BBC Asian Network editor charged over naming Rotherham child abuse victim

Arif Ansari

Do you remember Arif Ansari? He used to be the BBC's North West political editor and appeared on local news programmes in our area over many years. I must say I always rated him as a decent reporter and a decent presenter. But he moved on and moved up in the world and became head of news for the BBC Asian Network. And now he's been charged under the Sexual Offences Act over a BBC Asian Network report which mistakenly identified a Rotherham child abuse victim. It wasn't his report but prosecutors have charged him personally with overall responsibility for it. The BBC believes that that was unfair and that the prosecutors ought to have brought the criminal action against the corporation as a whole. He intends to plead not guilty and the BBC is backing him. You can read all about it in the Times and the Daily Mail. The Times, which broke the story, says:

Mr Ansari, 43, faces a potentially unlimited fine if found guilty. A £5,000 cap on fines for identifying sex crime victims was lifted in 2015. The Asian Network editor was charged more than a month ago but the BBC issued no public statement. 

This week, after being approached by The Times, the corporation said that the reporter who named the victim “genuinely believed the name he broadcast was a pseudonym”.

Poetic justice

When stuff comes back to bite you on t’bum

Sarah Champion c. 2014.

Terror police boost security for MP Sarah Champion over criticism of Asian sex gangs (£)

Everyone’s entitled to change their mind, but really, I had to smile at this prescient comment on HP: “Karma’s a bitch.”

This may only be tangentially related to the BBC, (until one remembers the way it “champions” all things Muslim) but the BBC hasn’t so far mentioned the fact that ‘terror police” have boosted security for Rotherham MP Champion, which one might consider newsworthy. The Times seemed to think it was.  

This next bit is laugh-out-loud bonkers. (You don’t think it’s anything to do with Sacha Baron Cohen, do you?)

“The strongest public attacks on Ms Champion, who campaigns for the victims of child sexual exploitation, have been made by a Rotherham-based racial justice charity, Just Yorkshire. 

The charity’s leader has accused the MP of “industrial-scale racism” and “inciting and inviting hatred against minorities”. One of its leading figures is a radical academic, Waqas Tufail, whose research speciality is Islamophobia and the “racialisation of crime”.

Are we done with Sarah Champion?

When “former race tsar” Trevor Phillips spoke out “On abuse it's time to call a spade a spade” it caused a mere ripple. Did his words carry less weight that Sarah Champion’s?

What about Trevor Kavanagh? The backlash from his “Islamophobic” piece in the Sun mainly concerned his ‘extremely poor choice of words’. His critics felt “The Muslim Problem” sounded a little too much like “The Jewish Question” and by implication, well, everyone knows how that ended up.

Sarah Champion has received much publicity, mainly praise and support, for what turned out to be a short-lived bout of truth-telling. Her subsequent apology for her ‘extremely poor choice of words’ and resignation from her post in the Labour Party (did she jump or was she pushed) was equally welcomed and derided. 

Is she weak for caving in or was she strong for speaking out? We who will not be divided, are divided.

I thought we were done with Sarah Champion, but no.  The affair still simmers. People who agreed with what she said in the Sun  are still praising her for having the courage to speak out, despite her subsequent resignation and, if I may say so, imprecise apology. Exactly which words were the extremely poor choice? All of them? We should be told.

Most people assume she was silenced by Jeremy Corbyn, but 'they would say that wouldn’t they' because they choose to see her as a political martyr rather than a vacillating self-publicist. 

For the record, I too agree with what she said in the Sun and I don’t doubt that Jeremy Corbyn welcomed her resignation and probably encouraged it, yet I still see her as a vacillating attention-seeking self publicist.  I’ll just have to accept that if it takes a vacillating, attention-seeking self-publicist to initiate a taboo-busting debate about the relationship between Islam and ‘British values’ I’ll have to lump it. But I don’t much like it.

Sarah Champion’s initial fifteen minutes of fame came about via the documentary ‘Inside the commons.” The cameras followed her rushing eagerly round the HoC learning the ropes and getting to grips with being a new MP. She was entertainingly portrayed as energetic and driven; ready willing and able to ‘do good’. Fantastic free publicity for the brand.

I repeat, many people agreed with her Sun piece; it was about time someone came out with it, and as she herself said in the Sun:

“British Pakistani men ARE raping and exploiting white girls… and it’s time we faced up to it”.

Or did she? Not quite sure - later she was to claim it was the Sun wot wrote it. Maybe the Sun fiddled with the original content, who knows, (they deny it) but assuming she did write, in the body of the piece:

“There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?”

No-one who has seen her on YouTube castigating Israel over ‘the Palestine issue’ and telling an audience of Pakistani men just how passionate she was about the Palestinians could accuse Sarah Champion of being an Islamophobe. The video was so good I posted it twice. I thought it was remarkable, partly because of the inappropriate way she was 'exercising her right to bare arms' and almost flirtatiously flaunting her ‘immodesty’.  Goodness knows why she would do that, when simply denouncing Israel would have been enough to guarantee unanimous support from that particular audience - some sort of committee of local councillors. Rotherham folk.

Her disgust for Israel was peppered with references to herself:  “to me” or “for me”- a habit that surely begs a psychological diagnosis. 

Even if the only MP  brave enough to say so is an attention-seeking opportunist, the truth is that there are issues (as Jeremy Corbyn might or might not put it) with British Pakistani men and underage white girls. 

Of course the term  ‘Pakistani men’ is a euphemistic one. It’s an improvement on the  BBC’s default ‘Asian men’, but technically inaccurate since the perpetrators in the Newcastle case were not solely British Pakistanis; some originated from elsewhere; the elephant in the room is their religious/cultural  backgrounds. They’re Muslims.

If Sarah Champion was genuinely brave, she might have called them ‘Muslim men’, but either way, be it Pakistani men or Muslim men, it did turn out to be an ’extremely poor choice of words’, or extremely unwise words from an MP whose constituents are predominantly Pakistani and Muslim.

Shortly after expressing pleasure at the way the Sun presented her article, she rowed back, claiming the Sun had fiddled with it, apologised for the article and promptly resigned as ‘Shadow Secretary of State for women and equalities’.

If you’ve got that feeling of deja vu all over again but are wondering why, it’s probably because Sarah Champion has form when it comes to resigning when she sees fit. 

For example, when she thought Jeremy Corbyn was unelectable, she quit  - and when that particular bandwagon appeared to be hurtling off piste she ‘unresigned’ again, resuming her post as  “Labour’s domestic violence spokesperson” (officially “Shadow minister for preventing abuse and domestic violence) first-hand experience, evidently, qualifying her for the post, though her role as perpetrator rather than victim would ordinarily seem something of a drawback. 

Because of my dismay at Sarah Champion’s shameless sucking up to antisemites (call me paranoid) I have probably monitored her roller coaster political journey with more interest than absolutley necessary, and I know I judge her negatively / see her through a negative prism and so on.

However, praising her courage for speaking out, and for ‘saying the unsayable’ is easy. For one thing it provides cheap ammunition against Jeremy Corbyn - as if more of that was needed.

It’s just a pity that there was so little praise for the courage of people whose words can genuinely be taken at face value on the numerous occasions they have spoken out and said ‘what Sarah Champion said’. 

Can one unequivocally praise Sarah Champion for her courage without her track record diminishing the impact of her words? Former MP Denis McShane believes so, for example.  Accuracy may not have been Denis McShane’s priority; for example he wrote: 

“My plea was triggered by a young South Yorkshire Muslim, groomed by British-based Islamists, who blew himself up in Tel Aviv in a failed terrorist mission.” 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but was he referring to the 2003  terrorist Omar Khan Shariff who I understand hailed from Derby?

  

In 2004 Denis McShane was a Foreign Office minister representing the same Rotherham seat where Sarah Champion is a presently “hard-working Labour MP”, and he believes she was badly let down and harshly treated by her political masters. Here is a passage from his Times article:

“No one came to me when I was an MP to speak about the awful sex crimes committed against local children by groups of men whose family roots lay, as is the case with much of the British Pakistani community, in rural Kashmir.”

Read on for more of his thoughts about the incredibly difficult question of sexuality in the Pakistani Kashmiri community.

However, according to Mr McShane, he learnt about the situation  in 2012, “when years of failure by Rotherham’s child-protection authorities to act against known abuse gangs” was exposed by “painstaking journalism” in The Times. 

But Sarah Champion was MP for Rotherham at the height of the abuse. To quote from an earlier article about Denis McShane in the Telegraph  “I was too much of a ‘liberal leftie’ and should have done more to investigate child abuse”.  

Surely if Denis McShane felt he should have done more to ‘burrow into’ the problem then, it might have occurred to him that Sarah Champion could also have done some burrowing, or that she appeared positively blinkered by showing far more concern about Palestinian children than about what was being done ‘right now’, by Muslim men to children under her nose. Did no-one at all in Rotherham raise the matter with their MP while all this was happening?  

I still see Sarah Champion as opportunistic, vacillating and irresolute, but her antics have attracted publicity to  the malevolence of Corbyn’s Labour Party and that’s almost enough to forgive her for everything. Almost.

Cultures of fear; one exposed / one pending

It seems like an ominous coincidence that today’s blanket coverage of Dame Janet Smith’s review  of the BBC’s Savile scandal comes on the same day as reports on the Rotherham abuse trial:

Both cases involve people in authority turning a blind eye to the terrible abuse that was going on virtually before their very eyes.

Both cases involved  ‘cultures of fear’, and we’re now seeing remorse, regret and attempts to apologise to the victims, or ‘survivors’.

At the BBC potential whistleblowers were afraid to act in case doing so would damage their job prospects; in Rotherham everyone was afraid to speak out for fear of being found guilty of a crime more heinous than any other.... racism.     Yet several truly vile individuals were left, unhindered and unchallenged,  to carry out unimaginable crimes - in Rotherham with the collusion of corrupt members of the Police and Rotherham council ad in the BBC, where there undoubtedly was collusion, but by individuals as yet unnamed.

Rotherham - from the BBC website:

“This is the first trial to come to court since the revelation that 1,400 children in Rotherham were groomed and abused. Even more stunning was that the authorities had ignored repeated warnings.
They preferred instead to protect the reputation of the town, or to avoid rocking race relations in Rotherham but in doing so police officers and social workers missed many opportunities to investigate abuse on a huge scale. 

“A youth worker in the town, who wrote an unpublished report for the Home Office in 2002 on child sexual exploitation, said the men had considered themselves above the law.Adele Gladman said: "They were being allowed to do it completely unchallenged and I think that did definitely give them a feeling of invincibility."I don't think I have ever encountered the levels of sadism and torture and sheer cruelty that we were encountering against children."

At the BBC, back then, Savile and Hall, (and now perhaps assorted other “talent”)  were also considered beyond criticism. Their status bestowed infallibility upon them.

Tony Hall’s apology seems futile, like governments apologising to the descendants of victims of historic abuses by cultures gone by. All his promises not to let it happen again and his proposals about how to go about ensuring that it won’t, don’t seem enough, somehow. 

I’m sure others will have a lot more to say about this, but I would like to highlight a parallel problem, which I hope will one day be resolved.

It concerns the BBC’s arrogance, its overbearing certainty that it is right and you are wrong.  In the Q & A session following the prepared speeches, a question addressed to Tony Hall stressed that contemporaneous complaints about Savile and Hall had been dismissed and batted away by the BBC. Tony Hall duly batted it away; I don’t think the irony was missed.

The missing question most urgently begged concerns the BBC’s bias. What would Tony Hall have to say about that? 

The BBC’s political and cultural biases are well documented, as is the reflexive batting away of complaints and complainants.

Just as the levels of corruption and collusion in the cases of Rotherham and the BBC are finally coming to light, I hope one day the extent of the BBC’s antisemitism masquerading as anti-Zionism will be seem for what it is.

Many viewers have noticed the BBC’s systematic downplaying of the Islam factor in sex abuse and other cultural practices that contravene British cultural norms, and the insidious normalisation of Islamic religious rituals and superstitions that are superimposed on all genres of broadcasting.

No doubt the message surrounding the new mosque in Albert Square will eventually be one of good Islam triumphing over evil Islam. 

“There is a great opportunity here to dispel misconceptions about Muslims and their faith, and we know that EastEnders has done this in the past through its Muslim characters.  

“However, there is a worry if this set is built to pursue a particular storyline along the lines of extremism, which would in fact further denigrate the Islamic faith and play into the hands of negative stereotypes that are unrepresentative of the majority of Muslims living in Britain.”

I haven’t watched Eastenders since the Vic was run by Den and Angie, so I don’t know if the plot-lines have reflected the Rotherham issue. 

I have already mentioned the frequent guest appearances of well-known antisemites as panellists and experts on the BBC’s political, religious and ethical programmes. Abdel Bari Atwan, George Galloway, umpteen pro-Palestinian activists - nearly always without the health warning that accompanies individuals or bodies considered right-wing.

Then there’s the unexplored territory of antisemitism in the new left. Jeremy Corbyn has never been truly challenged by any of the BBC’s rottweiler-like attack dogs over his association with antisemites and supporters of terrorism. 

Douglas Murray.  “Britain’s New Mainstream Racists?”

“Of course the Labour party has responded in the usual way -- split between expressions of concern and those of outright denial. But the real question is: when did this type of behaviour break out into the open and become acceptable? The answer is obvious to me. From the accounts of those in the OULC and elsewhere, it is clear that anti-Semitism surfaced in the Labour party at exactly the moment the party started to be led by a man who, throughout his political life, had demonstrated extreme comfort with anti-Semites.”

and Tom Harris in the Telegraph:

There’s no shame in Zionism: we must reclaim the word from anti-Semites

“........ the onslaught against Israel from the broader Left of British politics is real, aggressive and worrying.
Michael Dugher, the former Shadow Culture Secretary who was recently sacked by Jeremy Corbyn, made a speech to a Labour Friends of Israel meeting last year in which he declared: “I am proud to call myself a friend of Israel. I am proud to call myself a Zionist.” 

“ Not only do we have a leader who can’t even bring himself to utter the word “Israel” when he’s attending a reception organised by Labour Friends of You Know Where. But we also have a leader who calls the terrorist, anti-semitic fanatics of Hamas his “friends”.”

At present the BBC overlooks antisemitism. Many of its employees are Islamophiles and Israelophobes.  Accusations of bias are there to be batted away. Antisemitism has become mainstream. 

As a whole the BBC supports Labour, is tolerant of the religion and culture of Islam, and hostile towards Israel accordingly. Its Middle East reporters and journalists are ignorant about Israel’s history and in denial about the similarities between Israel’s situation and our own, vis a vis Islamic terrorism. They tend to see ‘all Jews’ as capitalists; greedy, manipulative and self serving. This is the opposite of the truth, frightening and quite scandalous. 

So. One cover-up exposed, at least one more to go.  

Champion of democracy

While hundreds of Rotherham girls were being groomed abused and raped and their complaints ignored by the police and the council, MP Sarah Champion was sitting at a large table with about 16 Asians and one ‘white’ man, saying  ”Personally this is something I’m very passionate about”. 

No; not about that. You’d know if you watched the video. Her passion was about Palestine, where, according to Sarah Champion “so many civilians are being murdered and so many more are having to flee their country.” Of course this was taking place in the summer of 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, when the BBC and all the other news channels were disproportionately bombarding Britain with graphic images of what they insisted was Israel’s disproportionate bombardment of Hamas.

“The violence that Israel is showing is completely disproportionate as far as I am concerned” said Sarah Champion.  “Our government has really got to do something to create a ceasefire because it’s untenable, this level of violence.”

“I’m terribly glad that Ed Miliband has come out incredibly strongly against what Israel is doing [.....]I’m seeing the people in Gaza being slaughtered”

She is indeed seeing the people in Gaza being slaughtered. She’s seeing the dead and injured paraded before the cameras at the invitation of Hamas, and she’s seeing it courtesy of the BBC.

The flaw in western democracy is that in order to function as intended, voters should be engaged enough to go out and vote and (reasonably) well-informed enough to understand what they’re voting for. Ever since the Labour government decided to secure its position ‘forever’ by importing hoards of potential Labour supporters willy nilly from the undemocratic third world, the western democratic vision has fallen apart. 

If the financial crisis hadn’t come along when it did, this ploy might have succeeded, and who knows how much worse things could have been. Remember the ‘democracy’ that brought in fanatical Islamist regimes during and after the farcical Arab Spring? The BBC didn’t get it at all. Even now people are still calling  Hamas ‘democratically elected’. Once elected, majority rule says democracy has reached the terminus, and the bus will never move on again.

Sarah Champion must pander to the followers of Allah, or else. If she doesn’t someone else will.

“The definition of Islamic democracy (contrary to western democracy) is simply that the government is essentially Islamic and it is controlled by whichever sect, tribe or group has the majority of members. This is always the essence of democracy: rule by the majority. In Iraq and Iran the majority groups are the Shiites. Therefore the only possible type of democratic government in Iraq and Iran is a Shiite Islamic Republic. The majority (i.e. Shiites) of Iraqis want democracy, but they want Islamic democracy not the American style of secular democracy. Whenever Bush uses the word democracy, he means western secular democracy. Whenever the Iraqi people use the word democracy, they mean Islamic democracy. The difference between these two concepts is crystal clear to anyone who takes the time to think about it. 

For ‘Bush’ you can easily insert ‘the BBC’.

Since much local politics has been taken over by Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslims, antisemitism and the anti-Israel lobby rules okay. See what is happening at Tower Hamlets. See how Sarah Champion is duped, first by the BBC’s inflammatory reporting, then by the necessity of pandering to her constituents. She has to, otherwise she’ll be out on her ear.

What makes it worse is that she is not alone in deciding to be passionate about the Palestinians. Why? What, other than the blanket coverage given to their anti-Israel propaganda, is so special to Sarah Champion about the Palestinians?

There was a huge puff piece about her by Damian Whitworth in last week’s Times (£). Michael Cockerell’s ‘Inside the Commons’ has propelled Ms Champion to a more favourable variety of prominence than would have been the case had she not starred in the first episode of the programme. 

Here is an excerpt from the Times:

“Sarah Champion is one of the few politicians in Rotherham to have emerged from the child sexual exploitation scandal with any credit. She describes herself as a “freak” among MPs who was regarded with suspicion by colleagues at Westminster when she agreed to take part in the fly-on-the-wall TV series “Inside the Commons”
She is loathed by many members of Rotherham’s disgraced local Labour party, and is so unimpressed by traditional squabbling between the political parties nationally that less than three months before a general election she is happy to describe David Cameron as “decent”and held a private meeting with him to try to advance the cause of abuse victims.”

Call me cynical but some of her behaviour, her remarks about Nigel Farage for example, don’t coincide with this spin.

I agree with Craig that “Inside the Commons” is an enjoyable and fascinating series. The viewer was given privileged access to some of the mundane, everyday, housekeeping aspects of our great parliamentary institution, and we could glimpse some familiar faces coming and going, but we still knew that the  editing sets the tone. Editing is the master. I’d love to see what ended up on the cutting room floor. No I wouldn’t - it would mostly be boring stuff, but you know what I mean. 

The ones who ‘agreed to take part’ must have had an idea of how they were likely to come across. Fly on the wall films are not random. Otherwise how come we saw Steve Rotheram MP the former brickie on his roof, dismantling a chimney? If he didn’t want to be seen as a brickie he could easily have not performed this rooftop exercise in front of the cameras. 

An MP who was sitting in Rotherham at the time of an enormous scandal would normally be bearing the brunt of a barrage of criticism. But somehow Sarah has come out smelling of roses. 

Acting on behalf the abused women and passionate about it.

Feeding Jews to the crocodiles

 Austria’s foremost claim to fame may be that it is the birthplace of many major classical composers, but it also happens to be a well-known snake-pit of antisemitism. 

It seems there is a Chechen problem in Austria in the shape of radicalised Muslim immigrants, some of whom are off to Syria for a first-hand dose of Jihad.

According to an analysis published by the newspaper Der Standard, Austria has emerged as a central hub for jihadists seeking to fight in Syria because Austria's geographic location provides easy access to land routes through the Balkans.

The current president of Austria is Heinz Fischer. Despite the problems associated with the domestic situation outlined above he thinks the solution to the current global and European problems is to denounce Israel. (Harry's Place)

What caught my eye was a below the line comment -

“ The Holocaust made sure that the Jews are no longer a force to reckon with in Europe.” It seems apparent that many a present-day politician is resorting to feeding the Jews to the crocodile, having forgotten that it will eat him last. It will eat him.

I’d just seen a comment on Conservative Home in response to the question, what shall we do with the drunken sailor? Or more precisely: "How should Britain counter the Islamic State group? Take our latest monthy (sic) survey"  

Under the header “Some thoughts” A contributor offers the following suggestion (number 2 of a set of three.)

2. Cease to give the impression that we support Israel (99 % of British Muslims view our apparent preference for the Israelis with acute suspicion or worse) and instead work, by diplomatic means only, for to just Two State solution for Palestine. 

A couple of commenters (2 out of 69) indicated that they were not happy about sacrificing the Jews ‘to placate the fifth column in our midst’, to which the original poster replied with an unpleasant remark to do with MPs displeasing Muslims by being ‘friends of Israel.

This brings to mind the advice that a former British Ambassador to Amman gave to Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s.  

"It is presumably in the national interest to do what we can to counter Arab fears and suspicions that the leader of HM opposition is already a prisoner of the Zionists."

The gentleman in question is charming enough. I met him at a friend’s house. He has a great deal of admiration for Yassir Arafat and holds the kind of Arabist views that Oxbridge-FCO types imbibe from birth. With the exemplary manners of his ilk,  he held forth on the topic, undeterred by not being particularly au fait with the facts. (at least not of the ‘other’ side of the story) Self confidence carried him through.   

I don’t think much has changed. 

Slightly off topic, a thought about the Rotherham grooming inquiry that is dominating the headlines today. 

The BBC is relaxing into a newfound freedom from the shackles of not-mentioning-the-racial-origin of the guilty men! It looks as though they’re really enjoying it.

It’s as if the news about ISIS has emboldened them or something. It’s ‘say what you like’ time. 

“At last, we can say “men of British/Pakistani  origin” says the BBC. "And we can go to town on blaming the police and social services for sweeping the whole lot under the rug for fear of being thought racist.” 

But they’ve forgotten that the BBC itself was just as bad, if not worse than the police and social services, at the business of turning a blind eye to racial profiling of any kind, lest they commit racism. The nearest was the sotto voce “Asian” but more often than not it was merely 'men.'

Perhaps if it weren’t for fear of the press and the BBC making a big deal out of allegations of institutional  racism, these institutions might have come out into the open long ago, saving children years of suffering.

So the long-term I/P ceasefire has been relegated to second place in the headline charts. I can’t wait to see how things pan out, BBC wise.

Matthew Parris wrote a ridiculous article in the Times (£) on Saturday. “Don’t lump all Muslims in the extremist camp.”

A few letters responding to it in today’s paper drew it to my attention. Matthew took some insulting Islamophobic Tweets and comments he’d read recently, and substituted “Jew” for “Muslim’ then said: “See? How d’you like that?” I think he was trying to make a point about Islamophobia.

Two glaring oversights Matthew. Firstly, as today’s letter writers observed, the Jews don’t behead, crucify or shoot each other, nor do they wish to establish a global caliphate, advocate the death penalty for apostasy or demand that we adapt this country to suit their many and varied religious practices. So your analogy or whatever it was meant to be was useless in an apples and pears kinda way. You might as well have used the term “Gays”. Equally sensitive and equally inappropriate. You could call it “Don’t lump all gays into being extremely camp”

The second one is, since you asked, well, Jews do get such insults and antisemitic remarks  all the time, from ignoramuses and antisemites, online and off, so your pseudo psychological experiment was ill-conceived and, really, quite offensive.

If he’s trying to shame Islamophobes by accusing them of ‘tarring all Muslims with the same brush’ I do wonder why a gay man would defend a group of people who use quite a broad brush themselves. ’They’ do tend to be institutionally ‘homophobic’. 

He’s a bit like Robert Winston, who is fond of equating Jews and Muslims in an all encompassing gesture of politically correct wishful thinking.