could make them blow (the Nabdila Ramdani Thesis, I'd call it). Kind of "Shall I put my cream on my jam or my jam on my cream, or shall I smash up the whole Cream Tea Parlour jsut because you said there is a problem with my faith?"
ReplyDeleteTrevor Phillips, for all his previous misdemeanours, is to be heartily congratulated on having the guts to address the issue in something like a pragmatic and sensible manner - unlike 99% of BBC, Sky and ITV media professionals.