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:

 

Political choices. Part 2.

While I’m aware that this topic represents something of a minority interest and many visitors to sites like this will scroll past as soon as they see what it’s about - I still feel that, well, someone’s gotta do it and it might as well be me.

And I haven't forgotten the reason I started writing about bias against Israel (and/or antisemitism) in the first place, and why I chose to do so on a general ‘BBC bias’ platform, rather than below the line on a dedicated “Zionist” blog, like, say, Elder of Ziyon or Harry’s Place. 

I know that this specific issue isn’t necessarily at the top of every bias-watcher’s agenda, but such people aren’t likely to visit ‘Jewy’ blogs at all, so in the hope that I might catch the eye of someone who might otherwise avoid listening to me, I keep soldiering on.  

I’m not apologising in any way. I’ve said this many times before. I’m not religious. I’m secular through and through. I don’t belong to any association, group or community. But I do feel compelled to make a fuss about a massive injustice that has been going on forever and seems to be getting worse the more ludicrous it gets.

Yesterday I just scraped the surface of it, but the piece grew a bit too long and unwieldy for a blog post. Brevity is a virtue - I wish I knew how to achieve that.

So let me recap. 

I began by asking myself whether singling out the BBC’s undue respect for someone with such unpleasant “political views” as John Ashton was justified when it was really nothing out of the ordinary.  The BBC routinely promotes virulently antisemitic individuals without so much as a whisper that their views might be in any way controversial.

The people who immediately came to mind (Chris Gunness, Richard Horton, Abdel Bari Atwan, etc) were but the tip of a giant iceberg. And that’s before we got to the long and terrifying list of (mainly Labour) MPs. Lo and behold, David Collier came up with just such a list, and all the more sinister for the fact that these individuals were ‘democratically elected’ and their ferocious anti-Israel activities are regarded as ‘political choices’. 

One of these people - Sarah Champion (MP for Rotherham) is routinely lauded as a “champion” for the victims of the Pakistani grooming gangs and the MP who selflessly sacrificed a front-bench position for the cause.

However, calling her courageous for naming the perpetrators as “Pakistani men” in a Sun newspaper article is ‘benefit of the doubt too far’. Because, well, this crime was being perpetrated for quite a while before she ‘spoke out’ and she was by no means the first MP to do so. 

As we have pointed out before, Sarah Champion has long been pandering to the virulently antisemitic ‘political choices’ of her constituents, and as Collier points out:

"How many times did she critically mention Israel? – and how many times did she critically reference the world’s serial human rights abusers?
Israel: 60
Syria: 7
Iran: 5
N Korea: 2
Pakistan: 1
DRC: 0

That’s dealt with section one. 

Next, there’s the mountain of a communication problem to overcome regarding those wretched “annexations” which the BBC and its international ilk are determined to misrepresent in their default “It’s all settled” manner  -  i.e., as yet another of greedy Israel’s characteristic land-grabs. 

As I said yesterday, legally, the land is already Israel’s, and here is another easy-to-read and a particularly accessible piece which I enjoyed, despite my own recently acquired short attention span syndrome.

“The Palestinians have adopted a paradigm of the conflict in which Israel is entirely at fault. Justice, they say, requires that we vacate “their” land – in fact, if you asked them, they would say that this includes everything from the river to the sea; they believe they are being generous by just asking for Judea and Samaria (at least, for now). But this paradigm is wrong. In fact, we are the ones who have been excessively generous in repeatedly offering them large parts of the land, offers that were rejected because they did not provide a clear enough path to an Arab state in all of the land.

Within the article, there's a link to  Why Israeli Rule in the West Bank Is Legal under International Law in which Professor Eugene Kontorovich explains the legal (not the political choice) aspect of it.

Professor Eugene Kontorovich

Lastly, I’d like to expand on the final section of yesterday’s post. Matthew Sweet’s piece in UnHerd. Anti-Semitism runs deep in Britain.

Antisemitism is not exclusively ‘on the left’. I read some interesting comments generated by this article on Harry’s Place. Commenter Fritz Wunderlich linked to several detailed and extremely lengthy historical accounts of Britain’s role in the establishment of Israel in 1948 and I’m afraid it doesn’t look good for Blighty.

Two conclusions can be drawn from research into these documents, which are relevant to the role of British intelligence in the war in Palestine. 

The first is that, in the 1940s, Britain conducted a two-track policy in the Middle East: one, a well-documented, official policy defined by Whitehall under both the Conservative and Labour parties; the second was informal and secretive, which can be termed “regional,” implemented by “agents in the field,” which left few traces in British archives. 

It was perpetrated by a small, influential group of Arabist secret agents who manipulated the cabinet in London and implemented their own policies, which deviated from the official position. These agents enjoyed a unique status as intermediaries between Whitehall and local Arab leaders. Either intentionally, or because of deep-seated personal beliefs, they provided biased assessments. 

They did not merely gather and interpret information and recommend policy, but controlled the flow of information and implemented their own policies while keeping the London decision makers in the dark. They joined forces with Arab rulers, whom they portrayed as voicing the Arab view, in order to mislead their government. Their tactics, which were backed by senior military officers in Cairo, gathered momentum under the post-WWII Labour government and during the crisis in Palestine in 1947-48. 

The second conclusion is that the British secret agents succeeded in implementing their policies due largely to their use of indirect control over local “agents of influence.” They employed undercover political operations, clandestine diplomacy and covert propaganda to manipulate Arab leaders and public opinion – methods widely used in the Middle East during World War II.

British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin

Britain’s antisemitism runs deep indeed. It looks like our covertly (right-wing) Arabist agenda and our arrogant meddling planted the seeds of an increasingly intractable conflict. So the ongoing situation in the Middle East is our fault? Not entirely, though. The religiously-based hatred of Jews emanating from the religion of peace probably had something to do with it as well. 

Political choices

Antisemitism is just a political choice. Remember that! (One has to wonder, though, if the same can be said of Islamophobia and all other forms of racism)

When Ms Unsworth did her best to justify the BBC’s commissioning of a known antisemite to appear on the “Tory Takedown” episode of Panorama, various BBC scrutineers took up the case. Guido Fawkes  had:

Back in 2012 when Ashton was campaigning against health reforms, CCHQ got sick of the BBC, issuing the statement “The BBC has a responsibility to report news objectively. They should always inform their viewers if the person they are interviewing has political motives”. Eight years on and the BBC are still refusing to adhere to their own guidelines…

And the Campaign Against Antisemitism had

CAA INVESTIGATION REVEALS EVEN MORE RACIST TWEETS BY PROF. JOHN ASHTON AS WELL AS HIS TROLLING OF THE BBC TO INCLUDE GAZA IN A HOLOCAUST COMMEMORATION, WHILE HUNDREDS SIGN OUR PETITION TO TAKE HIM OFF AIR
After antisemitic comments made by Prof. Ashton were revealed in the Jewish Chronicle last week, Campaign Against Antisemitism launched a petition to urge the BBC, ITV and Sky News to stop inviting him to appear as a regular commentator on their news programmes. 

As well as his comments revealed last week (in tweets he has since deleted), which included phrases such as “time for Jews to reflect” and “Zionists behave like Nazis”, we have now uncovered further comments which show the extent and venomousness of his obsession. 

In light of these revelations, and the BBC’s and Sky News’ dismissal of Prof. Ashton’s antisemitism as mere “political views”, we call upon others to join the hundreds who have already signed the petition to get him off our television screens. 

Although this seemed to me to be an obvious breach of the BBC’s obligation to identify their guest speakers’ political affiliations and advocacies, it set me athinkin’.

In what turned out to be a never-ending exercise of whataboutery, I was able to list dozens of known antisemites, Jew-haters and Israel-bashers who appear fairly regularly on our screens without even having to wrack my brain cell.

For one example, take emotional-meltdown-prone, exBBC staffer Chris Gunness. Formerly Gaza-based head of UNRWA, the discredited Palestinian aid agency, Hamas affiliate and recipient of $squillions of international aid, having had his Twitter account suspended for tweeting an obnoxious poem, Gunness has reinvented himself as a music critic. The biggest mystery of all is how he got away with both being gay and collaborating with Hamas. 

Perhaps, for Hamas, the perceived benefit of his anti-Israel advocacy outweighed their inherent homophobia. At any rate, he escaped being dragged behind a motorbike or thrown off a building or whatever they like to do to gay men in Gaza.

Then, of course, there’s QT panellist Richard Horton of the Lancet. He’s well known for his ‘political choice’.

We mustn’t forget Dateline London’s most frequent guest, Abdul Bari Atwan  Usually introduced simply as the editor of Al Quds magazine, our ‘Bari’ is famous for his Jew-hate and for saying he’d ‘dance with delight’ in Trafalgar Square if Iran attacked Israel with a nuclear weapon.

That’s quite strong for a political choice, wouldn’t you say, and worth a mention in the introduction to any platform the BBC might be offering him.

Ken Loach, Miriam Margolyes a multiplicity of pop stars and thesps, they’re all at it - they’ve been spoon-fed the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian fiction for so long that no kind of enlightenment whatsoever is likely to dawn on any of them 'anytime soon'. 

So without boring myself rigid with further lists and links, I’ll say what I originally set out to say. With the pro-Palestinian narrative firmly embedded as the default ‘political choice’ of the many (not the few), I keep asking myself how did we get to this? 

Most antisemites, anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian advocates must know there’s ‘another side’ to the story. (surely?) Aware of it or not, they choose to dismiss it. Let’s call that a political ‘choice’.

What baffles me is why anyone in the post-Christian, liberal/libertarian largely secular democratic Western world would align ideologically with radical Islam? Why would they simply believe the infantile lies, the more absurd the better it seems, of the fanatics and religious bigots who simply loath Jews?

And the anti-Israel narrative is so embedded in Britain, sad to say, that anyone trying to explain the case for Israel is asking to be ridiculed and scorned. The most recent example I can give is Israel’s strategic decision to annex settlements in the West Bank. 

The legal argument for this is set out by Michael Calvo here,:

“According to international law, the Jews are the indigenous people of the lands referred to as Judea, Samaria, Palestine, Israel and the Holy Land, and therefore fulfill the criteria required by international law. The Jews are the ethnic group that was the original settler of Judea and Samaria 3,500 years ago, when the land was bestowed upon the Jews by the Almighty. Leaders of this world, who chose to make abstraction of history, misleadingly refer to Judea and Samaria as the "West Bank" of the Jordan River (which includes Israel) or the "Occupied Palestinian Territories”.

but who’s going to bother with trying to get to grips with that?

“With the Mandate for Palestine, accorded to Great Britain in August 1922, the League of Nations recognized "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country". The Jewish people's right to settle in the Land of Palestine, their historic homeland and to establish their state there, is thus a legal right anchored in international law. 

UNDRIP reaffirms the right of the Jewish people as the indigenous people, and "especially their rights to their lands, territories and resources."

That’s not going to be very popular, is it? So the Israel-bashers in the UNGA  get round it by making hundreds of non-binding declarations and treating them as though they’re legally valid.

“Recent UN General Assembly Resolutions stating that the settlement of Jews in Judea Samaria is contrary to international law are no more than recommendations and have never led to amendments of existing binding treaties. 

“UN Security Council Resolutions, stating that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria are illegal, are not binding. Only resolutions taken under Chapter VII of the UN Charter are binding on all UN member states. For example, Security Council Resolution 2334 was adopted on December 23, 2016 by a 14–0 vote. Four permanent members of the Security Council -- China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom -- voted in favor; the US abstained. This resolution was not adopted under Chapter VII of the Charter. It is not binding. That resolution states that Israel's settlement activity constitutes a "flagrant violation" of international law. It has "no legal validity". 

We’re in there, look! The UK voted in favour of another ‘non-binding’ resolution crafted to undermine Israel’s legitimacy in favour of the Palestinians and their fairy-tale fantasy!

“This position is political, not legal. Despite UN resolutions to the contrary, the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not inconsistent with international law.

Will the case for Israel ever be heard with a sympathetic ear? Not very likely, is it?  And just as I was thinking all this, and realising how hopeless it would be (for anyone) to try, in the face of such a resistant audience, to persuade the British establishment to be reasonable, this popped into my inbox. Unherd

Anti-Semitism runs deep in BritainThere is a strong native tradition in this country and it cuts across party linesBY MATTHEW SWEET

He starts off with an anecdote. It’s the kind of anecdote that I could easily have recounted myself. This sort of thing has happened to me many times over. I think it’s why I blog. He’s describing the belly-blow one feels when someone who seems perfectly nice and ‘relatable’ turns out to be a raging, antisemitic, ignoramus. His contention is that embedded antisemitism isn’t confined to the left. It’s also a feature deeply ingrained in the right (left and centre.)

“The journal Political Quarterly has just published the first academic study of Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis. Its authors are the sociologists Ben Gidley and Brendan McGeever, and the historian David Feldman — all attached to the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck University of London.
[…]
Their conclusions will comfort few. Conservative voters, the data suggests, are more likely to assent to an anti-Semitic proposition than their Labour equivalents. These numbers are alarmingly large: added together, they work out as about 30% of the population.

I’m not totally convinced by all the reasoning, but 30%! That sounds pretty bad. 

“They suggest that most of the participants in the crisis — from Jeremy Corbyn to Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis — are guilty of the same intellectual error. They have chosen to characterise anti-Jewish racism as a poison, a virus, a disease — a foreign pollutant that has breached the defences of a 120-year-old British institution. “Figures on all sides,” the article concludes, “conceive antisemitism as an exogenous force which contaminates and spoils the political body it inhabits.”

I had to look up exogenous. It means “external force”. I can’t see that it is such a big blunder to mischaracterise a “reservoir: a deep reservoir of stereotypes and narratives, one which is replenished over time and from which people can draw with ease”  as an exogenous force, or to confuse one for the other. 

Whatever it is, exogenous force or deeply embedded reservoir, it’s real, and the examples of cultural (and casual) antisemitism he cites are all too familiar. 

It’s in the literature of John Buchan, Graham Greene and the antisemitic sources upon which many of our favourite black and white movies were based. It seems that these movies were ‘sanitised’ before release by Jews running the big studios of the time.

Interestingly, Matthew Sweet declares:

The deadlines for peer-reviewed academic journals are long. Gidley, McGeever and Feldman were committed to print before the new Labour leader issued his thoughts on the anti-Semitism crisis in his party. Keir Starmer’s language was much the same as that of his predecessor, though he did add a slightly confusing horticultural layer: “Antisemitism has been a stain on our party,” went his victory speech. “I will tear out this poison by its roots.”

and concludes:

“Prejudice does not show up on an X-Ray. It can’t be collected on a swab or in a blood sample. It lives in our actions and utterances and encounters, and in the culture they generate — on pages and screens, in workplaces and social media feeds. We are, however, a metaphor-loving society. The present moment demonstrates that. Covid-19 is a virus that we discuss in terms of war; racism is a form of human conflict that we discuss in terms of virology and toxicology. 

When words fail, sometimes our ideas are at fault. It is an opportunity to find better ones. Better deeds, too. And better friends.

This brings me back to the BBC. (At last)  Can antisemitism be seen in terms of war? Is it something nasty and pervasive to be rooted out? Is it a virus that someday a vaccine to prevent it or a treatment to cure it can be found?  Or is it deeply embedded in our reservoir of memes and tropes, and (unlike any other form of racism) for the BBC simply a matter of political choice? 

The Spaghetti Western

Especially sharp-eyed (or snaked-eyed) regulars might remember me posting, from time-to-time, semi-gratuitous YouTube videos of Spaghetti Western scores by Ennio Morricone - the man behind the coyote calls, the whipcracks, the grunts, the whistles and the unforgettable tunes of Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly), plus the haunting harmonicas and gritty guitars of Leone's mighty Once Upon a Time in the West - and, oh, so much more besides.

I love those films, though I believe it's the music that mainly makes them so special for me. 

I probably ought to watch more films. But they're mostly too long and, besides, I've got Mark Mardell and Mark Easton to attend to. 

Once at work a temp guy who loved his films began asking me if I'd seen such and such a film. I said 'no'. He went on. I went on replying the same. It went on for ages. Hours even. He even tried again the next day. He couldn't believe his ears. 

My taste in films isn't overly sophisticated. I like Star Trek movies, Japanese Godzilla films of the 1950s to the 1970s, Carry On films, Hitchcock, the odd James Stewart or Cary Grant film, The African Queen, Some Like It Hot, a few Glen Ford westerns and - of course - my beloved Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns (plus the Don Spiegel-directed Morricone-scored Two Mules for Sister Sarah), and The Naked Gun and Airplane.

Most of my experience of cinema-going was a girlfriend-pleasing thing. She liked kiddies' films and horror films and took me to see plenty of both, bless her.

(I seriously loathe horror films, or any films with violence against women. It verges on a phobia with me). 

I particularly remember being taken to watch The Lion King in Lancaster's now-defunct central cinema.

The film was ear-splittingly loud (as is the way of modern cinemas) but even that was no match for the hordes of young kids leaping up and down throughout and shouting and screaming at an intensity that would surely have shamed Douglas Adams's (Roger Waters and Dave Gilmour, Pink Floyd-inspired) megagroup Disaster Area - "the loudest band in the galaxy".

So many little mouths, so many decibels.

The little ones managed to pretty much drown out Elton John entirely (something some people might think to be no bad thing at all. But how can anyone really hate the singer of Your Song?).

Ah, Douglas Adams and Disaster Area. Time for a long quote:

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert-goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet – or more frequently around a completely different planet. 

Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath a silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason. 

Many worlds have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band’s public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitation treaties. 

This has not, however, stopped their earnings from pushing back the boundaries of pure hypermathematics, and their chief research accountant has recently been appointed Professor of Neomathematics at the University of Maximegalon, in recognition of both his General and Special Theories of Disaster Area Tax Returns, in which he proves that the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.”

Where was I and what's the point of this post? 

Well, time for a bouquet: I do like classic, classical film scores and I really like Radio 3's Sound of Cinema, hosted by famous feminist Naomi Wolf's arch-nemesis Matthew Sweet. 

This week's episode focused on Spaghetti Westerns. And it wasn't all Ennio Morricone and Lee Van Cleef. It also looked at the lesser lights who slung their guns and smoked their smouldering cheroots in Ennio's mountain-like shadow.

And it was all fascinating stuff, though no one got anywhere near approaching Maestro Morricone in terms of being The Maestro of 'this kind of thing'.

But what anecdotes Matthew told us along the way!

For example:

'Spaghetti Western' is the name we give to films set in the Wild West but shot in Europe. 

But this is something that British film-makers had been doing years before A Fistful of Dollars. 

The Singer Not The Song was shot in Spain by The Rank Organisation in 1960 and, instead of Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson, it has Dirk Bogarde as a bandit called Anacleto - which was also the name of a Pizza Express dessert, now sadly discontinued. 

Its director, Roy Ward Baker, always described it as "that dreadful film that put paid to my career", but I think he underestimated it.  

What Roy did, quite in spite of himself, was to make a picture that John Waters would have been proud to put his name on - a gay Western starring Bogarde as a Mexican bandit and John Mills as the Irish priest for whom he develops a strange attraction. 

Dirk took the role because he thought he was going to be smouldering opposite Peter Finch or Richard Burton and because he'd get to wear a pair of incredibly tight leather pants. When he found that Mills had been cast he was so angry that he vowed to make life hell for everyone concerned. Which he did. But, as Samantha Fox once sang, the pants stayed on.

And:

This wasn't, however, the first British Western shot on the European mainland. In 1958 the Hollywood veteran Raoul Walsh signed with Rank to direct The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw - an action comedy starring Kenneth More as a British gunsmith who finds himself the arbiter of law and order in a one-horse Western town. Jayne Mansfield was his co-star who, whilst she was in England, also found time to cut the ribbon on a crucial section of the Chiswick flyover. Her character sings in the picture but Mansfield doesn't. The voice emanating from her high escarpments is that of Connie Francis.

I like yarns like that.

Meanwhile, the 'classic score of the week' this week was from Ennio Morricone. And I'm going to feature its climax in context - the final duel from Once Upon a Time in the West:

Now, please, if you've never seen it and still want to see it, close your eyes. This is the glorious climatic scene of the film, that reveals everything and brings the bad guy in black (Henry Fonda) to realise, as he death-rattles his last (with a harmonica stuffed in his gob), just who exactly the good guy in white (Charles Bronson) actually is.

So if you don't want to see it, as you've not yet seen it, just listen instead.

But the music and the direction and the acting work together in ways that made cinema history. The actors were responding to Ennio's music, played live while they acted out their quasi-operatic scene of life and death and revenge, measuring their motions to the intense but leisurely measures of his music.

What beats this, all you cinema fans?