Ridiculing a radical

You don’t have to know much about television to realise that production companies function from the premise that everyone is gagging to appear on telly. This assumption gives film crews a sense of entitlement which inspires everyone, from the producer to the lackey in charge of charging up the batteries, to be as dismissive and insulting to the…let’s call them actors…..as they choose.

Someone named Jim White has written a review of ‘Muslims Like us’ in the Telegraph. It’s headed: “Muslims Like Us is a Wake up call for Islamophobes everywhere.” 

He has obediently taken this project in the spirit in which it was intended, i.e., a vehicle for making Muslims look whacky and cool and ‘just like us’. Jim White willingly plays along with the theory that getting the ‘just like us’ Muslims to ridicule a radical would be enough to make us all realise that, phew, the Muslims are fundamentally just like us - et voilà! Instant cure for Islamophobia. 

It was heartening to see that most of the below the line comments weren’t quite so sure.

On the other hand, Christopher Stevens in OMG The Daily Mail strap line says:

Bigoted. Nasty. Cynical. The BBC's 'Muslim Big Brother' - including a zealous convert who would 'rather be in Syria than Britain'- won't unite cultures, it'll divide them: 

This review gets closer to reality.  He begins with:

“A woman in an elegant headscarf, knotted almost like a turban, is explaining her beliefs. Her name is Humaira and she is, she says, a sort of ‘radical moderate’. She seems articulate, educated, rational.
And then her throat tightens, and she adds: ‘British values for me are colonialism, institutional racism and theft, and genocide.’
The disturbing fact is that Humaira really is one of the more moderate voices in Muslims Like Us, the two-part BBC2 reality show that puts ten Muslims in a house in York and gleefully films their furious arguments over faith and Islamic culture.”

For me, there was far too much emphasis on the deluded Abdul Haqq, whose radicalisation was triggered by a childhood ruined and humiliated by his given names: ‘Anthony + Small’  - and who could blame him? 

I mean, what else could one do under the circumstance, other than turn to Islam? Not just any old Islam but the full English M & S Islam of the most foul incarnation, in an absurdist - or do I mean absurd - quest for meaning and manliness?

All the handwringing and agonising over the ethics of including Abdul in this TV extravaganza was disingenuous in my opinion. The BBC and Love Productions put him in for two reasons. 

Without him it might be: a) a bit boring, and b) it might make the Muslims look less ‘like us’ than the BBC intended.

It’s simple. They put him in for contrast, if you like. Didn’t work though, did it? They still looked unlike us with or without Abdel and his leaflets on Islam at its most absurd.

The second episode was much worse, in documentary terms. Not only was it chaotic and badly crafted, but the Big Brother format was showing badly. Bigly and badly. You could almost hear the brainstorming meeting with the company throwing around their best, most hackneyed Big Brother tactics. It would be exactly like W1A. Siobhan would suggest provoking more action by introducing some random local infidels. Cue four locals, an atheist, an actress, a prostitute and a vicar, (or something) striding purposefully along the pavement towards the B.B. house. If the perennial cliché (meaningful camera shot of their feet) was absent, I must have included it mentally.

I suppose it was an excuse to discover which of the Muslims would refuse to honour the war dead. Most of them duly obliged. Then a trip to York Minster so they could fail to be moved by the perpendicular architecture and have a great big row on a parapet. 

The remainder of the programme was a series of rows, squabbles, accusations and anger. Everyone was at loggerheads with everyone else and the (Shia) Muslima got upset when she tearfully provoked a confused Abdul (Sunni) into more or less admitting that he believed she should be shot.

The  least devout participant of all who, throughout, had tried to distance herself from some of the goings-on suddenly had  a little indignant rant about English people’s inability to learn unfamiliar, ‘foreign’ names, and she found their automatic tendency to anglicise them insulting. She didn’t see it as a friendly gesture, as might have been intended. 

The whole exercise was quite absurd; its aim, its execution and its vacuousness. I did enjoy the girl with the most unIslamic dress code, the highest heels and the reddest lips (Mehreen) being disarmingly honest, personal and sort of charming, by admitting, to camera, that she used to have a monobrow, and adding sheepishly “and a moustache….. and a beard”. "Asian girls can be hairy", she mused.

Tell you later

Black macaque reserving judgment

When I first started blogging I often used go through my ‘prose’ and take out all the “I”s and “me”s because I thought too much first person in a blog was naff. As you can see, I no longer bother. Let the naff all hang out.

I’m not intentionally trying to make myself look virtuous - you, know, virtue signal alert - but the reason I tend to confine my opinions to the one issue is because - on broader, party political issues - I keep seeing both sides of the story. That might sound like a boast, “look what a good person I am”, but in fact it’s a bit of a drawback.

The one issue I don’t see the other side of is antisemitism and anti-Zionism. 

I hate being labelled, particularly when the label is ‘right wing’ and when it’s just because I defend Israel against the BBC’s unfair depiction of it. 

Here’s what Charles Moore has to say about labels:

“I am not offended by being called right-wing, because I don’t agree with the left-wing view that right-wingery is a mark of personal turpitude. I don’t much like the term, though, because it suggests a rigid ideological position.”

And a bit further down he says:

“Those who protest at immigration levels ten times higher than 30 years ago are treated as racists. Even the ballot box itself is seen as ‘populist’.

This piece and the comments beneath it are worth the sub to the Speccie. If you can’t access it, tough.

Muslims Like Us.

I think I’ll reserve judgment on the upcoming two-parter ‘Muslim Big Brother’ that’s going to be aired on BBC 2 tonight and tomorrow. I’ll see it first. However, I did hear an item about it on Women’s Hour earlier. I didn’t like the sound of it. 

There were a couple of participants - ‘housemates’ - in the studio, and the BBC’s commissioning editor (the person who nursed it into existence)

“On the surface, Britain's 2.7 million Muslims are united in faith. In a two-part BBC Two series, Muslims Like Us, ten British Muslims with contrasting world views move into a house together. Their passionate debates, honest disagreements, humour and insights reveal what is like to be a British Muslim today. Jane is joined by Zohra and Saba, two of the women who were filmed for the show and BBC Commissioning Editor, Fatima Salaria, to explain why she wanted to create the programme in the first place.”

Don’t just sit there reading this, listen to it.

Fatima Salaria explained to the listening ignoramuses what she actually does, in her job as a BBC commissioning editor:

“I have really good ideas”

(such as commissioning a Muslim version of Big Brother.) It turns out that the idea came, in fact, from “Love Productions” the controversialist production company who stole back their most lucrative creation (GBBO) from the BBC and sold it to Channel 4, oh, and they also produced “Benefits Street’. Oh my. 

It just occurred to me that this could payback - stealing the Big Brother concept from Channels 4 and 5, adding Islam for extra ratings, and tendering it back to the Muslim-friendly BBC. 

One of the carefully chosen housemates was a convert aged “nearly 77”, who said her motive for participating was that it is “high time to normalise Islam” and “To see that Islam is for the entire planet “ (!)

However, the general idea was to show that the one radical housemate (a fundamentally good person) doesn’t represent real Muslims and ideas such as his are really challenged by the Muslim community, but “We do it behind closed doors.”
As you can see I’m reserving judgment.

Antisemitism

This labelling malarkey can be most unhelpful. The BBC has been headlining Theresa May’s latest ideas about antisemitism. The government is to adopt the latest definition of antisemitism, as determined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. 

So, once it’s labelled, then what? Is it going to be made illegal? I hope not. That would have all sorts of ramifications. Every time someone clamps down on Islam it has a knock-on effect on ‘the Jews’. 

Not that I wish to defend extreme religiosity, not at all. In fact, what I gather from the little I know about it, orthodox Judaism seems to be constructed solely for the maximum inconvenience of its adherents.

I’m no expert on the topic but I do know that the orthodox Jew is not the same as the ultra orthodox Haredi type of Jew, images of which the BBC always chooses to illustrate ‘The Jews”. Some may say that the BBC has itself committed a tangentially antisemitic act by using the illustration here.

Jews

“A Downing Street statement said the intention of such a definition was to “ensure that culprits will not be able to get away with being antisemitic because the term is ill-defined, or because different organisations or bodies have different interpretations of it”.

So what does this announcement hope to achieve? It is a nice idea to proclaim that there will be ‘zero tolerance’ of antisemitism, but there is still potential confusion over where anti-Zionism stands in the equation. I think there is also a possibility of creating martyrs, and I’ll be quite surprised if the ‘culprits’ in the Muslim community will be held to account in exactly the same way as others might be, following this government announcement. And will it make the BBC try any harder?

I’ll reserve judgment on that too.