Is Fiona Bruce a racist?

There was an uncomfortable moment for Fiona Bruce on last night's Question Time when she asked the Muslim former Chief Crown Prosecutor for NW England Nazir Afzal to answer a particular question first and he scored a point about racism off her at her expense:

Fiona Bruce: Let's take another question. From Julian. Julian Lee.

Julian Lee: With the revelations from cricket's Azeem Rafiq and footballers still taking the knee, what does this say about racism as a continuing undercurrent in present-day Britain?

Fiona Bruce: Nazir?

Nazir Afzal: The brown person will answer first. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER].

Fiona Bruce: Nazir, so do you think that was wrong of me to come to you first?

Nazir Afzal: I think so. I think...

Fiona Bruce: Well, let's not do it then. Jordan? I don't mean...I'm not being sarcastic at all. I mean, if that is how you feel, I respect that. Let's go to Jordan.

Nazir Afzal: I do...[indecipherable]

Fiona Bruce: Well, that's a fair point, I will come to Jordan.

We should have known better

“How do you balance the rights of people convicted of Islamist terrorism with the rights of us all to walk safely on the streets?  

wonders Justin Webb.) Today Programme (at 7:32 am)

“The balance at the moment to most people feels wrong and the government is proposing emergency legislation including extending the sentences of people currently in prison rather than applying those rules only to those convicted in the future. Lady Chakrabarti is on the line.  Baroness Chakrabarti is the shadow attorney general. Good morning.”

I won't transcribe the rest of the interview verbatim because lengthy transcripts can be a bit meh, and anyway Shami is a hesitant, stuttering, stammering nightmare for a verbatim transcriber. Justin suggests that the new legislation will mean indefinite detention for future jihadis convicted of terrorism.

Baroness Chakrabarti says she isn’t quite sure but she doesn’t think that is what they're saying.

“I may of, I may of - misunderstood…..”I might be wrong about that, forgive me  …“my understanding is that  the government is saying that automatic early release should be replaced with discretionary release in the hands of the parole board…..”This seems quite sensible to me”

It’s her hesitancy that I’d like to get across, because to my jaded ears all this hesitancy and stuttering sounds like gratuitous ‘even-handedness’. As if she’s trying to be fair to the Islamists and Jihadis in a weird attempt to look ‘not right-wing’. 

What is this? Don’t tell me Shami “forgive me” Chakrabarti is afraid of appearing Islamophobic to the hard-lefty Momentomistas? She continues with something like this:

“I think, I think that we need to understand, that what we call Terror Offences could be a very wide range of offences, staring with um, um putting a few pounds in a collection box for an organisation that you say you thought was charitable but actually, um, was thought by others to be a, a, a terrorist organisation overseas, it could include, again at a lower end, accessing materials, um, that are literature, for example. Then of course, you get into offences that are preparing for a-a-a substantive acts of violence and terrorism all the way into um being actively involved in a plot -  it’s a broad range of offences; there are also people who may be a danger who’ve been convicted of things that aren’t even terror offences, but are thought of as, as, as a risk, and there are and there are people who are not even convicted of anything…

“So you're saying that…” interjects Justin.

“…..potentially unjust but also difficult, difficult to do,” 

she continues, and she goes on to explain how overcrowded our prisons are and how people get radicalised while they’re inside.

Of course, she’s right about the government’s sabre-rattling, all talk and no ‘do’ approach, and the fact is that our prisons are in a sorry state. (Overcrowded, underfunded and worst of all run by violent Islamist inmates who intimidate prisoners and staff alike - even some of the prison imams are terrified of them.)

However, I’m going to say that at the heart of our current problems is Islamisation in general. It’s like the innate problem with nice stuff. Everyone wants a bit of it, but in the process of acquiring it, it ceases to be nice. It’s like tourism, ruining the very paradise that makes people want to go there. That’s Britain, that is. A country that used to be known for tolerance and prosperity, but its popularity as a destination is the very cause of its downfall. In the true spirit of ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’ we shouldn’t have imported so many Muslims all in one go. We should have known that the choice was to absorb or to be absorbed. We seem to have chosen the latter. Oh woe.

"Terrorists who will soon be freed from jail" (The Telegraph)

This brings me to Melanie Phillips. Recently Melanie Phillips got herself into trouble for writing an article that failed to exonerate ‘moderate Muslims’ enough to avoid falling foul of the knee-jerk McCarthyite witch-hunters who constantly lie in wait to catch out and condemn unwary Islamophobes with their pants down. Woe betides anyone who carelessly commits Islamophobia.

In today's article by Melanie Phillips in The Times:  Britain is losing the fight against extremism The authorities are wrong to think that the power of reason is enough to rehabilitate fanatics she shows signs that ‘lessons have been learned.’ 

The following ‘terms and conditions’ type paragraph from the piece that I’ve reproduced below is a little longer than the one-line qualifier she included in her earlier piece, (Of course, true prejudice against Muslims should be condemned, just like prejudice against Hindus, Sikhs or anyone else.) This morning the aforementioned qualifier goes:

“Within the Muslim world there are different interpretations of Islam, some of which are peaceful and apolitical. And it should never be forgotten that Muslims are the most numerous victims of Islamist extremism. In Britain, many are cultural Muslims with scant interest in religion at all.

Nevertheless, she still bravely risks being dismissed as a ‘phobe with a fairly hard-hitting piece, although in truth it’s little more ‘phobic than other pieces on the same topic in the same newspaper. Of course, Nazir Afzal can hardly be dismissed as an Islamophobe, can he?  Streatham terror attack: extremists can be deradicalised but it takes resources  

Then, why not take another look at Ian Acheson’s article. London Bridge attack: I told ministers we were treating terrorist prisoners with jaw-dropping naivety. Did they listen? Another villain who’s been banging his head against a brick wall for yonks.

I’m afraid we’re all banging our heads against brick walls.  Or maybe it’s just me. I’ve written about this over and over again. It doesn’t make any difference - this is seriously deja vu all over again. (Have you heard the one about John Reid, as Home Secretary, telling a former Christian prison chaplain to “ ‘eff off”?  The chaplain had organised a personal meeting with Reid to complain about having been hounded out of his post by bullying prison Imams. 

“eff off indeed!  Well, I’ve mentioned it on this blog before and you can tell how long ago this happened (around 2006)

So, why do we allow extreme pressure from the left in general (and especially from Baroness Chakrabarti and her ilk, and from all and sundry in the media) to hobble our freedom to say what we think, and to censor us so very egregiously? Perhaps the imaginary (or real) unhinged-and-volatile masses who are always poised, ready and waiting for some tenuous excuse to go-on-the-rampage, is the reason. Or the imminent ‘backlash’ against the Muslim community that somehow never seems to happen. Is that it?

Perhaps these are the obstacles that persuade the most eloquent voices to condemn or to distance themselves from ‘persona non grata’ or ‘non-person’ Tommy Robinson, who knows a thing or two about prisons and radicalisation. After all, they're saying virtually the same things, albeit with different ways of saying them. Melanie Phillips delivers her message with refined and carefully considered language, whereas Tommy Robinson (otherwise known as S Y-L ) drops his ’t’s and gets all het-up and swears a lot. It’s only the swearing that made me think twice about putting his video up rather than linking to it here. 

I don’t mind swearing one little bit, but that might be because I’m not as well brought up as you are.

Hmm. You’re not going to de-radicalise anyone by pulling your punches. I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but I ain’t bothered. I’m saying it anyway. We should have known better.

Had you heard of this?

Looking through my Twitter feed this morning I saw a link from Harriet Sergeant to an AltNewsMedia article that quoted part of an interview on Radio 4's PM back on 19 October. 

As Harriet says, it contains an "explosive" claim from former Chief Crown Prosecutor in the North-West of England Nazir Afzal. 

To set the quote in context I'll transcribe the whole first half of the interview:

Carolyn Quinn: Nazir Afzal is former Chief Crown Prosecutor in the North-West of England. He was the main prosecutor in the case against the Rochdale grooming gang in 2012. And Nazir Afzal, you hear the case here. We heard from the local MP listing the towns and cities that have experienced similar cases. How do you respond?
Nazir Afzal: Good afternoon Carolyn. I think there's about 20 now, 20 towns and cities that have had this type of model of street grooming prosecuted. And it is sadly no surprise. I suppose there is one silver lining, namely the fact that these individuals are now being prosecuted. We've now got, I think, more than 200 men have now been prosecuted over the last 5-7 years for this type of behaviour. But the reality, of course, is that this has been going on for perhaps two decades, and so we're now having a reckoning in effect. And in large part it is about the failure of authorities, it is the failure of all agencies, all agencies, to not listen to what these young girls invariably were going through And, yes, we've learned...They all keep talking about learning lessons, and the reality of course is they should have got it right first time. And the only person that knew they weren't going to be listened to was the perpetrator, the offender, and he knew that and, therefore, he was able to carry on abusing them in the way that he did.
Carolyn Quinn: And in the meantime these vulnerable and brave young women suffered and tried to give evidence about the wider issue. These girls were calling out this behaviour for a long time for anything was done.
Nazir Afzal: Absolutely Carolyn. If you think about it, you may know this, but back in 2008 the Home Office sent a circular to all police forces in the country saying "as far as these young girls who are being exploited in towns and cities, we believe that they've made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour and, therefore, it's not for you police officers to get involved in". That's the landscape coming from the top down in 2008. Rest assured, all agencies are going to listen to it. It only changed because of the work we did and the work the Times newspaper did in 2010-11. The fact that we were able to bring the prosecution in Rochdale led to this investigation in West Yorkshire opening...it  only opened in 2013. And the series of prosecutions that have followed indicate to me that the agencies are getting it right now but the reality, of course, is that we've lost a generation of young girls who have been left behind and abused.

So if Mr Afzal, who knows as much about this as anyone, is correct, then why hasn't this been picked up on by mainstream journalists? Why didn't this PM interview spark a nationwide clamour to investigate that 2008 Home Office circular, and the behaviour of the Home Office under Gordon Brown's government? Surely, if, as Mr Afzal alleges, it played a part in keeping the grooming gangs operating with impunity for a few years more then it's a massive scandal, isn't it?

Easy Meat

I've been meaning to tackle the tree Girls trilogy, its ramifications and the publicity surrounding it. Fortunately for you and me Melanie Phillips has done it for me. (£)

The media were almost universal in their praise for the BBC’s courage in tackling such a delicate topic. Did they mean the courage in the sense of daring to defy the culture of political correctness (much of which was of the BBC’s own making) that led to the suppression of the truth for years?


Or perhaps they meant the courage of possibly inciting multiple backlashes. Threats from angry Muslims or threats against Muslims from the ‘far right’, or threats to that fragile construct, social cohesion.

Of course the film included the obligatory moral equivalence in the shape of scenes of a BNP (or an EDL) demonstration outside the court, but the script didn’t shy away from mentioning the ethnicity of the perpetrators; they were explicitly named as ‘of Pakistani heritage’ or ‘Asian’, but conspicuous by its absence was the theory that Islam itself regards the unbeliever as of little or no value, and sees immoral white girls as easy meat.


Last week’s Sunday Programme included an interview with Nazir Afzal, the Muslim prosecutor who finally allowed the CPS to accept the testimony of the girl victims and bring the case, belatedly, before the law.

Afzal said he had received abuse from the far right ‘because he had damaged their narrative’ due to the fact that he was himself a Muslim. The interview then veered away from the very crux of the Three Girls drama into a vehicle of damage limitation on behalf of the Muslim community. 'More white men are guilty of underage and child sexual abuse than Asians, and by the way, Asian girls are abused too.' That’s the Sunday Programme for you.  

Nazir Afzal popped up again on the Question Time panel. Not sure if he strikes me as the sharpest tool in the box.

Melanie Phillips’s article (linked to above) outlines the Three Girls programme and raises some vital issues.

“The second insight is scarcely less disturbing. In the dock, the leader of the pimping gang exclaims: “Where are your white people? They train them [the girls] in sex. They train them in drinking from very young age [sic]. And when they come to us, by that time they’re fully trained. Look at yourself first! Look at your community!” 

His words are disgustingly self-serving, but the sting is that they can’t be denied. There’s an unspeakable symbiosis between these predators and the society that fashions children into their potential victims.”

‘Society’ is not something that arises out of a vacuum. The BBC has a part to play in the dumbing down of culture and the sexualisation of pre-teenagers by  pandering to the ‘get-famous-quick’ fantasies of the lazy and poorly educated viewer. I think the BBC performs a type of grooming without the help of Pakistani gangs. Some of the superficial crap they air in their pointless ratings war with the commercial broadcasters is a contributory factor. In my humble opinion.

Religiously obsessed, sexually repressed Muslims who stay within their own enclaves don’t understand what is meant by British Values. If they see Western society as corrupting and evil, it’s hardly surprising, is it?

Snapshot

A snapshot from this morning's BBC Breakfast paper review, featuring Nazir Afzal, former Chief Prosecutor here in the North West:

Naga Munchetty: Something we've been talking about this week. we're talking about this morning as well - and something all the papers have picked up on. Jeremy Corbyn has announced changes to recognising anti-Semitism, if there is any, in the Labour Party, and this focus in The Times. 

Nazir Afzal: Naga, I suspect when I was growing up - I'm older than you - in the 60s and 70s, racism and the like was so overt. Now it's much more subtle. But I think we've got complacent. You know, when I saw Ken Livingstone in the disabled toilet with journalists shouting questions about Hitler about him, I thought 'This is all surreal'. But let's not forget the important issue. The important issue is that racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, is very real to those who are suffering it, day in and day out, in this country. And I sense, maybe, now we're going to be taking it a bit more seriously than we have done. We've got complacent. We thought, 'We're doing it really well. We're handling these cases really well. We're dealing with people who may have offended in some way, shape or form'. But my sense is that this was necessary for us - not just for the Labour Party - across the board - for people to start taking this issue much more seriously. 

Naga Munchetty: When you say 'take an issue much more seriously', what do you mean? Ken Livingstone has been suspended. Do you think he should be sacked?

Nazir Afzal: That's a matter for the Labour Party. I'm no long... 

Naga Munchetty: In a sense of taking it seriously though? 

Nazir Afzal: 'Taking it seriously' is suspending it, investigating it, and seeing if people learn. I'll give you a good example. Naz Shah was, earlier in the week...She posted something on Facebook three or four years ago. She apologised in parliament. She really means that she will act differently. Hopefully she will be a voice now for change around those who don't want to believe in equality across races, etc. So there is good that can come out of something like this. My sense is that something good has to come out of it because the Labour Party's not the only organisation that's got problems in this area.

From today's BBC Breakfast paper reviews...

For those who missed this morning's BBC Breakfast paper reviews with Nazir Afzal, former chief prosecutor here in the North West, here are some extracts from his two discussion with Jon Kay and Naga Munchetty.

The contributions of the BBC presenters here are well worth noting for the way they steered the conversation in particular directions.

Note the general disdain for Donald Trump, the admiration for Justin Trudeau, Naga's promotion of a pro-migrant story and the careful handling of the latest findings from Ofsted:

From the first paper review:

Jon Kay: Let's move on to the Daily Telegraph. It's just one of many papers, of course, referring to Donald Trump, who's been in the papers and news every day this week. What's he said now? 

Nazir Afzal: Well, he's never short of a comment or two. Today...or yesterday, he talked about his view...and he seem to keep focusing on British Muslims a lot given that he's running for the American presidency...he's talked about British Muslims apparently, according to him, more likely to be fighting for the Islamic State, so-called Islamic State, rather than the British Army, basing it on some figures he's seen somewhere. And most of the newspapers have taken him to task over that, the reality being that's not true, and he doesn't take account of the thousands of Muslims that are fighting against the Islamic State and also the fact that 99% of the victims of so-called Islamic State are Muslims themselves. And I think there's a wider point...and I've been trying to make this all week...is that he doesn't take account of the Muslims in the police service, the Muslims in the prosecution service, the Muslims in public service. You know, we make a...Muslims make a tremendous contribution to British society and that's something he seems to neglect and ignore. And, you know, I might have been a chief crime prosecutor, I might be...I'm a pro-chancellor of a university, you know, I chair various charities, but there are too many people, unfortunately, who just simply want to identify me by my faith. And not only is that sad, it's very dangerous. 

Jon Kay: And you think it's more likely that would be the case if these kind of comments from Donald Trump continue to get this kind of coverage? 

Nazir Afzal: It feeds this feeling that Muslims are different and Muslims are not contributing, when I know for a fact that's not true. 

Naga Munchetty: And actually, in stark contrast, Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, he's been greeting the first plane carrying refugees from Syria. 

Nazir Afzal: It's a...it really puts us to shame, doesn't it? The Canadian prime minister is meeting, himself, the new Syrian refugees that have come. And people tend to forget that Syrian refugees are leaving everything behind. They are running away from these murderers of the so-called Islamic State and we have an absolute responsibility to look after refugees, as we did in the '30s when members of the Jewish faith were leaving...and, you know, running away from the Nazis. So the fact that Trudeau himself is meeting them as they arrive is a statement and one we should be...well, one we should be shamed by. 

Naga Munchetty: Another statement that is quite interesting...I don't know if you saw the Banksy photo of Steve Jobs, former Apple CEO and son of a Syrian migrant? 

Nazir Afzal: Yes. 

Naga Munchetty: And you spoke about, you know, the words from the likes of Donald Trump and what it does for Muslims. There are other voices though that are coming out and that must be quite heartening as well? You know, actually not everyone has a negative point of view and people are willing to put forward a positive point of view. 

Nazir Afzal: Absolutely. It has to be said that this country's the best country for Muslims in the world in my view, and the view of many, many Muslims. And the fact that Steve Jobs was, you know, the son of a Syrian migrant and made an enormous contribution - and he did build the biggest corporation in the world - says a good deal about what we should be focusing on which is 'contribution' not 'cost'.

Googling around this morning reveals that the BBC played no small part in first promoting the positive pro-(Muslim)-immigration Steve Jobs angle to the Syrian refugees/immigration story. 

According to Apple's UK brand MacWorld magazine: 

Less well known is the fact that while Steve Jobs was born in California he was actually adopted, and his biological father was a political migrant from the Syrian city of Homs, now devastated by the civil war in Syria.

On Twitter this fact has now gone viral, starting via a tweet by David Galbraith, and further exposed by the BBC World Service's Outside Source programme. It remains a powerful statement, especially following the ISIS atrocities in Syria, Iraq, Egypt and now mainland Europe.

Back to BBC Breakfast though, and from the second paper review:

Naga Munchetty: OK. Erm, "Islamic schools face prosecution after the discovery of anti-gay books and rats". You're going to have to explain what's happening. 

Nazir Afzal: OK, yes. Ofsted has, quite rightly, they inspect these independent schools and supplementary schools as well as the schools that we would normally associate with them. And they've identified a number of schools - one in particular that's referred to which has anti-gay propaganda and materials available to children. 

Naga Munchetty: Well, it's quoting "misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic material". 

Nazir Afzal: Absolutely, and as I understand it that school has now actually been closed down and Ofsted have used their powers. And again my point here here is it's also...some of...one of the other newspapers talks about Sunday schools may be inspected as well under the new regime, and I'm very much in favour of anywhere that's responsible for safeguarding our children being subject to inspection. That's how we raised standards. Anywhere that's looking after our children should ensure they don't have access to materials like this, that they're given a proper curriculum and they're taught the kind of things we would want them to be taught.