Who’s sorry now?

Can we talk about Telford now or must we wait till the Conservative leadership race is over?

I don’t think (at the time of writing) any of the Conservative leadership candidates have set out their policy on culturally sensitive issues surrounding the grooming gang phenomenon?

At least - or at last - the BBC has acknowledged the “Telford” report. Telford child sex abuse went on for generations, inquiry finds

Up until now, vociferously politically correct ‘anti-racists’ have, with mind-boggling hypocrisy, stifled and suppressed campaigners against the grooming gang phenomenon. People have long been dismissed as Islamophobes for trying to raise awareness of C.S.E. (child sexual exploitation) by “predominantly Pakistani Muslim men.”

From 2020

  A new Home Office report admits grooming gangs are not a ‘Muslim problem’. 

"If we really want to tackle this issue, we have to stop fixating on the lurid and false distraction of “Muslim grooming gangs”.[…]

The past decade has shown that too many people in power are insufficiently concerned when sexual abusers are not from Asian or Muslim backgrounds. Their hypocrisy fails victims and damages prevention efforts."

 

Okay then. If you say so. It’s imaginary; and racist.

Recently the redoubtable Mark Steyn has featured CSE victims Samantha Woodhouse and Samantha Smith on GB News. Good for him. Better late than never.  

Still, no respectable anti-CSE campaigner can risk being associated with bad-boy Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) whose ‘political awareness’ originated long ago in Luton alongside fellow Lutonian Stacey Dooley. 

Robinson appeared to be his own worst enemy. Accused of "bringing hatred and division to the town.” he played into the hands of his detractors. Various bad choices led to him being pilloried, imprisoned, and bankrupted  On the other hand, Stacey Dooley shot to fame, fortune, and BBC stardom. 

 Jan 31, 2022

 1,000 girls abused and raped by Asian gangs while police looked the other way.

Tommy Robinson brought Telford to the public’s attention way before the press and the media were forced to acknowledge the problem let alone admit the scale of it. Might Robinson deserve a glimmer of recognition from the likes of Mark Steyn? Had the media done ‘the right thing’ in the first place might things have turned out differently?

Radio 3 v GB News

Any regular listeners to BBC Radio 3 will be familiar with Dr. Matthew Sweet, presenter of its film music programme Sound of Cinema and its late night discussion programme Free Thinking. Here he is on Twitter today calling for Ofcom to investigate GB News:

1. I think it's time for Ofcom to investigate GB News for spreading anti-vax misinformation. It's Naomi Wolf again, building another conspiracy theory from data she doesn't understand - this time about recent neonatal deaths rather than Victorian legal records.
2. In this interview Mark Steyn accepts her false claims about a rise in neonatal deaths in Ontario as truth and amplifies them. Then he agrees with her proposition that Bill Gates has bribed the BBC into suppressing the facts about it. Here are the facts.
3. She then makes some defamatory allegations about an Office of National Statistics employee, who, she says, conceded that he had lied to the public. I recall the exchange from her now-defunct twitter feed, and how patiently he tried to explain why she was wrong.
4. Then she makes a false claim about vaccines and sperm count. That one is fact-checked here. She speaks, in obscenely sensationalist language, about neonatal deaths in Scotland, and accuses the BBC of misreporting the story.
5. Dr Wolf cranks her tombola of messianic ignorance for a good few minutes. Steyn nods it all through and then thanks her for her splendid work. To my mind all of this fails to meet some very basic journalistic standards. It went out on 23 June.
6. So what should we do about this? A complaint to Ofcom I suppose - form below. But I can't help feeling it needs a more co-ordinated approach. A conspiracy theory/misinformation debunking service that could deal with this stuff as it arises in the media.

And here's the interview in question:

 

A pair of interviews

Following on from the previous post...

It was fascinating watching Operation Midland victim Paul Gambaccini [my teenage favourite] reacting live to the breaking news of Dame Cressida Dick's eviction on Mark Steyn's GB News programme on Thursday night. 

As you'd hope, he was given time and space to have his say, and not interrupted. 

Contrast that to Newsnight's inept, awkward interview with Harvey Proctor, another Operation Midland victim. 

He was constantly interrupted by rookie presenter Emma Vardy, as the BBC programme repeatedly panicked at what he had to say in criticism of Dame Cressida and her high-up Met colleagues - despite him insisting it was perfectly OK legally to say what he was saying. 

Why invite a victim on if you're going to repeatedly get the Heebie-jeebies when he says something you've obviously not prepared for?

Simon Schama, actually

I watched the Munk debate, which is featured in Douglas Murray’s piece in the Spectator  entitled 

“No, Simon Schama, people worried about gang rape and FGM aren’t ‘obsessed with sex’”

It was an interesting debate with some fine highlights, what with Nigel Farage and Mark Steyn on the one side and Simon Schama and Louise Arbour (whom I was not familiar with) on the other.

It’s the immigration thing, and they stuck to the topic. Oddly enough, Rod Liddle crops up again in this piece from last year by Douglas Murray in which he clearly expresses his views on Simon Schama.

Rod Liddle must be like a bus. Nothing for ages, then several come along all at once.  Maybe I should do a poetic riff about that and submit it to the BBC. 

On QT, Simon Schama had called Rod 'a hack' in a most dismissive fashion (though he steered clear of the food particles) and now Douglas was hoping he’d have ‘his arse handed to him on a plate’ by Mark Steyn in this debate. 

In fact I didn’t think the two sides were all that far apart. They seemed to be talking about two separate things. A) Naturally occurring immigration in general, which is beneficial to the ‘host culture’, and B) Mass, unmonitored immigration which is detrimental to it. 

If they’d clarified that there is a distinction between gradual, culturally enriching immigration and a sudden, overwhelming invasion of culturally alien refugees and economic migrants  in the first place, it might have been a shorter debate.

The most remarkable moment (for me) came when Simon Schama asked, rhetorically, if there was anything within Islam that causes the problems we’re seeing in Cologne and Sweden etc.

  

His mannerisms were bad enough, and his habit of saying the word “actually” every few seconds was weirdly reminiscent of our friend Abdel Bari Atwan.

“It’s an appalling slander to the Muslim religion to imply, actually, that if you’ve got a Muslim immigrant that he’s bound to commit a  sexual crime sooner or later. That seems to me to be a monstrous and grotesque falsehood about Muslim communities that have been settled for a long time...”

That’s the kind of twisting of reality that we’re accustomed to. But when he went on to say:

“What is it about Islam that you’re saying that actually is about actually Islam that is designed to make men brutal animals?”

That could have opened up a very interesting strand of the discussion, but not on this occasion. 

That brings me to the first of two programmes on radio 4 about Deobandi Muslims in the UK. They’re being ‘investigated’ by Owen Bennett-Jones. 

This episode concentrated on the isolationist principle of this movement, and it looks as though Owen B-J is heading towards re-evaluating the current concept that the Deobandis are ‘moderate’.

The Deobandis certainly seem to have some extreme ideas and a genuine fear of letting their young people be corrupted by our debauchery and beastliness. 

Owen Bennett-Jones

Many years ago, before the carcinogenic properties of cigarette smoking were officially recognised, other negative implications of the habit included an implied permissiveness and possible sexual promiscuity on the part of the smoker.  Long cigarette holders; naughty, sophisticated and seductive. 

Never mind the cough. Parents would impose an outright ban on their children taking up fags on pain of disinheritance or the threat of a good whipping. More progressive parents might invite their offspring to have a puff, in the hope that it would make them cough, hopefully vomit, and thus put them off the habit for life.

Risky. It took a long time for the smoking fashion to subside, and cost many lives in the meantime. But it seems to have more or less come right in the end..

There was a similarly risky theory I once read in a 60s or 70s Dr. Spock manual on child rearing. A child knows what’s good for it, said the good doc, therefore fussy and faddy eaters would be perfectly fine if left entirely to their own devices. The infant’s body would tell it what it needs. All well and good if you're a native of some godforsaken jungle or if you live amongst the Kalahari Bushmen miles away from civilisation, but if you’re surrounded by junk food and sweet stuff, what hope is there of a good outcome? Next to nil, I think; so not worth the risk.

where did we go wrong

Something similar seems to be behind the isolationist practices of the Deobandis. Keep them on the straight and narrow, away from the Kafir’s debauchery and everything will be ok. If they let their children taste a speck of our over-indulgent, ungodly lifestyle, they’ll be hooked. Hooked and lost. You can almost understand it. But why, one must wonder, do they even want to live amongst such temptation?

Which brings me back to Simon Schama’s question. Yes, there really is something within Islam that makes some men into brutal animals. It’s a tinder-box combination of sexual repression and the concept of the superior/inferior relationship between the Muslim and the nonMuslim.

Isn’t it odd how gay men can have such a blinkered view of a cult that openly despises them?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the BBC.

Having castigated the BBC for playing down the elephant in the peace negotiations, i.e., the PA’s officially sanctioned cradle-to-grave incitement to hate/kill/exterminate Jews whilst amplifying spurious obstacles to peace concocted by the PA, I’d like to mention that the BBC has in fact publicised Brandeis University’s unfortunate decision not to award an honorary degree to  Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They even link to this, with its sympathetic Q and A.

Brandeis's deplorable decision is worse than merely ‘deciding not to’ because having decided to award it, they were persuaded by an angry letter from a number of left-leaning objectors to retract the wretched award after it had been offered. 

This grossly insulting reversal has drawn adverse publicity, both to the university and  to the craven individual responsible, one Fred Lawrence. It has also set off a controversy over Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s views about Islam as well as everyone else’s views about Islam, everyone’s debating whether it can ever be modernised, reformed, or be compatible with the infidel world. 

Melanie Phillips supplies the background:

“Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born woman who, after enduring ritual genital mutilation, fled an arranged marriage, renounced Islam for atheism and became a Dutch MP. Subjected to death threats after her colleague Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam in 2004 because of the film they made highlighting the plight of women under Islam, she moved to the US where she continues to campaign against Islamic extremism.Now she is at the centre of another controversy. Brandeis University, a small but well-regarded liberal arts institution in Massachusetts, has withdrawn its proposal to award her an honorary degree. The university’s president, Fred Lawrence, said: “We cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” These included calling Islam “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death” that “legitimises murder”.The volte-face followed pressure from Islamic groups, in particular the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group accused by the FBI of being a front group for Hamas, and by members of Congress and others of having links with extremism.This has far wider significance than a spat in a small American university. It graphically illustrates, and deepens, the dangerous muddle over Islamic extremism and the charge of “Islamophobia” that has caused problems in the UK for years, and now seems to have spread to the US.”

The rest of it is behind the annoying Times paywall.  

The interesting part of the aforementioned letter objecting to an honorary degree being bestowed upon Ayaan Hirsi Ali is where they try to rationalise their opposition by glossing over the cognitive dissonance that allows the liberal left to align itself with illiberal  Islam.

  “Please know that, like Ms. Hirsi Ali, we fully recognize the harm of forced marriages; of female genital cutting, which can cause, among other public health problems, increased maternal and infant mortality; and of honor killings. These phenomena are not, however, exclusive to Islam.”

...says the letter. You see, we’re not going to get caught out approving of these terrible things. We defend Islam because.. because.. because  other cultures do them too so that’s okay goodnight.

“The selection of Ms. Hirsi Ali further suggests to the public that violence toward girls and women is particular to Islam or the Two-Thirds World, thereby obscuring such violence in our midst among non-Muslims, including on our own campus.”

What? How does the selection of someone who opposes violence, forced marriage, FGM, honour killings and the like within Islam automatically suggest that these problematic cultural traditions are exclusive to Islam, merely because they’re characteristic of, or if you like, particular to Islam, (and, good grief, if they’re rampant on the campus, root them out why don’t you) and why exactly does highlighting the existence of them within Islam obscure them outwith Islam?   Not logical at all in my opinion.

 “It also obscures the hard work on the ground by committed Muslim feminist and other progressive Muslim activists and scholars, who find support for gender and other equality within the Muslim tradition and are effective at achieving it.”

No it doesn’t.

 We cannot accept Ms. Hirsi Ali's triumphalist narrative of western civilization, rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples.” 

Hmmph. Do we hate ourselves?

Their main objection to Hirsi Ali is that she takes an uncompromising approach to what many people think is an uncompromising religion. No half measures. 

Many liberals are desperate to prove that there is “moderate Islam”, even though people like this, and surely they should know, are adamant that there is no such thing. Abdullah al Andalusi had his knickers in a right old twist because the BBC allowed Maajid Nawaz a platform to spout his inconsistent theories about moderate Islam, and what’s more they did this in the sincere belief that he speaks for others, not just himself alone (when it is I, Abdullah al Andalusi, who I believe speaks for others, not just myself alone.) For our enlightenment, Abdullah al Andalusi summarises, with derision, a list of the devilish reforms the UK government wishes to impose upon the Muslim community. 

• Create a ‘reformed’ (and deformed) ‘Liberal Islam’ (2) (3) that fully adopts Liberal values,

• Detaching Muslims living in Britain intellectually and emotionally from the rest of the Ummah (global Muslim community), and set up British nationalism as the definer of their ‘main identity’  and

• Complete mental enfranchisement of Muslims into the concept of Secularism, by encouraging active enfranchisement and confidence in the Secular democratic system, via voting (4)

The impudence of the UK government! If only they had the will.

Mr al Andalusi seems oblivious to the fact that this is Britain, and the Western World appears equally oblivious to the fact that they are The Western World. Or, if you will, “Western civilization, rooted in a core belief of the cultural backwardness of non-western peoples” and if all’s well, rooted in a core belief in their own superior humanitarian credentials.

Because Islam is the one religion that by its very nature has resisted reform and will do so for ever after because that’s an inbuilt requisite of Islam. 

No-one knows whether ‘moderate Muslims’ are “culturally Muslim” apostates, ex-Muslims who emerged, blinking, from Muslim backgrounds, or what? Without the trappings, is there anything left?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali says what others are afraid to say. If they agree, they’re ashamed to say so. All they can do is qualify everything with disclaimers. 

“I’m no supporter of the EDL, but...” “I disapprove of Geert Wilders, but..” “I agree with some of what Robert Spencer says, but..” “I admire Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s courage but...”

Mark Steyn has written extensively and forthrightly about this topic . He’s a fine writer.

“At Brandeis University, we are learning the hierarchy of the new multiculti caste system. In theory, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. If conservative white males were to silence a secular women’s rights campaigner from Somalia, it would be proof of the Republican party’s ‘war on women’, or the encroaching Christian fundamentalist theocracy, or just plain old Andrew Boltian racism breaking free of its redoubt at the Herald Sun to rampage as far as the eye can see. But when the snivelling white male who purports to be president of Brandeis (one Frederick Lawrence) does it out of deference to Islam, Miss Hirsi Ali’s blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly news anchor. White feminist Germaine Greer can speak at Brandeis because, in one of the more whimsical ideological evolutions even by dear old Germaine’s standards, Ms Greer feels that clitoridectomies add to the rich tapestry of ‘cultural identity’: ‘One man’s beautification is another man’s mutilation,’ as she puts it. But black feminist Hirsi Ali, who was on the receiving end of ‘one man’s mutilation’ and lives under death threats because she was boorish enough to complain about it, is too ‘hateful’ to be permitted to speak. In the internal contradictions of multiculturalism, Islam trumps all: race, gender, secularism, everything. So, in the interests of multiculti sensitivity, pampered upper-middle-class trusty-fundy children of entitlement are pronouncing a Somali refugee beyond the pale and signing up to Islamic strictures on the role of women.”

So the BBC didn’t avoid this subject altogether, which is a plus. At the risk of sounding like Amazon (People who bought one of these, also bought one of those)  if you’ve ploughed through all this, you’ll be interested that the BBC has also mentioned this.

That’s a turn up.