Recap

As I was saying in my previous post, we all make use of cherry-picked examples when it suits us. Sometimes it’s genuinely necessary to cherry-pick for quick and easy, soundbite-style emphasis, but there’s a fine line between wilful bias by omission and diluting one’s argument with too much background information. Taking things out of context on purpose is nasty, but people who do it habitually dent their own credibility, which ultimately has to be counter-productive. 

Back to finding oneself politically homeless, which is how Melanie Phillips seems to feel. I mean, the way politics is constructed automatically involves a whole bunch of compromises and caveats. It’s a Party Line thing. We toe it for the sake of political unity and efficacy. Finding flaws and faults in your political or ideological compatriots is par for the course.

Who could support Trump unconditionally?  With unconditional love? No-one! He’s decidedly repulsive, inarticulate, almost infantile and seemingly totally un-self-aware. But somehow, his fundamental political instinct seems - if not ‘simply the best’- at least “better than all the rest.”

Another of my bête noire obsessions is the Sarah Champion contradiction. She’s cast as the epitome of unjust political ill-treatment and victimhood - sacrificed at the altar of Corbynism. But she’s no saint, and painting her as one is lazy and misleading. She’s a 'Philo-Islamic' antisemite who kowtowed to the Rotherham Muslim community throughout a vitriolic anti-Israel campaign in 2014, and who sat through Rotherham’s grooming gang activities for a good long while before ‘bravely’ speaking out. So, no, she’s not quite the innocent victim she’s made out to be. 

(I've posted this video about four times now - it's when the camera pans out to reveal 'the room' that I find fascinating)

On the opposite side of the coin, there’s the curate’s egg of Miriam Margolyes. She’s totally and utterly wrong, ignorant and gratuitously vociferous about Israel. Nevertheless, a certain charm still seeps through the narcissism, crudeness and ungainliness. If you see what I mean.

In a similar vein, there’s Jo Brand. Everyone loves to hate her, and even more so following her battery acid quip. Not funny Jo. However, she has a certain wit and I liked her ‘Getting On’ sitcom. It was quality TV.

See? I even like the Guardian. Only for its TV reviews and recaps, mind. At the time when most TV dramas are more or less incomprehensible, the Guardian is invaluable for  ‘explaining’ what passes for ‘the plot’.

I was wrong about David Goodhart. I felt insulted by his definition of ‘Leavers’ as ‘somewheres’, which I interpreted as a euphemistic term for parochial, narrow-minded and insular. Turns out not to be exactly the case. 

I’m ambivalent about nearly everything -  the thing that goes “I used to be indecisive but now I’m not so sure’ that's me, that is. 

Although I am pretty decisive about the (admittedly few) things I do know about. As Douglas Murray said - when you read nonsense about something of which you have first-hand knowledge, it dents the credibility of everything else that emanates from the same source. 

Forwards Updated

The Daily Politics had David Goodhart on. He was given their ‘Soapbox’ platform, to plug that book. 

It must be tedious having to explain his innovative sociological theory again and again, every single time you’re on the bleeding BBC. 

David Goodhart and a passer-by (probably a 'Somewhere')

There are the Somewheres and the Anywheres. The Anywheres are educated and cosmopolitan and the Somewheres are parochial and a bit thick. 

But we, the Anywheres, he explains, mustn’t dismiss the concerns of the Somewheres. If you haven’t read the book, he says, you might assume there’s no nuance, but there is; it’s complicated. 

I haven’t read the book so I mustn’t be judgmental, but if the poor old Somewheres (like me) are guilty of preferring security and familiarity, I suppose the Anywheres prefer insecurity and unfamiliarity. Unattached to the old-style norms, the Anywheres are pioneers of the forthcoming post-everything era. 

I don’t know if it’s only Somewheres that have worries about the rising presence of Islam but I’m sure it’s all addressed in the book, even if it’s all euphemistically couched in language about minority communities.

Update:

I don’t want to look as though I’m obsessed with David Goodhart and his book “The road to Somewhere” so I’m updating this post rather than creating yet another post on the topic .

I think I ought to refine my comments, such as they are, because I’ve now read the interviews he gave to Kathy Gyngell over on TCW. 

I’m beginning to think that the media hasn’t served him well, what with their (and his) exploitation of the provocative soundbite, his invented terms the Anywheres and the Somewheres.” 

Those terms still sound trite and patronising. Even though he modifies these definitions, as he did on the Daily Politics Soapbox, (and has done over a few years) identifying the Somewheres as “less educated” is undeniably disparaging. 

Maybe he needed to invent special new terms in order to publicise his book. (I once saw Nigella Lawson doing a book signing in a deserted Bristol superstore) 

Well, I suppose the media has to have something controversial upon which to hang an item, but it does tend to work against one in the long run.

it is indeed true that the Conservative party ‘seems to have gone completely liberal on this issue” and on several other issues, too. 

Mr. Goodhart’s observations about the family, feminism and the way the Conservative government has caved in to the massive pressure from the ‘progressives’ are entirely worthy. His controversial views on mass immigration (not a wholly positive thing) seem pretty bold, too, for a left-leaning think tankist and author.

David Cameron’s enthusiasm for “gay marriage”, Theresa May’s “Terrorism - Nothing To Do With Islam”,  the government’s lack of support for the institution of marriage and the stable family unit show how far left the Conservatives have gone. What with the implosion of the Labour Party, what else could the Tories do but move into the vacuum?

Has David Goodhart has moved in the opposite direction?   Kathy Gyngell has read the book, including the chapter on the destruction of the family. She describes it as excellent.

There. I needed to say that.

Long View or Wrong View?

I listened with increasing incredulity to Jonathan Freedland's “The Long View of Targeted Fake News” Radio 4. He set out to compare the infamous blood-libel that stemmed from the murder of 8 year-old William of Norwich, with the “Fake News” of today. 

I assume the general idea was to demonstrate the ease with which unfounded rumours can take hold, with ensuing dire and far-reaching consequences. Only - and this is as predictable as anything could possibly be - he chose not to make his comparison between the Jews of then and the Jews of today.  He chose instead  to make his comparison between the wholly unfounded libel against the Jews, which occurred in 1144 and the “New Jews” of the present day; namely the Muslims.  

 At one point he conceded that, while the rumours against the Jews were “bogus’ and “wholly invented”,  there “have been” some attacks involving Muslims, and “there’s a difference”. 

“Yes” said Miqdaad Versi, the man from the MCB, deftly brushing terrorism to one side, “but there have been a number which are entirely fictitious,” and he cited a few inconsequential examples, such as the falsely reported Muslim ban on the new five-pound note. Good grief. 

Jonathan Freedland's Long view isn’t long. In fact it’s pretty short. He failed to see that could have saved himself the trouble of contriving an unconvincing comparison for the very simple reason that the same old blood libel against Jews is still very much alive and kicking. It’s still the same old fake news, the same old antisemitic memes and themes; same as it ever was. He should have compared fake targeted news then with fake targeted news now.  But he didn’t. Instead he chose to make capital out of the flawed claim that ‘Muslims are the new Jews.

He should have taken a genuinely Long View, comparing the much maligned Jews of 1144 with the much maligned Jews of now.

Half the story about hatred of the Jews has been deliberately excised, quashed, suppressed, hidden away from “The News”.  What is “targeted and fake” about that? Just that the omission has crucially skewed the news to the point where it’s simply fake.    

Trust Jonathan Freedland to invite someone from the Muslim Council of Britain to cement his false comparison. 

Still with Jonathan Freedland,  I had intended to say something more about David Goodhart, whose new book “The Road to Somewhere" I wrote about the other day. 

Goodhart seemed to me to be a person from the left who is now perceived by persons from the further left as a bit of a traitor. They accuse him of turning right, evidencing his populist views on immigration, or rather his understanding, nay, sympathetic portrayal of ‘the right’s’ views on immigration. He’s a veritable Gillian Duffy, they assert.

I happened to see Mr. Goodhart on Sunday’s The Big Questions and I still had the feeling, that for all his rationalisations of the poor misunderstood ‘Leave’ voters for whom he’s created the benign-sounding term “Somewheres’,  he is at heart a true lefty trying his best to appear even-handed. 

However, I did wonder, yet again, if I’d got him wrong. Now that Jonathan Freedland has reviewed his book for the Guardian, I’m beginning to think I just might have been right all along.

The first part of the review consists of a straightforward description of the book’s contents. 

(Here am I opining on a book I haven’t even read, the irony of which hasn’t escaped me.)

 However, it’s not so much the book itself that concerns me here, but Freedland’s tiresome conflation of Jewish and Muslim communities. 

Here’s the bit that interested me, which I’ll quote in full:

“Where Goodhart goes wrong above all is on Britain’s ethnic and religious minorities. Even though he concedes that these groups can exhibit Somewhere-ish attitudes – prioritising stable families, for example – he frames them throughout as the cloud on the Somewheres’ horizon, the blot that has darkened the Somewheres’ previously sunny landscape. It is their arrival that has changed Britain beyond recognition, their presence that has to be dealt with.

I’d contend that this ‘blot’ applies exclusively to large Muslim communities where whole ‘landscapes’ have changed beyond recognition and the hapless outsider is subjected to a palpable atmosphere of hostility. This doesn’t apply, on the whole, to Jewish communities, apart from, say, the odd rudeness or brusqueness emanating from some of the ultra orthodox. But Freedland insists on conflating them. He continues:

“Perhaps my own experience as a member of Britain’s Jewish community has skewed my perspective, but I’d suggest that the very qualities Goodhart most admires among the Somewheres – including neighbourliness, trust and a sense of shared destiny – are to be found in Britain’s minorities. They have not caused the social fragmentation he laments: globalisation, automation and a thousand other shifts bear more blame than they do. If anything, and especially in the cities, they point to a remedy for those Anywheres Goodhart believes have become unmoored. Minorities might be more of a model than a threat, more to be emulated than to be feared.”

Where does Jonathan Freedland live? Luton, perhaps? High Wycombe?  Rotherham? I doubt it.

If anything qualifies as ‘targeted fake news’, surely consistently drawing false equivalences between Jews and Muslims comes pretty close.

Belated catching-up

Progressive Class system.

Have YOU read anything by David Goodhart?

His forthcoming book “The Road to Somewhere: The populist revolt and the future of politics”  was plugged on Start the Week yesterday morning. 

Goodhart looks down from heaven at all mankind. Much as he tries to hide it, his approach to the “Somewheres’ sounds patronising. The peasants are revolting, and they wreaked their revenge by by voting Brexit.

My impression was of a simplified analysis that conveniently put us into two groups, by implication ‘good’ and ‘bad’, which came across as heavy-handed and insulting. Too neat and tidy, and smug. Then someone - possibly by Andrew Marr - boosted that impression by casually remarking that “Leave” voters tend to approve of Capital punishment.

I freely admit that I may have misunderstood the whole thing. Correct me if I’ve got it wrong, but I thought David Goodhart sees the “Somewheres” as parochial, narrow-minded and bigoted, part of ‘the hang-em-and-flog-em brigade’, whose brains are addled by ignorance and fear of the unfamiliar.  

Mind you, he did concede that extremism in the  “Somewheres” only represents a small minority of the Somewheres. (In other words extremist ‘Somewheres’ are Nothing To Do With common ‘Somewheres’)

The “Anywhere” lot, on the other hand, are the open-minded liberal elite, the ‘anywhere I hang my hat, that’s my home’ brigade. They the are right-minded globalists who love adventure and are open to new ideas and dismissive of the old; they are the moral-equivalence-mongers.

‘Anywheres’ and ‘Somewheres’ sound like progressive euphemistic terms for old fashioned class snobbishness.

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Not newsworthy. Part 1.

Much of the most recent bias is that of omission. The OMG Daily Mail featured a couple of tales about you-know-what and you-know-who which the BBC hasn’t covered. A story about foreign aid funding incitement against Jewish Israelis appeared in that newspaper two days running. 

The readers’ comments were divided, perhaps between the anywheres and the somewheres, but one couldn’t be sure which was which. 

 

role-play

The other Daily Mail story was more upbeat, and the same story was also featured in the Times. It was a ‘picture’ story about orthodox ‘Stamford Hill’ Jews celebrating Purim and was quite jolly. Ultra conservative parents were snapped with their children who were dressed up in elaborate fancy dress. Quite a sight. 

The BBC wasn’t interested. However, elsewhere it’s almost as if a lightbulb has suddenly been switched on. Oh look, here’s something we hadn’t noticed till now.

We await,  with anticipation, the media’s celebrations for the Balfour centenary. Hopefully not influenced by this. Warning; contains traces of Robert Fisk.

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In fact there’s a rather embarrassing bandwagon emerging. The antisemitism bandwagon. People who were the most vocal “critics of what Israel is doing to the Palestinians” and the most ardent defenders of Islamic immigration and apologists for Hamas and so on, like, say Owen Jones, have started making statements about antisemitism, and how they’re against all forms of racism. 

Jeremy Corbyn is on board, as are a sizeable portion of the Labour Party. It’s rife in the US too. Think Linda Sarsour whose recent concerns about antisemitism can only have been adopted to mask the antisemitism within her anti-Israel activism. 

There has also been a mini explosion of genuinely non-political Israel-themed reporting. We’re talking foodie programmes and articles, although the Times piece featured a book based on Israeli research rather than the research itself. 

Taking the ultra cynical view, as is my wont, it could be that a certain section of the media has belatedly woken up to the fact that the disproportionate focus on all things Islam (Eid, Ramalamadingdam, the Hajj, the hijab, etc) was beginning to look conspicuously propagandistic. They’ve realised that if they must equate antisemitism with Islamophobia and vice versa every time one or the other comes up, then they have no excuse for ignoring Purim or, for that matter failing to interest themselves in the wide ranging achievements of the Israelis. 

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Not newsworthy Part 2.

This is pretty shocking by any scale of bias-by-omission. It’s yet another occasion when glorification of a murderer is played down. 

Compare the (neutral) BBC’s report with (anti-Israel) Al Jazeera’s . The two reports appear to have got mixed up.

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Still catching up.

Recently I’ve been reading reports by Jonathan Hoffman on Harry’s Place and David Collier on his blog ‘Beyond The Great Divide’ about the appalling events in “Israel Apartheid week”  (I think it’s a fortnight now) an annual event hosted by various universities.

These talks take the form of one speaker or a panel and include a Q & A session. They do not appreciate criticism or any sort of critical questioning. If some of the speeches are fact-free and fanciful it doesn’t matter because we’re in a post-factual era. Only feelings count, and the sort of feelings at Israel Apartheid events should be evident from the title.

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Talking of antisemitism, there were a couple of threads on Guido’s blog last week, one about Jenny Tonge and Jackie Walker having tea together.

and the other  about more of Jackie Walker's insights (“Jewish media pattern’)

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They say no-one reads the comments on Guido Fawkes’s blog. But surely that can’t be 100% true! Last week I read the comments on the thread entitled “Budget Bloodbath”. https://order-order.com/2017/03/08/budget-bloodbath/ 

For some reason this comment struck me:

Tom Collins 

“We have over 3 million muslims. 50% of the men and 75% of the women, are signed on at the Job Seekers Centres. Cost of their Benefits = £14 Billion a year.There are probably 600,000 Somalis living in the UK.80% live in Social Housing compared to 17% of the indigenous population. Over 21% of muslims have never worked.. These facts, and others, could drive one to drink. The future cost of this massive, uncontrolled immigration is virtually unimaginable.”

I don’t know if Mr. Collins’s figures are correct, but I did follow a link from Not a Sheep’s blog which appeared around the same time. It led to a covert video from 2009 filmed surreptitiously at the Darul Uloom school, which I hoped to paste into this blog for your edification. But it’s been taken down and I don’t really blame them. I wonder if the ofsted inspectors are mad or blind.

“A person who’s got less than a fistful of beard, then you should stay away from him” 

said the teenage Imam, randomly kicking pupils as he wandered past the children sitting in rows on the floor

Thanks, I certainly will. And a person who’s got more than a fistful of beard and a dress, for sure.

Again, at the same time as the above - possibly on the same day - I came across a piece via a link on our sidebar to an item on the ITV website.

“A new report says measures to tackle terrorism and extremism are jeopardising efforts to promote integration in Britain.
Government initiatives such as Prevent and Channel risk "fomenting fear and resentment" among people from national and ethnic minorities, a European watchdog claims.”

 I was going to paste the whole item into this, but you’ll get the drift from a few excerpts.

“The report highlights Prevent duty as a problem, the policy was brought in during 2015 and requires state bodies such as schools and councils to report people they suspect of being at risk of early radicalisation.
The Advisory Committee "observes that under these programmes liability has been shifted to local authorities and in particular to teachers, to detect early radicalisation," the paper says. 

The report criticises the fact teachers and lecturers were not given the "necessary competence" and putting them at risk of "over-reacting for fear of breaking the law.
Prevent has repeatedly attracted controversy, with critics labelling it "toxic" and calling for it to be scrapped.”
[…]
The study said: "Overall, persons belonging to ethnic minorities are in a better place in reducing educational gaps, but challenges remain in relation to higher levels of unemployment, low wages, underemployment, worse health status and access to care, high levels of poverty, low levels of English language knowledge and inadequate political representation.”

(emphasis added.)

Tom Collin’s assertions look quite credible now. Surely it’s those European watchdogs that need watching.

A European watchdog that can’t even watch an ethnic minority that’s busily fomenting hate and resentment against ‘the unbelievers’ since well before the Prevent strategy was a gleam in the eye of its creator must be as useless as one of those chocolate teapots that people keep referring to.

If we’re afraid to provoke enclaves of hostile citizens by interfering with their hostility to us, we’re stymied. We’ll just have to stand back and wait till enough “fear and resentment” are fomented to ignite  civil war. 

Meanwhile the BBC and much of the MSM are flooding the air waves with Good Muslim stuff while waiting for ‘integration’ to happen, which they hope to bring about by turning a blind eye to schools like Darul Uloom, ignoring the antisemitic teaching in aid-funded UNRWA and PA  schools and downplaying the glorification of Palestinian terrorists. 

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Unlike my co-blogger I live in a self-employed micro bubble. Everyone round here is self-employed apart from, say, schoolteachers and the G.P. And I’m not too sure if he isn’t, come to think. 

Meddling with NICs didn’t sound like good news but the devil’s in the detail and they say some will be better off. Maybe Phillip Hammond will be forced to make a u-turn when possible on the long and winding road towards our fiscal destination.

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The other day I read an essay about how to construct essays. I thought it might help. 

(The introduction should contain a clear indication of the proposed conclusion. The argument plus a counter-argument should be sandwiched between the introduction and the conclusion.)  Show your workings-out. Or make ‘em up and stick ‘em in afterwards. 

What if you reach the end without a conclusion?  I’ll never be able to write properly constructed essays.