Resist it while you can

Everyone will have seen the video of milkshake-gate by now.

No use crying over spilt milk - but it went all over Tommy’s favourite jacket and stale milk does have an unpleasantly pervasive stink.

Now, one might speculate that Tommy (Real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) was almost asking for it - he knows it’s the kind of thing that happens to him, as it has happened many times before.  He’s been hit, punched, sworn at and called a fascist and a racist.

He’s often excitable, his body language can be provocative, and if someone is confrontational and aggressive with him, he can be equally confrontational and aggressive back. The fact that he’s not as afraid of a punch-up when push literally comes to shove gives him the edge over your average shrinking violet. I suppose John Prescott had that going for him back in the day.

I think Tommy’s excitability, impetuousness and tendency to make exaggerated claims weaken him and undermine any credibility he might otherwise have. These shortcomings allow people like Brendan O’Neill, who’s usually pretty smart, to say something as annoying as this... 

“It doesn’t matter what you think of Robinson’s views — like the vast majority of people, I oppose them.” 

...without feeling the need to qualify it further, which is what he says in an article that actually sets out to defend Tommy Robinson’s right to go about his lawful business - campaigning as an independent for the upcoming Euro elections - unimpeded.

The fact that the police got in their car and scarpered at the first sign of trouble added insult to injury. 

The comments below the line are mixed. Several commenters take issue with the assumption that “the vast majority of people oppose his views.” Yes, it’s likely that the vast majority of people dislike Tommy Robinson, or consider him too toxic to ‘like’, but do the vast majority really oppose his views? If so, which views? Do “the vast majority of people” support the Islamification of Britain, or support the introduction of Sharia Law? Or any of the other cultural differences that are gaining notoriety?

Probably the people who agree with Brendan O’Neill’s “opposition” to Tommy Robinson’s views inhabit what is often described as the “media bubble”.

We’ve come a long way from the days when Christopher Hitchens tried to warn us. How perceptive he was. Resist it while you can.

Natalie Haynes Doesn't Stand Up for (Dead) Christopher Hitchens

Natalie Haynes, standing up

One Radio 4 series I've always rather enjoyed is Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. 

It's in its fourth series now and I've heard and, up till now, enjoyed every episode of it.

It's USP is that it's a BBC programme about Classical Greece and Rome presented by a former stand-up comedienne. 

I like quirky Natalie's enthusiasm for the classics. She makes me smile and, every so often, laugh even. And her enthusiasm spurs me into exploring things I've not explored before. 

It's not hard to see it as classic old-fashioned BBC: Inform, educate and entertain. 

But it's also very contemporary BBC. 

Its mock-amateurism-plus-experts is just for starters in that respect...

This week's episode talked about Phryne, the beautiful Greek courtesan who inspired the great Athenian sculptor Praxiteles of Athens to create a trend-blazing full-sized female nude, the Aphrodite of Knidos (which aroused at least one Athenian male to embarrass himself to the point of disgrace and suicide), and who was tried for impiety.

According to tradition, at her trial her lawyer Hypereides (the Michael Mansfield of his day), with the trial seeming to be going against here, disrobed her and showed the jurors her naked body and, "out of pity", the jurors acquitted her. 

Alas poor bare-breasted Phryne (her name a Tommy Robinson-style moniker that meant 'Toad') struggled to retain her position as the episode's focus. Her champion Natalie Haynes usurped her place and spent a remarkable amount of time ranting....yes, ranting....about herself and how upset and hard-done-by she felt personally about a Vanity Fair piece by the late Christopher Hitchens called Why Women Aren't Funny.

We were in full feminist rant mode here. 

And, to my shocked astonishment, Natalie banged on and on, and joked on and on, about how she's still alive while he's dead.

She really did. 

(He died of cancer in 2011). 

And the ruder she got about her aliveness and his deadness the more BBC audience whooped and clapped.

Now, why did that BBC audience whoop and clap rather than gasp, groan and boo (or stay stonily silent)? How do I know? But...

Phryne (as Aphrodite)

Probably they did so because they - or the most vocal parts of 'they' - felt that it's the right thing to do when you're in such an audience and faced with such jokes: applaud a right-on feminist rant from a BBC comedienne because it sounds like the right thing to do, and whoop and clap even harder if you think it reaches Frankie Boyle levels of offensiveness against a deserving target, even if you know next to nothing about that target or his views {and even when the jokes come nowhere near Frankie's jokes, quality-wise}. You're a BBC Radio 4 audience after all. That's what you do.  

So, am I just being a snowflake here? Shouldn't I just laugh along with Natalie here?

Yes, she's not died from cancer yet but Christopher Hitchens has. (You go girl!) And he upset her with a provocative article in an American magazine and now he's dead. (Karma!). What's to object to?

And BBC Radio 4 must have thought the same way. They gave this edition of the programme a pass.

On Syria

Here's a thought-provoking piece by Peter Hitchens in today's Mail on Sunday. Is he right?:

If a small army of Islamist terror fanatics makes its base in a crowded city, and will not let women and children leave, it is very hard to know what to do. For instance, the Iraqi army was faced with this problem in 2014 when it sought to recapture the city of Fallujah from Jihadists. Nouri al-Maliki, then President of Iraq and so the West’s ally, used barrel bombs to fight ISIS terrorists in Fallujah. Pro-ISIS propaganda made much of the civilian deaths, but I don’t recall the USA, or the BBC, or the moralizing choir who now emote over Aleppo and shout ‘war-crimes’, saying much. Nor do we hear at all from these moralists about Saudi Arabia’s rather savage little war now going on in Yemen (using British munitions) [well, in fairness, we do hear about Saudi Arabia, Yemen and British munitions on the BBC's 'Newsnight'. They've been heavily reporting the story for months] in which more than 2,000 civilians are said to have died. There’s a similar problem over the severe criticisms of the Syrian government made by the USA’s diplomats and their mouthpiece, the BBC. 

Near-identical repression of dissent in Bahrain and Egypt (currently our allies) passes with barely a mention. Their governments aren’t called ‘regimes’. Why is this? For instance, on a recent edition of BBC Radio 4’s over-rated ‘Today’ programme, the presenter, Justin Webb, stated as a matter of fact that Russia ‘has no obvious interest’ in bringing the Syrian war to an end. How does he know? He then used that interesting phrase ‘some who think’. There are some (namely me) who think this is a BBC way of sliding an opinion into a place where it shouldn’t be. Anyway, according to Mr Webb ‘There are some who think they (the Russians) want it to go on and on and on in order to damage Europe with the flows of migrants’. No doubt there are, but who are they, and are they right, and why is Justin Webb smuggling this opinion (especially if it isn’t his) into a major news programme? 

A BBC spokesperson says feebly that this is ‘news analysis’, but it looks to me like taking sides. From the start I have been shocked by the BBC’s partial coverage of this issue, and its willingness to be a conduit for war propaganda in Syria, as it was in Libya. This is important because we are being softened up for a war far more risky than that in Libya or Iraq. In Syria, western forces might actually find themselves in direct combat with Russian troops and planes. Can you begin to imagine how dangerous that could be for Europe and the world? 

Please don’t be rushed into supporting such a thing, even by the BBC.

As everyone's writing about Syria today, here's something I prepared earlier on the subject (about a month ago) but didn't get round to publishing because I wasn't sure it was well-thought-through enough. Still, as it ties in with the above piece, here goes anyhow. Please see what you make of it:

Having been focused so much on Brexit-related matters in recent months I must have failed to notice a lot of other BBC bias-related issues. But out of the corner of my eye I do seem to have semi-registered a lot of the BBC's Syria-related coverage. And I think, not having much of a bone in the fight, that I can state with some confidence that the BBC has overwhelmingly featured partisan voices from only narrow side of this many sided-conflict - and, far more than anyone else, the voices of/supporters of 'the moderate Syrian opposition'. Voices supportive of what the BBC calls "the Assad regime" (with the same regularly that it calls IS "the so-called Islamic State") are voices I've very rarely heard. 

I almost blogged about it a couple of months ago when a Newsnight special on Syria was so staggeringly one-sided (in favour of 'the moderate Syrian opposition' against 'the Assad regime') that it struck me as something quite extraordinary. And an episode of PM  reminded of that, featuring (as it did) two anti-'Assad regime' voices. 

As one of those people who used to kind-of think of the BBC as having its own foreign policy rather than merely following the dictates of the Foreign Office, I've started to rethink matters. Of course, my rethinking might be leading me into Corbynista-style conspiratorialism, but the BBC's apparent siding with a particular stand in the Syrian conflict (against the 'regime') does strike me as being worth getting a serious handle on. 

My personal bias on this is that I can't really find any side, other than the Kurds (and even they - in Syria - are linked to Turkey's far-left, terrorist PKK), to root for. Like many though, I find the barrel-bombing, Hizbollah-backed/backing butchers of 'the Assad regime' a somewhat safer option than the heart-eating, 'moderate Syria opposition' who have aligned themselves with the al-Qaeda boys there, if only because Bashar and Asma aren't the types to slaughter non-Muslims, run amok in Paris or behead Catholic priests in Normandy. They keep their own atrocities local (though their well-recorded, highly cynical use of the very worst Islamists to help them survive gives me another cause for having a 'pause for thought' about them).

Hitched to their bandwagon

Harry's Place has just cross-posted a fine tribute (originally posted in The Independent) to the late, great Christopher Hitchens - a man so full of contradictions as to make you proud to be a human being. 

It brought back to me, as Sue and myself are feeling nostalgic today, an old comment of mine (now lost) from the October of last year, left on the old Biased BBC blog:  

Radio 4's 'Book of the Week' at the moment is Christopher Hitchens' latest collection of essays, Arguably. There are 108 essays for them to choose from, covering a broad canvas of history, literature, science and politics. They've missed out all his literature pieces and have chosen four political ones instead, plus a meditation on science. 

There are a wide range of political essays in the book. They could have chosen any of his essays on the threat from radical Islam (such as this). They chose not to, nor to pick any of his essays on the Iraq War, which he supported (such as this.) Nor his powerful essay, 'What Happened to the Suicide Bombers of Jerusalem?' They passed over his essays attacking the madness of Hugo Chavez and the Castro Dynasty or his pieces on the slave state of North Korea. 

They will be broadcasting a fine piece on Lebanon, probably for its hopeful ending (which will chime with their enthusiasm for the 'Arab Spring'). It will be interesting to see how they abridge that long piece. Will they cut out much of his savaging of the thuggish/anti-semitic elements in Lebanon? [I'm embarrassed to say I failed to follow that question up at the time - and the answer will have to hang in the air forever as it's no longer available to listen to]. 

The other three articles are just what you would expect the BBC to select:

1. Believe Me - It's Torture. An attack on the U.S. use of waterboarding.  

2. Let Them Eat Pork Rinds. A piece on social class and the flooding of New Orleans, beginning with a strong attack on George W. Bush and his mother.  

3. The Vietnam Syndrome. An attack on America's use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.   

108 essays to choose from, and the BBC select the three that seem most to reflect their political prejudices, pieces all from the Left side of Hitchens, none from his Right side.

May the non-existent God bless that many-sided man! And darn the BBC for attempting to shrink him into being merely their sort of human being!