A little light relief

Baffling things and conundrums

A couple of weeks ago Beyond Belief (Radio 4) tackled antisemitism. In the chair, Ernie Rea. 

Ed Kessler and Dr. Yaakov Wise were there to speak as ‘Jews’, and for some reason best known to the BBC, Mo Ansar had been invited to represent ‘the Muslims’, doing his utmost to shoehorn 'Islamophobia' into the picture at any and every opportunity. 

Islamophobia

I’ll summarise (my impression) as follows:

"Did you, know, Muslims are the new Jews, and wherever you find antisemitism, Islamophobia is lurking nearby? (Well you do now) Also, antisemitism doesn’t emanate primarily from the Muslims.  No, where it comes from is a bit of a mystery. 
Some people conflate Jews with Israel. Of course not every Jew supports the Israeli government, in fact more and more young Jews support the Palestinians! Not a lot of people know that, so hating Jews just because you think Israel is evil is the wrong thing to do. It’s a complete misunderstanding of the situation, which is (obviously) that almost everyone, including Jews, thinks Israel is wrong. The few exceptions who don’t, they’re the ones you should hate.” 

Here’s me thinking that Mo Ansar had made an absolute fool of himself over various issues; cartoons and stuff like that. Yet there they go again, dragging him in for his ‘opinion’ as though he wasn’t an utter charlatan. Silly me.

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Last week German Jewish writer Julia Franck reflected on her move from East to West Berlin.

Listening to the beginning of this episode, a description of her family’s unhappy experiences as East Germans trapped behind the Berlin wall, then, as new immigrants to the west, the family's gratitude and willingness to put up with the harsh conditions imposed upon refugees, such was their relief at escaping the GDR. 

Upon listening to this lead-up, a casual listener who understood that the talk was supposed to be about PEGIDA, might assume that Ms Franck was about to declare that she was somewhat in favour of protests against the 'Islamification' of Europe. 

Not a bit of it.  In fact it turned out that she was about to explain, from her special position as a one-time immigrant, that she was not at all against immigration, mass Muslim or whatever, nor was she concerned about the Islamification of Europe. 'Islamicization', she (or the voice-over) called it, enunciating it with disgust. Not because she thought it was undesirable. No. She didn’t even recognise it. She didn’t accept that such a thing exits, but if it does, there was nothing undesirable about it.

This is the BBC, and Julia Franck was so heartily in favour of immigration, that the producer (or whomsoever was responsible for directing the actress translating Ms Franck’s words) made sure they were given the full-on ‘Islam is the Religion of Peace’ treatment with a reverential, saccharine, smiley-face tone of voice.

“I am a fugitive myself, therefore all fugitives are benign; look at me,” was what she said, completely forgetting that she was a fugitive for a reason, and similarly forgetting to ask herself what she was trying to get away from and why she needed to get away from it. There’s stupid.

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More melodrama on Harry’s Place over George Galloway. From a link on the thread, more about his attention-seeking threats to sue, and the ‘chilling effect’ of this and most of what he does.

This ‘chilling effect’ is another way of describing the ramifications of what “the terrorist” does. Scares the pants off would-be dissenters from his particular rules.

I understand that Hadley Freeman (me neither) deleted the offending Tweet as soon as George started expressing his outrage, so the forthcoming ‘day in court’ if it ever comes to pass will be a massive publicity stunt for the gorgeous one, whereupon he and his acolytes will be delighted.

Also on Harry’s Place, more on Sizer and  more from Archbishop Welby: Good grief. One interesting point, which I read in a comment, I’ve forgotten where, is that if Sizer religiously (ha) complies with his promise never again to refer to the Middle East, it would seriously hamper his ability to do his priestly duties. It’s where Jesus hung out, after all.

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The BBC has presented 'member of the International Solidarity movement 'Kayla Mueller as another saintly martyr.

She certainly  ‘didn’t deserve to die’, (who does?) but it turns out that she’s a bit of a Rachel Corrie. 

Mark Steyn:

“If "idealism" is defined as taking the side of the Palestinians against the Israelis, Kayla Mueller was super-idealistic. That's her right, of course - the right to choose which side she was on. And then she took her "idealism" and "optimism" off to Syria. And, even though she was on their side and believed as they do that "resistance flows from the minaret five times a day", to ISIS she was just another high-value infidel. So they kidnapped her and killed her.”

More revelations; She might have ‘married’ an ISIS commander before she died! 

"I'm not sure yet how to live in a world without Kayla, but I do know that we're all living in a better world because of her," said a tearful Eryn Street, one of Mueller's closest friends, as she spoke from the courthouse plaza in Prescott on Tuesday.

What can she mean??

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The Telegraph online has a picture gallery. The other day it featured about  30 pictures of a Hamas youth training camp. 

Today it’s Prince Charles touring the Middle East.  “Comments are closed on this picture gallery.” Shame. No. 5 was particularly strange. 

I’d swear that HRH prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud (!) is wearing an actual tea-towel and one of those glass-cloths, on his head.

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And finally, just for fun:

The Decline and Fall of the Charlatan in Eyeliner

Oh dear, The Big Questions, Sunday Morning Live, etc, are going to have to put a new Muslim on Speed Dial 1 for any discussion involving Islam 'n' stuff. 

Apparently, Nicky Campbell has already dropped Mo Ansar, that 'charlatan in eyeliner', from his radio show and the rest of BBC Radio 5 will no longer have him on either. His media career looks to be over. 

Why? Well, following Sheikh Ya Bhatti's heavy pounding of him back in January (see Harry's Place), Iain Dale won a comprehensive legal victory over him a couple of weeks ago and then exposed what Mo Ansar had done to him.

Guido Fawkes now reports the latest onslaught of articles and revelations which should finally finish off what remains of Mo Ansar's reputation:

Nick Cohen, Spectator: The curious case of Mo Ansar: How did a former bank employee from Hampshire become the voice of British Islam?

Milo Yiannopoulos: Mo Ansar, the bogus Muslim theologian who defends slavery and says Muslims discovered America in AD1000 while claiming benefits and appearing on the BBC

Jeremy Duns: The dangerous Mr Ansar 

Guido ends by writing, 

Given what we know know about Mo Ansar, it is difficult to see how television and radio producers can ever book him for a media appearance again...

Well, you would certainly hope so, but given that Abdel Bari Atwan still gets invited on, the BBC aren't always that fussy.

Life's too short

Not all my precious time is spent blogging. I have parallel obligations; domestic servant, business partner, confidante to random strangers (dunno why) and a lot lot more. Ugh! I hate “lot lot.” I threw it in to see if you were listening.

Some of my time, and yours I bet, is spent looking for things in and around the home. My specialism is the vital message written on a piece of paper. Everything in the vicinity has to be sifted through and no paper must be left unturned. If whatever-it-is does turn up at the end of a hard day’s goose-chase, it infuriatingly reveals itself not to have been on a piece of paper at all, but on a greasy old brown envelope or a torn off bit of newspaper. Or a scrap of wood.

This time can never be reclaimed. What’s the moral?

Blogging also means reading, and I limit that to one or two core websites like Harry’s Place, the Spectator and the iPlayer. 

Harry’s Place has the most interesting btl comments and the articles often address subjects I like. I’m a mere infant compared to many of these commenters, you’ve noticed.

Why am I telling you this? Oh yes, I’m telling you because I first heard about the  Newsnight debacle on an H/P thread. The article was titled: “Who Speaks for British Muslims? Reflections on Newsnight”   with the sub heading: some perspectives on the recent  Newsnight debate. 

The Harry’s Place discussion veered off at a many faceted tangent and developed into a fascinating thread about Islam in general.  Disqus’s nesting system is helpful in that a ‘reply’ states which poster it’s addressing, but it throws the chronology out the window. If you happen to come upon the thread, say, a few days late, there’s a continuity problem, which is hard to unpick.

The so-called Newsnight ‘debate’ was also alluded to by Craig here. Debate it was not, but I thought it sounded like a spectacle one ought to watch. So I looked at it on iPlayer.

It was in fact a free-for-all involving the three most irritating male media-Muslims, whose individual incoherences merged into one unintelligible incoherence with Jeremy Paxman smirking in the background.

The item was introduced with a short film by Maajid Nawaz. It featured an excessive amount of smoking on hookas. 

Nawaz, Hasan and Ansar are notoriously verbose and apt to prefer the sound of their own voices to those of other people, but obviously the chaos wasn’t predictable enough for Jeremy Paxman, as he saw fit to exacerbate things with a provocative remark about Nawaz’s famous Jesus and Mo cartoon T shirt Tweet. This scuppered any hope of finding an answer to the original question:  “What is a spokesman for the Muslim community? What does it mean, how do you get the job?” 

Nawaz presents himself as a reformer. Actually he seems just as much of a self publicist as the other two, who also present themselves a reformers, of a slightly different, equally unconvincing strain. At the end of the day it’s the same old same old.

These gentlemen are never off our screens. My perfect unbiased BBC day would have to be Maajid/Mehdi/Mo-free, and it would also have to have at least one Woman’s Hour without a discussion about the veil or any other topic that starts from the premise that Muslim values are universally accepted, and/or of interest to  all and sundry. The unfortunate assumption that this is the case has crept by stealth into much of the BBC’s output. As Shirley Conran said ‘Life’s too short to stuff a Muslim.

I always find vital messages in the end. Usually under some papers on one of the surfaces I mentioned, or on the back of an old exercise book. It’s very satisfying.  Happy Mother’s day to me.

Charlatan in eyeliner.

Have you seen the exposé of Mo Ansar on Harry’s Place? It’s like seeing, in print, something you already knew, but don’t exactly know how you knew it. Ah so.

The BBC’s tame Muslim spokesman, willing to appear on the BBC at the slightest opportunity - The Big Questions, Sunday Morning Live, anything to do with Islam, he’s there with his little crocheted skull cap and his same dress, same scarf thing and, according to  “Sheikh Ya Bhatti”,  black eyeliner.

He claims he’s a moderate one minute, a scholar the next, a lecturer, a marriage guidance councillor, you name it, he’s it. Only he isn’t. 

Why, only the other day he was opining on the Lib Dems’ deselection of Maajid Nawaz. (He is for the deselection) Oh, maybe not, he now says he only called for  "1. Full investigation by LibDems 2. Apology from Nawaz 3. Whatever sanction LibDems see fit".

His opinion was aired at great length on radio 4 last week and quotes from it actually made the headlines on several of their news bulletins. A comment on H/P reminded me of this. I had heard it myself, but when I tried to pin it down in the form of a link there was no trace; at least the BBC search engine showed nothing.

His opinion, which the BBC took seriously enough to promote, somewhat uncritically I’d say, concerned the threat from British Islamist Jihadis returning from Syria, and as another H/P commenter observed “If he is in touch with such people how could the BBC ignore that?” “With ease” was my first reaction. They have form. 

Of course Ansar is such a bullshitter he probably isn’t in touch with them at all, merely bigging himself up by jumping aboard a passing bandwagon, as is his wont.

The only thing that jarred in a very funny article was that the author took a pop at Nigel Farage, which I think was quite unnecessary as the media is already doing its best in that regard, unlike the other two he cited for their unwarranted status as media golden-boys, Mehdi Hasan and Owen Jones.

Miscellany for another weekend

Fatwa Lifted

 I suppose the BBC could have named Fergal Kean’s series “Militancy through Time the BBC’s prism”. But they didn’t. They’ve lifted the fatwa on the word ‘terror’. 

Terror through Time.

TERRORˈtɛrə/noun
1.
extreme fear.
"people fled in terror"

 Fergal Keane celebrates sultry failed hijacker Leila Khaled, referring to her as “an icon of terrorism”.

ICONˈʌɪkɒn,-k(ə)n/noun
a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol or as worthy of veneration.

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“Always something there to remind me” but not in a good way.

When the BBC News channel reported the conviction of Pavlo Lapshyn it seemed like Anders Breivik all over again. They’re still trying to embed within our Branes an implicit-association between ‘far-right’ terrorists and murderers like Lapshyn - and, you’ve guessed it - the ‘far-right’ EDL. 

One BBC 24 report described the incident, the court case and the conviction at some length, then suddenly tagged on a postscript about Tommy Robinson’s decision to link up with Quilliam. It’s much more than Amazon’s marketing  strategy, the nudge: “If you bought that, you might like ‘this’. 

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One Show went to Mo

Mo Ansar was a guest on the One Show the other day where he described his uncomfortable encounter with Tommy Robinson.  Alex Jones and Matt Baker who made no secret of where their sympathies lay. (clue: Not with Tommy R.)

Don’t they know anything?

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Question Time.

On Question Time Tim Farron MP complained that people were mistakenly blaming immigration for ‘bad’ things, but we should all regard immigration as a blessing. Obviously tarring all immigrants with the same brush is the Lib Dem order of the day. I suppose it’s a kind of numbers game. If numerically more immigrants are hardworking and beneficial to “us” than actual Islamist terrorists, we should ignore all the rest of the problems caused by vast conglomerations of non-integrating non-English-speaking ‘Asians’ and thank Allah for our blessings.

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Newsnight    

Russell Brand and Jeremy Paxman are more or less equally repulsive. A fair and balanced contest. Russell Brand is just like Kenny Everett being Cupid Stunt. It’s the feminine face and hair. An effeminate man in drag; convincing but for the beard. I’ve heard that some women find him attractive. It must be something to do with his $ fortune. The Brand revolution? Sounds like an orgy of directionless over-enthusiasm leading to self destruction, much like the Arab Spring (or the riots) 

His pretentious verbiage about redistribution of wealth begged a pretty obvious response, (i.e. begging) as in this Tweet from Trending Central.

Neither media icons were worth watching, even out of morbid curiosity. Sadly you can’t unwatch sickening things. The item should have gone down the pan.

Now for something completely worthwhile from the Gatestone Institute. This writer has a nice turn of phrase.

I’ll tar the whole BBC with one gigantic homogenous brush and suggest they read it.