Insulting listeners intelligence

And now for something completely different.  It’s not about Israel. (well, only a tiny bit)

Insulting voters’ intelligence? I thought: am I the only one who was taken aback by the bullying here? (scroll to about 2:21.41)  It’s Nick Robinson taking advantage of his position in the concluding moments of this tetchy interview with George Eustice.

G.E. “In the interest of balance you need to recognise that the leader of the opposition…

N.R. (interrupting) “I don’t think we need any lectures from you about balance Mr Eustice, we interviewed Mr Starmer all about it yesterday”..

I did spot another reference to this exchange within a GB News feature titled: 'Does Britain still love the BBC?’  (scroll to about 6:20)   Dame Esther Rantzen (Supporting the Beeb) and Rupert Lowe (not so much,) discuss with Mark Dolan. 

 

Rupert Lowe:

“I mean I listened to an interview the other day between Nick Robinson and George Eustice. I’m a farmer - George Eustice is not my favourite person but I couldn’t believe Nick R’s arrogance when he was interviewing GE and it’s an example of how they know they’re going to be there well beyond when that person they’re interviewing is going to be voted out of power so there is a degree of arrogance which I think is unacceptable now….”

Full disclosure; George is my M.P.   The  Eustice family farm produce is pretty pricey though. George has come in for such a lot of stick for his ‘let them eat cake’ remark, but it’s sound advice. (Shop at Lidl’s and Aldi) I don’t know if the Eustice family farm would agree.

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So then I caught a programme on the radio late last night about  BLM.  on the theme of combatting racism. It was hosted by our old friend Samira Ahmed.  It came across as pretty vacuous, to be honest, but a couple of throw-away remarks suggested that the discussion was based on a somewhat creative interpretation of ‘anti-racism’. 

One participant navigated his self-inflicted minefield of tricky glottal stops with such agility that something that would normally send my hackles through the roof was so distracting that it slipped by almost unnoticed. “…the way Israel has colonised Palestine” On reflection, I found that so profoundly dumb that it threw the whole of his tenuous anti-racist thesis down the toilet.

I concluded that their version of ”anti-racism” is itself pretty racist, especially when Samira Ahmed brought in Azeem Rafiq as an example, evidently having forgiven and forgotten his casual antisemitism or disregarded it altogether. That's what I call insulting listeners’ intelligence. 

Sunday round-up (?)

George Eustice is my MP. He has been made plenty of use of since his promotion last week when he was anointed secretary of state for flooding. The current severe flooding is a baptism of fire; he’s in much demand to defend the PM’s apparent dereliction of duty in not showing up in his wellies to commiserate with the unfortunate people of Yorkshire.

"Where is the Prime Minister this week?"

With widespread flooding, @SophyRidgeSky asks Environment Secretary George Eustice why @BorisJohnson hasn't visited affected areas or been seen in public for 9 days.#Ridge pic.twitter.com/Br6kVvxaIg

— Sophy Ridge on Sunday (@RidgeOnSunday) February 23, 2020

Good old George seems unflappable. I’d quite like to see him being vocal and unflappable on certain other matters too, given time. His predecessor Theresa Villiers was a reliable supporter of Israel and participant in relevant HoC debates, but I think the likelihood of George following in her footsteps, in that area at least, is next to nil.  

“British officials have pledged to urgently review the tens of millions of dollars in aid the UK provides to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, after an investigative report found that a majority of the funds have been going to schools in the West Bank and Gaza Strip which use textbooks that incite violence against Israelis. 

According to a Friday report in the UK-based Daily Mail, the Department for International Development and its secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, vowed to raise the issue with the Palestinian Authority, adding that London was working to carry out an independent review of the Palestinian textbooks.”

It’s bad enough allowing our own textbooks to spout inaccurate and antisemitic material, but it beggars belief that any of my hard-earned wages go towards gifting UNWRA with $427 million worth of incitement to murder my kith and kin.

As I was saying, George Eustice was on good form on Sophy Ridge and on Andy Marr immediately afterwards, having evidently been teleported to the BBC studio.

Sophy Ridge gets more ‘senior’ people on her show these days than the BBC seems able to attract, despite being a bit of a shallow interlocutor, even in comparison with Andrew Marr whose Boris-related comeuppance seems to have taught him a lesson. (Thinks: Are the Conservatives actually implementing ‘semi BDS’ on the Beeb?) 

(I don’t know how many times my autocorrect - autoincorrect - has changed SopHy to Soppy. I’ll just leave it in future.

You have to watch these things on a Sunday, and I stuck it out all the way through to The Big Questions. I was surprised to see Andrew Doyle sitting in the front row. (Identifying familiar faces in the front row is the first thing you have to do when you switch on TBQs.) (It’s downhill from then on.) 

Up first, the question of race. Of course, we’re all racists, although one might contend, as I do, that it’s not necessarily based on skin-colour, (except, perhaps in India where they use the Pantone shade-card as a guide) 

I’ve heard of Adam Rutherford but I didn’t know much about him. Lefty, isn’t it? 

Anyway, I think I’ve learned a new thing. The Labour Party is a race with its own language. (Just think. It nearly had its own state.) This was beautifully demonstrated for us on this programme by  a lady called Maya Goodfellow (Maybe later, do something about that gender-specific surname?) 

The Labour Party Language is a form of English, built around rigorous abstention from the percussive sound that native English-speakers usually use to articulate the written letter ’t’.

This does hamper fluency and makes pronunciation and comprehension difficult, but once you ‘get your ear in’ it’s almost possible to get the gist of most of it. The knack of delivering the language with true conviction seems to be in forming a kind of impenetrable word-barricade while beating time with talon-like nail extensions, a signal that these non-proletariat hands are unsuitable for chores, playing stringed instruments or any demeaning form of DIY.

Then I watched a bit of 'Homes Under The Hammer,' which used to be one of my favourites until Lucy Alexander who knew stuff was replaced by token diversity who apparently doesn’t.

  

Collateral damage

You will have seen or heard about PMQs with Theresa May’s attack on Corbyn and his mishandling of his party’s antisemitism crisis, and his reflexive counter-attack on the Tories’ you-know-whatophobia.

I’ve just been notified of a programme about male circumcision “A Cut Too Far?”  scheduled for 22:35 tonight in the Question Time slot. (Bated breath.)

By pure coincidence, I also came across a half-hour debate in Westminster Hall about religious slaughter. 

Animal welfare concerns about religious slaughter were expressed by (as it happens) my own local MP George Eustice. Concerns about religious slaughter (and some dodgy practices going on in Halal abattoirs) threaten to undermine the religious freedom currently enjoyed by observant Jews. 

Coincidentally, I’d just written about a related topic in a comment on the open thread. 

I understand that Shechita (Kosher) and Halal slaughter have certain principles in common - that the animal must be slaughtered ‘uninjured’ (this precludes stunning the animal before its throat is cut) but that the Jewish and Islamic requirements are not identical. 

This may be a question of my own personal bias, but I have read several accounts of Halal abattoirs where animal welfare is the last of their concerns. As far as I know, Jewish slaughter is considered to be as clinical and humane as non-Jewish slaughter; that stunning is not always effective and that Shechita doesn’t require prayer as part of the procedure.

As I have said before, the Muslims are always ‘spoiling things’ for the Jews. Their demands and prohibitions have antagonised others and Jews are caught up in the flak - collateral damage if you like. 

It seems inevitable that eventually, Britain will have exchanged its Jews for Muslims. 

Essay By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

“I walked down the street in Barcelona , and suddenly discovered a terrible truth - Europe died in Auschwitz ... We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world.

This is a controversial topic. You may disagree. Feel free.

Miscellaneous observations

There’s a bit of a ‘grateful for small mercies’ flavour to some of the responses to Shami’s antisemitism report. John Mann and Jonathan Arkush both seemed reasonably satisfied with it. 

We’ll have to see how Keith Vaz and his merry men handle it tomorrow.

Incidentally, Ed Stourton began the interview by mentioning the death of Elie Wiesel.

The BBC’s obit was respectful, but the early morning reports of his death on radio 4 bulletins - not so much. For some reason they shoehorned something about Wiesel’s critics (who doubted the enormity of the Holocaust) into the report  Work experience guys on night duty I suspect.

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Did you read Fraser Nelson’s review of Andrew Marr’s interview with Andrea Leadsom? 

He called it a ‘scratchy job interview” (I wonder if Speccie writers make up their own headlines) I didn’t think it was scratchy at all - at least any scratchiness came from the direction of the interviewer rather than the interviewee. 

This business of trying to destroy ‘Leave’ people by bashing them over the head with a wet Nigel Farage is beginning to grate. The media has managed to toxify Nigel Farage so that letting slip the merest whiff of agreement with anything he’s ever said or done is to commit virtual suicide by association. The very mention of “That Poster” is enough to trigger sufficient unsafety to reach outer space. My god. It’s almost like “Settlements” 

Mention “Settlements” and you’re finished.  Poleaxed by misdirected outrage.

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My constituency MP, minister for DEFRA, has come out in favour of Michael Gove. Good for him. 

The media has been really mean to Gove, amplifying the back-stabbing label for all it’s worth. I actually believe his version of how events panned out with Boris.  As Gove says, Boris could have stood if he really wanted to. The downside of it all is that it reveals a lack of judgment on Gove’s part - or at least a prolonged case of hope triumphing over experience.

I think the media despises honesty whenever they suspect an MP is suffering from it. They want their MPs to be back-stabbing, ruthless and robotic. I don’t know why. That’s my honest opinion and, for now, I’m sticking to it.