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.

“You saw it here first”

Allow me to point you in the direction of a couple or three topics we’ve covered on ITBB, which have subsequently been expanded upon at much more length and in much more depth on other blogs and websites.

If we had the time and the expertise to flesh out pieces we’ve barely scraped the surface of, we’d do so. (if appropriate) Of course, if we did they’d likely end up “tl;dr”. It’s a fine line.

Search for ‘gotcha’ on this site and several posts show up, amongst which are those infamous ‘wasted opportunity’ interviews by the two Andrews - the Andrews Sisters I’ll call them - where the ‘gotcha’ strategy backfired.

Anyway, this piece is on CAPX. It's by Douglas Carswell, and he addresses the “Gotcha’ phenomenon concisely. 

“Is more gotcha journalism really what people want?” 

If most ordinary people had a chance to put a question to Farage, I reckon it might be to do with the government’s handling of the Brexit negotiations or the state of our democracy. What did Marr decide to challenge Farage on instead? Things he might or might not believe about president Putin or gun control. 

UK audiences might be unfamiliar with Shapiro, so one might have expected a series of questions that would enable him to inform the viewers a little about his world view – with follow up questions to challenge it. Instead, he was confronted with a tweet he had sent out in 2011. 

Yes, Shapiro was guilty of losing his temper.  But what does it say about his interlocutor that he set out to goad him? 

Perhaps Marr and Neil thought that they were being clever and cunning by not asking the obvious. But what they did lead with sounded to me like one long effort to insinuate and smear. 

That either man might have some opinions that aren’t mainstream among UK media circles is hardly interesting or surprising. It requires extraordinary self-absorption on the part of the BBC production team to imagine otherwise.

He’s making sense.

I’m not the only one who’s blogged that nasty interview on the Today Programme, in which Dr Rosena Allin-Khan got away with some blatantly anti-Israel propaganda, uncontested and egged on by Mishal Husain.  In fact, I had a couple of goes at it. 

BBC Watch also deconstructed this story, producing a forensic and detailed two-parter on the website,  here and here, and Honest Reporting took it a step further and included similarly exaggerated claims made in the Independent by Dr Allin Khan.

That Hamas regularly diverts international aid money to its own leaders over-inflated bank accounts is undisputed. Instead of investing in homes, schools and medical clinics, Hamas has taken away desperately needed funds and poured them into terror infrastructure, wasting countless millions of assault and kidnap tunnels built dug deep into Israeli territory. Hamas has also taken over Gaza’s medical services, with the Washington Post describing Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital in 2014 as the “de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” 

The article also fails to mention that the Palestinian Authority recently declared its refusal to pay for medical expenses in Israeli hospitals. The move came in protest over Israel deducting the amount of money the PA pays in salaries to imprisoned terrorists and families of “martyrs” and withholding the equivalent sums from tax money Israel collects on behalf of the PA. As a result, hundreds of Palestinian medical patients are currently left in the lurch regarding their treatment.

Now for something completely the same.

I wrote about the casual  - nay, affectionate references to Hezbollah and its bizarre theme park that I heard on the BBS’s radio 4 programme “Loose Ends”. Anecdotes from a nostalgic Dom Joly about his childhood in Lebanon left the impression that Hezbollah are merely cheeky rogues, rather than Iran’s proxy and brutal murdering terrorists. Again, BBC Watch has addressed the story about Hezbollah’s terrorist plot intended for London and the BBC’s lack of interest in it.

“The story has led to questions as to why details of the raid were kept secret, why Members of Parliament were not informed and why the incident was never mentioned during extensive debates about whether all of Hezbollah should be banned as a terrorist organisation.”

Finally, the question of the BBC’s instructions on the use of the word ‘terrorism’. I thought this matter had been wrapped up in 2005. Done and dusted, as they say. 

My understanding was that the use of the word was discouraged by the powers that be because it involved making a value-judgement. Staff were only allowed to use it in reported speech or in other exceptional circumstances - apparently one was that it was ok to call it terror if the offence was committed by Jews. That’s hearsay  - but I’ve heard it so I might as well say it.

Now it seems that there’s a new edict from on high. I can’t quite tell if it differs from the old edict, but it’s based on the principle that “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” In other words, the BBC is scared to offend Islam-fuelled terrorists by showing disrespect for the cause, which could be deemed judgmental. 

I thought terrorism had a definition. Google says: "a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims."

In other words, it’s not really anything to do with whether Isis, Hezbollah, Hamas and the IRA fancy themselves as freedom fighters. 

In the case of those ‘lone wolves’ it’s a toss-up between being a ‘qualified’ terrorist, or an insane, psychotic madman, (or woman) but cloaking it all in euphemistic language makes the BBC look less impartial, not more.