75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

Holocaust Remembrance; 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

 The Russia v Poland debacle. Backstage drama.

“Polish President Andrzej Duda is furious that he was not invited to speak at the gathering”

Everyone who is anyone will be there. Prince Charles* will be there to represent the UK.

Apparently, the Poles and the Russians portray each other as collaborators and appeasers and President Duda thinks Putin is being given carte blanche to virtue-signal, whereas he is not. Of course, there’s more to it than that.

The BBC says: 

“Andrzej Duda is staying away in protest at not being invited to speak unlike his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, who he has accused of distorting the history of the Holocaust and the war to attack Poland.”

and: 

“His decision has threatened to overshadow the event which will bristle with world leaders and bring parts of Jerusalem to a standstill.

*Kay Wilson (the British born Israeli who was attacked and left for dead by two Palestinians who attempted to murder her, and succeeded in murdering her friend Kristine Luken,) wrote to the British authorities requesting a meeting with Prince Charles “for a few minutes during his four-day visit”  -but they said they are ”not interested.”

The BBC traditionally covers Holocaust Commemorations, deriving whatever fitting amount of ‘misery memoir’ material out of the occasion they deem appropriate. (Wringing it out till the pips squeak.) 

As Israel thrives and flourishes, sympathy for Jews drains away and the media’s mawkish quest for pathos alights on Gaza and the Palestinians who, as is their wont, capitalise on this interest so cannily that the media over-shoots with sufficient chutzpah to equate “the plight of the Palestinians” to the Holocaust.

Just as one can’t mention antisemitism these days without Islamophobia and all forms of racism tagging along for the ride, the BBC can’t commemorate the Holocaust without someone trying to play down the enormity of the attempted extermination of the Jews by bringing up “Israel” and “the occupation” as a kind of mitigating factor.  

pic.twitter.com/iDq31B8ijM

— SussexFriendsofIsrael (@SussexFriends) January 22, 2020

“The State of Israel is now a regional power. For decades it has occupied Palestinian territories. But some here will always see their nation through the prism of persecution and survival.”

Just for clarification, and for anyone less geeky than Craig and me, here’s an easy to remember wimmin-only digest of the BBC’s Middle East correspondents:

Orla Geurin is the Irish voice of doom who has form when it comes to Israel. 

Barbara Plett (or Plett-Usher) is the one who wept at Yasser Arafat’s dramatic air-lift from his compound. 

Not to be confused with
Lyse Doucet, who oversaw the conveniently mistranslated substitution of the word ‘Yahud” for “Israeli”  in her Children of Gaza film. "Everyone knows they (Palestinians) mean ‘Israeli’ when they say ‘Yahud’ (Jew)" she argues. The I/P conflict in a nutshell, really. Palestinian Arabs reject Israel. … is it ’cos they is Ya…hu?
(Lyse  doesn’t like being confused with Plett.) 

Yolande Knell is on maternity leave.

Update:
Stephen Pollard: The BBC Has shamed itself.

Mid-week mixed bag

The Times online hits my inbox at various times of the morning - I’m not complaining - but it’s interesting (to me) that this morning, at about 6:45 am the number of comments below Hugo Rifkind’s piece (£) about Boris Johnson and Donald Trump had already reached three-figures, yet there were none at all below Melanie Phillips’s excellent article (£) about a sensitive topic - the siting of the proposed Holocaust memorial and learning centre near the Houses of Parliament.

I’m about to make a superficial kind of statement, but here goes: I live hundreds of miles away from the capital and won’t experience the feeling of being visually assaulted by a grim-looking structure in the way that perhaps regular passers-by might - according to their architectural preferences. Nor will I be dismayed at the thought of a dramatic and unwanted change to my personal environment in the way I was when I first saw the hideous and incongruous plans for a carbuncle of a supermarket in my patch, yet I have to admit that now it’s real and it’s there, in yer face, I’m used to it and I have been known to pop in for a few bits of shopping without giving it a second thought. (I do have some second thoughts, but they are fleeting and getting fleetinger by the week)

What’s the point I was about to make? Oh yes, it was that the Times must have held back before publishing the comments - weeding out the virulently antisemitic ones presumably - but now they’re here. And largely supportive I’m pleased to see.

I think Melanie has nailed it again. Like her splendid analysis of President Trump’s remarks about US Jews who vote Democrat (loyalty and antisemitism) her sensitive response to the Holocaust Museum debacle is spot on. 

At the risk of feeding people who like to complain that any negative thoughts about Jews, Israel or anything remotely connected has become unsayable (because ‘antisemitism’) and that the whole antisemitism business has had a chilling effect on free speech, or that ‘you can’t say anything these days” - all of that - I can see that there is an element of truth in there. 

I can also see that it’s a lot easier to dismiss all negativity as prejudice at a time when it takes a huge effort to clarify any subtle and nuanced position, especially in consideration of the battle against intransigence and ideological resistance that comes with the territory.

However, handing ammunition to the enemy works both ways. The chilling effect is totally reversible like a coat you can wear inside out if you want. Now you can’t say anything is antisemitic just as you can’t say anything isn’t, without causing offence. It’s a shame that some commenters felt the need to call Melanie Phillips ‘brave’ for saying it what she said. 

There was one little segment that touches on an unpalatable truth, which loyalty to this country makes it hard to acknowledge. 

“Even fewer are prepared to acknowledge that, despite having stood alone against Hitler in 1940 and accepting 10,000 Jewish child refugees in the 1938 Kindertransport, Britain during the Holocaust barred Jews from pre-Israel Palestine. This flagrant denial of its legal undertaking to settle the Jews in the land caused untold numbers trapped in Europe to perish. 

The very mention of this tends to provoke frenzied outbursts about Jewish anti-British terrorism at that time, as if that negates the shocking British record.

The King David Hotel affair is something that sets off an internal conflict in many supporters or defenders of Israel who aren’t fully aware of the historical and political context in which it took place. To somehow reconcile the contradictions within their consciences they settle for supporting Israel’s right to exist ‘despite the King David Hotel affair’. 

This is about clarification, not about justifying violence or terrorism - and already we’re deep into the kind of mire you can see thrashed out everywhere and anywhere that Israel-related controversies crop up. 

  

 **********

I thought I’d recommend a comment I just read on Harry’s Place. I’m so jealous. I wish Anton Deque would notice ITBB. But never mind. 

My reaction to John Wall’s article was exactly the same, but it’s AD’s remarks about the BBC that gives his comment a good bit of relevance to this blog. If reproducing this transgresses blogging etiquette I apologise most sincerely.

“Another curious piece about Brexit on Harry's Place. Having read it I cannot decide what Mr Wall's point is apart from explaining the obvious long after it entered the realm of last weeks chip's wrapper. 

"I suggest anyone goes and looks at the quartet that the B.B.C., never neutral, put up on its web page this morning to show the 'party leaders' coming together to discuss how to avoid a 'no deal'. Look at these mediocrities and ask not why but how. How do such figures become the political leadership anywhere? I have thrown away brighter light bulbs. 

"Brexit was not about a deal. There was no mention of a deal at the time of the vote and no party has a mandate for any such deal. There was no mention of 'hard' or 'soft'. The tensile strength became an issue only when the side that lost insisted on a deal. Each and every variant of this deal, regardless, has been to devise a way in which the U.K. does not shake itself self free – not from Europe, but this apparatchik United States of Europe. 

"The likelihood is that Johnson will fudge and cobble something together to save his party – pro tem. We shall then see a swarming to Farage and his far right (©B.B.C. passim) Brexit Party. It is even possible the U.K. will then have a very strange Parliament indeed, Rump Tories, Brexit, Liberal-Labour and Nationalists. 

"I watched Johnson give us his "Hugh Grant in mop wig' from the G7 press conference. Having beautifully yorked* the truly appalling Robert Peston over an invented remark Peston attributed to Trump, Johnson was asked in passing to make a comment about England's latest 'Great Escape' from the jaws of an Aussie shark; Johnson made a joke about Ben Stokes' performance being worthy of a dukedom. The B.B.C. gave this obvious joke 'Breaking News' status on its strapline. There's a certain uniformity about that dying corporations reporting of all things Brexit.

*******

I know this has already been promoted on GF’s blog, but this piece by Douglas Murray resonates. It’s all about Channel 4, which is a good deal more biased than the BBC and getting worse with every passing moment. In this piece, he asks why Boris should trust Channel 4 in response to Dorothy Byrne’s  MacTaggart lecture in which she criticises the PM and the leader of the opposition for avoiding being interviewed by the likes of Jon Snow and Cathy Newman. They’re frit, she thinks, of being held to account.

If you listen to Dorothy Byrne - her speech is all over the interweb  - you might wonder how she got to where she is today, as Reginald Perrin used to say. The comments below the YouTube version of it are a mixed bag - it seems you either love her or loathe her, but the lack of self-awareness in her guff about honesty, integrity and ‘good faith’ is staggering. 

As Douglas Murray says: (and this equally applies, across the board, to the Beeb)

“Boris Johnson may or may not be correct in choosing to avoid being interviewed by Cathy Newman or Jon Snow on a regular basis. But he is certainly right if he presumes that such an interview would not be conducted in good faith. It would be conducted by an interviewer who is known to have particular political biases.

“It is almost certainly fair to say that ‘holding Boris Johnson to account’ would consist of haranguing him constantly, rarely allowing him to get more than a sentence out uninterrupted, accusing him of terrible things to his face, trying to embarrass him and – dream of dreams – getting him to say something embarrassing or wrong which could subsequently be reported across the world’s press as ‘Boris Johnson exposed as liar in Channel 4 News interview’. That is the story they want, and there is ever-less effort at Channel 4 and other channels to disguise that fact.

Post in honour of Holocaust Memorial Day

Post in honour of Holocaust Memorial Day 

Sky News interviewed Jeremy Dronfield, the author of a book called “The Boy Who Followed His Father Into Auschwitz”. Although there was nothing untoward about the interview itself, in the closing moments Mr Dronfield gave out an ominous warning about “the threat from the far right’.

How obscure - what could he mean?

Many people believe there is a vital lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, which is that civilised countries like ours must realise that they have a moral obligation to offer hospitality to refugees and asylum seekers, regardless of the circumstances that caused their predicament.

The loaded expression “Never Again” has been reinterpreted and now embraces ‘all genocides’, a term which has itself been adapted to embrace other non-specific victims of violence, and not confined to the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate an entire race.

Kindertransport is often cited to illustrate Britain’s generosity and open-heartedness as if such moving humanitarian endeavours epitomise a uniquely British ethos.

However, to fit that narrative it is necessary to gloss over the reality. In fact, rather than welcoming European Jewry with open arms, even during the years when Hitler’s activities were becoming apparent, the British attitude to Jewish immigration was extremely limited and conditional.

Historians disagree about the motivation behind those cruel policies; suffice it to say that at the time antisemitism came primarily from the right.

“Jeremy Hunt has described Britain’s 1939 white paper capping immigration to Palestine as a “black moment” in history, in what is believed to be the first such remarks by a British foreign secretary.[…]
“in a stark moment of candour he said there had been “black moments” including the white paper, which limited the number of Jewish immigrants to Palestine to 75,000 for five years during the Jewish world’s darkest hour.”

An article in the Guardian inadvertently validates this awkward historical fact. The writer cites Britain’s less than hospitable attitude to Jews in the 30s and 40s, but draws the conclusion that  “we were mistaken then, therefore we must be careful not to make the same mistake again” (therefore it is our moral duty to be open-hearted and welcoming to Syrian and other refugees, just as we should have been to Jews fleeing Nazism in the 30s and 40s.)

This non sequitur simply boils down to this: 'We regret being mean to the Jews, therefore we might regret it if we’re mean to the Muslims', and with that, the magic words “Never Again” are forced into an ill-fitting parody of a moral principle. 

Admittedly that essay was written in 2002, and things have moved on since then -  the writer may not wish to make the same moral equivalence now as she once did, but she is not alone in equating the right-wing antisemitism that existed in Britain 75 years ago with present-day fearfulness of mass Muslim immigration, casually labelled ‘phobic,’ ‘racist’ and ‘right-wing’. (How can it be racist to oppose a racist ideology?) 

Now that problems thrown up by mass Muslim immigration are starting to destabilise society, Britain’s long-established reputation as a compassionate and ever-ready destination and safe-haven for the world’s desperate and dispossessed, which was once something to be genuinely proud of, has been sullied by our weak and misguided tolerance of the intolerant. Our feebleness is spoiling everything for everyone.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the ignorance in America and Europe about the Holocaust that came to light through recent polls and surveys. Now, another survey, this time concerning the U.K., finds that:

 "five per cent of UK adults don’t believe the Holocaust – the intentional murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators – really happened and one in 12 (8%) say the scale of the Holocaust has been exaggerated, according to research released on Holocaust Memorial Day 2019.

Many commenters below a Times article about these findings have reacted badly to this information, some by minimising its significance and some by way of ‘whataboutery’. 

To me, it’s not a mere matter of numbers. The cold-blooded and calculated methods used by the Nazis to exterminate an entire race are unique, and the protracted political build-up to it appears all the more chilling as we come to recognise the familiar signs of history repeating.

Shown on that day, The Last Survivors was a powerful and thought-provoking film and a worthy complement to the harrowing and graphic Holocaust: Night Will Fall, shown on More 4 the previous night. 

The Telegraph: 

“The Last Survivors was a masterclass in documentary making with restraint and without editorialising. Cary allowed the narratives to unravel in their own time and direction, with no apparent attempt to console or rationalise. The editing was discreet and the horrifying footage of the deceased in the camp was used judiciously.” 

The Guardian was also enthusiastic:

“Director Arthur Cary spent a year with a handful of survivors, making an impeccably thoughtful 90-minute documentary that gave his interviewees their due dignity as each reflected, often scarcely willingly, on what happened to them as children. For an hour and a half, I was crying, especially when Cary followed three generations of Holocaust survivors to Auschwitz, knowing all the time that tears are not enough.”

I wish I agreed more wholeheartedly, but I was sorry to hear that the “marvellously formidable” Anita Lasker-Wallfisch has fallen for the Angela Merkel ‘open borders’ policy in such a big way. 

There are plenty of wrong-headed Jews who find it convenient to turn a blind eye to the antisemitism that seems fundamental to the religion of Islam, and who reserve their fear for the reactionary so-called ‘right-wing’ politics that is a direct response to the rise of an unenlightened form of Islam and the threat it poses to us all. That is, until some distant and hard to visualise future, in which reformers such as Mohammad al-Issa, secretary-general of the Muslim World League, make significant headway towards influencing the masses.

I do wish Lord Dubs, for one, would face the facts. While strenuously campaigning for Britain to accept more child refugees from Syria, he says: 

“When I hear and see antisemitism, the tropes, the conspiracy theories and so on, I feel depressed and sad. Have people learnt nothing of the Holocaust? Don’t they understand how sensitive this is to people who’ve got relatives who died in the camps? So, it’s important we remember. And it’s important that we say resolutely: these things must never be allowed to happen again.”

I wonder how many of those Muslim refugees would genuinely sympathise with a people they so despise. 

Some of the things I say may seem - or indeed be - hypocritical, but I was once confronted by a couple of the most ardent disciples of the Guardian and accused of ‘exploiting the Holocaust’.

“Haven’t you ever heard of ‘The Holocaust  Industry?’ they say as if Norman Finkelstein’s sacred theorem is definitive and set in stone.

All I can say is that if the Guardian adopts Finkelstein’s ‘Holocaust Industry’ meme, which cynically appropriates the emotive word “industry” (deliberately lifted from the original adjective that describes the (industrial) scale and method of the Nazis’ attempted eradication of an entire people) in order to promote the notion that Zionists cynically exploit the Holocaust to capitalise on their own victimhood, then how would they describe their own fanatical  obsession with the Palestinians?  Wholesale promotion of Pallywood is also a bit of an industry - and is it not the ultimate propaganda machine? 

This unresolved rant is to commemorate the BBC’s longstanding bias against Israel by omission, by emoting and by “emission”  and to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, 2019 (last Sunday, January 27th.)

My supernatural powers

The supernatural means by which I cause harm or destruction (I think I mentioned them in my previous) are manifesting indirectly, via the pen of Rod Liddle.

Once again Rod has written a piece after my own heart. Following his preamble about Diane Abbott, which I must have accidentally transmitted to him brain-to-brain during the fallout from last week’s Question Time, he dived (dove(?)) straight in with a litany of stuff about Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad.

It’s obvious that I transmitted this to Rod Liddle in the form of demonic telepathic messages, or why else would his piece deal with matters I’ve thought about, nay, mentioned myself?

One of which is Tom Watson’s attempted intervention in the Malaysian government’s ban on Israeli swimmers coming into the county to compete in a Paralympics event they’re hosting, as well as the antisemitic nature of Malaysia in general. (I must say Tom Watson is looking a little perkier in the illustration above Rod’s piece than in the pre-weight-loss image HuffPo chose to use.) 

[Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad] “has described Jews as ‘hook-nosed’ and commented that they understand money instinctively, meanwhile denying that six million Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust and insisting that Israel should have no right to exist. Nor does he have much time for the concept of anti-Semitism, per se. He told a BBC journalist: ‘Anti-Semitic is a term that is invented to prevent people from criticising the Jews for doing wrong things.’ He said Jews, you will note — not Israel. 

(I was curious as to how the BBC journalist in question responded to that idea.)

But then the country, with its Muslim majority population, is steeped in anti-Semitism.”

Readers! That’s the content of my telepathic message, ‘word-for-word’!! It’s so comforting to know that one’s demonic, supernatural powers are still in good order. 

The below the line responses to Rod’s piece are nearly all sympathetic. What a turnaround from  - well, not so very long ago - when the space below any article about Jews or antisemitism would be chock-a-block with ignorant comments from bigots and racists. And I do mean in the Spectator (and the Times and Telegraph) as well as their ancestral home, the Guardian, where that sort of antisemite permanently squats.

It’s due to attractive people speaking out that people are beginning to wake up and smell the coffee.

Rachel Riley has also been writing in the Spectator. Her beauty and intelligence give her a huge advantage. People will sit up and take notice of what she has to say, so lucky, lucky, lucky her. But not lucky enough to be immune from the tsunamis of antisemitic bile for which social media is renowned.

In the name of Labour, I’ve been called a hypocrite, lying propagandist, teeth, tits and ass, clothes-horse dolly-bird, weaponiser of anti-Semitism, fascist, right–wing extremist, Nazi sympathiser, Twitter-cancer, thick, Tory, brainwashed, an anti-Semite, white-supremacist, Zio-political trollster, not a real Jew, a child bully, bonkers mad conspiracy theorist, a paedo-protector minion puppet whom my dead grandfather would be disgusted by.

I read the transcript of the HoC debate “That this House has considered Holocaust Memorial Day 2019”,  a motion brought by Ian Austin MP.

There were some moving speeches, but to me, the occasion was somewhat marred by the obligatory ‘inclusiveness’ that political correctness has forced into this commemoration. Yes, there have been other genocides, but the Holocaust was unique. It was preceded by an unstoppable tide of antisemitism, which polluted and overwhelmed civilised society. A prolonged process of demonisation and delegitimisation, all based on lies and conspiracy theories, which culminated in an industrialised programme of extermination. 

No. Don’t dilute the memory with “and other atrocities”. The Jewish Holocaust was unique and deserves its own dedicated commemoration.  And antisemitism is not the same as Islamophobia.

The BBC hasn’t been helpful. Over the years it has added to the palpable hostility one can detect in the atmosphere. (Supernatural powers not necessary.)

The power of speech

Another furore surrounding Jeremy Corbyn is the omission of ‘Jews‘ from  his Holocaust Memorial Day speech. 

This year’s HMD is themed “The Power of Speech’ so here are a few examples of  ‘speech’ from Corbyn’s defenders. 

Here’s a short excerpt from a powerful Commons speech from the January 18th Holocaust debate  by one Labour MP who ‘gets it’.

Lyn Brown (West Ham) Lab.

“As we know, the Nazis created and peddled myths about Jewish people; they dehumanised them, representing them as an existential threat to ordinary German citizens. Their propaganda was massively and horrifically effective. Hate-filled words enabled their crimes. It is startling how many of the myths they created reflected the Nazis’ own sickening plans and twisted thinking. In March 1942, well after the campaigns of mass murder had begun, Hitler said that the so-called Jewish wire-pullers aimed to
“unite democracy and Bolshevism into…a conspiracy…to annihilate all of Europe”.  

They peddled fear: democracy a threat from the west, Bolshevism a threat from the east, and Jewish people threatening Germany and Germans from within. Goebbels said:
“The Jew will not exterminate the peoples of Europe. Rather, he will be the victim of his own attack”. 

This web of fiction was channelled into cruel and cynical propaganda, and it enabled the holocaust. 

Ensuring that such fantasies would be believed by ordinary people was not easy. In 1937, teachers were instructed to​ 

“plant the knowledge of the true danger of the Jew deep in the hearts of our youth from their childhood”—done using children’s stories. One, “The Poisonous Mushroom”, told children that just as they should not assume they could tell the poisonous mushroom in the forest from the good ones, they could not assume that Jewish people were good and honest just because they seemed that way—truly heart-breaking.” 

Oddly, the BBC hasn’t reported Jeremy Corbyn’s speech. At least not according to the BBC’s wonderful search engine.

Hugo Rifkind has been criticised for singling out Jeremy Corbyn for “not mentioning the Jews” when Nicola Sturgeon and, apparently, Theresa May didn’t mention them in their speeches either, which in my opinion, says as much about them as it does about Mr. Corbyn.  

Why bother

I’m getting fed up. I can’t be bothered to write about many things that have been in the news recently, such as the ‘fake sheikh’ type sting, crafted by Al Jazeera to look like an Israeli government plot to sabotage UK parliament .

Even the Guardian’s Michael White, famous for  announcing: “In Israel they murder each other a great deal” Tweeted that it looked to him like a cheap entrapment job, (With a Twitter timeline like that how does he find time to do anything else?) which, amusingly, led to a few fanatical Israel bashers accusing him of being a Zionist.

I can’t even bring myself to mention the decision of a German court that  “Torching a synagogue is not antisemitic”  and I don’t know how (or if) the BBC reported that, but they did mention the Amber Rudd hate incident. Andrew Neill savaged the poor Oxford professor (of physics) who dreamt up that ludicrous allegation. 

I know everyone loves Andrew Neill, but in this case the victim seemed too much of a soft target, like a rabbit in the headlights really, who, for all I know did this out of a misguided desire to stand up for the underdog. If you see what I mean.

I won’t even bother to mention “On Your Farm”, aired early on Sunday morning when we were all half asleep. It brought us a Halal farmer, whose religious beliefs were alluded as a kind of ‘given’. You know, PBUH and midday prayers were woven into the conversation as though they were common parlance. The normalisation of Islam by stealth.

I can’t be arsed to mention Radio 4 this morning, which had more than the absolutely necessary quota of Islam-related content and a good dose of overt Trump-bashing. (I wonder if the level of BBC Trump-bashing will continue after the inauguration?)

I won’t even try to tackle Yolande Knell’s reporting about the Paris summit, but I did wonder if Yolande Knell knows anything at all about history pre 1967? I mean who does she think Israel stole captured the West Bank from? And how did she think they came by it?  

One thing I will just mention is the Holocaust remembrance edition of the Antiques Roadshow. Of course it was nice that the BBC chose to feature this on a long-running programme such as this, and I thought Fiona Bruce was rather good, her ‘say-it / act-it-out’ style was suitably reined in for once. 

However, I will remind you that the BBC has always been fond of recounting tales of the suffering of Jews, as long as it’s purely holocaust-related. One of the artefacts in this episode was a pair of striped trousers. The actual ones. Cynicism aside, it was a very moving film.

One particular artefact struck a chord. In fact it was Fiona’s favourite. It was a board game, a kind of cross between Snakes and Ladders and Monopoly, where the object was, through lucky throws of the dice, to round up the most Jews and cart them off to the police station. The cone-shaped pieces were painted with ugly faces to represent Jews. Fiona Bruce was shocked that this popular game was designed to inculcate Jew-hatred into German children. 

I wonder what Fiona Bruce’s reaction would be if she knew about the Jew-hatred that is being inculcated into Palestinian children as we speak. Through UNRWA, funded by foreign aid. The similarities are undeniable. I’m shocked, aren’t you?

So I won’t mention any of that. Instead, for sentimental reasons, I’ll tell you about quotes and recitations that my father often came out with, (when he was alive) the general theme being absurdity. 

One that tickled him came from an old ‘music-hall’ routine by Wilkie Bard:  “I want you to notice my leggings”. 

Mad. I think he adapted some of the words.

Another favourite was from Samuel Beckett: 

My father’s simplified version just went:

“Why did you engender me?”   “I didn’t know it’d be you”

I do like a bit of the absurd, as you’ll guess.

Don't mention it!

Last night’s Sky News showed the new London (Muslim) Mayor, Sadiq Khan attending the Holocaust memorial event in North London yesterday. They even included short clip of the ceremony. It was a significant gesture on Khan’s part, much appreciated by the Jewish community, and a hopeful indication that his intention to clamp down on or root out antisemitism is honourable.

The BBC, however, in their late evening bulletin was only interested in the implied rift between Khan and Corbyn. They even showed an interview with Khan, which was filmed in front of the poster in a location in or near the memorial’s venue. We know this from Sky’s report, which included similar footage. The BBC didn’t make anything of Khan’s attendance at the ceremony, in fact I’m not sure they even mentioned it.

Mishal Husain was the newsreader, not that one could hold her personally responsible for the omission, but a mention would have been nice, coming from her.