Sorry?

What’s wrong with everybody? Can’t anyone comprehend English these days?
 Perhaps comprehension has been dropped from the school curriculum. Aren't children expected to master comprehension at about eight or nine years of age any more? I'm sure English teachers used to set a passage of text and pupils had to reproduce the gist of it in their own words to demonstrate that they’d properly understood it.

“[Reading] comprehension involves three levels of understanding: literal meaning, inferential meaning, and evaluative meaning.”

Something has happened. For some reason, it's become commonplace for politically motivated journalists and their followers to maliciously fail to comprehend ‘news’. and no-one seems to bat an eyelid at the alarming proliferation of “Quote mining”. 

On TCW David Keighley examines the BBC’s responses to the Emily Maitlis and Naga Munchetti  affairs. 

By way of a  personal declaration of non-interest, I can’t stand any of the BBC’s flim-flam formats which feature Hello Magazine style items sandwiched between the inane banter of a pair of BBC anchors on a sofa in a garishly lit BBC studio. Like many of you, (probably) I hadn’t been following The Naga Manchetti ruling, but I have heard it discussed in the media. 

I gather that Naga Munchetti’s Beeb colleague had invited her to opine on President Trump’s “racist” remark, which had been retrospectively revised  (‘quote-mined’ ) to infer that President Trump had told the ‘squad’ (of BAME congresswomen) to “go back to their own countries”.

  

I have actually seen President Trump’s whole Tweet - the full monty - reproduced on the TV screen with just the relevant words emboldened. Yet despite the entirety of the tweet being clearly visible, the crucial caveat  “and then come back and fix it ” was completely ignored. Some kind of collective blind spot? (Has Ilhan Omar hypnotised the whole world?) 

Here’s an example of the type of ‘quote mining’ we'd normally dismiss as laughable when used to promote some godawful film, play or book. 

“David Turner-Samuels (for the Eye): With your permission, my lord, I will read an extract from The Times Literary Review — "Lord Russel's works could be said to be pornographic…" 

David Hirst, QC (for the plaintiff): Read the rest of the sentence. 

David Turner-Samuels: "But they are not."

See what I mean? “Read the rest of the sentence”  - but of course no-one has any appetite for the rest of President Trump’s sentences.

Naga’s opinion concerned her personal experience of ’racism’ - all perfectly legitimate, but nothing much to do with President Trump because any alleged connection was entirely predicated on a deliberate misinterpretation of what he'd said. The whole silly business blew up because the media decided to scoop words out of a longer passage in order to paint President Trump as a racist. And it’s easily forgotten why he made that remark in the first place. It was in response to the blatantly racist conduct of the congresswomen in question.  This is getting really silly. 

Look at the relentless, malicious, politically motivated journalistic hounding of  PM Boris Johnson. 

Firstly, we have the watermelon smiles and picaninnies. All taken out of context and repurposed to ‘prove’ “racist belittling” of persons of colour by Boris.  Flippant and reductive maybe, but racist only if one ignores the context.  Then we have those wretched letterboxes and bank robbers. Racist against Muslim women? How so? Taken out of context again. (And are we really supposed to see the full-face veil as anything other than ridiculous?)   This language-related madness is being deliberately uncomprehended for political purposes. 

The most recent Boris-related hurricane in a teacup blew up over the Bill-and-Benn-undermine-Brexit-act being disparagingly referred to as the ‘surrender’ bill. To the Remain lobby that might sound flippant and disrespectful, but it’s an accurate label nonetheless. The ‘foul’ comparison between an MP and a turkey and something fictitious about traitors is so lame I can’t be arsed to go into it. Especially in the light of the long list of truly foul language thrown around by angry lefties.

To pile incomprehension upon incomprehension, I watched a snippet of a conversation about this language business on Sky News. A person of colour known as Poet George and a young conservative with a Geordie accent were invited to discuss this problem.

Poet George expressed horror over the MP whose name he couldn’t initially recall who had used the “N” word.  Here we are. 

“A Conservative MP has been suspended from the party after it emerged she used a racist expression during a public discussion about Brexit.
Anne Marie Morris, the MP for Newton Abbot, used the phrase at an event in London to describe the prospect of the UK leaving the EU without a deal.
She told the BBC: "The comment was totally unintentional. I apologise unreservedly for any offence caused."
The Conservative Party later confirmed she had had the whip withdrawn.
Announcing the suspension, Theresa May said she was "shocked" by the "completely unacceptable" language.
"I immediately asked the chief whip to suspend the party whip," she said in a statement.
"Language like this has absolutely no place in politics or in today's society.”

As any fule other than Poet George must kno, in the olden days, before the N-word was censored, that particular ‘unmentionable in the woodpile’ phrase was intended to illustrate a concept: 

 “some fact of considerable importance that is not disclosed—something suspicious or wrong”

Back in the Enid Blyton era, when friendly gollies with waistcoats and striped trousers were objects of affection and the N-word was casually used by all and sundry to describe a shade of brown with no offence intended and not exclusively reserved for rap artists of colour to bandy about amongst themselves, anyone could freely use all sorts of phrases and metaphors. Then, with all its good intentions, along came the ‘enlightenment’, which paves the road to the kind of hell in which anyone can be caught out for unintentionally committing acts of racism such as accidentally saying “coloured person" instead of 'person of colour'.

Anne-Marie Morris MP duly apologised and grovelled and so on, and after a suitable period had the whip restored. Apologising for using such an out-of-touch phrase might have made sense, but she was probably even sorrier that she'd been unfairly accused of racism. 

Nowadays we deliberately misunderstand and mis-comprehend whatever suits us. The media cavalierly repurposes quotes and sound-bites until they’re devoid of literal meaning, inferential meaning, and evaluative meaning.  

Apologies in advance for any offence caused.

Trump’s "Muslim ban"

Trump’s "Muslim ban." That's how Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib describe Israel’s last-minute decision to ban them from their proposed tour of Palestine, the non-existent state that non-exists in Israel. 

Of course, they can’t actually go to Israel while boycotting it. That would be hypocritical!

You might have noticed there’s a particular type of spin attached to the reporting of a decision that turns out to be the gift that strikes two of the media’s least favourite birds - Trump and Israel - with one stone.

There are numerous examples of this spin, but let’s stick to the BBC. (1m 24s)

Newshour and The World Tonight featured two ‘anti” interviewees. The poisonous hag (sorry) Hanan Ashrawi who giggled with forced amusement at any question she deemed preposterous while making the ultimate preposterous statement herself, namely  “Israel cannot tolerate dissent!”.  

Next to reinforce the BBC’s disapproval was Yaakov Katz of the Jerusalem Post, whose argument against the ban came through as deluded naivety. He hoped the two democratically elected congresswomen ‘might see how open Israel is”.   A likely scenario (I don’t think.)

However, a lengthier presentation of this development came with Beyond 100 Days. Katty Kay and David Eades (sitting in for Christian Fraser) with the help of Tom Bateman and Chris Buckler. 

All were in default anti-Trump mode. While Katty Kay was probably quite correct to speculate that President Trump was using this opportunity to divide the Democratic Party (a shrewd move perhaps) by ‘tarring the whole party with the “views they (Omar and Tlaib)  might have,” the actual views “they might have” were played down. Hardly mentioned (not mentioned) was the fact that the pair’s proposed itinerary left hardly any space (no space at all ) for any of the so-called ‘reaching out” that rose-coloured specs-wearing pro-Israel opponents of the ban hoped for.

Rather than detailing the anti-Israel /antisemitic histories of these two ladies, they glossed them over  with the pared-down, cavalier “having been critical of Israel.’ Someone mentioned: “coming with open eyes, open ears and open minds.” (As if!) Buckler even revived the truncated  “Go back to their own countries” theme, which I mistakenly assumed had been discredited for good.

Ilhan Omar has announced. “This is Trump’s Muslim ban being implemented.” 

If you think this move by Israel is a bit of an own goal - and in many ways, that’s what it looks like, try thinking again. 

Take, for example, the ‘bans’ our own country has implemented over the years. Take the bans that many of us consider having been unwarranted, for example when the Home Office banned Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Lauren Southern, bans we opposed in the name of freedom of speech. These voices should be heard, we said. 

But how many of the people we wanted to hear were seriously coming with “open eyes, open ears and open minds.” Is it likely that Geert Wilders would have gone to one of Luton’s or Birmingham’s many Mosques to ‘learn’ about the beauty of Sharia from one of the imams? Perhaps he would then go back to Holland and say “Hey guys, I was a bit harsh on Islam. Forget the whole Fitna thing and bring it on”.

On the opposite side of the coin, look at the case of ‘Jews bake bread out of babies’ blood’ Raed Salah. He managed to evade the ban although I’m not sure if he was able to take up the invitation to take tea on the terrace with Jeremy Corbyn, but I’m pretty sure that nothing he did or saw in the UK helped moderate his antisemitic views or did much towards promoting peace and goodwill.

So I would speculate that Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib had no more intention of ‘learning’ anything at all from their Ashrawi-sponsored tour of Palestine.

I have to say that certain individuals who claim they are only defending their right to exercise free speech are in fact hellbent on crying ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre. So on this occasion, Israel’s US-inspired decision is probably the right thing to do.


Meanwhile, Rashida Tlaib has been granted the right to enter the Israeli-occupied West Bank on humanitarian grounds. She has a 90-year-old grandmother there. The proviso is that she would “not promote boycotts” during her visit. 

"Granny" 90-year-old Mufti Tlaib

 So there.

Update:

Oh noes! Under such oppressive conditions, she doesn't want to go after all!

Silencing me & treating me like a criminal is not what she wants for me. It would kill a piece of me. I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in--fighting against racism, oppression & injustice. https://t.co/z5t5j3qk4H

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) August 16, 2019

The numbers game

The BBC's James Cook was tweet-reporting from the London protests yesterday, sending these forth into the world:

• Outside parliament, police have stepped in to separate the main large anti-Trump crowd from a small counter-demonstration in favour of President Trump and Israel.
• There’s now a very large and loud crowd in front of the Houses of Parliament chanting “Donald Trump’s not welcome here”.
• I have spent all day on the streets of London. We struggled through throngs of anti-Trump protestors, many tens of thousands of them. I also saw tiny handfuls of Trump fans. This is not fake news. We have the pictures.
• Tens of thousands of people thronged the streets of central London today, protesting against President Trump's state visit to the UK.

Not everyone believed him:

• I counted them out, I counted them all back, then I made up a number.
• BBC doing a Falstaff again. It's gone from their earlier claim of "hundreds" to "tens of thousands" according to the BBC's James Cook
• I’m in Westminster now.  “Many Tens of thousands”!  Try getting out of White  Hart Lane at the end of a game to realise that this claim as just as ridiculous as Trump’s
  .

And someone spotted a turn of phrase in one of James's tweets that suggests the BBC man might have been slipped in a dig at the President:

"Tiny handfuls". I see what you did there James!

Press conference

I have to quickly say something about the Trump / Netanyahu press conference.

I happened to watch it on Sky. As soon as it was over, Kay Burley immediately said something about ‘settlements’, which demonstrates the media’s reflexive reaction to anything to do with Israel and the Palestinians, (and no wonder, the way the propaganda machine has been working at it.)

I didn’t even bother to switch to the BBC to see if their response was similar. 

The first to review it (when I Googled straight away) was the Washington Post. They picked one particular stand-out moment, which I must say worried me too. You have to wonder if Trump is ‘all there’ when he behaves so oddly.

However, let’s set aside our worries about President Trump’s idiosyncratic personality for a minute, and concentrate on other interpretations of what was said. Or what wasn’t said. 

The New York Times says Trump “Backs away from Palestinian State” in its headline, but the first clip on its website shows the bit about settlements. “I’d like to see you hold back on settlements for a bit”

When Trump said “I’m looking at two-state and one-state formulations” and ‘I want what they want’ one wonders if the vagueness was there to cover up the fact that he didn’t really know what he was talking about, or because he knew but preferred not to say, or a bit of both.

‘Time’ goes for the Washington Post angle. “Talking about his Electoral College win at inappropriate moments”, but NBC  is headlining “Settlements”. Of course the other bizarre moment was his mini rant about Flynn being badly treated by “Fake Media”, of which there is a clip on their website.

The Independent is more interested in the fact that Trump only took questions from ‘right-wing’ news outlets. 

As for the BBC,  Nothing particularly surprising or enlightening there.

No-one seemed interested in the Israeli PM’s remarks about the Palestinian education system or the e Palestinians' refusal to recognise Israel as the Jewish state, not to mention their aspiration to eradicate it altogether.

For more  thoughtful debate, look at Harry’s Place, catch the btl comments while you can.

140 character assassination

I do see the point of Twitter but I don’t have an account. Looking through the Question Time timeline (if that’s the right term) makes me think I’ve made the right choice. The absolute absurdity and inanity of most the Tweets is compounded by the fact that they’re accompanied by selfies. It’s as if they’re proud of themselves:

”This is a portrait of the idiot who just made that 140 character testimony to it his/her/its own stupidity.” 

Mainly, but not entirely, the reaction to Laura Perrins's appearance on the panel went something like: 

• “Who is she? 
• “I’ve never heard of her! 
• “Dreadful woman! 
• “Get back to Ireland!    (g’wan g’wan)

That is an indication of the level of discourse I’m alluding to. But then, that’s Question Time. It’s par for the course. But wait! On the other hand Nick Hewer’s inanely lefty comments didn’t go down too well either. 

Anyway, Laura Perrins gave a robust response to Rebecca Long Bailey’s outrageous faux indignation over  President Trump’s  “Muslim ban” being announced “on Holocaust Remembrance Day of all days”

What disrespectful hypocrisy, coming from a member of the antisemitic Labour Party! (Of all people)

As Laura Perrins so eloquently pointed out, the Holocaust was a systematic, government sanctioned genocidal programme to eradicate the Jewish people, whereas President Trump’s executive order was………well, what was it exactly? At its very worst, “a Muslim ban.” (Some Tweeter typed “Muslim band”, now that would be fun)

And let’s just reiterate, throughout all the faux indignation shown by Yvette Cooper and any colleagues of hers who invoke the Holocaust in connection with this matter, there is never one squeak of acknowledgement that much of the antisemitism we’re being told is on the rise emanates from Muslims. 

Much of it has ‘trickled down’ through the ‘hard left’ and politicians with high numbers of Muslim constituents, not to mention the BBC. 

Admitting that would weaken the entire case for the exaggerated moral outrage at the inaccurately christened “Muslim Ban”,  and while we’re at it, that goes for Theresa May’s forced (by the media) condemnation of it, too. 

The Executive Order may not be the most sophisticated way of following through those election promises, but dismissing it as racist and Islamophobic is simply wrong.

When Craig and I give examples of the BBC’s bias against any of the topics we think the BBC is biased against, we risk being labelled apologists for said topic. 

I’m prepared for the inevitable assumption that when I criticise the BBC’s OTT demonisation and ridicule of Donald Trump, I’m an avid Trump supporter. I’m certainly not that.

When we point out the BBC’s excessive pro-Remain coverage, we’re seen as unequivocal Brexiteers. We’re not so unequivocal about that, either.

When I side with Israel against the BBC’s relentless bias, which mainly takes the form of unadulterated regurgitation of the Palestinian viewpoint with little or no genuine attempt to redress the balance, I must be what people call an “Israel Firster” - a Zionist zealot who thinks Israel can do no wrong and is blind to its faults. I’m more of an anti-anti-Zionist than anything.

 The same principle applies to the BBC. We are not anti-BBC. We just think it needs a reformation.

The pendulum has swung far enough to the left and it’s time for a recalibration. (I suppose that could fit into a tweet.)

It’s not only Twitter. The blogosphere is a no-go area when it comes to nuance. It’s a waste of time trying to be subtle or express any form of ambivalence. But not to worry. We keep calm and carry on.