Daindruss Times

Jeremy Bowen has been promoted from Middle East to **International** editor and has been mostly covering the war in Ukraine but he still can't resist pontificating on Israel/Palestine. On 4th Jan 2023, Today programme  (19 mins to 9) Nick Robinson called upon him to report upon a dastardly provocation that Melanie Phillips describes as:

“a Jew walking for 15 minutes on the site that is most sacred to Judaism … without fanfare or media attention, early in the morning when the compound was almost empty and didn’t pray there or say anything to stir up trouble.”

 The Arab press calls this “storming” the al-Aqsa Mosque!

Here’s a near-as-dammit transcription of the item I heard on the Today Programme last Wednesday at 19 minutes to nine. 

Nick R

Now, why did a brief visit by the new Israeli security minister to the Alaska (sic) mosque compound in Jerusalem lead to such international condemnation and also to warnings of violent retribution from Hamas? China and the UAE have now called for a UN security council meeting to condemn the visit. Jeremy Bowen knows the area well, he’s our international editor and joins us on the line. “Morning, Happy New year to you Jeremy!” (Bowen mumbles) “Deliberately naive question if I may Jeremy - a daft laddie question - he didn’t pray, he didn’t enter the mosque at all, so why the fuss? “

JBowen

Well, it’s very symbolic. Ah, the piece of ground in question, which Jews call the Temple Mount in English, and Muslims call - Palestinians call The Noble sanctuary in Arabic, ah it’s probably the - it’s certainly the most disputed ground - piece of ground - in the Middle East and quite possibly the world - it’s holy to both religions - the holiest place for Jews, the third holiest place for Muslims and it’s also a massive national symbol, particularly for Palestinians; and now this particular individual, Itamar Ben-Gvir is the most prominent group …. prominent of a group of militant right-wingers on whom the new government of mister Netanyahu relies for support, and they’re driving the ideology of the government and of course his supporters say that they’re elected fair and square, that’s democracy; but Ben-Gvir, he’s a police minister but he’s got a long criminal record of which includes incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist organisation.”

Nick R

Huge symbolism then, as it is it’s him going there, but I guess what everybody’s watching is to see the underlying question of what policy actually changes under this new wide coalition.

JBowen

Yes, well, Netanyahu’s come back to power, relying on the votes in the Israeli parliament of these hard-line right-wingers, which, y’know, Israelis in the election liked the look of their coalition and voted for it. It’s not just a question of supporting harder action against Palestinians in the occupied territories, although that’s a big part of it. The— in Israel when they form a new coalition government they have a … they put out a political agreement, a statement. Now, this is often, not at all um, ah, brought in ‘to the letter’, but it’s clear that Ben-Gvir and his colleagues, they want big changes inside Israel to make it more religious, more their version of how a Jewish state should be and this horrifies many secular Israelis, and what would that mean? It means putting orthodox Jewish beliefs ahead of the rights of women - of LGBTQ people, of Arab citizens - 20% of the population of Israel is in fact Palestinian Arab. Ben-Gvir says those people need to know who is the landlord of the country, by which he means “the Jews.“ And they’re also, there are talks about removing much of the independence of the Israeli judiciary which for Netanyahu may have the result of  rescuing him from his own trial, which is continuing, on very serious corruption charges and all this at a time when the West Bank is very tense and anything that stirs the pot there is… daindruss!

Nick R

When you say tense Jeremy I’ve heard people predicting that it could ‘blow’ this year, that we could see very serious trouble indeed. On the West Bank that might be the excuse the Hamas wants to move out of its stronghold in Gaza and move in, do you think that’s a likely scenario?

JBowen 

Tensions are very high on the West Bank, and also in Palestinian parts of Jerusalem without question and it’s a really daindruss situation, it’s a really daindruss cocktail of a new generation growing up of Palestinians, a lack of hope, a feeling that um their aspirations towards - towards independence, towards freedom because there are millions of people who’ve been under a harsh military occupation now for generations, if you feel that that’s never going to go away - one thing that Netanyahu’s government has given another hard right-winger Mr Smotrich a lot of authority over settlements to expand them and so it’s a very difficult and daindruss situation; it’s a really nasty cocktail. Last year in 2022 something like 150 Palestinians were killed in the area by Israeli security forces, and more than 30 Israelis. Now Netanyahu. in his politics, has tried to play a double or a treble game, where he says one thing and does something else, reality and rhetoric being separated, but hard-liners like Ben-Gvir are very serious about imposing their views - and now can Netanyahu control them? Does he want to? and at the same time there’s this rising tide of anger among Palestinians and it’s just one serious incident, I’d say, at any given time, away from a very serious situation.

Nick R

Jeremy, thank you.

It did occur to me that the disdainful description of the new Israeli government: “militant  ‘hard-right-wingers’ that's “putting orthodox Jewish beliefs ahead of the rights of women, of LGBTQ people, of Arab citizens” looks oddly hypocritical when it comes from someone who happily overlooks the illiberal “orthodox religious beliefs” of his favoured ethnicity. On this occasion, only Nick Robinson specifically mentioned the word “Hamas” but that particular absence from Bowen’s narrative was conspicuous.

Insulting listeners intelligence

And now for something completely different.  It’s not about Israel. (well, only a tiny bit)

Insulting voters’ intelligence? I thought: am I the only one who was taken aback by the bullying here? (scroll to about 2:21.41)  It’s Nick Robinson taking advantage of his position in the concluding moments of this tetchy interview with George Eustice.

G.E. “In the interest of balance you need to recognise that the leader of the opposition…

N.R. (interrupting) “I don’t think we need any lectures from you about balance Mr Eustice, we interviewed Mr Starmer all about it yesterday”..

I did spot another reference to this exchange within a GB News feature titled: 'Does Britain still love the BBC?’  (scroll to about 6:20)   Dame Esther Rantzen (Supporting the Beeb) and Rupert Lowe (not so much,) discuss with Mark Dolan. 

 

Rupert Lowe:

“I mean I listened to an interview the other day between Nick Robinson and George Eustice. I’m a farmer - George Eustice is not my favourite person but I couldn’t believe Nick R’s arrogance when he was interviewing GE and it’s an example of how they know they’re going to be there well beyond when that person they’re interviewing is going to be voted out of power so there is a degree of arrogance which I think is unacceptable now….”

Full disclosure; George is my M.P.   The  Eustice family farm produce is pretty pricey though. George has come in for such a lot of stick for his ‘let them eat cake’ remark, but it’s sound advice. (Shop at Lidl’s and Aldi) I don’t know if the Eustice family farm would agree.

**********************

So then I caught a programme on the radio late last night about  BLM.  on the theme of combatting racism. It was hosted by our old friend Samira Ahmed.  It came across as pretty vacuous, to be honest, but a couple of throw-away remarks suggested that the discussion was based on a somewhat creative interpretation of ‘anti-racism’. 

One participant navigated his self-inflicted minefield of tricky glottal stops with such agility that something that would normally send my hackles through the roof was so distracting that it slipped by almost unnoticed. “…the way Israel has colonised Palestine” On reflection, I found that so profoundly dumb that it threw the whole of his tenuous anti-racist thesis down the toilet.

I concluded that their version of ”anti-racism” is itself pretty racist, especially when Samira Ahmed brought in Azeem Rafiq as an example, evidently having forgiven and forgotten his casual antisemitism or disregarded it altogether. That's what I call insulting listeners’ intelligence. 

Riots will erupt

We haven’t done any ‘housekeeping’ posts for a good while. Or any posts whatsoever for that matter. We’re in blogging doldrums.  That cries out for a calypso; missing Lance Percival now.

Now that the BBC’s leftwing bias is generally accepted, why don’t you and I - the listening public - just stop moaning and carry on regardless, autocorrecting as we go? We’ve got our own antennae, haven’t we? We can edit as we see fit, in realtime.

That is what we do when we hear Mishal Husain introduce an item about riots at Al Aksa, you know, the third holiest site for the Muslims. We know she’ll parrot the Palestinian version of events. It’s expected and we make allowances. Do listen. It’s a bit of a shocker, bias-wise.

     Today Prog; scroll to 2:23:01

As Adam Levick points out, the Guardian sets the tone with its 'erupting clashes':

“…..clashes that erupted when Israeli riot police entered Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque compound ….”

Clashes erupt! Riots occur!  Vehicles run people down! 

Life’s far too short to peel this kind of onion. It’s a multi-layered vegetable. 

(Mishal, I do wonder who you think “started the riots”? The Jews in 1948, maybe? Or should we go back a few millennia to the origin of the oldest hatred)

Mishal Husain may not be interested, but BBC guidelines state: 

The BBC is committed to achieving due impartiality in all its output. This commitment is fundamental to our reputation, our values, and the trust of audiences. The term ‘due’ means that the impartiality must be adequate and appropriate to the output, taking account of the subject and nature of the content, the likely audience expectation, and any signposting that may influence that expectation.

Mishal, this morning's report on the Today Programme cried out for a balanced picture of the incident, but you talked over and obstructed the Israeli spokeswoman you were supposed to be interviewing and you did so with such cloth-eared belligerence that you virtually drowned her out. You mustn’t do that, Mishal. It’s very biased.  Here's the gist of the part you drowned out. To quote JPost:

The Muslims who stockpiled stones, rocks, logs, and firecrackers in al-Aqsa did not do so for religious purposes. They prepared for a riot – to attack police and Jewish worshipers – not for prayers. Police did not storm al-Aqsa Mosque to “conquer” it. They broke in to arrest the rock throwers who had barricaded themselves inside after Friday prayers. Some of the masked Palestinians waved Hamas flags and praised arch-terrorist Muhammed Deif as they tried to bombard the Jewish worshipers who had come to pray at the Western Wall at the start of the Passover holiday.

Did anyone say "They would say that, wouldn’t they?"  I bloody well hope so, too. Someone’s got to say it, and it certainly won’t be the BBC.  

Maybe Mishal Husain let her utter contempt for the Israeli spokesperson shine through because she knows that listener numbers are shrinking and assumes that those remaining wouldn’t care. 

Continually speaking over her guest in one of her rudest, most schoolmarmish, and sneeriest tones, she outdid even her usual self this morning. The self-righteous, prissy, and sneery timbre to her voice on such occasions is as irritating as the saccharine tones that accompany her heartwarming stories. Perhaps she ‘smiles’ while speaking. I hear that's a technique to make the audience like you.  I'm thinking of trying that.  

I implore everybody to listen (link here again and at the top of the page, scroll to 2:23:00) to Husain indulging that malevolent fanatic Husam Zomlot, no stranger to this site, allowing him acres of air time in which to express his opinions.  But wow! Was he allowed to rant and ramble on, barely interrupted - even though he strayed off-topic, wildly, fancifully, and at great length - and fawned over to the point of servility. Did nobody else notice?

This is almost unbelievable when you consider that Tim Davie was supposed to be addressing the bias. I understood that the BBC’s entire raison d’être for co-opting Tim Davie to the maelstrom  — bringing him aboard - was to iron out the bias once and for all!  But when? This year, next year, sometime never?

Not only with regard to the Martin Bashir and Jimmy Savile scandals, but something more fundamental, namely the BBC’s unspoken mission to normalise and acclimatise the British to creeping Islamification.  Does the public want this? Do people want to pay for it?  

I can’t quite follow my own advice here. I can’t just autocorrect everything as I go along and leave it at that. Someone has to say something. I’m afraid this particular issue is bigger than both of us. 

Oh yes, and has anyone noted the recent absence of the BBC’s most ubiquitous guest on Dateline London recently?   One of his rants has apparently been removed from YouTube but does anyone know if his recent (semi) withdrawal from our BBC screens is a coincidence or part of Tim Davie’s nascent decontamination project? Yes, I’m talking about “Barry Atwan or ‘arry Batwan.

Haven’t seen Mr Atwan lately. Did he creep away quietly, or was there a showdown? (Asking for a few million friends.)

Killer question

If the Halo Trust wants to bring people together, why does Mishal Husain want to keep them apart?

“It’s nice to see people cooperating,” says James Cowan of the Halo Trust. It’s a pity Mishal Husain hasn’t got the message. She doesn’t seem to know that the six-day war arose because of yet another failed attempt (by the Arabs) to annihilate Israel. (Or if she does know, she isn't interested)

Relying on 'our ignorance' of the facts, she posed the carefully formulated killer question she’d been leading up to on the Today programme this morning. (Scroll to 3:2:59)

You need to listen to get the full effect, but there was almost a note of glee in the venomous-sounding tone she used to probe for the context-free answer she sought.  “Who left them?” 

Here’s the transcript:

MH
“Eleven minutes to nine. Churches on the banks of the River Jordan in the West Bank, abandoned for more than 50 years because of the 1967 Arab Israeli war, will now be available to visit, thanks to de-mining work that has been completed there, by the Halo Trust. Its chief executive James Cowan is on the line; good morning.  

JC
Good morning Mishal 

MH
Describe the sites that you’ve been working on. 

JC
Well Mishal, the Halo Trust normally works with communities to help put them back to normal. We work in countries like Afghanistan and Yemen but this is a very special situation, where these eight churches have been mined and booby-trapped during the six-day war and it came to our notice that, it’s a long time ago actually, in 2014, that they needed to be cleared. So we got the various churches together, asked them if they’d work together - eight different denominations - and then we got the Israelis and then we got the Palestinians, and so all three major faiths, and we looked at how we could do this. All the churches had been booby-trapped and then surrounded by a huge mine-field of eleven hundred land mines, so it was going to be technically complicated but also quite diplomatically challenging, and it was great just walking into the Greek Patriarch’s church with the other members of their denominations, big hats, big beards, twinkly eyes, and getting them to sign, for the first time really, a cooperative agreement to do this work. 

MH
And those mines and booby-traps, who left them? 

JC
So they were put there by the Israelis, ah, during the six-day war as a protective belt. And, of course we were appalled at the laying of the land-mines because they remain in the ground, just lethal, decades after the event, but I think, to Israel’s credit, they were at least prepared to join us in removing that threat. 

MH
And the significance of these churches is that they’re all built around the site where Christ was believed to have been baptised. 

JC
Yes, it’s extraordinary and one of the great sites of Christendom and actually the Jewish faith as well, um, should be treated in this way, so it’s really nice that fifty three years after the event we’ve now managed to finish the last land-mine; we blew up five hundred of them actually, in a huge daisy-chain explosion. When we walked into these churches, it was like walking into a time capsule with beer still on the shelf, the table laid for dinner, and it was just wonderful to return there and now we can begin the process of actually restoring the churches. 

MH
Right. So they’re not necessarily in a fit state to have visitors, and obviously the virus is affecting the West Bank and is certainly affecting people’s ability to travel there from other parts of the world but is there a lot of restoration work that now needs to begin? 

JC
There’s a huge amount of restoration work. You can imagine after fifty three years of being abandoned the churches need a lot of work doing to them. But I think in a time of Covid, as you mention, grim times, it’s nice to have a story like this in which there’s actually a bit of hope, and in a place like the West Bank where these three faiths have competed with each other for millennia its nice to see them cooperating. 

MH

James Cowan of the Halo Trust, thank you very much.

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.

Good old letterboxes

Today Programme  5/12/2019   (2:20:02)

I think Martha Kearney has taken a leaf out of Andrew Marr’s little red book of interupterviewing.

Although the interruption quotient didn’t sound quite so excessive when I 'listened again', I noticed the Today Programme didn’t use the Islamophobia-related excerpt on Twitter. It’s impossible to convey the full ‘interrupterviewing’ tone in a transcript, but here's my best attempt. 

I’ve tried to keep to the appropriate punctuation  (onomatopoeic rather than grammatical) to indicate where the end of a sentence runs straight into the next one so as to prevent an inconveniently ‘premature’ answer, as in the emboldened section below.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

M K

I want you to address what’s going on, ah in your party, in particular the issue of Islamophobia do you acknowledge that this is an a-a-an-important issue for your party the Guardian last week talked about twenty-five sitting and former Conservative councillors being exposed for posting Islamophobic and racist material on Facebook and social media.

SJ

I-I- it’s a very important issue of course I acknowledge that and whenever we have found any kind of prejudice, whether it’s anti-Muslim hatred or any other type of prejudice, I’m proud that we’ve always taken action immediately as soon as that is presented to the party centrally

MK

That’s not the view of Sayeeda Warsi, the former Conservative cabinet minister who thinks that the party has been slow to act on this.

SJ

Look, I’ve got time for Sayeeda Warsi I’ve always listened to what her and others have got to say but she wouldn’t be knowledgeable of all the actions that we have taken, it’s right that when someone is accused that we look at the evidence but we have a zero-tolerance policy against any type of prejudice or hatred it is something - it is something I came into politics to fight, it’s one of the things…

MK

But have you been fighting hard enough within the Conservatives because Sayeeda Warsi talked to The World at One last week and she said she understands your position, she said it would be the career-ending moment for you to criticise the party for Islamophobia, but she hopes that one day you will be braver and bolder.

SJ (chuckles)

Well I have to say, with respect, saying that’s nonsense. This is - why come in to politics if you’re not going to make positive change and this is one of the things that has motivated me more than anything and it’s not just about me it’s something that the Prime Minister would never ever tolerate, and remember, this is the Prime Minister that has appointed the most diverse cabinet that this country, has ever seen and that’s because he…

MK (interrupts)
Would - would you have written an article, as Boris Johnson has, about…

SJ

…loves and celebrates the…

MK (interrupts)
……….would you have written…

SJ ..the whole diversity of this country.

MK 

Would you have written an article as Boris Johnson did about Muslim women wearing the veil looking like letterboxes?

SJ 

I don’t write articles so, but Boris Johnso….

MK

Would you use that language?

SJ

Well he was a journalist and he’s written lots of articles, as he said himself, you know, people can pick one word out or another but what matters is the kind of prime Minister he is going…

MK

So you won’t criticise that..

SJ

and when it comes to our nation and the great diversity of it, it’s hard to find anyone who celebrates it more than Boris Johnson does.

MK

Sajid Javod … sorry, (laugher) Chancellor of the Exchequer, thank you for talking to us.

SJ

Take care.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The BBC (as an institution) clearly equates Islamophobia with antisemitism. The  BBC’s default position is to regard them as two cheeks of the same arse. This might have something to do with rigidly presenting the appearance of ‘impartiality’ that the BBC is so proud of. I think this is foolish and ignorant, but it is what it is, and sadly, one is obliged to accept the situation.  

It seems to me that the BBC sees its role as one of redressing a (non-existent) imbalance. The Chief Rabbi has intervened in the long-running battle for meaningful recognition of the fact that the Labour Party is mired in anti-Jewish racism, therefore the BBC must counterbalance this with “Sayeeda Warsi.”

Remember the famous response to Dan Quayle likening himself to Jack Kennedy? In a similar vein one might say “Sayeeda, you’re no Chief Rabbi”.  Of course, it wasn’t Warsi herself doing the comparison - not on this occasion and not in so many words, but the BBC appears to be doing so on her behalf and making a similarly unfortunate analogy.

The BBC seems to regard Warsi’s demands as the ‘other side of the coin’ in a currency where her non-stop grievance-mongering is given equal billing to the once-in-a-blue-moon intervention by a religious leader whose role is traditionally a-political. 

I just watched Matthew D’Ancona on Politics Live saying he can’t vote for Boris Johnson because “he said veiled Muslim women look like letterboxes and bank robbers.” Deep thinking there, Mr A. Especially when you come on TV looking like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards. 

I’d love to know whether there is an acceptable description of the fully-veiled Muslim woman whose sole window of navigation is through a narrow slit of a peephole. What’s wrong with letterboxes, anyway? They’re a delight! Letterboxes still facilitate a human way of keeping in touch with others - that is until they’re as outmoded as fountain pens and paper. 

What will we use as a comparison when letterboxes are obsolete? Then we’ll only be left with bank robbers. No doubt they will still be with us.

John Humphrys signs off

Here's the moment John Humphrys signs off after 32 years of broadcasting on the Today programme and an illustrious journalism career spanning six decades #r4today

Full sign off 👉 https://t.co/JYz6qDwUTL pic.twitter.com/vm1nBIHPHM

— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) 19 September 2019

Plenty of plaudits for Humph this morning during his farewell appearance on the Toady. 

A big article by Giles Fraser on Unherd, too. Who will miss John Humphrys? 

The Today Programme seems to be getting less and less listenable under Sarah Sands’s headmistress- ship. "She introduced the puzzle", someone announced, as if that was a good thing.

He sounds ok, but when you see him Humphrys has the pallor of a man who’s been living underground for years. For his sake, now that he can have a lie-in and a bit of a relax, I advise him to get some fresh air (for the vitamin D) 

Bye John, and good luck. 

Dealing robustily

Talking of missed opportunities, let’s not forget the antisemitism scandal. (Jonathan Arkush speaks for the Jews and Norman Smith speaks for the Labour party)  Lots of coverage following the “Missed opportunities” verdict from various members of the Jewish delegation following their unsatisfactory meeting with Jeremy Corbyn.

From Today, Norman Smith, Justin Webb and Barry Gardiner.  And  Ian Watson.

The Daily Politics with Andrew Neil. Peter Dowd MP, Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury is in the hot seat. A little sheepish, but still loyal to Dear Leader. Andrew Neil had a long list of examples of Labour’s outrageous conduct, (reputedly lifted from Guido Fawkes) which he read out, item by item. Dowd had no answer, but he did express regret. 

The Today programme featured Kier Starmer who said the party should “deal robustily” with the antisemitism. 

We mustn’t forget Len McCluskey who has written a nasty piece in the New Statesman in which he dismisses it all as a smear. 

Did you know that Jennie Formby is a former partner of Len McCluskey a relationship from which they have a son? She’s the one who has the task of dealing with it, no doubt robustily.