Whatever next

Following my post about how I feel when people I like say stupid things, here’s a post about my own hypocrisy. How does it make you feel when you catch yourself accidentally using tactics you loathe in others? Yes, it’s me, channelling my inner Victoria Derbyshire.

The Gotcha. We criticise BBC stalwarts like Andrew Marr for relentlessly pursuing the ‘gotcha’ for its own sake. What is the adversarial interview for? To draw out the flaws and weaknesses in a given argument, or simply to humiliate the interviewee? If the sole aim is to make the victim shrivel up and expire, like pouring salt on a slug, it indicates that somewhere along the line someone has lost the plot.

It doesn’t happen very often, but when the victim does crumble and fall, the ‘perpetrator’ appears to be taken aback. After the infamous evisceration of George Entwistle John Humphrys kind of protested “I didn’t really mean it”. The pyrrhic victory of killing off your prey altogether. Poor Humph didn’t know his own strength.

Look at those YouTube clips captioned “so-and-so “destroys” so-and-so. In fact, so-and-so very rarely does any such thing. In any case, the way you see it always depends on whose side you’re on.

‘We’ critics of the BBC go for gotchas, too, but one difference is that we’re relatively impotent. If we bag a corker, no-one influential gives a stuff. Personally, I prefer to highlight the ‘general’ pattern of bias, rather than going down the ‘gotcha’ route but I’m not averse to drawing on the particular to illustrate my point. If I ever manage to capture a definitive ‘gotcha’ of my own, I’ll be hypocritical enough to exploit it.   

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Avoiding the term ‘terror.’ Here’s something that doesn’t properly qualify as a gotcha. Yesterday  Frank Gardner (Help me I’m a Muslim) was wheeled in to Beebsplain the fatal incident at a police headquarters in Paris. He said the motive wasn’t clear. The perpetrator was an ex-employee, so it may have been personal. He did mention that the counter-terrorism department was involved in the investigation, but he didn’t know if this will be regarded as terrorism. Well, we all know by now that the perpetrator is a recent ‘convert’ to the ROP, but we don’t yet know whether the conversion was related to the deadly rampage.

In any event, the BBC doesn’t use the term terrorism, said Frank “because one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”. Oh! So that’s the reason the BBC doesn’t use the term! Who knew? However, they sometimes do use it. But not when it’s anything to do with … oh well. 

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“Indarjit Singh, as he has been known to listeners, has accused the corporation of “prejudice and intolerance” after it tried to prevent him from broadcasting an item commemorating an executed Sikh guru who had opposed the forced conversion of Hindus to Islam under the Mughal emperors of India in the 17th century.
He said that the BBC had tried to stop the script being broadcast last November “because it might offend Muslims” 

Good Grief, whatever next.

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US congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s overtly antisemitic remarks, which almost everybody whole-heartedly condemns. Might I say anything almost similar, but in reverse, which could be interpreted in a similar way?

Her most well-known offensive comment is of course  “Israel has hypnotised the world,” There are umpteen articles about this. It was initially a Tweet.  Like Naz Shah, Omar hadn’t realised this was redolent of an antisemitic trope, and she apologised and deleted the Tweet. It’s hard to believe that someone smart enough to get herself elected to congress, as she has, could be so ignorant or innocent, but she did apologise - before almost straight away reverting to type. 

The latter part of the Tweeted sentence is the key: “…may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” 

It’s fair to say that Omar’s background explains her antisemitism, even if it doesn’t justify it - after all she is an American now and she demands to be treated as one - but invoking “Allah” exposes her inability to see ‘reason’. Reason is inaccessible to a religious Muslim. The point I would make is that it’s not “Israel’ that has hypnotised the world. Here, I am about to stray a little (towards shades of hypocrisy) and ask - Who’s hypnotised? Not the world, by a long chalk. Not the Muslim world. Not the U.N. Not the hard left nor the hard right. 

If there’s any ‘hypnotism’ involved, it’s in the historically illiterate population’s trance-like espousal of the hocus-pocus fictitious “narrative’ that the Palestinians and their useful idiots have imposed upon the world. You might say I’m echoing Ilhan Omar in reverse. My narrative is better than your narrative. But I know which side I’m on. The side of reason.

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Rosie Duffield MP made an emotional speech in the HoC  which drew a round of applause from the honourable members sitting nearby. And hugs. 

On the one hand, the HoC seems to have its own inner Victoria Derbyshire about it these days. However, this was about a domestic violence bill, and my off the cuff reaction is that it might be one of those ‘Act in haste, repent at leisure’  laws with unintended consequences. (Not that I know what’s in the bill) Coercive control is already a criminal offence by the way.

We’re so polarised these days. I realise Isabel Hardman has recovered from a serious bout of clinical depression so it’s understandable that her piece in the Spectator (with video) was unequivocally sympathetic to the MP's suffering. However, the comments below the line were not unanimous. Some wanted to hear “his side of the story.” As a casual observer, it immediately struck me that the behaviour of the abusive partner indicated that he had acute pathological insecurities of his own, which also need ‘help’. 

  

Her colleagues’ sympathetic response to Ms Duffield’s story was completely understandable, but for what it's worth, I think, when the dust settles, a reflective approach to this complex two-handed kind of scenario would be productive. Punishing the perpetrator for own psychological problems seems futile.

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If you find your own ambivalence to almost every topic an increasing worry, you’ll understand. 

I’m even beginning to find Lisa Nandy’s ‘tribal’ comment slightly defensible - in a good light and with a following wind.

After all, if you’ve been seduced by the pro-Palestinian machinery (hypnotised)  then you too might aspire to become chair of some ghastly anti-Zionist cabal. I just thought Lisa Nandy was smarter than that, but - may the Israel lobby awaken Lisa Nandy and help her see the evil doings of Hamas.