Here we go again

One of the things with blogs like this is that we cannot but repeat ourselves. 

Unfortunately, this isn't like in TS Eliot's Little Gidding where “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.” 

No, however much we explore the BBC, we know the place we arrive at all too well and it never feels like 'for the first time'.

Or, to put it another way, we've been here before with the BBC far, far too many times and it's always the same.

There's been another horrific terrorist attack in Norway today. Though the BBC News Channel presenter this morning raised the far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, most other outlets by that time had been reporting that the attacker was Iranian-born, suggesting another motive - especially given that a gay bar was evidently a prime target.

I read account after account from major UK and international outlets, nearly all mentioning this, often - like Sky - right at the top of their reports. But the BBC News website stood firm in refusing to mention the man's Iranian background.

I'm assuming it's the old BBC 'social cohesion, so shush!' thing yet again, tiptoeing around the news and deliberately being vague.

And they still haven't mentioned this in their online report, which has pretty remained throughout wholly focused on the attacker being aged 42 - as if that's the main thing about him, other than him being a man.

There's no other way of putting it, given that most other outlets were reporting it: the BBC was censoring the news for the umpteenth time.

Finally though, after many hours and seven edits, the BBC News website finally gave enough ground late this afternoon to concede what had been blindingly obvious for hours about this attack focused on a gay bar during Pride month: “Police said they consider the attack an act of extreme Islamist terrorism.”

You really shouldn't go to the BBC for 'breaking news'. 

Immediate Update: And as soon as I posted that I clicked on the BBC News website and saw a new update, even before Newsniffer caught it. 

Though those news outlets I mentioned said the attacker was Iranian-born, they also said he was now a Norwegian citizen. Guess what they BBC has added just now?

The authorities later said the suspect was a Norwegian national.

Hm. Up to a point, Lord Copper. 'The BBC and half the story', as the saying goes hereabouts.

The BBC knows what it's up to, and it's clearly being very deliberate in its careful obfuscation.

Later Update: In a further edit to the BBC's main article about this, the BBC has dropped the word 'extreme' from “Police said they consider the attack an act of extreme Islamist terrorism.”

The doctor is in.

 

Tim Davies’s attempts to defend the BBC from the current tsunami of BBC-bashing inadvertently highlight the unsurmountable obstacle to reform.

As a self-appointed graduate of the famous Lucy school of psychiatry, I humbly submit my diagnosis - kindly regard this as my booth.

There’s something of the Greg Dyke about Tim Davie. If that sounds like some obscure rhyming slang, it’s not that.  The intended comparison merely concerns speech patterns and body language. Left-wing body language. You don’t need actual glottal stops to convey that certain je ne sais quoi. 

What I call ‘contrived lefty’ (calculated not-posh enunciation) communicates ‘institutional lefty’. All traces of acquired ‘down with the plebs’ articulation signals red flags danger. 

That’s enough subjective, snobbish and, if you like, bitchy analysis from this doctor.

I’d rather look at various articles about the latest terrorist incident at the Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. 

I wondered if it was worth spending time addressing that issue on this blog at a time when all eyes are on Boris, and the media’s campaign to unseat him. Who knew that Beth Rigby was running the country? I think we all accept that the media is in the driving seat.

On first inspection, the BBC’s articles seem fairly innocuous. They merely iterate (some of) the facts. 

But 

Stephen Pollard begs to differ. “Well, he would,”  I hear you say. This is the Jewish Chronicle.

The BBC has a serious issue with Jews.

Take last night’s coverage of the Beth Israel shul siege in Texas, when a rabbi and three other Jews were taken hostage in the synagogue. Not once in its report on its flagship 10pm news did it mention antisemitism. Not once, at any point, did Ed Thomas, the BBC’s Special Correspondent, even hint that the gunman might even possibly, just perhaps, you never know, have had an issue of some kind with Jews. 

Mr Thomas began his report by asking: “What made Malik Faisal Akram leave Blackburn, the place he called home, to travel to Texas , arm himself with a gun and hold people hostage inside a synagogue?” A real mystery that, eh? I don’t know, Ed. I am really struggling to think what might have motivated him. But obviously it had nothing to do with Jews.

That’s funny. The FBI came to the same conclusion. Gotta laugh, eh? No. Not laughing.

I Am A Jewish Advocate And The Way The World Has Reacted To The Texas Synagogue Siege Is Terrifying

It's time for the non-Jewish world to actively free itself from antisemitism. If you're not Jewish and you think Jews are centring themselves in cries about media bias, you don't have a clue what it feels like to watch mainstream media serve your enemies and jeopardise your security. You have no idea the act of courage and resistance that it is to walk into a synagogue in 2022 and pray. America tells itself it's a safe place to do that. That is a lie. This could have happened at any Jewish institution in this country. Why don't more people care?

Here’s another weird thing:

The BBC has admitted to shortfalls in its initial coverage of the Colleyville siege.

More than five hours after Akram launched the siege that ended with his death, the BBC was still referring to his captives as ‘hostages’ - in speech marks.

Trivial maybe, but the cumulative effect….

Much more detail here.

In a chilling conversation with his brother in Blackburn from inside the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Malik Faisal Akram, 44, said: "I'm opening the doors for every youngster in England to enter America and f*** with them”.

Addressing fellow jihadists, he shouted: “Live your f***ing life bro, you f***ing coward. We’re coming to f***ing America. F*** them if they want to f*** with us. We’ll give them f***ing war.

It’s a bit odd that the most widely respected media organisation in the world was slow to pick this up. At first: “Probably not antisemitic, just generally deranged. You know, mentally ill.” chorused the BBC. Still, the emphasis is on Akram’s mental ‘elf, even though it’s now being grudgingly speculated that antisemitism might also be a factor.

Anti-Semitism is rife in the British Pakistani community

Last June, the Jewish Chronicle published an investigation into Urdu-language anti-Semitism on YouTube. Hundreds of hours of the vilest Jew-hatred is freely accessible on the video sharing platform, we revealed, racking up millions of views. 

In one particularly vivid clip, the Pakistani broadcaster Zaid Hamid said: “Hitler was an angel, the way he took action against Jews, the way he killed Jews.” In another, Imran Riaz Khan, a television personality with 1.6 million followers, said: “[The Jews] lobby a lot in America and have strangled America, have it totally controlled.”

Now, as your psychiatrist, I have no doubt whatsoever that Malik Faisal Akram was mentally ill. You’d have to be a bit off-colour in the brain department to travel to America from Blackburn to try to leverage the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist known as “Lady al Qaeda” who was convicted of trying to kill US troops in Afghanistan. And, to be frank, he even looks distinctly unhinged in the immediate lead-up to the event. 

But, was he much more mentally ill than any other devout Muslim from Blackburn?

Finally

Well, here it is - at last. If you look hard enough...

Back on 19 November we wrote:

The media, especially the BBC, have disgraced themselves over the Liverpool bombing.

Was there any sensible person when the 'Christian convert' element to the story first broke who didn't instantly think, 'Well, he's obviously reverted back to being a Muslim again or he would have done what he did'?

Using Occam's Razor, the likeliest explanation was always that his Remembrance Sunday attack had an Islamist inspiration, especially given the methods used and the likely targets. 

And yet, following reports in various newspapers, the BBC especially went overboard in shoving the phrase 'Christian convert' and mentioning 'his' Christianity in report after report.

Today, right down in the closing paragraphs [paragraphs 34-37 out of 37 paragraphs] of a long BBC News website report headlined Liverpool bomber made device with murderous intent, coroner says, the BBC finally got round to reporting the blindingly obvious - an 'obvious' they've long gone out of their way to avoid reporting:

Mr Rebello [the senior coroner] said there had been reports Al Swealmeen had rejected Islam and converted to Christianity. 

Det Ch Insp Meeks agreed with the coroner that he might have converted to strengthen his asylum claim. 

The inquest heard a Koran and prayer mat were found when police searched his premises. 

Mr Rebello said: "It was fairly evident that he carried out the religious duties of someone who is a follower of Islam, not withstanding the reported conversion to Christianity."

You don't say! 

Moving on...and on [as 'job done']

The BBC may have moved on but The Times is still doing proper reporting:

Liverpool bomber ‘reverted to Islam’ in months before attack

The Liverpool hospital bomber had reverted to practising Islam in the months before his attack, investigators believe. One theory is that Emad Al Swealmeen, who had converted to Christianity after his arrival in Britain, was trying to atone for apostasy which is considered to be punishable by death by some Islamic scholars.'

That, literally, was my best guess as soon as I heard his name and began hearing all the 'Christian convert' stuff-and-nonsense that the BBC was pumping out over and over again - particularly on hearing that he was living with other 'asylum seekers'. 

'You won't hear that on the BBC' used to be a half-quip, but no longer. You really won't hear that on the BBC - at least if the BBC has anything to do with it.

I've checked TVEyes. BBC TV, across its various TV channels, has only mentioned Al Swealmeen for a few seconds a very few times in recent days, and always in connection to ball bearings - just a sentence or two at most at a time.  

Farcical times

Max Klinger of the E2 Review Podcast has made a very important point this morning:

Someone *set off a bomb* outside a hospital full of mothers and babies, at 11am on Remembrance Sunday, in the UK, less than a week ago, and we've already pretty much forgotten about it. These are farcical times.

Moving on?

Almost as unsurprising as learning that the 'Christian convert' who attempted to kill so many on Remembrance Sunday has been a regular mosque-goer since April was the news, broken yesterday by The Times, that man-of-the-moment Azeem Rafiq - the cricketer making 'powerful' allegations of racism slurs  by Yorkshire Cricket Club - himself made racist slurs in 2011, in this case about Jews. 

I watched the BBC News Channel's early reporting of story and BBC journalists and ex-BBC journalists went into defensive mode straightaway, insisting that those antisemitic tweets by Mr Rafiq didn't undermine his 'powerful' testimony to Parliament this week and shouldn't deflect from the wider story of racism in cricket. 

And the BBC News website's piece on the story went through various revisions to cast Azeem Rafiq's slurs as 'historical' and something everyone [especially Jews] agrees he's now transcended by 'sincerely apologising' and through all he's been saying recently. 

I see though that the whole 'racism in cricket' story has now dropped out of the main headlines - finally, after nigh on two weeks of relentless 'headline news' coverage. It will be back though in a day or so no doubt.

Update: And it now emerges that he made a racist gibe on Instagram about Africans in 2017, only 4 year ago. when he was no longer 19. The BBC was making much of the fact that these slurs were 'historical' last night. The word cropped up on their website and on last night's News at Ten. And the News at Ten twice mentioned that he was 19 at the time of the antisemitic slurs. By my reckoning he would have been 25 when the racist slur about Africans was made. [We aren't allowed to call any of this stuff 'banter' of course].

Further update [9.00am]: It didn't take long. This is now a main headline:

Here's a short Twitter exchange on the matter:

Patrick O'Flynn: A cricketer dressing up as someone from a different race for a fancy dress party in 2009 is leading the news. That's utterly absurd. Our broadcast media is clearly being run by left-wing ID politics addicts and activists. 

Tim Montgomerie: I couldn’t agree more. The news isn’t the news anymore. It’s become McCarthyist with its daily search to identify and destroy “racists”. Foreign news, other social ills like loneliness and family breakdown all eclipsed by this obsession. The BBC has lost the plot.

Patrick O'Flynn: Now R4 has just led its second bulletin in a row about the cricketer and the 2009 fancy dress party. It's abandoning any claim to be funded via a licence fee in real time today. It's now an ID politics campaign. 

I see the BBC online report has solved the Azeem Rafiq problem by continuing to cite his 'evidence' while briefly tagging on a mention of his antisemitic language [but not the bit about Africans] at the very end of the article.

Random Thoughts for a Sunday Evening

 

I

Lib Dems, lib Dems and Facebook

It's been a while since I've made myself listen to The World This Weekend but I learned something quite interesting from it today - albeit only after a bit of Googling as they didn't disclose it themselves.

The programme's main focus was on demands to regulate Facebook, particularly in light of the murder of Sir David Amess. 

I avoid Facebook like the plague.

Being politically-minded I now associate Facebook with Sir Nick Clegg, as he's become their Vice President for Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook since 2018.

The World This Weekend's sole defender of Facebook today was one Lord Allan, Facebook's Director of Policy in Europe until 2019. 

Like former Lib Dem leader/Deputy PM Sir Nick, Lord Allan is a former Lib Dem MP. So Facebook seems to like UK Liberal Democrats. 

And it gets spookier.

Lord Allan, it turns out from searching for him on the internet, was the MP for Sheffield Hallam from 1997-2005 before giving way to the one Nick Clegg, who remained MP for Sheffield Hallam from 2005-2017. 

What are the chances of that happening?

My random thought here is that maybe the American liberal Democrats at Facebook chose the UK's Liberal Democrats because of their party name, assuming because they call themselves 'Liberal Democrats' they must think like liberal Democrats in the US...and, if so, they should be careful when hiring from Russia and Japan or they might end up with Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Shinzo Abe, and they might un-ban former US president/possible future US president Donald Trump while Mark Zuckerberg isn't looking. 

II

The BBC and the word 'terrorist'

The estimable Scottish blogger Effie Deans has a thoughtful piece on her Lily of St. Leonard's blog about the murder of Sir David. It made me re-think a few things. and is well worth a read. 

If Sue's not seen it yet, it begins: 

Whenever there is a terrorist attack in somewhere like Israel, we are told by the BBC that it carried out by militants. It gives the impression that the far left from the 1980s stopped handing out newspapers to blow himself up. Only when a terrorist attack happens here in Britain will the BBC allow itself to describe it as such. IRA militants after all did not try to blow up Margaret Thatcher. If a word is useful then we must use it consistently. If something is terrorism call it terrorism, otherwise you are lying in which case how can you be trusted on anything.

It then moves on.

It's certainly true that the BBC will use the word 'terrorist' more about terrorist attacks in the UK than anywhere else and that it goes out of its way to avoid applying it to the like of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah.

But the BBC has used it in connection to radical Islamic terrorism in the UK through the most gritted of gritted teeth over the last couple of decades. 

They were very reluctant to begin with post 9/11, and particularly post 7/7 in London. 

All of us hereabouts observed that at the time. 

It made the BBC look terrible and absurd. 

I'm guessing they finally realised that they were dangerously adrift from the public mood, so they eventually eased the prohibition. 

And that's where we are now - with a word that should never had been banned being grudgingly allowed in the UK context - albeit still through gritted teeth on certain BBC reporters' parts - but still being banned [except in heavy inverted commas] when it comes to terrorism against, say, Israel.

III

Sunday, Flipping Sunday

The one Radio 4 programme I've tried to keep up with during my blogging slumbers is Radio 4's Sunday, what with it being the starting point of this very blog. 

It never really changes. 

Todays programme featured:  

[a] Takes on the murder of Sir David Amess which avoided the thorny issue of Islamic terrorism.

[b] An entirely one-sided 'woke' segment on Ethiopian demands for the return of some sacred plaques held by the British Museum where neither context nor the other other side of the argument was given. Presenter Emily Buchanan simply announced that the Ethiopians were demanding them back, said that we [the UK] ''looted'' it, and stated that ''lawyers'' said it was legally right to return them, and then interviewed an Ethiopian Orthodox priest who told listeners how precious these plaques were to the Ethiopians. When it's that one-sided it reeks of abetting a campaign.

[c] A strange piece about how cuddly toy deities might be ''the best way to help children understand faith and culture'', reporting on how a range of cuddly toys of deities like the Hindu god Ganesha is ''expanding to include all major faiths'', including Jesus and Buddha. I googled the company and checked their range of cuddly toys and found that the phrase Sunday kept using - ''all major faiths'' - wasn't quite true. You won't be surprised to hear that Islam was the exception and that the BBC skirted around the point like a cat trying to avoid its fated date with a cage during a trip to the vets. 

[d] A piece on a Jewish comedy Fringe event featuring...and here's the BBC angle...''the only Orthodox Jewish woman on the British comedy circuit''. There's always got to be a bit of identity politics and marking of identity politics milestones. 

[e] The inevitable book-plug for a friend of the programme, here Catholic author Peter Stanford. 

[f] A somewhat campaigning closing segment about aggrieved Muslim women being refused entry to pray within some mosques and how ''conservative'' attitudes in mosques need changing, followed by an interview with Sunday's favourite Muslim, the silky Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, who positioned himself somewhat vaguely on the matter, as is his way. At least Sunday raised the question of Deobandi influence.

I've been going on about the programme for over a  decade now, but there's now a small legion of people criticising Sunday every single week on Twitter and on blogs hereabouts. It's a growth industry that growing fast. The programme remains the ripest of ripe targets as far as BBC bias is concerned.

IV

Nancy wonders if it's just her

Following today's Sunday was - as ever - Sunday Worship. I was in the mood for hymns and heard it live. 

It provoked a murmur on Twitter when Annunziata Rees-Mogg [sister of Jacob] complained about it being about gender equality today when it should have been a Catholic service in honour of Sir David Amess.

Wouldn’t it have been nice if Sunday Worship on BBC Radio4 had been from a Catholic Church in memory of Sir David Amess? And perhaps a sermon about the value of public service rather than gender equality? Or maybe that’s just me.

Now, I have to say that - much as I can see where she's coming from -  I agreed with those of her critics who pointed out that these things are prepared weeks and months in advance. The BBC publishes the text and running order of the service in full before it's even broadcast. And this was coming live from Ely Cathedral. So this was a juggernaut that's being rolling for weeks ready for this morning, and the BBC couldn't just drop it and swap it with a different service. And, in the event, a pray for Sir David was said at the start before the feminist-influenced, all-women service about women in the Bible began.....though, amusingly, the male dean popped up at the end to read the blessing.

So Annunziata might have been better saying that, yes, the BBC couldn't reasonably have replaced this service at the last minute, but that it's still 'very BBC' that the identity-politics-obsessed BBC Radio 4 prepared yet another service with an 'identity politics' focus today, because Sunday Worship is doing that ever more often as the channel increasingly sinks into a smelly slough of 'woke'.

V

John Simpson says 'this can't go on'

Fantasies, born of childhood/adulthood reading of brave British men rescuing women in peril, have occasionally led me to dream that we British would somehow spring Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe from jail in Iran, literally leaving behind a Carry-On-style black fingernail card of 'two digits rampant' for old 'Smiler' Khamenei to splutter at as his beard caught on fire humorously.

Five years younger than the Supreme Leader of Iran, the BBC's World Affairs Editor John Simpson is unimpressed: 

The rejection of @FreeNazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe's appeal in Tehran is predictable but disgraceful. She is being held hostage for the repayment of a £400m debt the UK owes to Iran. Handing money to Iran is a big problem, given its support for terrorism; but this can't go on.

I do believe that the BBC's Mr Impartiality is demanding, ever so impartially, that the British Government cough up to the terroristic, hostage-holding Ayatollah. 

Hm. 

Double standards

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Brendan O’Neill has written a sharp piece about ‘the problem we don’t like talking about.’

I urge you to read it, as well as the responses below the line. 

I’ll try to summarise, which is very cheeky and presumptuous, but I’ve learned that not everyone (especially me) has the time and patience to click on every link.

O’Neill is concerned that the conviction of Hashem Abedi for the murders of 22 attendees of Ariana Grande’s concert at the Manchester Arena hasn’t engendered an appropriate amount of media coverage. Although his brother Salman was the actual suicide bomber, Hashem Abedi was equally responsible for the crime.

Where is the debate? asks O’Neill, where is the concern that ISIS-inspired extremism has fuelled such atrocities?  He identifies the media’s gross double standards, comparing the ‘Don’t look back in anger’ approach and the therapeutic style ‘deradicalisation’ strategy prescribed to treat violence and terrorism motivated by “Islamism” with the unadulterated ‘blame’ we attach to ‘far-right’ acts of terror, which must somehow be defeated.

"The very use of the term ‘radicalised’ reduces them to passive creatures who have had something bad done to them, probably by a twisted preacher on the internet. Apparently, they need our help. Fascists must be defeated, but violent Islamists must be cared for, put on the couch, pitied.

It’s a powerful piece, but it leaves me with one or two unanswered questions.

 1) Why do people like Brendan glibly condemn Tommy Robinson in such a reflexive and out of hand manner? (However, I now see Brendan has cautiously re-framed that condemnation - I suppose I'll have to search again for 'people like him' distancing themselves from Tommy Robinson )  After all, Robinson, (aka S Y-L ) has made an admirable effort to study the ideology that’s at the very heart of the problem. In other words, his Luton accent and his volatility are not enough to make him into a mere racist thug.  In fact, it’s his fearless, perhaps innately pugilistic quality, (lacking in many a lesser, more easily intimidated critic of Islam) that has protected and prevented him from being utterly intimidated and silenced by ‘the system’. 

2) The murky distinction between the ’ism’ in Islamism and Islam proper is problematic. In some ways, it’s a mirror image of the ‘good’ (anti-Zionist) Jew and the regular Jew. After all, when push comes to shove, a Jew is a Jew is a Jew.  Are we now saying the only good Muslim is an ex-Muslim? I kind of think we really are.

See the comment from Geoff W 18th March 2020 at 8:51 pm (I don’t think I can provide a direct link) but arguably the way forward hinges on some sort of future enlightenment within the religion. But, isn’t there a built-in super-injunction (within Islam itself) against reform?