Today's Sunday programme on Radio 4 conformed to type when discussing the Macron government's latest initiative to tackle Islamic radicalism in France.
The segment began with a clip of a Muslim activist attacking it for being unfair to Muslims and followed it with an interview with an American academic who thought exactly the same, also disapproving of it.
Edward Stourton even inadvertently admitted as much saying, 'And what do you make of the point we just heard from [the Muslim activist], which is very close to what you're saying...'.
And it was also very close to what nearly all guests say when they've invited to talk about Islam in France on Sunday, where uniformity of thought prevails - especially on these kinds of subject matter.
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The increasing 'woke' programme also did a feature on the transatlantic slave trade and St Helena and marked Racial Justice Sunday with a feature on racism in the Church of England and talked to a campaigner about it.
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Another regular element of Sunday is its heavy focus on particular countries. India is one such country regularly in its crosshairs, and the coverage of it is usually from the same angle - one of intense negativity towards the ruling Hindu nationalist BJP. Here a BBC reporter piled on - nay, positively heaped on - the negatives. The feature attracted a passing comment on Twitter:
Linda Floyd: Discrimination of any religion always wrong & if that’s happening in India it is indeed wrong. However, I fail to understand why same condemnation isn’t directed at the dreadful discrimination of religious minorities in Muslim countries like Pakistan.
David Robertson: The weekend of 9/11, the thought crossed my mind that the BBC’s right-on religious affairs programme would use it to talk about Islamaphobia. But no, surely they wouldn’t be so crass? It was worse. No mention of victims. No commemoration. Just Islamaphobia in Bradford.
That said, there was even more, as there was also a piece on how Sikhs got mixed up in the original 'backlash against innocent Muslims' after 9/11.
The 'backlash' angle has been a classic BBC kneejerk take on such events for twenty years now. It seems to be their default angle.
The piece David mentions was a massive, uncritical plug - an advert, pure and simple - for Peaceophobia, a Bradford-based theatrical self-declared ''unapologetic response to rising Islamophobia around the world''.
[So much for the BBC not featuring third-party advertising].
The piece featured someone explaining the title. She said that, as 'Islam' means 'peace', if you're 'phobic' about Islam you're also 'phobic' about peace.
Though doesn't 'Islam' actually mean 'submission'?
'Submission' is something people might rightly be 'phobic' about, surely?
As a lifelong atheist and born cynic I have always seen religion - for other people - as a parental substitute and a kind of balm or emollient, giving comfort and offering companionship. I think of religion as a security blanket; provider of ready-made social structures; births marriages and deaths; continuity through generations. Religion can soothe away insecurities and uncertainties and eradicate loneliness.
Also, I’ve seen many a happy outcome and even had fleeting feelings of envy. But I also felt that religion could be benign, but is more often malign. Either way religion was for ‘them’ not me, and of little relevance.
That was before Islam came along and slapped us in the face. I can remember long lost tales from far-flung places, of families torn apart by wars and natural disasters, but bearing devastating loss with unimaginable stoicism because they believed it was all “the will of Allah.”
What is that all about, we would ask ourselves, marvelling at the alien beings’ capacity for credulity and resilience.
Now though, the violence accompanying the cultural tsunami of mass immigration that has engulfed an apathetic Europe forces us to acknowledge that something is not right in the state of Denmark.
I understood Islam to be a sexually repressive, misogynistic, patriarchal cult, bogged down by life-limiting dogma and cultural rules and regulations. With all that baggage stripped away, as is necessary for a reformed, new fangled, ’moderate’ Islam, would there be anything left at all, I wondered? But why even bother to speculate, as Islam’s built-in infallibility, inalienability and non-negotiability makes the prospect of any such stripping away very unlikely.
Politicians who are concerned about terrorism and aren’t sure how to react to it should read this revelatory article by MEMRI's Yigal Carmon. This is the information that the BBC should be disseminating, as per their charter - for the good of the country.
Dear Amber Rudd, you’ve got to read it. And Theresa May and all the clueless political leaders who have taken on the responsibility of governing Britain and keeping us safe. Wouldn’t we feel a little more confident knowing our politicians were on the case? As it is, they seem to have little or no idea.
Jihad is designed to divide us and make us change our way of life, but not to separate us into two camps, left wing tolerant sympathisers of Islam on the one side, and intolerant Islamophobes on the other. Neither is it to convert us and our way of life from the debauched boozers they think we are into goody-goody, teetotal church-goers.
No, holy Jihad demands an all-or-nothing revolution. They want to divide all humanity into believers and non-believers, eventually eradicating the latter - in order to create the ideal Islamic utopia.
They do want to change us and our way of life, as we infidels exist in a cesspit of promiscuity and impurity and they want the whole wide world to embrace the purity and dedication that underpins the life of the pious Muslim.
The jihadis who perpetrate these horrific crimes are neither losers, nor nihilists, nor worshipers of death, nor sick cowards. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of them are devout and fanatic believers. They are idealists who sacrifice their lives for the sake of a utopian future: a world ruled by their faith. The attacks they commit are extreme acts of piety. They seek to emulate the dedication of the early believers in order to revive the glory and grandeur of the past. In fact, as part of their training, many suicide bombers adopt a pious lifestyle: they immerse themselves in prayer, help the needy in their society, pay all their debts,[1] and become moral and religious role models for others”
I wrote about a similarly informative piece here, (and I made some of the above points too) but I’m not sure how many people bothered to listen to Sam Harris’s podcast.
Yigal Carmon presents a less defeatist theory. That Islam is redeemable. That there are great things to respect and admire within historic Islam; creativity and empire building and so on. He says that in order to encourage reform it’s necessary to stop mischaracterising Islamic terrorism:
“the truth is that these perpetrators, by the standards of their own belief, are virtuous people who follow the directives of the Koran [48:29]:”
First, we must be prepared to recognise that murderous activities do derive from the core values of Islam.
“The problem lies not in the perpetrators' innate character but in some of the core values of their religious belief system. “
“Western leaders cannot expect to defeat "terrorism" in their countries when they deny and evade acknowledging the roots of the jihadi phenomenon: the deep connection of the attacks to the faith. Admitting this connection will not only be more respectful to Muslims, it will also be conducive to reforms and useful to Muslim reformists, who acknowledge that the terrorists' ideals come from within: from the houses of worship, the schools and society at large. Being truthful towards the Muslims is more respectful than denial.”
Melanie Phillips must have been reading the same piece. She has written in a similar vein in the Times (£).
“We should be promoting and defending such Muslim reformers in the desperate hope that they succeed. Instead we knock the ground from under their feet by saying Islamist attacks have nothing to do with Islam. Until and unless Islam is reformed, we need to treat its practices on a scale ranging from extreme caution to outlawing some of them altogether.”
We’re really letting the reformers down if we don’t support them. Come on BBC. This is where you (could) come in.
I am tempted to go back to my initial cynicism. I am still an atheist and inveterate cynic. But if anything can be salvaged from the religion of Islam to make it compatible with me and mine, all might not be lost.
This morning the BBC were still in a seemingly never-ending loop, obsessing about sexual abuse in football, while Sky News wheeled in Haras Rafiq and Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra to discuss the matter. But it was short and sweet. Rafiq looked disconcerted when ‘time ran out’ before he was able to finish a point. I can’t remember what was said, but it was largely a case of Muslims wondering why the British expected Muslims to adapt to the British, rather than the other way round. They couldn’t quite understand the problem. It baffled them.
Not to worry, a little later, the BBC was on the Casey; that is Dame Casey herself appeared, followed by some extremely defensive Muslims.
Let’s just recap. When the debate about mass immigration first raised its head in public, people couched their concerns in the only terms they could, to avoid being (or being seen to be) racist. Surely, they asked each other, there’s nothing racist about objecting to mass immigration as long as we stick to the rules. That is, we do it in terms of numbers - especially as we’re already struggling to house, employ and educate our own. Charity begins at home, does it not? A-a-a- am I being racist?
“In order to cope with immigration at the current rate, this country needs to build a new house every few minutes. The ‘housing shortage’ in Britain is talked about as though it is a native phenomenon – as though the British people just keep needing more and more houses. In fact we only need to keep building on green-belt land and covering over our beautiful countryside with new houses because we keep importing more and more people. Why do we do this? Why do we need to keep doing it? What is the cultural enrichment that we failed to get from the first few million Pakistani and Bangladeshi migrants which we will only be able to really enjoy from the next few million?”
As if all that weren’t bad enough, there’s the underlying problem - that shamefaced ‘stranger in my own town’ feeling, which was swept under the very rug that people felt was being pulled from under their feet. Whole neighbourhoods transformed. People walking round in strange and alienating garb. Out with familiarity and its concomitant sense of security and in with uncertainty and not being quite sure what it all amounts to or where it's going.
Eventually everyone was talking openly - about numbers. Pressure on schools, surgeries, wages. In other words they spoke about mass immigration alright, but strictly in terms of anything but you know what. Unspoken, but ominously present and jumbo sized — i.e., creeping Islamisation and the BBC’s relentless attempts at normalising all those regressive cultural abnormalities. Also, the persistent promotion of diversity and the denigration of anything dangerously resembling patriotism.
Even when the grooming scandal broke, and even when the Trojan Horse affair hit the headlines, still, full and frank debate about Muslim immigration was hobbled by political correctness and the ever present fear of being outed as a racist.
Now it looks as if Dame Louise Casey has fallen victim to a very similar type of deflection. Or perhaps it’s merely the BBC’s (and Sky’s) selective spin. They’ve homed in on the one aspect of the report with which they’re pretty sure there will be no dissent. It’s women’s lib. The feminist angle.
They’re actually criticising Islam, but not for its homophobia, nor for its appalling antisemitism. Not for its medieval attitude to practically everything, including apostasy and blasphemy. No, it’s the one thing they feel sure everyone will approve of. That a woman needs the permission of a man to do anything remotely independent. They even pretend it’s only Muslim men who are at fault, when although the religion itself is indeed fatally misogynistic and patriarchal, many Muslim women are usually just as dictatorial, rigid and unforgiving when it comes to enforcing all that mumbo jumbo they like to live by.
This goes to show that even when someone comes near to the crux of the matter, they deflect at the very last moment and retreat to a position of safety. The safe space. "We’re not racists. It’s just that Islam is not feminist enough, and anyway the country is full."
Well, they’re quite right. Islam is not feminist enough and the country is full, but that’s not what scares me most about mass Muslim immigration.
See? I’m openly Islamophobic. maybe I should be a football fan after all. I’m ‘racist’ and that’s the way I like it.
File under the heading “Any other matters that take our fancy”
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An example of the normalisation of Islam in The Times:
“Islamic toy store puts children on the path to peace” says the headline.
Unlike the paper version, the online piece doesn’t illustrate the products this unfortunately named mum, “Nazia Nasreen”, is marketing. It just has a picture of two innocent youngsters, boy and girl, happily playing with toy alphabet bricks. The Arabic variety.
In fact the Times presents it as a good-news business story - a young mum with entrepreneurial ambitions - what’s not to like? Oh, and her aim is to put children on the path to peace.
“She is in a group of leading British 'Muslim Mumpreneurs', which also includes Bake Off winner Nadiya Hussain, who juggle bringing up children and running successful businesses in what has traditionally been a male-dominated world.”
[...] She said: 'A lot of times children learn the wrong things and that's where the extremism kicks in. If the right educational toys and books are provided from a young age, we can instil the correct Islamic ethos and values in our children'.
That’s what it says in the Mail, and they have illustrated some of her wares.
Muslim Barbie (sold out) As far as I can tell it’s your bog standard Barbie wearing a Barbie headscarf - why can’t anyone just customise their infidel Barbie?
The above is possibly a poster.
Three little girls who look about 7 or 8 years old dressed in black, with hijabs plus a handy epithet from Abu Dawud:
“The prophet said: “If anyone cares for three daughters, gives them a good upbringing, marries them (to good husbands) and treats them well, they will enter paradise” “
There must also be a booklet on how to be a good husband. Possibly.
The oddest thing of all is….. three leaflets or booklets entitled: (in order:)
ETIQUETTES OF EATING; HAVE YOU PRAYED?; THE MONTH OF RAMADAN.
These items ("toys") will put Muslim children on the path to peace and instil the correct Islamic ethos and values in them.
Is this a joke?
Who knows; the cover illustrations are straight out of South Park.
There's been criticism of the BBC from Christian groups in recent days over what these groups see as the BBC's determination to sideline the Christian faith of Olympic athletes like Usain Bolt.
The Jamaican is a devout Catholic and always gives praise to God both before and after his races. The complainants say that his faith never gets a mention in BBC interviews and articles.
Plus, they cite things like this: When Usain Bolt fell on his knees to thank God after he had won the 200m in Rio, the BBC presenter talked about it being "a moment to himself"....
....when it was clearly the opposite. It was an act of public worship which would have been condemned as crass and distasteful if it had been an ordinary mortal. But because it is a hero then it has to be explained away as something else.
This morning's Sundayon Radio 4 took on board this criticism of the BBC and went on to discuss faith and sport, including some discussion of Usain Bolt's Christian faith.
This discussion, however, was prefaced by a clip from a 2012 BBC interview where another famous athlete's faith was discussed. That athlete was Mo Farah and the faith being discussed was Islam.
If Sunday meant that as Exhibit A for the Defence against the charges of anti-Christian bias from certain Christian groups their case may have misfired somewhat at that point!
His counter-example (an online BBC article which made a lot of the athlete's Muslim faith), unsurprisingly, also involved Mo Farah.
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Mo, of course, has just taken us to 27 golds in Rio. I suppose we all ought to stop what we're doing for a minute and do the Mobot instead. I'd join you but I'm drinking a cup of coffee at the moment and wouldn't want to spill it.
Was it supposed to be affectionate but slightly ironic? Or was it another example of Islam infiltrating our cultural norms? In other words, does it demonstrate the BBC’s normalisation of Islam in the UK.
Putting into context by taking Nicky Campbell’s and TBQ’s past performances into account, it’s truly hard to say,
Remember, not everyone can be an obsessive BBC geek. Some of us know more than enough about a given BBC employee’s political affiliations and preferences. We trawl their Tweets and document their impartiality lapses, be they overt, covert, subtle, subliminal or imaginary. We might spot something genuinely worrying, or, on the other hand we might get over excited about something that turns out to be nothing.
Nicky Campbell has been eviscerated (and the contents analysed) by connoisseurs of BBC bias over the years, particularly as regards his radio 5 shows, which I’m afraid I’ve never heard. My radio doesn’t go there.
Lookie here. And, on this very blog, there are 12 items tagged Nicky Campbell! (only one was mine)
Personally, I do watch TBQs, not only for the pantomime but also to keep an eye on what’s going on. Watching one’s back. In my opinion Nicky Campbell does tend to over-apply moral equivalence. Not that he tolerates radicalism or violence, but let’s call it an almost rigid adherence to the non-value-judgmentalist, multicultural ethos preached by the BBC.
On that occasion Campbell’s use of that term may have been tinged with irony, but at the same time, in that particular context there is certainly an element of deference to Islam. Which some of us find sycophantic and - I don't know - disconcerting.
As we know, the BBC is used to pleading ‘we must be doing it right because we get criticism from “both” sides’, so maybe Campbell’s gratuitous use of this expression with an infinitesimal touch of irony is pure mischief-making. A way of hedging his bets and leaving enough mystique in its wake to please the Muslims while simultaneously heading off the inevitable cries of bias from the likes of us. Or maybe it’s none of that; just creeping Islamisation.
Meanwhile the normalisation of Islam in the UK grows apace, and if it makes some of us feel uneasy, we must suck it up. Happy Ramadan.
Someone I know suddenly decided to give up his business and work for someone else. He was fed up with hiring staff who turned out to be unreliable and incompetent, and tired of reps phoning him every ten minutes. He figured he’d be better off just doing what he enjoyed - (hairdressing as it happens) No more responsibility, thanks. I’d rather be told what to do.
That’s an allegory. Parable for the day.
Call me Dawkins, but that’s kind of why people do religion, or more specifically, Islam.
Get your daily guidance from God almighty, and be righteous. While I appreciate the appeal of relying on eternal paternal guidance, it also seems like an abnegation of responsibility.
I regard people who espouse literalist interpretations of holy scriptures with incredulity. Especially when they seem otherwise normal. As Professor Richard Dawkins said to Mehdi Hasan “You believe that Mohammed went to heaven on a winged horse?”
However, this isn’t the time or place for my views on religious mumbo-jumbo. My job here is to opine on the BBC’s approach to these vexed issues. Craig has already blogged yesterday’s The Big Questions - the episode called “Do we need a British Islam” but nevertheless, I’m going to do it some more.
First of all, who is “we”?
As Craig says, all the front row participants were Muslims. Does the “we” in question allude exclusively to “Muslims”? Was the Big Question: Do Muslims need a British Islam? Do British Muslims need any kind of Islam?
It was impossible to derive any kind of satisfaction from this unpleasant programme. Viewers were further away from knowing whether or not British Muslims think they need a British Islam at the end of the programme than at the beginning. At one moment, when Nicky Campbell tried to elicit a straight answer from an Imam, one might have thought we were dangerously close to getting somewhere. But no.
It was just an unstructured row, with no beginning, middle or end. Maybe they’d have forced out a more definitive answer if they’d stuck to the usual format, stuffing three different Big Questions into the allotted hour. Condensing it might have taken them by surprise. Who knows what might have come out in the rush.
On the other hand, it was a big subject, so the one-topic experiment was worth a try.
I think what they were arguing about is this: should someone create a watered-down version of Islam in order to fit in with “Britain”?
Unfortunately this argument fell at the first hurdle because no Muslim agrees about what truly constitutes Islam, let alone which bits need watering down to fit in with British values.
Judging by what we saw on this programme and what we already know, that is insoluble. True Islam is unBritish and true Britishness is clearly unIslamic.
I’m suspicious of people who wear a collar and tie with a jumper so I felt obliged to Google Adam Deen. He has an extensive Youtube / web presence.
I learned that he used to be called Hakkan Cerrah and is married to TBQ regular Myriam Francois Cerrah. No doubt her absence on yesterday’s episode was due to some kind of BBC misogyny.
Incidentally, Myriam’s verdict on misogyny in Islam is that it doesn’t really exist. Any perceived misogyny is just a wrong interpretation of Islam. Phew. That must be a relief to all those Islamic ladies in Britain.
I mean, what if British Muslims believed the teachings of, say, Imam Ghazzali? I realise that ‘Jedi’s” summary of Imam Ghazzali’s teachingsis a tad tongue in cheek, but it seems fairly accurate.
“She should remain in the inner sanctum of her house and tend to her spinning; she should not enter and exit excessively; she should speak infrequently with her neighbours and visit them only when the situation requires it; she should safeguard her husband in his absence and in his presence; she should seek his pleasure in all affairs and refrain from betraying him through herself or his possessions; she should not leave his home without his permission: [...] she should be content with the means that God has provided her husband; she should place his rights before hers and before the rights of his relatives; she should always observe the rules of personal hygiene, and be ready at all times for him to enjoy her whenever he wishes; she should be affectionate toward her children, zealous to protect them, refraining from uttering profane words against them and from talking back to her husband.”
Is it any wonder that Myriam and her feminist Muslim coreligionists, frantically pushing their dream of a feminist, non-misogynist Islam, wish to reinterpret all outmoded codswallop? But too much reinterpreting risks losing the essence of Islam and arouses all sorts of ire from traditionalists. Interpreting the Koran seems to be as elastic as...go on, supply your own knickers simile.
I also learned about the controversies surrounding Deen’s conversion from extremism to Quillium and the hooha over a ‘Happy Muslims’ video - of Muslims dancing to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy”, featuring Deen’s poor dance moves. (his own words). Several Muslims were not happy at all. They thought it was a disgraceful attempt at kowtowing to .... the British.
The Bradford Imam, aptly named Imam Fazal Dad, complained that Adam Deen was getting too much airtime. Very childish and unbecoming for an Imam called Dad. (I think it was him - one does sometimes get ones Imams mixed up)
There is one small question I’d like to mention, and one Big one. The small one first.
Why does the BBC allow audience members to ‘photo bomb’ the speakers? I mean the attention-seeking idiot in the audience who wouldn’t keep still. Gurning, waving, clapping and being generally distracting. The camera could have moved in close to the speaker and edited out this annoying person.
The Big Question that needs answering is one that no TV presenter ever gets round to putting.
Is Islamic antisemitism acceptable in Britain? Why does the antisemitism in Islam get a free pass? The British don’t like it when antisemitism or racism emanates from any other individual or group, be it a non-Muslim individual, a right-wing antisemite or a bunch of Nazi sympathisers. But with the majority of Muslims antisemitism and anti-Zionism are a given.
Mindless opposition to Israel’s existence is rooted in gross antisemitism, and that is the elephant that’s always present in the studio. An enormous elephant that’s allowed to career around, willy nilly, trampling on everything with impunity, utterly and completely confident it can get away with it.
Polls are in the news. Has anyone conducted a poll to assess the general public’s perception of Islam?
One problem is how to broach the matter delicately without antagonising the man on the multicultural omnibus.
My poll would be designed to find out how much people know about current issues, and what they think about them; Islam, the Arab world, immigration, Israel and antisemitism. I’d also need to ask where they learn about politics and current affairs. I’d have one box saying ‘BBC’ and another saying ‘other.’
I don’t have a Facebook account myself, but I have access to one, and I’m taken aback by the inexhaustible torrents of pro Jeremy Corbyn posts that keep appearing in front of me. More and more and still more. Am I hallucinating already?
Are all those star-struck fools really oblivious to Corbyn’s affiliations with radical Islamists and antisemites? Love is blind; even if they were aware of something nasty in the woodshed they’d play it down or they wouldn’t even care.
One obvious piece of advice to myself. Don’t go on Facebook. Don’t look.
If they choose to advertise their ignorance, who cares? Am I bothered about those who ‘don’t know much’ about world politics, but ‘know what they like’? Should I care or just go ‘so what?’
When questioned, Dara O’Briain explained why he never makes jokes about Islam. The main reason, (apart from the obvious) was that he doesn’t think the public knows much about the subject, other than that Muslims pray five times a day. He felt, quite rightly, that in order to be funny, a joke must be based on a fundamental truth, and if no-one knows enough about Islam to recognise truth, they won’t get the joke.
I think he may be right. Having just watched a Tommy Robinson video in which he also expresses concerns at the public’s ignorance of what Islam actually is, I think it’s fair to say that universal ignorance is a pretty well substantiated fact. So - how come? How can it be that no-one knows much about Islam? It’s topical. More than topical.
If public figures don’t really know what they’re talking about maybe they should just shut up.
“.... the renowned Quranic scholar David Cameron” he writes. That’s heavy sarcasm, in case you didn’t recognise the joke.
Where’s the BBC? We employ the BBC to inform and educate us. We pay for this. Give us our money’s worth!
One would think that in the current circumstances the BBC would fully enlighten the audience so that they can make up their own minds about what’s racist, what’s phobic and what’s incompatible with British values.
This needn’t violate the BBC’s controversial edict that prohibits BBC reporters and journalists from making and airing value judgments. So don’t. Simply equip the people to make them for themselves.
As it is, the BBC seems to be doing their utmost not to do so. Instead they do everything possible to muddy the waters, particularly by overlooking some of Islam’s most outrageous cultural and religious practices, supposedly to maintain social cohesion. I think that bus has already left.
“It may well be that when you first heard of the barbarous Islamist atrocities in Paris you thought: ‘My God. My God. How could they do that? At least now maybe the scales will fall from some eyes and we will tackle the problem head on.’ And then, like me, having thought this, you will have watched a BBC news programme and very quickly realised — nope, not a chance, business as usual. The same delusional rubbish, the same gerrymandering of public opinion, the same absurdities.”
Says Rod. Yep. That’s the BBC.
A French reader pointed me to a video of Nabila Ramdani being interviewed sympathetically by Victoria Derbyshire following the terrorist attack in Paris. The entire interview was conducted on the topsy turvy terms of the (hypothetical) imminent anti-Muslim backlash.
Nabila decided to tell Ms Derbyshire that Muslim children in France who had refused to observe a minute’s silence for the victims had been taken to the police. Our reader said this was false, and I failed to find any evidence of such a thing on the internet. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Until then I’ll assume it didn’t happen.
Making a potentially inflammatory allegation could have been deliberately designed to ‘anger the Muslims’. Was Ramdani deliberately setting out to engender a backlash? Why? What is she up to?
Why was Victoria Derbyshire interviewing a distinctly antisemitic Islam apologist in the first place? I wonder if Victoria Derbyshire knows much about Islam. Has she read the koran? Has she heard the rantings of radical preachers whose videos are all over the internet? Has she seen the opinion polls? She probably just dismisses uncomfortable facts as Islamophobic smears. We can see where Victoria’s sympathy lies. With the lies.
Rod Liddle refers to a ‘French Algerian’ woman who told Kirsty Wark that the attacks could have been by rival drug gangs’ I assume this was Nabila’s expert contribution to our enlightenment before she thought of plan B. The backlash schtick.
If Victoria Derbyshire wasn’t savvy enough to apply a healthy dose of skepticism to exaggerated Muslim grievance-mongering, was the BBC acting responsibly in handing the topic over to her? Andrew Neil might have approached Ramdani’s imaginative testimony with suspicion and might even have raised an eyebrow.
The casual viewer is so anxious not to be thought racist that he tends to soak up lies and propaganda as long as he seems tolerant and right on as he does so.
We can’t be sure how much of the BBC’s sheer disinformation is responsible for the current political situation but if politicians insist that it’s ISIS alone that’s evil, and that it’s solely Isis, not Islam itself, that means us harm, then it’s high time the public were given a fuller picture. Why did al-Qaeda instigate 9/11? Are Al Shebab and Boko Haram peaceful? Are they all nothing to do with Islam?
Rod has also noticed.
“Meanwhile, the Home Secretary was telling us that the terrorists represent a ‘perverted’ form of Islam. Hmm. The same perverted form of the religion as practised by Abdul’s home country, Saudi Arabia? Or in Iran, or Libya, or Palestine, or Somalia, or . . . the list of countries which kill apostates, persecute Christians, Jews, homosexuals and women is longish, you have to say. We must grasp that the proportion of Muslims worldwide who hold this ‘perverted’ view is far, far, higher than Mrs May or the BBC would like you to think. Some 27 per cent of British Muslims, for example, expressed sympathy with the Charlie Hebdo murderers. This week it was reported that one in five British Muslims sympathises with Islamic State fighters. That is a number which is, as John Major might put it, not inconsiderable.”
I note that Rod has come round to the opinion that the conflict in ‘Palestine’ might have something to do with Islam. Long time coming, but hopefully worth waiting for.
If the BBC did its job properly we could tell our MPs how we feel, robustly reminding them that their job is to represent us. That is instead of being expected to to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Islam is the religion of peace. Rod again:
“I stared at the screen, mouth agape, unable for a while to believe what I was hearing. A whole programme about the Paris attacks in which three words — Muslim, Islam, jihadi — were not used at any point. The desperation to exculpate the ideology was present long before the bodies had been carried away. Then, when it was revealed that some attackers had entered the country as refugees, the Today programme had a fair, balanced and unpartisan debate between three people who agreed that we should take more refugees, because getting tough is ‘what they (the nasty terrorists) want us to do’”
I find assertions that we mustn’t do this, that or the other - because it’s “what the terrorists want” deeply irritating. Usually it’s said in defiance: “We refuse to alter our normal behaviour, because altering our normal behaviour is what the terrorists want.” No they don’t; they want us to keep repeating our normal behaviour so that we keep on being sitting ducks. They don’t want us to take precautions because they want to kill us. Where’s the logic in deliberately being an easy target?
I’d put a question about that in my poll. What do you think the terrorists want? I could send the questionnaire to Victoria Derbyshire but I doubt she’d bother to tick my boxes.
Further to my last, I think someone should compile a detailed checklist of various not-the-real-Islamists and pass it to David Cameron and Theresa May so they can issue once and for all the definitive rules on what is ‘the real', as opposed to a perversion of, Islam. Just to be clear.
Think of it as a search, as in ‘where’s Wally?’
The list should include Islamic State otherwise known as DAESH, Al Qaeda and the others I mentioned previously, as well as the affiliated branches of Islamic Jihadi groups and groupettes. As in The Jihadi’s Front for ISIS and The ISISian Jihadi’s Front.
Also present on the list should be the individuals in the poster everyone’s talking about, advertising the comically titled “Quiz a Muslim”.
The fact that this audacious fiasco could take place in broad daylight but apparently below the radar of the not-the-real-Islam brigade only goes to show how dumb we are to agonise over the dangers of importing ‘those who wish to harm us’ while studiously ignoring those already in situ. The enemy within. This took place in Bedford; no more can we look forward with pleasure, at the end of a long day, to trudging tiredly 'up the wooden hill’.
Further to a btl comment by the esteemed Daphne Anson, I would just like to congratulate Amena on her experiment with comedy. Although ‘opposites’ is an infantile variant of humour as anyone who knows a four-year old will attest, little ones will burst out laughing after saying ‘black is white’, while Amena manages to keep a straight face.
However she gives the game away with: “In a rare burst of reporting on an Israeli atrocity the BBC ran an article....”
When Craig and I first imagined this blog we envisaged a lively below-the-line commentariat, with brilliant ideas being batted back and forth good-humouredly. No we didn’t. We thought we’d be plagued by trolls, antisemites and fools. Maybe the absence of frantic and furious btl interactivity is a jolly good thing.
I can’t remember why I started this, but I intended to apologise for the recent paucity of posts on this blog. Events seem to have prevented both of us from posting. While I was out of action someone stole my thoughts. Well, not just one person, several.
I’m not the only one who wanted to ask David Cameron and Theresa May, if IS / DAESH / ISIL /ISIS is nothing to do with Islam, how about Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al Shebab, Islamic Jihad, the Al Qaeda affiliate that just went berserk in Mali and the Jew-stabbing loonies in Israel --- how about them? Are they anything to do with Islam? Or not? Let’s be clear, as the politicians say.
Melanie Phillips and many others voiced similar thoughts. Who believes IS and all the rest of them have nothing to do with Islam? No-one. No. One. No-one’s fooled, so stop it. Stop being so silly.
*******
I see Nick Cohen has been addressing the vexed but hypothetical question of life after the BBC. He fears that ‘the right’ is plotting to deprive us of our national treasures, like Bake-off and the Archers, and the left will never forgive them. “Never mind a little bit of bias” he says, “we can’t all be perfect.”
*******
Then there was another bizarre Question Time. See Douglas Murray. Mehdi of “cattle” fame was on again.
I actually marvel at everyone’s superior insight in grasping ‘what the terrorists want‘. Knowing exactly what this is and depriving them of it is the way to go, apparently. One of several ‘things the terrorists want’ is for us to take measures to prevent them from carrying out more atrocities, so we mustn’t. We must keep on living our merry, laissez faire, happy go lucky, western lives as though nothing has happened. That’s the way to stand up to the terrorists. Also, they want us to bomb them, so we mustn’t. Mustn’t let them win.
Of course, the “We love death as you love life” mantra is a tough one because if it’s sincere, well, they’ve already won. It’s the ultimate stopper. Un-winnable for us.
Oddly enough (silly me) I had been thinking that what the nothing-to-do-with-Islam terrorists really really want is a caliphate: world-wide pure Islam where no creativity, musicality, or any kind of independent thought can interfere with a proper Muslim lifestyle. The terminal suppression of humanity is all they crave, in an ideal state.
The deterrent effect of gruesome punishments, (limb-amputations, being thrown off tall buildings, being beheaded or stoned to death) will guide the Proper Muslim on the trouble-free journey to paradise. Obedience and total submission, what’s not to like?
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As the three sisters who ran away to join the jihad said, we want our children to grow up knowing the real Islam and “to be brought up as Proper Muslims”.
David Cameron might want to put them straight about that.
BTW, I heard that on the radio. BBC radio 4 as it happens. Thursday 19th November at 8pm. Paris: Could it happen here? With Edward Stourton.
Yes, it could happen here, they say. British Muslims feel frustrated. They’re aiming for global war.
Ed Stourton treated the relatively banal observations from British Muslim journalists as pearls of wisdom. As far as I was concerned nothing new emerged from that half-hour, apart from the fact that one of Lee Rigby’s killers had “Daddy issues” -
“Apart from very basic facts, there’s almost nothing you can take at face value from the MSM.”
Daniel Pipes says terrorist attacks like the one in France push ordinary citizens to the right, towards embracing national security, restricting immigration, especially Muslim immigration; but he predicted that it would push the official people - what he called “the four ‘P’ professionals” - (Politicians, the Press, Police and Professors) in the opposite direction.
To maintain their worldview they’ll have to go even further to the left, to demonise as racists anyone who criticises Muslim migrants; to introduce censorship laws, not to stop Imams, but to stop those who criticise Muslim Imams; to open the floodgates to even more migrants.
I always thought that being ‘right’ meant you had a moustache and you hated Jonny foreigner whom you might refer to as a wog or a darkie. You believed in corporal and capital punishment and you had sharp creases in your trousers.
I’m not that. I’m shocked shocked that I’m thought of as ‘on the right’. (Not in the right.)
That’s why I’m supposedly trying to destroy the BBC, and why I’ll never be forgiven. Only I’m not, but what I really, really want is the BBC to properly reflect my views as well as theirs. I’d like the BBC to be what it’s supposed to be. Reliable, balanced, truthful, accurate, topical, grown-up.
Maybe the BBC think they “know what the right wants”, and they’re determined not to let us win. They won’t change, because that would be a victory for us. Above all, they mustn’t let us win.
Of course, some people are willing to give up a few of our rights. There seems, as Rose says in his book on the Danish cartoons affair, The Tyranny of Silence, some presumption that a diverse society requires greater limitations on speech, whereas of course the more diverse the society, the more diverse you are going to have to see your speech be. It is not just cartoons, but a whole system of inquiry which is being shut down in the West by way of hard intimidation and soft claims of offence-taking. The result is that, in contemporary Europe, Islam receives not an undue amount of criticism but a free ride which is unfair to all other religions. The night after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities I was pre-recording a Radio 4 programme. My fellow discussant was a very nice Muslim man who works to ‘de-radicalise’ extremists. We agreed on nearly everything. But at some point he said that one reason Muslims shouldn’t react to such cartoons is that Mohammed never objected to critics.
There may be some positive things to be said about Mohammed, but I thought this was pushing things too far and mentioned just one occasion when Mohammed didn’t welcome a critic. Asma bint Marwan was a female poetess who mocked the ‘Prophet’ and who, as a result, Mohammed had killed. It is in the texts. It is not a problem for me. But I can understand why it is a problem for decent Muslims. The moment I said this, my Muslim colleague went berserk. How dare I say this? I replied that it was in the Hadith and had a respectable chain of transmission (an important debate). He said it was a fabrication which he would not allow to stand. The upshot was that he refused to continue unless all mention of this was wiped from the recording. The BBC team agreed and I was left trying to find another way to express the same point. The broadcast had this ‘offensive’ fact left out.
I cannot imagine another religious discussion where this would happen, but it is perfectly normal when discussing Islam.
The BBC got into a spot of difficulty earlier this year over its attempts to put a positive spin on a BBC/ComRes survey in which 27% of British Muslims expressed some sympathy with those who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
Such behaviour fuelled claims that the BBC is far from impartial in its reporting of such stories, that it actually pursues an agenda to downplay negative angles, often downplaying or ignoring them.
It will be interesting then to see how or even if the BBC reports the latest Huffington Post/YouGov poll into the British public's attitude towards Islam. So far I can't see a thing.
The question they posed was a highly specific one, asking their respondents to focus on Islam in general rather than on Islamic extremists:
Do you feel that Islam (as distinct from Islamic fundamentalist groups) poses a threat to Western liberal democracy?
The results were:
27% said 'Yes', it's 'a major threat'
29% said 'Yes', it's 'some threat'
20% said 'No', it's 'not much threat'
15% said 'No', it's 'no threat at all'
8% said 'Don't know'
That's a total of 56% saying Islam is a threat to Western liberal democracy compared to just 35% saying Islam isn't a threat to Western liberal democracy...
...and even the majority of that 35% who said 'No' chose the 'not much threat' option rather than the 'no threat at all' option.
The results also show a significant shift in attitudes over the years. In 2001 (in a post-9/11 poll), the figures were almost reversed (32% saying Islam is a threat, 63% saying it isn't), and even in 2005 (in a post-7/7 poll) the figures were pretty evenly split (46% saying Islam in a threat, 47% saying it isn't a threat).
That is a major shift in public opinion. Will the BBC cover it?
Please can you stop the noise. I'm trying to get some rest.
Even by recent standards, today is proving a particularly depressing news day though, what with Tunisia, France and Kuwait...
Having had an unnerving personal scare this afternoon over events in Tunisia, I feel in the mood for a reflective post. So here goes...
I've admitted before that I often find myself viewing tragedies and atrocities through a peculiar prism - the prism of someone who blogs about BBC bias.
I watch the news, I take on board the horror of the situation, but I've still always got one eye firmly fixed on what might often seem (to people other than me) a relatively trivial side issue: BBC bias.
Today I was forced to think about that habit.
Whether I'm watching a series of fascinating reports on the transformation of a Chinese village into a fully-fledged city within ten years (Carrie Gracie on Newsnight this week), or a report from on board an illegal immigrant ("migrant") vessel in the Med, or Countryfile (Tom Heap's heavily-steered piece this week on travelling gypsies who want to stay put illegally), or listening to a science programme on Radio 4 (usually BBC Inside Science - or, as I like to think of it, Guardian Science), or...God help me!...watching the News Channel and reading the BBC website this afternoon, frantically trying to find out what exactly is happening in Tunisia...some part of my brain is always on high alert for evidence of BBC bias.
Now, I don't think BBC bias is a trivial side issue. Obviously. If I did I wouldn't have spent most of the past six years blogging about it! I think that BBC bias is a serious problem and that, in many areas, its influence is pretty much proven and deeply harmful, and that it needs vigorously resisting.
But I'm growing increasingly queasy at the extent to which I view pretty much everything I watch and hear and read on the BBC through this particular prism of mine.
Even today, when I was fretting myself into a state of near illness about a friend's daughter (on holiday in Tunisia), I found myself simultaneously monitoring the BBC's coverage of the story, with a mind to blogging about it.
Yes, really.
At the risk of sounding like a commentator on Radio 4's The Human Zoo though, I'm holding out the hope for myself that I'm not that odd after all.
Most people seem to respond to the news through their own peculiar prisms.
A BBC reporter whose Twitter feed I read today responded to one of the Islamist atrocities by quickly seeking to interpolate himself into a Twitter conversation (also involving, of all people, Mo Ansar), to make the VIP (Very Important Point) that because one of one today's murderous Muslim loons cited 'God' (i.e. Allah) as the justification for his atrocity not all "bleevrs" are "psychos".
Obviously true, but really the VIP to make today? Well, yes. if that's the peculiar prism you see things through.
Applying my own prism then, in what light did the BBC respond to this lunchtime's breaking news?
Well, I did a screengrab (naturally) of the BBC News and Sky News lead articles at around 1.00 pm:
The immediate thing I noticed was that Sky News had the Islamic angle straight away in the blurb below its headline and then in the first paragraph of the main part of its article while the BBC left introducing that angle until its fourth paragraph.
Then I noticed that Sky News was far more explicit about the barbarity of that Islamist attack. Where Sky said, in its second paragraph:
The severed head had Arabic writing scrawled across it and was found on a fence next to two jihadi banners.
BBC News put in far more coyly:
The dead man was found with Arabic inscriptions on him and an Islamist flag was found near the site.
There was a clear difference there - and, for a seasoned BBC bias watcher like me - it was the expected difference and strongly suggestive of BBC bias.
Is it wrong to point that out? Obviously not.
Whether it's entirely healthy to be so determined to do so, however, is another matter entirely. It wears me out, it wears me out...
Thankfully, I'm off on holiday now to somewhere exotic (Florence? Sorrento? Amsterdam? Plymouth? You guess!), so I'm giving myself a break - like Melanie Phillips, who always has a summer holiday (starting in Morecambe, ending in Israel apparently)...
...so best wishes and please don't get too depressed by the news...or the BBC.
I bet the tweeter guessed the answer in advance. (Lots of people seem to be cottoning on to the BBC's ways). If so, he probably wouldn't have been surprised when this happened:
