Highly informative

Attack of the 5'6" Dutch Woman

On a cheerier note about PM, I did learn yesterday that the Dutch are the tallest people in the world. (You learn something new every day.)

The average Dutchman is now 6 ft tall, the average woman 5'6".  

The expert in John Laurenson's report put in down to genetics, hygiene, food and the environment - and Holland's high milk consumption. The recent slowing down of Dutch growth rates might coincide with a fall in milk consumption. (One for More or Less?) 

The 7'4" guy in the report described the ups and downs of being so tall. One of his anecdotes involved going to a carnival and finding a woman prodding the bottom of his legs, thinking he was walking on stilts and admiring how skilfully he was doing it. She quickly apologised. 

Just thought I'd share that with you.

Owen Bennett-Jones might not approve, but...

I'd be failing in my duties as a hopefully-honest blogger if I failed to point [belatedly] out that - two Sundays ago - Radio 4's Sunday broadcast another excellent piece on the concern of Parisian Jews from John Laurenson. 

It's a must-hear.

John Laurenson's reporting has been the subject of several reports here and I'm going to persist in keeping faith with him, despite a couple of pieces pointing towards our displeasure with him. 

Our displeasure after all is sometimes what we need. If we aren't occasionally affronted by a BBC reporter who is clearly trying to report what he sees without apparent fear or favour, then shame on us.

The 'Sunday' after the Paris massacres

According to Rod Liddle in the Spectator, 

...the BBC, yet again, has misjudged the story in its news coverage, wringing its hands over the treatment of French Muslims, while at the same time insisting that the murders were nothing to do with Muslims – it was just mad terrorists.

As if to prove him right, this morning's Sunday on Radio 4 continued in exactly the same vein. 

We hadn't even got to the end of Ed Stourton's introduction before we were hearing a French Muslim woman complaining:

18 months ago I was wearing the hijab. Now I'm wearing a woolly hat. Why? To melt into the crowd because I'm afraid. I'm a Muslim woman. I'm afraid of being attacked.{I think she said 'attacked'. I couldn't quite decipher it}. 

The BBC needs reminding, doesn't it, that it was journalists, policemen and Jews who were the deliberately-targeted victims of these atrocities, not Muslims, and that French Jews have been the intended targets of both recent terrorist rampages in France (Toulouse 2012, Paris 2015). 

That 'vox pop' came from a John Laurenson report which was broadcast later in the programme. Its stated aim to to reflect Muslim reaction to the attacks. 

Though the BBC man said that they all expressed outrage at the attacks, we didn't actually hear any outrage being expressed on behalf of the victims; instead, we heard repeated expressions of resentment that Islam's good name is being harmed and Muslim stigmatised because of these attacks, by people who have "hijacked" the religion. One Muslim blogger said she refused to have the name of "Allah" associated with the attacks and said that Mohammad was insulted many times during his life but "he never responded to violence". If insulted, he'd leave the assembly and pray, she said. The report ended with the words of another Muslim- an anti-racism and anti-'Islamophobia' campaigner - saying that "Islam is not the Kouachi brothers". 

As well as the familiar "Nothing to do with Muslims, of course" line, the other line being pushed here was the "backlash against Muslims" angle. The Muslim anti-racism and anti-'Islamophobia' campaigner complained about discrimination and played up the 'backlash'. The point was not made that the people who have twice really suffered a 'backlash' (four deliberately killed in 2012, four deliberately killed in 2015) have been Jewish. 

Now, John Laurenson, who, to his credit, has covered anti-Semitism in France before, has also to be given a little more credit here for at least challenging the blogger who was saying that true Islam follows Mohammad in turning the other cheek when insulted. He mentioned the "virulence" and "violence" in the Koran, passages which "urge violence". 'Aren't they following those passages that you aren't paying attention to?', he asked.

Still, all in all, this was a report that projected the familiar BBC messages.

As for the closing discussion (previewed here yesterday), there was a change to the panel overnight. Though Nabila Ramdani and Riem Spielhaus were both present and correct, Dr Sara Silvestri was dropped and Dr Edward Kessler of the interfaith Woolf Institute was brought in instead. Dr Kessler, who works to increase understanding between Jews, Christians and Muslims, is the programme's most regular Jewish guest.

Riem Spielhaus had originally been booked, before the Paris massacres, to talk about PEGIDA, the anti-Islamisation campaign in Germany. Given her belief (see the last post) that Muslims are the new "folk-devils" for Europeans, she maintained a fairly neutral, academic tone in discussing recent events in both France and Germany, though she did describe the PEGIDA line as a "narrative" and she then broke free from her dispassionate-seeming manner to state that such people need to understand that 'freedom of religion' also means 'freedom of religion for Muslims'.

Edward Kessler said that he has been tweeted 'Je suis Ahmed' and 'Je suis Juif' as well as 'Je suis Charlie'. He feels that a European Islam is developing, as per Tariq Ramadan. He sees it as following in the integrationist path of European Judaism. Reflecting his organisations mission, he said that the way forward is to focus on "human relations". (Can you see why he's Sunday's most regular Jewish guest yet?)

Nabila Ramdani did her usual thing. (No worries for France's Jews for her.) She criticised politicians for using secularism for stifling the expression of faith (i.e. Muslim faith). She worried about far-right parties exploiting this week's events. Marine le Pen has already been "capitalising" on them, she said. "It's quite worrying", she added. She also said she feared the Muslim legacy in Europe being discarded. She then complained about the "inconsistency" of having state legislation against Muslims whilst allowing expression of "prejudice and hatred" like that at Charlie Hebdo [insulted the victims again].

Of course, freedom of speech entitles each one of them to say what they want to say. The BBC's decision to give them a platform is, however, a different matter - especially when contrasted with those they don't give a platform to. Sunday, especially, was never likely to have gone beyond its comfort zone after an event like this (or, for that matter, at any other time). No Ayaan Hirsi Ali for them. And certainly no Robert Spencer, ever. 

As for Edward Stourton's contribution to this discussion, he raised the following topics: (1) the 'Je suis Ahmed' Twitter campaign, (2) the Muslim shop assistant in the kosher supermarket and his heroic rescue of Jewish people, (3) the fact that Jews died simply because they were Jews, (4) PEGIDA, and (5) the question of whether PEGIDA-type people are "misreading" Islam in Europe.

The discussion ended with a discussion about the (alleged) 'backlash' against Muslims. 

Unlike on yesterday's Dateline London, no one dissented about that here. And, also unlike on Dateline London, no one (and that includes Ed Stourton) challenged Nabila Ramdani's insults against the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.

All very predictable.

"I don't feel the thing smells good"

Usually on a Sunday morning I post something complaining about bias on Radio 4's Sunday programme. 

Instead, this morning, I'd like to post a transcription of a report from the BBC's John Laurenson, featured on today's programme, which looks at anti-Semitism in France. [Transcribing French names isn't easy, so there will be asterisks where names cannot be deciphered.]

I found it to be a report which, not for the first time, does John Laurenson great credit - and giving credit where credit's due is something we ought to give much more often. 

France was the country where Theodore Herzl finally realised the necessity of a Jewish homeland. Watching the public humiliation of Dreyfus in front of a baying French crowd, Herzl saw the danger facing Europe's Jews as a whole and the need for some place of safety to escape to. Thus, Zionism was born. That place of safety, Israel, now exists. Shockingly, in 2014, many French Jews are now again feeling the need to flee their own country. Israel awaits.

********

William Crawley: Figures from the Israeli Integration Ministry show that, for the first time, France has become the biggest source of new migrants 'making Aliyah' (or going to live in Israel). 4,500 Jews left France for Israel in the first eight months of 2014. That's far more than from the next-placed countries - Ukraine, Russia and the United States. The reason? France's economic woes, but also what some describe as a climate of anti-Semitism. This report from John Laurenson starts in the Parisian suburb of Sarcelles. 

John Laurenson: In a synagogue courtyard a hundred or so families gather around trestle tables laden with food and drink. They're dressed up smart because it's Simchat Torah, the day in the Jewish calendar when you celebrate the Jewish holy book. Dressed up smart, and dressed up Jewish. Some French Jewish leaders now urge Jews not to wear their skull caps in the street in order to avoid trouble, but Sarcelles - 'Little Jerusalem' they sometimes call it - is different. Jews who moved here from North Africa in the 1960s make up a third of the population, and most of the time they've lived peacefully, side-by-side with Muslims who now make up another third. But this summer it all went wrong when an anti-Israeli demonstration that had been banned but went ahead anyway turned into a riot. **** is a Sarcelles resident.

Sarcelles resident: The shops that were targeted were Jewish and Iraqi Christian. A Chaldean bar, a Jewish pharmacy, a Jewish supermarket burned down. Another Jewish supermarket was looted. 

John Laurenson: Around here everyone knows people who have left for Israel, says Max ****, president of this synagogue:

Max: We have friends who have left. We have friends who are planning to leave. We've been living hear for years. We are French. Why should we be forced to leave? It's not right. That's what saddens us. We're all from North Africa. We lived very well there. We left when it became no longer safe to stay. I think those people who pushed us to leave there followed us here and are now trying to throw us out of France.

John Laurenson: In a boulevard cafe in the Bastille neighbourhood of Paris, the waiter brings a coffee to Cendrine ****, the CEO of an internet advertising start-up. She was born and brought up in Paris. Next April she's making Aliyah.

Cendrine: When I saw since two or three years how people are in France, I said to myself, "I have to move right now".

John Laurenson: If she's alive today, she says, it's because her grandfather took a similar decision and got out of the Greek city then called Salonika before its Jewish inhabitants were rounded up and sent to the death camps during World War Two.

Cendrine: I don't feel the thing smells good. For me it looks like the beginning of the Second World War, with the people protesting in the street saying, "Jew, go back! Go away!" It's crazy.

John Laurenson: Ashdod, the town between Tel Aviv and Gaza, where Cendrine's moving to, is full of French Jews she says. One she's already met there is a survivor of the school shooting in Toulouse where the young Muslim fanatic Mohammed Merah shot dead three very young Jewish children in 2012. In an office block near Montparnasse Station, after passing through some very impressive security, I found myself inside the Jewish Agency - the Israeli government body that helps people move to Israel. I'm surrounded by Franco-Israeli migration guides on their coffee break. The agency is now running two Aliyah information evenings a week for Parisian Jews. They've never been so busy, says director Ari Kandel. 

Ari Kandel: This year we're going to have close to 6,000 people moving to Israel from France. Last year it was 3,300. Many of these people are from what we call the 'core community' who go to the synagogue and send their children to Jewish schools. But now we're getting increasing numbers of Jews from outside that core, people who want to live their Jewish identity in Israel because they feel that nowadays getting up in the morning and walking through the streets as a Jew is more and more difficult.

John Laurenson: Ari, who's now an Israeli citizen, left France for that reason.

Ari Kandel: I was walking through the Gare du Nord station at 6 in the evening with by skull cap on my head when a man started insulting me. He even started pushing me. The station was full of people but no one lifted their little finger to help me. It was that day I decided to go and live in Israel because people there know how to look after each other.

John Laurenson: According to the French Jewish representative organisation, the CRIF, in the first seven months of this year the number of acts of aggression like this were up 91% on the same period last year to over 500. I asked CRIF president, Roger Cukierman, what he says to Jews who say they want to leave France - a country where Jews have lived for 2,000 years.

Roger Cukierman: I think that you have to face adversity wherever you are. The life of Jews is not easy in any place. All over Europe you have anti-Semitism. Israel is surrounded by enemies. It's also a country that's at war, frequently at war. So I think French Jews have to take the example of the Israelis and face adversity and confront it. 

John Laurenson: Back in Sarcelles, Max **** says they're worried about the future, about the France they'll leave to their children - the ones who haven't already bought their one-way ticket to Tel Aviv.

"We're tired of hearing about Islam."

It may be late Monday evening, but early Sunday morning is on my mind...yes, here's this week's belated review of Radio 4's Sunday with St. Edward of Stourton. It will come in two parts, spread over two days. Here's the bit about the first half of the programme....

Just before catching up with it, I happened to read an admiring review in the Telegraph of a new book about British Islam called Medina in Birmingham, Najaf in Brent. The book's author is a BBC radio editor called Innes Bowen [no relation apparently]. The Telegraph reviewer calls her book "admirable and clear-headed", praising it for "dispelling myths" about British Muslims. The book's "gentle and optimistic" message, according to the Telegraph reviewer, is: 

...there is no contradiction between Muslim identity and loyalty to the British state. 

...over time there is no fundamental contradiction between Islam and the modern Western state. 

...which is exactly the kind of message I'd expect a liberal BBC radio editor to be putting across [and "liberal" is her own description of herself, not mine]. It's a message that many believe the BBC as a whole is seeking to put across too. I don't know it it really was the book's message (as I've not read the book myself), though it probably was. Why the element of doubt? Well, the Telegraph reviewer praising Innes Bowen was none other than Peter Oborne, and his judgement on these kind of issues is rarely to be trusted. 

I mention all of this because Edward Stourton's first guest on Sunday was Innes Bowen herself. Together they discussed the 'British' jihadis fighting for the bloodthirsty medieval-minded bigots of ISIS. Innes talked specifically about the jihadi from Cardiff who appeared in that video inciting other Western Muslims to come and join the slaughter:

The thing that the people who go have in common really, it's a shared set of ideals. They're young. They're idealistic. And if you look at that video yesterday you can see in this case certainly not stupid, very intelligent young man, and on that video he's appealing to other Muslims to a sense of duty. He's making them try to feel that they have a sense of duty to go to Iraq and Syria, and that is the ideology which is inspiring some people to go.  

That sounds nice - bright British kids doing their duty, joining an international Young Men's Muslim Association. So nice it almost makes me want to burst into song:

Young man, there's no need to feel down.

I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground.

I said, young man, 'cause you're in a new town (Cardiff)

There's no need to be unhappy.

Young man, there's a place you can go (Iraq and Sham).

I said, young man, when you feel full of woe.

You can stay there, and I'm sure you will find

Many ways to have a good time slaughtering people in the name of Allah...

It's fun to fight with the Y.M.M.A.

It's fun to fight with the Y.M.M.A.

They have everything for you men to enjoy,

You can hang out with all the boys, and hang...well, anyone you like.

It's fun to fight with the Y.M.M.A.

It's fun to fight with the Y.M.M.A.

You can get yourself ritually clean, you can have a good halal meal,

You can do whatever you feel, especially if it involves killing.

Young man, are you listening to me?

I said, young man, what do you want to be?

I said, young man, you can make real your dreams of murdering kaffirs and Shia. 

But you got to know this one thing!

No man does it all by himself.

I said, young man, put your pride on the shelf,

And just go there, to the Y.M.M.A.

I'm sure they can help you today.

The next item on the Sunday website was 'blurbed' in the following fashion:

In Berlin, a project to have a mosque, a synagogue and a church under the same roof is under way. It was organised by a Protestant pastor who says it's unique - in no other place do the three faiths share premises.

Edward Stourton's introduction live on Sunday followed a similar path:

There's an intriguing project underway in Berlin to put a mosque, a synagogue and a church under the same roof.

The ordering "a mosque, a synagogue and a church" suggests the motivation behind this report. I cannot help but suspect that if the story were 'merely' the story of Berlin building a major joint Jewish-Christian place of worship in the heart of German power, with all the historic resonances of that story, it probably wouldn't have featured on Sunday. [Alan at Biased BBC has similar suspicions]. The building is being built on the remains of an old church destroyed by the East German communist regime. A well-meaning Protestant pastor, Gregor Hohberg, is behind the project. 

The BBC's Stephen Evans reported, saying that for the imam involved in the project, Kadir Sanci...

...the importance is for the signal it sends. There is antagonism towards Islam in Germany and beyond, and he's anxious to dispel that.

[There's that word 'dispel' again - and it came from the BBC reporter's mouth.]

Kadir said that the site shows that Islam is peaceful [as we all know so well from the news]. The rabbi involved in the project, Tovia Ben Chorin, said:

It's important because it's a meeting place in Berlin, and from my Jewish point of view the city where the Jewish suffering was planned is now a city where a centre is being built where the three monotheistic religions that shaped European culture are now establishing this interfaith centre with three places of prayers - synagogue, church and mosque - and in the middle of all where we can exchange views in order to get to know each other.

Cynic that I am, I did note that both the Christian and Jewish participants said good-hearted things about different religions getting on with each other while the Muslim participant merely used the occasion to say that Islam is misunderstood and that the centre might counter that impression. 

You shouldn't always be so cynical though. The next item, according to the website blurb, ran as follows:

We assess the life and legacy of Rabbi Nachman Sudak who died last week. A leader in the Lubavitch community Rabbi Shmuel Lew tells us why he was so influential.

Rabbi Lew filled in the background for Edward Stourton, who said he didn't know much about it. The Chabad/Lubavitch movement began 200 years ago in Russia, said Rabbi Lew. It's an Hasidic movement, and has "a philosophy which shows how the spiritual world and the physical world are one and how every person can touch the divine potential within themselves and express it within life in the physical world through doing the commandments - a Jewish person as many as they can of the commandments of the Torah - and all of humankind to fulfill the seven universal laws, the Noahide laws"....or to put it another way... "It's through our interaction with people that we're able to encourage them and to spread the idea of thinking about the fact that the world is not a jungle, that there is a G_d and that a part of him is within me and I have to discover it within myself and within all my interactions with the world".

Still, next it was straight back to the the theme of tolerance and Muslims:

Today the Fes festival has become not only very popular but a beacon of religious tolerance and religious pluralism in the middle of the Muslim world. 

John Laurenson reported from Morocco. Swifts go crazy at sunset, and then fall quiet. Then the Sufis begin to sing. Everything is nice:

This week I've seen non-Muslims singing along to a chorus about Allah, and Muslim families - their hair hid under head scarfs - applauding a sung version of the Lord's Prayer. 

It gets better:

The Jewish cemetery in Fes is almost all that remains of a large and ancient Moroccan Jewish community. Many of those Jews came to this country after the Christians expelled them from Spain - among them the family of the Israeli-born singer Mor Karbasi who sang to a sold-out audience here.

She sings him a song she sang at the festival "about a Jewish woman who was forced to convert to Islam but on refusing to do so was executed." John said,

It's quite brave of Mor to tell this story and sing this song in a Muslim country. It's quite brave of the Moroccan organisers to have invited her, even if they didn't dare put the "I-word" on the programme.

Mor echoed the views we'd heard earlier from Berlin:

The festival is all about bringing cultures together.

The Muslim Uzbek singer who followed echoed these sentiments that having lots of different religions together in a Muslim country was "no problem".

Next, and before this post closes for the night, came a listener e-mail from "a Manchester-based evangelist" which Ed Stourton, to do him and his programme justice, then read out:

It's worth being reminded of the influence Christianity had in founding schools. In fact, the Christian Church founded hospital, orphanages, trades unions, and any other good who can think of. Why don't we hear more of these things on these programme? We're tired of hearing about Islam."

Amen, brother. Amen.

Vive la Reine!

There were some sour comments on Twitter last night about the closing piece on yesterday's PM [and those agreeing with Robert Peston's view that the BBC is pro-establishment might have tutted too had they heard it], but I myself very much enjoyed John Laurenson's piece on why the French like our Queen.

John Laurenson: The Queen doesn't speak French like a native - how horrible would that be! - but she does speak it rather well. She's an even quite lyrical Francophile. "Paris is a light that glimmers in our imaginations", she said. And the people of Paris are quite keen on her too.

Une femme française: Quite a woman! She's been on the froon for sixty years now, more than sixty years...

John Laurenson: On the throne for sixty years?

Une femme française: Yes the throne, for sixty years.

John Laurenson: She's 88.

Une femme française: She's 88!! Quite good!

Un homme français: I think it's a way for you to have something strong in your institutions and maybe something like that is missing in France.

John Laurenson: It would be nice for France to have a king or a queen again?

Une autre femme française: Well, it would be nice for us to have anything except the one we have now! Anything!!

Peter Ricketts: I'm Peter Ricketts. I'm the British ambassador in France. I think a lot of French people feel that they've known the Queen for years, that there's a continuity. Now the Queen has been coming to France since 1948, when she came as a young princess, just married. They admire her sense of duty, her calmness, the fact that she's always been there.

John Laurenson: Next to the embassy, at the entrance to his English-style gentleman's club, I meet the TV and radio presenter Stéphane Bern, France's most famous monarchist.

Stéphane Bern: She reigns over us for...I say reigns over "us" because she's sort of the real sovereign.

John Laurenson: You say "she reigns over us" almost as if she has some influence even here in France?

Stéphane Bern: Yes she has, of course. Every state visit, it was impressive on the Champs-Élysées to see the people, the crowds, the waving. And they shout her name with love and with admiration.

John Laurenson: At a house in Dreux, west of Paris, next to the chapel where the kings of the Orleans dynasty are buried, I meet Princess Philomena and her daughter Antoinette. "The Prince is in a bad mood this morning", she warns. "Been struggling to make his internet router work". But when Prince Jean appears, striding across the garden laid out by his great-great-great-great-grandfather, the last King of France, the heir-but-one to the admittedly hypothetical French throne, is in a sunny enough mood. The router, like a wayward vassal, has been brought into line and the prospect of the Queen's visit is an uplifting one. He was there last time she came over for a D-Day anniversary and he saw how popular a monarch can be.

Prince Jean of Orléans, Dauphin of France, Duke of Vendôme: The American president came in a whoosh-whoosh noise with all the cars and the helicopters and stopping in front of the tribune and waving with a hand on one side and looking on the other side, and you could hear a kind of mood of disapprobation from the crowd that was almost 25,000 persons. And then when the Queen arrived you had only three grey range rovers with the British flag, and when she came out everyone stood up and applause. And a long, long, long time.

John Laurenson: Are you a little bit jealous of the British royal family that you were unable to survive?

Prince Jean of Orléans, Dauphin of France, Duke of Vendôme: We were always very jealous of England.

John Laurenson: "The French are republicans in their heads but monarchists in their hearts", says Prince Jean, who hopes they will end up reconciling the two and restoring a constitutional monarchy in this country. In the meantime they seem happy enough to make do with ours.

John Laurenson [à une femme française]: Can you sing it?

Une femme française [singing]: "God save our gracious Queen, Long live our noble Queen, God save ze Queen!"

John Laurenson [à une femme française]: Very good!

"Jewish Extremists Have Gone Too Far" and other stories.

Craig and I are sorry to observe that John Laurenson, whom Craig formerly regarded as fair, and shall I say... ‘healthy’  - is showing some worrying symptoms.

I can only assume Laurenson has succumbed to a contagion that is sweeping the country -  shall I say ... a pandemic? 

Diagnosis: an acute case of BBC groupthink. Prognosis :uncertain.

If these opening remarks strike you as alarmist, and - shall I say obscurantist ... very sorry indeed, but read BBC Watch and all will be revealed.

Laurenson went off to Bethlehem where no man has been before; to boldly go in search of the answer to a mystery that is baffling us all. (The strange disappearance of Christians in the very Holy Land.) 

Hercule Poirot he is not. Not only was he fooled by the first red herring he met, but he completely failed to notice the fishy smell. 

In other words, he was taken in, hook line and sinker, by a known activist - an interested party - someone with an axe to grind and - shall I say... a motive; and whether through gullibility, lack of curiosity or straightforward Groupthink -  he took the weapon, aimed it in the wrong direction and fired.

*******

Here’s one for Ed Stourton and Paddy Agnew. 

Suggestion for an interesting diagnostic trial. 

1) Tempt suspected Groupthinker with irresistible, compelling scenario.

2) Once they’re hooked, (immediately) slowly pan out, revealing stark truth.

Unbeknownst to the Groupthinker, you’d cunningly turned the situation on its head, and now they’re forced to confront the uncomfortable truth. Or not as the case may be.

A true groupthinker will - shall I say...self-censor etc etc. 

Addendum (Craig): John Laurenson has beached himself, reputation-wise, with that programme. I'd urge everyone who hasn't read BBC Watch's take on it to give it a read. 

It all goes to show that you shouldn't judge a BBC reporter on the strength of just a couple of fine reports. 

Central Africa, a place that loves immigrants, Rev., slavery, the Bible, missing family members, the Big Bang & Islamic feminism

This morning's Sunday had a newbie presenter, veteran BBC reporter Mike Wooldridge.

He's such a BBC veteran that I seem to have been hearing his name all my life. Checking the infallible fount of all human wisdom, Wikipedia, apparently he's been a BBC reporter since 1970 - some 44 years. And now he's presenting Sunday. 

So what were this week's themes?

1. Central African Republic

Mike talked to the BBC's Tim Whewell about the conflict there.

Tim Whewell himself talked about the plight of Muslims there, saying they are now very much on the receiving end of the violence, and also about the role of priests in sheltering Muslims. He said many priests are doing this, calling them "very brave". There have been death threats madee against them. He said that the conflict was not a religious issue originally, and that the Christian militias arose partly for reasons of revenge and partly because they are being used by other nationalist political forces who believe that CAR nationalism has no place for Muslims. 

Several radio/TV programmes by Tim Whewell will reflect on his experiences there, so his take on the conflict will remain the dominant one at the BBC. Whether his single perspective is an essentially accurate one is something we may only know from reading beyond the BBC.

2. Immigration

John Laurenson reports from Riace where immigrants are welcome and encouraged to stay.

The BBC often gets accused - and sometimes (as per Helen Boaden, Nick Robinson, John Humphrys, etc) accuses itself - of having a pro-immigration bias. This report did absolutely nothing to refute that accusation.

We heard from a village in Italy, which you may also have read about in the Guardian last year. Refugees from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Syria, and other places are being positively welcomed there. Pope Francis was cited saying that each migrant should be treated as if they were Christ himself. Don Giovanni (yes, really) agreed, saying you're giving food & shelter to Christ himself by feeding and housing immigrants. He says there should be no limits at all on immigration, no limits on love. There should be open borders, no upper limits on numbers, no limits on social security. Riace isn't just offering emergency treatment, they are actually encouraging the immigrants to live there, to stop this village becoming a ghost town. They do jobs Italians don't want to do, said the mayor, such as looking after old people.

We also heard the experiences of a Christian Eritrean refugee & his journey to Europe. We heard of the dangerous crossing of the Med to Lampedusa, and of how he was badly treated by the Sudanese (who kept trying to get him to convert to Islam) & how he was treated even more badly in Libya (where they would beat him for refusing to convert to Islam). He says he feels free and at home in Riace. It's impossible not to feel relieved for him, and feel glad that he's now safe and sound in Europe's heaving bosom.

No then, definitely not a report to persuade people who think the BBC has a pro-immigration bias that they're in any way wrong!

3. Rev.

Next week sees the return of Rev, the BBC sitcom about a former rural parish vicar trying to cope with the varied demands of running an inner-city church. Co-creator and writer James Wood tells Mike where he gets his material.

A plug for the "cult" TV series Rev. It's popular with clergy, apparently.

James Wood discussed some of the issues the new series would tackle.  In Episode 1 Rev. Adam Smallbone will team up with a local imam. Episode 2 will deal with gay marriage, as Adam has two dear friends who are gay and want him to marry them.

He said the team meet up with London priests and get their stories, gathering lots of material, and then decide which stories to tackle.

4. Slavery

In an unprecedented collaboration Anglican, Catholic and Islamic leaders at the highest level have given their backing to a global campaign to fight slavery and human trafficking. What is this new initiative doing that hasn't been done before? Trevor Barnes reports.

There are an estimated 29 million men and women in bondage across the world, and a global network has been set up to tackle the problem. We heard from a bishop, and archbishop and an Australian philanthropist. All power to their elbow, I say.

We heard that the Grand Imam of al-Azhar is on board. Trevor Barnes said that there'd previously been a strain between Muslims and Catholics because of "Pope Benedict's some would say 'unfortunate remarks' at Regensburg". [It wouldn't be Sunday if someone didn't have a dig at Pope Benedict].

5. Listener e-mails

Two e-mails were read out. One said that RE teacher's have a vast amount to teach but very little time each week to do it. The other pointed out Ed Stourton's mistake in calling a Lib Dem MP a Conservative last week. Mike Wooldridge apologised [even though it had nothing to do with him].

6. Steve Chalke on the Bible

Mike Wooldridge talks to Steve Chalke as he embarks on a social media debate which he hopes will spark answers to some "Big" Bible questions.

Leading British Evangelical Steve Chalke is hosting a Twitter debate in the coming days. He told Mike Wooldridge that the Church has a history of getting sacred texts wrong, such as over apartheid, slavery or 'women in leadership', thus ending up on "the wrong side of history", justifying "prejudice" and "oppression". He said that Martin Luther King and others show that the Bible can also be a tool for "liberation". His Twitter debate will ask, 'How can it be used both to oppress and to liberate?'. 

He says he's always been inspired by the Bible, as an Evangelical, but says we now need to ask how to answer new questions that were never around in the 1st Century, such as gay marriage. This Twitter debate will discuss that too.

7. The missing Malaysian airliner

We heard from Katrina, whose brother when missing in the Alps 35 years ago. Since then she's been a counsellor, specialising in bereavement. Over that time she kept hoping he had survived. Her mother believed for a while that he had, against all the odds. She said she felt angry watching the TV seeing the grieving mother being pulled out of the room, screaming, crying. The families of the passengers will feel their sense of anxiety rising with each day. She said that everyone needs a story to hold onto. Her brother's body was finally found just last summer and was preserved enough so that she was able to hold his hand. By that stage, she herself didn't want his body to be found in her lifetime, feeling happier imagining him as a free spirit wandering on the mountain - though, she said, that wasn't the case for everyone in her family. She felt angry that that the body had been found, but....[Unfortunately, Mike Wooldridge had to cut her off at that point as they'd run out of time.]

8. The Big Bang

This week scientists recorded the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, coming one step closer to proving the Big Bang theory. Bob Walker reports on the theological implications of this.

1950 - The term 'Big Bang' first used (in a BBC broadcast)

1980 - cosmic inflation discovered

2014 - gravitational waves discovered

We heard from Chris Lintott of The Sky at Night. He's an atheist. Then from Anglican David Wilkinson, Durham (of Thought for the Day fame) who said the discovery reinforces the case for a creator, as beautiful, comprehensible laws suggest a deeper story to the universe. A Muslim particle physicist then argued that we overstate Big Bang, as classical Islamic theology talks of continuous creation. An American creationist finished the report by saying that some scientists are more interested in fame than the truth (i.e. they are after a Nobel Prize) & are tweaking the model infinitely to justify the notion of a Big Bang (which he doesn't believe in.) 

Well, that report certainly can't be faulted for failing to offer a range of perspectives - all the way from an atheist to a creationist.

9. Islamic feminism

Maslaha is a new project about Islam and feminism. How does Islam work within the Western ideas of feminism where traditionally religion has been left at the door? Latifa Akay and Shelina Janmohamed discuss.

This was a strange discussion, as it barely seemed to get anywhere. Latifa talked in fluent sociological wafflese throughout. She believes Islam and feminism go together, but quite how I really can't say (given how she said it). Shelina also believes Islam and feminism go together, but didn't make much of a case for that either. She did say that the "outside world" mocks them for engaging with such issues, saying that someone had just tweeted her asking if 'Islamic feminism' is a joke. Shelina believes that Islamic feminism is a bit different in that (unlike other forms of feminism) it draws on the Koran and early Muslim experiences. 

The discussion might have sprung to life when Mike Wooldridge asked a question about whether she thought women could lead a mixed-gender congregation in prayer. Shelina begins waffling and seemed to be beginning to deflect the answer by saying there are more basic issues to deal with first, when she was stopped in her tracks - as they'd run out of time (again). The programme was ending.

As is this post. Enjoy your Sunday.

Arik, Dieudonne, vicars under attack, Flesh and Blood, Bethlehem Unwrapped, Paul Goggins, a codex, and the devil

This morning's Sunday began with a short appraisal of the life of Ariel Sharon from the BBC's Kevin Connolly, beginning with Mr Sharon's role in "what Israelis call their war of independence" (as Edward Stourton put it). 

One area that interested Kevin and Ed was the changing nature of Zionism. We now tend to think of Zionism as being "associated with Orthodox religion", said Kevin, but in the early days it was largely a secular, socialist movement driven by the urge to build a new kind of society based on the principles of the Left, and the Sharon family belonged to that secular tradition. 

The Palestinian hatred of him was discussed. "It's a slightly uncomfortable thing to deal with in the context of writing people's obituaries, but there's no point in papering over the fact that Ariel Sharon was hated by Israel's Arab enemies", said Kevin Connolly. 

As ever we're running out of time", said Ed - clearly with something on his mind (which we'll come to later). 

He then talked to the BBC's John Laurenson about the growing campaign in France to ban the controversial French Comedian Dieudonne over his anti-Semitic material. 

John filled in the background, saying that before his notoriety, Dieudonne achieved fame playing comic roles in films - roles he got because some of the funniest comics in France "really rate him". John himself said, "He is quite good, in a Bernard Manning kind of way". He said he didn't have "the anti-Jewish thing" nearly so much back then, and "was more ecumenical in his hatreds". Now his performances have become more like political meetings, says the French minister. "And he does have a point", said John. 

This latest business was sparked off by one joke - which, unlike Sunday, I won't repeat here. It was a joke (a "so-called joke", John called it) which made light of the Holocaust. "You use the word 'joke'. It doesn't sound funny at all", said Ed. 

John Laurenson said his following is "rising very fast". He's got an extreme right-wing following ("no surprise there, I suppose"), but "his fan base traditionally is more trendy left-wing, and the part that's really rising quickly, I think, is the black and Arab-origin kids who are very numerous." 

We then heard a clip from Arno Klarsfeld (son of Serge) from the Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France, who is calling from demonstrations against Dieudonne outside French theatres and who said, "What he says is exactly what Hitler used to say in the 1930s, that all wars are begun by Jews, Jews control the world, and to that he adds that the Shoah didn't take place and that he regrets that not enough Jews have been killed in the gas chambers. So he's a perfect anti-Semite". 

John Laurenson then said it was "a bit of a lose-lose situation for France" - "either they allow him to forment hatred of the Jews or let him look like a victim of the system which Dieudonne portrays as pro-Jewish if not simply run by Jews." 

He then described the 'quenelle' - a sort of "lowered Heil Hitler salute", he called it. 

They then turned to Anelka's statement that Dieudonne's not anti-Semitic. John Laurenson said, "He says he just wants to be able to joke about Jews like people joke about black people. But the fact is that no one does joke about black people in this way. I mean, not any more in any case. And if anyone did joke about the slave trade, for example, in the way he jokes about the Holocaust they'd have just as much trouble with the law." Indeed.

John Laurenson is one of the few BBC reporters I rate highly. For the reason why, please click here. 

Talking of Dieudonne, the next feature examined a new campaign calling for an extension of Britain's 'hate crimes' legislation. As regular readers of Is the BBC biased? will be all too aware, that's a typical Sunday story: some left-wing campaign group denouncing the government or calling for a change in government policy gets a platform from Sunday. What wasn't at all typical for Sunday is that this week's campaign group was not a left-wing one. No, those calls come from a think tank called Parliament Street, which Ed Stourton specified as being "centre-right" in his introduction to the story. It is campaigning for attacks on the clergy to be classified as a 'hate crime'. 

Sunday wasn't exactly supportive - to put it mildly. First come a report from Lincoln by the BBC's Bob Walker. Bob interviewed a vicar there who has been attacked, several times a year. The vicar doesn't back Parliament Street's campaign, saying that the attacks on him have been by the marginalised, the vulnerable, those with mental health problems, those on legal highs (and the occasional gangmaster). "Very seldom is there any malice in it", he said, and its "nothing to do with our faith."

Then came Ed Stourton's interview with Parliament Street's Stephen George-Hilley. Ed adopted a sceptical tone and challenged him three times from a sceptical position. One of Ed's points was that "it's difficult to prove it's a religious motivation". It's funny how easily BBC interviewers realise that rather obvious point when it comes to, say, practising Christians, but how rarely it dawns on them whenever the issue arises with regards to those social/religious groups towards which they behave with more 'sensitivity'.

Another campaign formed the subject of the next segment - "Flesh and Blood", a campaign to mobilise the church to increase the number of blood and organ donors in the UK. This prompted a report from Trevor Barnes reports, who began by saying that it's thought that three people a week die because of lack of available organs. We heard from the Bishop of Carlisle, an academic from Bedford University, someone from the Muslim Council of Britain and the minister and congregation at a Baptist church - all were strongly in favour of the campaign. Rev George Pitcher, former spokesman for Rowan Williams, put the other side of the argument, worrying that people with moral concerns and other doubts about organ donation might feel pressurised into them if they are told to do so from the pulpit. As ever, the report ended with the side suspect the programme seemed to be on - the pro-"Flesh and Blood" Baptist minister.

Last week's double interview with the Rev Lucy Winkett and Alan Johnson over the 'Bethlehem Unwrapped' stunt outside St. James's Chapel, London prompted some e-mails to the programme. This is how Edward Stourton read them out in the middle of today's edition:

We've had lots of e-mails in response to last week's discussion between Alan Johnson and Lucy Winkett about the 'Bethlehem Unwrapped' festival. If you heard it you'll remember the festival involved building a replica of the Israeli separation barrier in the west end of London.

Many of you felt frustrated that the item wasn't given more time - and we often feel tyrannised by the clock too it has to be stated - and a number of people objected to Alan Johnson's comments about the Israeli campaigner Jeff Halper. Sharon Green e-mailed: "I was very upset to hear your interviewee, Professor Alan Johnson, describe Jeff Halper as an 'extremist' on last Sunday. Born in the United States, Professor Halper is a Jewish-Israeli university teacher who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006."

On the other side, several people e-mailed to support Professor Johnson, and then we had this rather different rebuke from Dr Katty Jennerson: "I wish you wouldn't be quite so keen to maintain an appearance of even-handedness"...which is one way of looking at it I suppose!..."Professor Johnson used his time to defend the Israeli wall. I would have been far more interested simply to hear from Lucy Winkett how people have been reacting to the wall at St. James's Church and how their view may have been changed as a result". 

The massive irony there is that someone is telling Sunday off for being too even-handed just as Edward Stourton was reading out two e-mails both from the Lucy Winkett side of the argument. When Ed said, "On the other side, several people e-mailed to support Professor Johnson", wouldn't you have thought that he'd have tried to balance out Sharon Green's e-mail with at least one of them? As someone once said, you couldn't make it up!

Next came an interview with David Blunkett, talking about Paul Goggins, the Catholic Labour MP who died this week. Mr Blunkett,  a Methodist himself, was a friend of Mr Goggins, a Christian socialist. From what Edward Stourton and he had to say, Paul Goggins was clearly a saintly, good-humoured and deeply principled man about whom nobody - not even his political opponents - had a single bad thing to say. His first step to canonisation may not be long in coming by the sounds of it. May flights of angels, etc...

A report followed. An early Christian manuscript, the Codex Zacynthius, has been put up for sale by the Bible society with a price tag of £1.1 million, and Cambridge University Library wants to buy it, if it can find the money. The BBC's Charles Carroll heard from the would-be buyer, Dr Ben Outhwaite of Cambridge Uni, and the seller, Paul Woolley of the Bible Society. The latter wants the money to fund a new visitor centre in North Wales. Dr Outhwaite described why he thinks it's one of the greatest early Christian manuscripts, despite it's "not very exciting" and sallow appearance (the latter down to its being "covered in the grease of many palms" over many centuries). It dates from around the 6th to 7th centuries and is a palimpsest, where one document is written over another one, offering clues about the early transmission of St. Luke's Gospel. The main concern of all the contributors (including the BBC's Charles Carroll) was that it shouldn't fall into private hands and disappear from public view. That would never do.

"Is the devil out of date?" That was the question for Bishop Pete Broadbent and  Reverend Tim Stratford, Archdeacon of Leicester, in the light of "the Church of England row" over the new baptism wording pilot [there's almost always a C of E row story on Sunday!]. Is baptism without the devil and sin not baptism at all? Well, Bishop Pete takes the latter point of view, believing that the new wording "denudes the service of its meaning". Rev Stratford, who helped draft the new liturgy, disagrees, saying the traditional wording is "making the shutters come down on people's eyes".  

Dost thou, therefore, in the name of this Child, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow, nor be led by them?

Their discussion was prefaced by a series of vox pops from the streets of Manchester. Sunday, being based at Media City in Salford, now does most of its vox pops from the streets of Manchester. As I've moaned before, the streets of Manchester are hardly a representative sample of British public opinion as a whole and the programme risks biasing all its vox pop features by doing so many of them in one, unrepresentative city.

Manchester is emphatically unrepresentative of Britain as a whole - it's about as solid tribal Labour as it's possible to get, for example. Thus, was it really any surprise that the first vox pop from the streets of Manchester on today's Sunday when asked what he thought of what he heard the words 'the devil' said "Margaret Thatcher"? It was also interesting that the editors at Sunday chose to make that the first of their vox pops, thereby giving it especial prominence. Why on earth would they do that?

As weather forecasters might say, and that's your Sunday!

Toulouse and beyond

"But to the BBC there is ‘No problem’ with anti-Semitism in France…..", asserted a poster over at the Biased BBC blog following the murder of three young schoolchildren and their teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse back in March. The killer was an anti-Semitic Islamist gunman. The comments at B-BBC are presently unavailable (or else I would quote some of them for you), but they were full of people at the time alleging that the BBC was deliberately playing down the scale of anti-Semitism among Muslims in France - and playing it down for reasons of either pro-Muslim bias or anti-Semitism, or both. 

As BBC Radio 4's Sunday is my test case, does its reporting of the Toulouse massacre bear out these charges?

The edition following the massacre included a report by the BBC's John Laurenson that struck both Sue and myself as being both surprising and rather good. It bears transcribing in full:

John L: "Men in black wail and rock in prayers at a synagogue in Marais. This is a neighbourhood of painful memories of French war-time fascist militia and deportation to the death camps, but for the past 35 years the Interior Ministry says, anti-Jewish violence has been overwhelmingly Muslim or Arabic in origin and has always been linked, more or less directly, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sylvie runs a non-profit café in the Marais. The murder of children is a huge shock, she says, but in a way Toulouse, she could see it coming. Israel may deserve criticism, she thinks, but what she hears is virulent and blanket condemnation.

Sylvie: "We were waiting for something like that. Just the atmosphere, and so on, what you see on internet and so on, and there is such a, how do you say, disinformation in the papers and on the T.V."

JL: "What sort of things are you thinking of?"

Sylvie: "Everybody wants that Israel is guilty, guilty, guilty."

Man's voice: "The problem is internet now. The problem is the propaganda on internet works very fine, very good, and this is the danger, this is the danger." 

JL: "Many people who live in this neighbourhood, the school children in particular, have stories to tell about everyday anti-Semitism in France today and the last ten years have seen a number of mercifully non-lethal fire bomb and other attacks on synagogues and Jewish schools. French Jewish leaders say the perpetrators or acts of anti-Jewish violence, big and small, habitually make reference to Israel, so the image of the Jewish state is crucial. At the headquarters of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, its president Richard Prasquier organises transport for a delegation of Jews and Muslims travelling to Toulouse for a ceremony today. He's outraged by the comments by Baroness Ashton, EU High Representative on Foreign Affairs, who seemed to equate the Toulouse killings with the deaths of Palestinian children in the Israeli-occupied territories. He believes this sort of talk created the climate which made the Toulouse Massacre possible."

RP: "When there is bombing, there always is some children among the victims. It's horrifying, but this is the way it goes. It is a difference to have children as victims of bombing, whatever the reason of the bombing, and to shoot in cold blood...cold blood, in the head of a child that one is holding. This difference is HUGE."

The Toulouse victims

JL: "Prasquier also says that that the Toulouse murders should also provoke soul-searching in the media. He goes it's been guilty on several occasions of relaying fake evidence of Israeli atrocities posted on the internet. And then there are the websites that preach out-and-out holy war. Political scientist Jean-Yves Camus says these are a growing problem because they are the means of indoctrination and training for the emerging threat from what he calls 'lone-wolf jihadis' or 'holy warriors'. Mohammed Merah was one such lone-wolf jihadi, he says, because although he made two trips to the Afghan-Pakistan border he was not, he says, part of an organisation."

J-Y C: "It's much more difficult in the fight against the previous al-Qaeda-affiliated movements because the lone wolf is not responding to any order from a centralised movement. He simply does his own thing. So unless you are into an arbitrary state and you put every citizen under scrutiny from the security agencies there will always be a risk that the guy will watch videos from the global jihad on the internet and will get radicalised by himself and will say, 'OK, I will just plan my own..(?)..and you can find many matters of making of bomb on the internet and that is really becoming increasingly easy to find the ways and means to go into terrorist action."

JL: "About the same time that Jean-Yves Camus was saying this President Sarkozy was making this announcement:"

JL: "Henceforth, Sarkozy said, all persons who regularly consult internet sites that call for terrorism, hatred or violence will be punished by law. President Sarkozy, it seems, is very much prepared to sacrifice a measure of civil liberties and even a little more religious freedom in the hope that will stop other Mohammed Merahs emerging in the future. Back in the Marais many will be attending the demonstrations this afternoon in remembrance of Merah's victims - the Jewish children, but also the Muslim soldiers. Merah told the police during the long negotiations that preceded his final gun battle did not realise that those victims were Muslim. Perhaps it was something he didn't want to see, like the fact that huge numbers of his fellow Muslims are happily integrated into French society and have uncomplicated relations with people of other faiths. But this is something many French Muslims know and many Jews too, like this woman whose name is Katya:"

Katya: "My sister is Jewish and she is married to a Muslim guy and they have three beautiful children and any religion if you look at the core of it is about love. Now if you want to manipulate it you can. In a way I'm sorry he's Muslim because again it's that same cancer between Jews and Muslims. You know, I've lived in Paris all my life and I find it's a place where foreigners are really integrated and there is a kind of peace and you see couples, a lot of mixed couples, you know, and so...you know, if the media want to use that to use this strife between those two, you can if you want but in the end I don't know if it's the truth."

On the whole a fine report, I hope you'll agree, which disproves that the generalisation, "to the BBC there is ‘No problem’ with anti-Semitism in France…..".