Nothing to say

I have nothing much to say specifically about the BBC as I haven’t been watching or listening, but I have been looking at blogs and videos online instead. I heard Gerard Batten’s edition of James D’s ‘Delingpod’ and I saw Batten being given the usual treatment on Andrew Castle’s LBC phone-in. I watched a clip of George Galloway and Jo Coburn sparring on YouTube.  Most of the commenters thought Galloway won, and they were probably right, but only in this particular case. 

The BBC must surely, sooner or later, get the message. We can see that their most highly regarded employees, Andrew Neil, Andrew Marr, Victoria Derbyshire and so on, are constantly trying to skewer their interviewees by bringing up stale trivia instead of drawing them out, and if appropriate, handing them enough rope with which to skewer themselves. It’s getting embarrassing. 

When are you going to start asking me about ..Brexit / Ukip/ my policies / my book? 

Never, we just want to show what an arsehole you are. 

I watched several “Tommy” videos, and I’m at a loss as to how people like Hugo Rifkind can get away with writing a piece in the Times, (£) supposedly about milkshake bombs, in which he refers to Tommy Robinson as: “the far-right thug and EU parliamentary candidate Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson,” and ‘wittily’ refers to him as “the soggy fascist”   

Rifkind is clearly on the side of Danyaal Mahmud, the innocent man-child whose strawberry milkshake accidentally slipped out of his hand. 

The Guardian is pleased, at least

We all know that videos are routinely edited and manipulated to cast the protagonist in a favourable light, but I’d argue that the BBC is as guilty as anyone of taking advantage of well-staffed, slick editing ability. In fact, the BBC seems to do that with gay abandon, because they can.  

I’d be fascinated to hear Hugo Rifkind flesh out exactly why he uses the terms ‘far-right thug” and “fascist”, for Tommy Robinson aka SY-L because as far as I can tell, being “anti-Islam” is not what those terms were coined for.

Rod Liddle’s Tommy Robinson-bashing doesn’t seem to quite fit in, either. He's another of those high profile journos who use wit and humour to disparage hypocrisy, and as someone who does a considerable amount of Islam-bashing himself, it’s a mystery to me why he does it and how he gets away with it.  

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.  

Defining terrorism

Some of the visitors to this blog will think I shouldn’t worry my pretty little head about non-BBC matters, but in the name of human rights I beg permission to deviate, alongside my usual hesitation and repetition.

There have been a few dodgy pieces in The Times of late, but recent events have created a mishmash of confused thinking - almost epitomised by Piers Morgan as per my previous post. Such a shame ITV took the video down.

Piers was trying to argue that Islam is a faith, therefore ‘good’, but Islamism, extremism, violence and terrorism are obviously ‘bad’ and entirely different.

A bully like Piers Morgan will typically clutch at any straw to maintain the popularity, if not the adulation, that sustains him.

On that occasion Piers Morgan was torn between associating himself with the views of a figure (Tommy Robinson) whom the mob has deemed to be ‘from the extreme right’ on the one hand, and on the other he was probably afraid of coming across as yet another of those ‘useful idiots’ on the left who pipe up all over the place as apologists for Islam.

The mainstream media have brought the debate down to a matter of semantics. They spend hours dancing on the head of a pin over what is and isn’t “terrorism” and explaining that criticising Islam amounts to calling all Muslims terrorists.

Tactically, they leave themselves with little choice other than to construct a giant haystack from a pile of straw men.

Tommy Robinson has learned a lot since he started his crusade. Are we allowed to call it that?

If we mean it in the sense of: ‘a vigorous campaign for political, social, or religious change’, then it should be okay.

He has developed. Nowadays he is more articulate and his arguments are more mature and substantive than they were before.  They have to be because he has a multi-pronged enemy to defeat.

One is the huge number of people who are completely flummoxed by the crime of criticising any belief system that is labelled ‘religion’.  Religion has to be respected. To tag a bit of religious piety onto a Marxist, a Nazi, a bigot and a racist is to make their toxic political opinions untouchable.

Tommy Robinson now knows the political implications of Islam far better than the bulk of his critics in the media who think of themselves as his superior. Most of them haven’t studied it in any meaningful way but they just know, Islam must be righteous, because ‘faith’. Terrorism is a distorted version. It must be, because ‘religion’.

He also has The State to fight. The state is trying to contain something that looks increasingly uncontainable. When it goes off, it will surely go off with a bang.

Putting Tommy Robinson behind bars, let alone leaving him there at the mercy of bloodthirsty Muslim criminals, is no way for any state to behave, least of all the state that’s supposed to represent the most tolerant country in the world. Silencing Tommy Robinson is not going to contain the problem. Wildfires have a habit of flaring up in unexpected places..

 First, I want to commend this article by Melanie Phillips in The Times (£). Never mind terrorism or Brexit for a minute. Melanie has articulated a very urgent threat to the social cohesion that the State is so cack-handedly trying to maintain.

Class warriors are cynically fanning the flames. 

Left-wing agitators are planning a “day of rage” tomorrow in protest at the government’s austerity policies, which they say caused the tragedy. The protest is being led by the Movement for Justice By Any Means Necessary, whose Facebook page declares: “We must escalate our actions to take down this rotten government, which has lost all authority to govern.”

(I read this when it appeared in the Spectator a few days ago.)

“What’s happening is an attempt to stir insurrection on the streets against the democratically elected Westminster government. Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell has called for a million people to take to the streets on Saturday to force Theresa May from power. 

At a Liverpool conference on March 10, 2012, McDonnell said there were three ways to change society. The first was through the ballot box; the second via industrial action. “The third is basically insurrection, but we now call it direct action . . . we have an elected dictatorship, so I think we have a democratic right to use whatever means to bring this government down. The real fight now is in our communities, it’s on the picket lines, it’s in the streets.”

Give John McDonnell a long nightie and a little crotchet cap and he’d have a free pass to do as he sees fit. Not that he doesn’t have one already. (The free pass rather than the outfit)

[…]
Many naive Labour voters believe Jeremy Corbyn is a “nice man”. The reality is frighteningly different. A fearsome tragedy is being cynically politicised. Even before all the dead of Grenfell tower have been retrieved and buried, Labour is unleashing mob rule in their name. Compassion is being hijacked and weaponised in what is nothing short of a planned uprising against democracy itself.

Now, let’s look at Hugo Rifkind whose article happens to appear on the opposite page. He’s doing his Piers Morgan thing for Times readers who don’t watch ITV.

These terrorists are just murderous weirdos.

“Not all preachers of hate wear a skullcap and robes. Some wear jeans.” 

That sounds about right. However, I can’t be sure, but I think Hugo is saying that the right is just as capable of radicalising its followers as the skullcap and robes brigade. Then I think he’s saying that to flatter the weirdos with the term ‘terrorist’ is to absolve them from personal responsibility.

Surely, as soon as one commits an act of terrorism one automatically becomes a weirdo. Therefore all terrorists are weirdos, but not all weirdos are terrorists.

Was the Finsbury Park Mosque incident an act of terrorism?

“the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” is one definition of the term.

The Welsh weirdo who ran down Muslim worshippers had a kind of political aim; allegedly, to “kill all Muslims”.  Was that a political act? If it was designed to put fear into all Muslims as well as bumping a few off, it certainly was. Also, the victims were most likely civilians, so on the whole this incident probably did qualify as terrorism.

But what if it was a revenge thing, or a copy-cat thing or an act of pure weirdoism? The political connection would be tenuous then, would it not?  And anyway, would the term used to define it really matter?

“If you do not like the notion that even mainstream Muslim narratives have a nebulous culpability for Islamist attacks — and I do not — then it seems contradictory to decide that western media narratives are culpable for attacks by people who consider themselves on the other side.”

Says Hugo.

Yup. The MCB won’t accept that Islam bears responsibility for terrorism unless we Islamophobes also accept that Douglas Murray is responsible for the Finsbury Park Mosque van-ramming.

If the MCB thinks it can deflect the notion that Islam bears responsibility for terrorism by arguing that Douglas Murray must accept responsibility for Finsbury Park, that is wrong. There are many flaws in this imaginary comparison. Apart from the huge difference in scale and ‘pattern’, and the differing elements of direct incitement to violence -  (some in the case of hate preachers and none from Douglas Murray) the most fundamental difference is that Islam is the catalyst and “the other side” is the response. The equivalence theory is not going to work.  There is no equivalence and no contradictory principle there.

My take on it is this. It doesn’t actually matter to me whether a murder qualifies as terrorism or just weirdoism, and equally I don’t care whether or not mainstream Muslim narratives have a nebulous or direct culpability for violent acts. The nature of the beast makes the question almost irrelevant.

I see the mainstream Muslim narrative itself as divisive, antisemitic, and wrong-headed. The fact that it’s a religion shouldn’t make it untouchable. Whether it leads to violence or just simmers away in the background fomenting division, it’s not good for Britain.  I don’t like violence or racism from anyone and I don’t want to hear excuses for any of it. Fearing Islam is not a matter of racism.

Journalists can dance on heads of pins as much as they like, but in my opinion they’re wasting everyone’s time.

Now back to the BBC. On the Daily Politics Tom Wilson from the Henry Jackson Society was invited to into the studio to defend Douglas Murray’s eminently sensible suggestion that “we need less Islam” , a remark he made during a discussion about the Prevent strategy. 

Yesterday’s guest on the programme, Miqdaad Versi, wanted the BBC to no-platform Douglas Murray for making that particular remark, which Jo Coburn called ‘inflammatory.’

She turned to her other guest, Lord (Digby) Jones to ask what he thought about it. “Well, we must be clear about the distinction between ordinary Islam and extremism” he opined.

So there you have it. There’s benign Islam, and there’s fundamental Islam. One is good, because ‘faith’. The other is not so good because ‘terror’.

It is a BBC-related matter after all, and I am worried about it and so should you be.

Nothing much to say

I might as well join the rest of the virtue-signalling community and boast that when me and Craig have nothing to say, we say nothing.  Nothing much, anyway.

It didn’t take long for the usuals to start politicising Grenfell Tower, did it? 

*****

I see Laura Perrins is on Question Time tonight, as is Emily Thornberry. Might be worth staying awake for. Go Laura! (g’wan g’wan)

*****

I listened to Jeremy Bowen’s puff piece about Yassir Arafat.  Another terrible piece. He’s obviously an Arafat admirer , like Barbara Plett - and I do believe Bowen thinks the discredited polonium story is feasible. 

*****

Hugo Rifkind(£) thinks the naturally irascible Corbyn has learned not to be too grumpy in front of the cameras.

“When an ITV reporter asked him a year ago whether he wanted there to be a general election, nobody forced him to say, irritably, “I’m being harassed!”, before storming off to hide behind what turned out to be, awkwardly, a glass door. This is who Jeremy Corbyn was. He was tetchy and he was incompetent, and if anybody with any sense was going to vote for him, then everything any of us knew about anything was wrong.”

He learnt to smile and jest specially for the campaign.

“…..a pivotal moment in this election came during Corbyn’s interview with Jeremy Paxman, when Paxman, in full Spanish inquisition mode, asked him why the Labour manifesto included nothing on Corbyn’s long-held ambition of scrapping the monarchy. “There’s nothing in there because we’re not going to do it,” retorted Corbyn, visibly amused. Hidden beneath the audience’s guffaws, this was the sound of a man wryly acknowledging the fundamental impracticality of his own radicalism. All of a sudden, Jeremy Corbyn was a moderate.”

There are signs that he has reverted.

*****

The BBC may be going overboard with its Grenfell Tower coverage. Sky is the same. All the other stuff that was so important before the disaster has evaporated - obviously the distressing, heart-rending human interest element of this terrible fire makes everything else pale into insignificance, but at the same time continuous interviews with people who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who is missing or killed, is not ‘news’. Dragging it out too long in a mawkish and voyeuristic way diminishes the tragedy, if anything . 

A tweet from Hugo Rifkind

Same old same old

I haven’t even got a Twitter account, but some bot thinks certain Tweets will be of interest so it kindly emails them to me, which is thoughtful. (They’ve invented thoughtful A.I. now.)

One such message, which arrived yesterday, was this:

How strange to watch some Corbyn-supporters lament anti-Semitism when they have spent years assiduously feeding it: https://t.co/WiUYNanu6j

— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) March 16, 2016

“How strange to watch some Corbyn-supporters lament anti-Semitism when they have spent years assiduously feeding it: “

Well, it was so interesting that at first I didn’t notice that the Spectator article in question was not current, but revived. It was first published in August 2014. 

Of course at that time it was prompted by the 2014 “Gaza war”, but it’s just as relevant today. In fact more so, in the light of Owen Jones’s recent piece, which is just one example of a whole cluster of lefties and anti-Zionists trying to distance themselves from being thought racist. But they are. 

Professor Geoffrey Alderman’s a short letter in today’s Times on the subject has the header: 

Left’s view of Jews.

“Sir, Hugo Rifkind (“Corbyn must face up to Labour’s antisemitism”, Mar 15) needs to appreciate that within the radical left in British politics there is a long history of anti-Jewish prejudice that pre-dates Zionism. [...] Within the modern Labour party it has now (I fear) become more or less institutionalised.”

Within the BBC it has (and always has been) institutionalised. 

Turning tide

Woolly liberal

Woolly liberals must face truth about migrants  (Times £)

Hugo Rifkind has written an interesting piece.

“ It’s no good embracing refugees without accepting that some of their values are beyond the pale and must change.I find myself discombobulated over migration and Europe. Do you, also?”

“Do you, also?” sounds as though he's speaking with a German accent. 

“Perhaps not. Perhaps, back in September, when the tiny body of Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, and Angela Merkel declared that Germany would take 800,000 Syrians, and the Swedes said they’d take even more, per capita, and the world’s liberals — such as me — genuflected before them, then perhaps you saw, quite clearly, where it was all going. So perhaps you aren’t discombobulated at all. The opposite, even.Combobulated as anything. 

Not me though. Firmly dis. This weekend, Mrs Merkel performed her sharpest volte-face yet (and she’s performed a few of late) saying that isf Syria and Iraq should ever again know peace (a big if, admittedly)then all the refugees that Germany has taken in should leave, and say “thanks” on their way out. 

In Sweden, meanwhile, on Friday, we were told that gangs of rightwing hooligans were roaming around Stockholm looking for brown people to punch.[...]For the woolly, well-meaning liberal - again, such as me - there’s a strong temptation to not quite think about any of this. Or, if you do have to think about it, then there’s an even stronger temptation to do so a little dishonestly”

Hugo proceeds to describe Jess Phillips’s misguided comparison between Cologne and Broad Street, Brum; then:

 “No. In fact a situation far more similar to Cologne occurred in Cairo on the night when president Morsi stepped down. Scores of women in Tahrir Square were harassed, beaten and raped by a jeering mob. And it is certainly true, then as now, that a whole host of surprising western voices piped up to condemn it. 

Some of them, than as now, seemed a lot more upset by sexual assaults conducted by Muslims than they ever seemed to be by anybody else, but that’s not really the point. Although, I cannot lie, I’d be a lot more comfortable if it were. 

[...]Yet in the end, even a woolly liberal needs to stop twisting and stare an obvious truth in the face. Leaflets are now being handed out in German swimming pools.politely explaining that women in bikinis were not to be unilaterally grabbed on the bottom. If you believe in immigration (which I do) let alone the moral necessity of accepting refugees (which I certainly do) this is the bit on which you have to dwell.Can we take in new people and make them just like us?”

(Not according to Trevor Phillips, who’s come in for stick for mentioning that Muslims aint like us, and it’s insulting of us to even expect them to become so.)  (The left does not approve.) 

“sometimes, in order to figure out your own thoughts, you need somebody to say the exact opposite. In that vein I’m grateful to Trevor Phillips[..] who said last month that continuously pretending that a group is somehow eventually going to become like the rest of us is perhaps the deepest form of disrespect”  

To do so, he added, was to suggest they just “haven’t yet seen the light”’ which is patronising and unhelpful, not least because maybe they never will. But they have to.  The lesson of Europe’s current migrant trauma is that integration - and, in the end, assimilation -  is not an option but essential. 

[...]It’s not enough for minorities to just keep their heads down. They have to change enough to not even want to. A society can have any number of foods, headdresses and religious ceremonies, but it cannot have any number of values. 

[...] For Germany, and for Sweden, though, the interesting bit is what happens next. The question is not just whether their migrants can become liberals. It is also, and perhaps more importantly, whether their liberals can stay liberal while they do.

Knit me a hairy jumper. I’m wondering if some of those woolly liberals aren’t beginning  to see the light. 

Here’s something else that caught my eye.

The Guardian is getting flak and it’s not happy. All those woolly articles are attracting avalanches of criticism.

Cologne seems to be the catalyst for some kind of turning point, although the Guardian itself is sticking to its guns. For now. Silencing the opposition can’t work for very long. Who’s going to keep on reading articles they disagree with, especially if they can’t have their say?

Chicken and egg

There is such hypocrisy around at the moment. Not just the hypocrisy of the discord between populist (pornographic) compassion for the Palestinians and the same parties’ virtual indifference to the suffering of other victims of Jihad. There is the hypocrisy about antisemitism.

Because of the virulence with which Europe’s immutable under-the-counter antisemitism has flared up under the auspices of compassion for Gaza, certain prominent shit-stirrers are looking over their shoulders and wondering if any of it was their fault.

Maybe they really do think it’s alarming to see people waving banners bearing ‘Hitler Was Right’ slogans at their pet demonstrations and rallies; maybe the people who bombarded social and mainstream media with images and knee-jerk retweets do sincerely believe that hatred of Israel has nothing to do with antisemitism, but logic says that can’t be true. 

As Hugo Rifkind tries to say in his Times article,(£) the very word Zionism  (a movement for (originally) the re-establishment and (now) the development and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel) has been tossed around, and has now settled in - as a pejorative. It means when push comes to shove, (which looks like being more than just a glib phrase)  Jews, like everyone else, have ‘somewhere to go home to’.   Before anyone tells me that the Palestinians don’t enjoy the luxury of their own state, let’s just say they could have had one before, and they could still have one if only they’d stop hating Jews. 

Unless they are intellectually incapable of employing logic, these Israel-haters must be well aware that the scale of their outrage is disproportionate. When challenged about their lack of compassion for other groups’ suffering at the hands of Islamist Jihadis, they say they have no truck with ‘whataboutery.’

In addition to Caroline Wyatt’s report about antisemitism in France, the BBC website features a report by Jenny Hill, which was originally shown on BBC Breakfast, August 7th.

Hadar has written about this on BBC Watch. Far from reflecting on the chicken and egg question that might occupy the minds of several doctoral students, as Hadar jests, Jenny Hill plumps for the chicken (Gaza) taking responsibility for the egg (antisemitism).

She’s saying if it weren’t for Israel’s habit of killing babies, people wouldn’t particularly hate the Jews.  Of course this is not borne out by the facts.  Neither Hitler nor the Grand Mufti had Israel as a convenient excuse.

If Israel’s option to retaliate were permanently disabled because, say, its allies unwisely chose to confiscate its arms, or because Hamas’s deliberate child-martyring strategy deterred it from taking any military action, Israelis would be destined to live in a permanent state of war and the Jihadis would have won. That seems to be what people want, and if they don’t think that is in any way antisemitic, they must be living in cloud cuckoo land.  

Articles penned by people who are scared that they might have to take the blame if the antisemitism they’ve whipped up should boil over into something unseemly, are now back-pedalling just to be on the safe side. You can hear the brakes squealing.  

They still refuse to entertain the possibility that they could be wrong about Israel. The emerging de rigueur caveat, which serves as a flimsy insurance policy against the potential consequences of too much Israel-bashing and too little Jihad-bashing is only another version of the ‘some of my best friends‘ excuse. 

They all say the same thing, namely “we must guard against antisemitism, which is truly awful, but we’re still condemning Israel for defending itself. Furthermore, we’re doing so in a way that would never stand up to scrutiny, we could never justify or in a way we would never demand of any other country.” In other words, we’re singling out Israel for blame because it’s the Jewish state.

Hugo Rifkind is saying it too. Even though he’s never self-identified as particularly Jewish, rising antisemitism is making him identify as such now. But he doesn’t defend Israel. 

“Look. It’s not as if I think that Israel is doing the right thing. Far from it. In my view if your only military success entails bombing a country where 50 % of the people are under 18 then it’s not a military strategy you should be following.”  

I’d like to hear his suggestions, but he hasn’t offered any.  However, he hasn’t been doing any whipping up as far as I know. He’s just casually absorbed the rhetoric of those who have.

Someone who has been agitating and stirring stuff up is saying something similar, and doing so even more disingenuously. 

That someone is a strangely popular pundit with the looks of a child, the politics of a child and the quack of a child.

 “I write this because antisemitism needs to be treated very seriously indeed. Attempts to belittle it are dangerous, allowing the tumour to spread unchecked.” Ah! A cancer allusion. I suppose antisemitism is like a cancer on the face of an old friend.
“But Israel’s assault on Gaza has highlighted another danger too. It has often been debated whether the charge of antisemitism is concocted against anyone who supports Palestinian justice or criticises the actions of the Israeli state. The principal objection is that such a tactic represents an attempt to silence critics of Israel’s occupation. Yet there are rather more dangerous potential consequences: not least that the meaning of antisemitism is lost, making it all the more difficult to identify and eliminate hatred against Jewish people at a time when it is rising.”

Antisemitism “needs to be” treated very seriously, he says. But I’m not going to do that, he says to himself. Instead I’m going to keep right on making cryptic allusions to the illegitimacy of Israel, and I’ll resort to that other antisemitic mantra, ‘the Holocaust industry”, which Jews use to shut down debate. But for today I’ll just all it the antisemitism industry, with the same implications, and if anything bad happens, don’t blame me.

The Guardian Op Ed is just as bad. They have been doing a great job of poisoning their fans against Jews and or Israel for years.  Suddenly they decide to cover their arses in case things get nasty.

“The controversy has gained extra heat because of the alarming increase in anti-Jewish racism.” “As we reported today, during the course of a single July week, eight synagogues in France were attacked, one of them firebombed by a 400-strong crowd, whose chants and banners included “Death to Jews” and “Slit Jews’ throats”. More chilling still, given that country’s history, Molotov cocktails have been hurled at synagogues in Germany, where chants heard at pro-Palestinian protests have included “Jew, coward pig, come out and fight alone”, and “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas”. The lay leader of Germany’s Jews told the Guardian that “these are the worst times since the Nazi era”. In Britain too there has been a spike in antisemitic incidents, with monitoring groups saying July was the second worst month in 30 years. It is the same spike they see every time the conflict in the Middle East escalates. The common thread here is the conflation of Jews with Israeli conduct.” 

Here we go. Israeli conduct. In other words ‘not lying down and taking it’, as we think they should.

The BBC’s report almost seems to be mocking the three Jewish interviewees who cite what appear to be trivial incidents. Name-calling - “People do get nervous that they’re gonna be verbally abused and things” says Esther, while her two kids happily munch away on their chocolate biscuits.

“People being followed by cars, and having “Hitler! Death to the Jews!” shouted at them” says a man. “I think it’s getting out of hand” says another. “people are getting more and more comfortable with being antisemitic.” Well yes. That does sound worrying, but in the scheme of things, tolerable.  Then we’re shown a clip of a man with a megaphone telling us what we should really be worrying about. “The death toll is increasing! It’s over sixteen hundred now” screeches he. “Most of them are young children” he adds. The film cuts to the talking head of Hugh Lanning of the PSC.

“We’re very clear that any form of racism isn’t tolerated on any of our protests” he claims. “And actually it’d be a distraction from the main purpose” “Our opposition is to what the Israeli government with the support of the US and the UK government is doing, and that’s where we want the focus to be”

What is he talking about? What Israel is doing of course. And, what is that, exactly? Defending itself, (the Jewish State) against a Jihadi group, a terrorist organisation, which is not only committed to Israel’s destruction, but equally committed to the destruction of its own sacrificial lambs. 

That’s what our objection is to, he's saying. Not to Hamas. We object to Israel. It’s conduct, you understand, nothing more.

If that reasoning isn’t based on antisemitism I’d like to know what it is based on.

The last thing I’ll add is about people like Baroness Warsi paying lip service to 'opposing antisemitism'. If they didn’t, all that crowing against Islamophobia would lose credibility.

People hate and fear Islam for so many demonstrably valid reasons. People hate Jews because they do.  And the people who hate Jews make sure that Jews have two choices.:

a.) Submit to antisemitic-engendered attacks or b.) defend themselves in the face of intolerable  provocation. 

Disingenuous crocodile tears about antisemitism from people who spout antisemitic politics aren’t fooling anyone.

Bleeding chunks from the 'Spectator'

It's time for another digest from the Spectator (an intermittent Is the BBC biased? feature that falls under our '...and other matters' remit.)

Here are some choice extracts from this week's edition:

David Frum: Diary

A quiet rural county in a peaceable dominion may seem a planet removed from the violence of the Middle East. But my wife and I wake up before six to read about the latest rocket attack upon Israel from Gaza. Our eldest daughter, Miranda, travelled to Tel Aviv in search of adventure early last year. She was recruited by a local modelling agency, and her face now decorates magazines and billboards. Her body, however, is frequently to be found in bomb shelters. When Hamas shoots at Israel, they’re now shooting at my kid. That makes this latest round of Middle Eastern war even more personal than usual. Miranda carries an American passport, and so — unlike most Israelis — can leave for safety at any time. She has repeatedly refused. This beautiful young woman who had never cared much about Jewish life has discovered under fire a new sense of belonging. One of the hardest things in raising a Jewish child is the question from young lips: ‘Could it ever happen again?’ Parents of course wish to promise that hatred and persecution and murder have faded into the past; that people have learned to live together. But we do not promise, because the promise would not be true. As rockets hurtle into Israel, gangs attack Jews in the streets of Europe — and eminent persons in media and politics condone what they do not outright justify. Again? Yes, again. 

Charles Moore: The Spectator's Notes

At the impressive Westminster Abbey vigil to mark the centenary of the first world war on Monday night, there was one big candle for each quarter of the Abbey, and one dignitary assigned to each candle. At different points in the service, each dignitary would extinguish his or her candle. Then the rest of us in the relevant area, all equipped with candles, would follow suit. The lamps went out, as it were, all over Europe. One thing niggled. I was in the South Transept, and our big-candle snuffer was Lady Warsi, Minister of State at the Foreign Office. I complained to friends that her prominence fell below the level of events. She was always a self-publicising minister — an Asian Edwina Currie — and she is notably sectarian. I had no idea, however, that she would resign the next day, once her little moment of history was passed, professing anger about Gaza policy. Her ill-advised appointment by David Cameron was tokenist, and so she gave no loyalty. Her resignation was tokenist too. How long before she pops up in another party? ['Is the BBC biased?' prediction: Baroness Warsi will join the Lib Dems before the year is out].

Hugo Rifkind: Double talk

Last time I was here (I’ve been away, as it happens, in somebody else’s holiday home), I wrote about Israel. This was before the latest war began, but after it looked like it was about to, and I shared the concern that this country, once so familiar to European sensibilities, was starting to feel decidedly foreign. And the good people of The Spectator put it online twice.

The first time, it ran under the headline ‘I’m not comfortable with Israel any more. And I’m really not comfortable with that’. It was a fair reflection of the text. The response was sizeable, and appeared to be mainly from sad Jews, hurt Israelis and furious Zionists. Douglas Murray wrote a very good blogpost about how I was the one suffering moral drift, not them.

The second time, it ran under the headline ‘If Britain was being shelled, as Israel is being now, how would we respond?’ This was a less fair reflection of the text, but only marginally, and the response was again sizeable. This time, though, it was from sad peaceniks, angry pro-Palestinian activists and furious anti-Zionists. A columnist in Saudi Arabia’s Arab News even wrote a (less good) column about what a mindless Israeli shill I was.

The text in both was identical. As a columnist, I know I quite often sit on the fence. It’s a first, though, even for me, to be on both sides of it at once.

Douglas Murray: Where have all the leaders gone?

So yes, the problem is bigger than one man, even a man in the position which for almost a century could have shifted such global drift [Barack Obama]. There are also the problems which are, if not unique to our time, then certainly exacerbated by it. For instance there is undoubtedly the problem of the West’s attention span in an era driven by 24-hour news. Like a lighthouse, we seem able to fix our beam on everything at some point, but settle nowhere, and focus on nothing. For many people, the downing of MH17 was a sharp reminder that the Ukraine crisis is still going on.

It’s not just in Ukraine that this attention deficit disorder is manifesting itself. It is now three years since David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy led the international effort to topple Colonel Gaddafi. But after the toppling and the victory tour everybody lost interest in the country. The American ambassador was murdered in Benghazi in an act that the current administration still insists was something between a random act of violence and the more exuberant variety of movie criticism. But apart from that incident, the world’s attention just couldn’t stick around. This week British and other western diplomats were pulled from Libya and the Royal Navy evacuated hundreds of British and other EU nationals. And all this in a country which is one of the main launch points for illegal migrants seeking to enter Europe.

That is more, the cycle of avoidance is self-reinforcing. There’s no political focus because there’s no popular pressure for anything to be done. And there’s no popular pressure because — unlike in, say, Gaza — Libya, Syria, Iraq, parts of Ukraine and numerous other places are now too dangerous for reporters to work from. So the world’s attention only ever focuses on moderately dangerous situations.