I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. The presenter Adnan Sarwar is from a Muslim background and his family still live in Burnley where he grew up.
Nowadays that he’s a cosmopolitan kind of guy with a busy life and an impressively open-minded approach to male circumcision. I breathed a small sigh of relief when I realised that this wasn’t going to be a vehicle for more Jew-bashing.
As a completely secular person I don’t relate to traditional religious practices at all, but I do understand and half-empathise with the tribal ‘pull’ that keeps them going.
I liked Adnan’s respectful manner when speaking about this with his father, a fairly immovable traditionalist. At one stage it seemed that Adnan was veering towards the pro-circumcision side of the argument, but at a later stage, he appeared to have swung into reverse. He hasn't got any children yet, but it does look likely that any boys he might have will remain intact.
Jewish News reported that the documentary “gets a mixed reaction.” Well, at least they weren’t wholly condemnatory of it.
Out of curiosity, I had a look at Adnan’s Twitter timeline, and I think I got a better picture of where he was ‘coming from’ from that.
I was one of the three viewers that stayed awake long enough to see whether the very last edition ever of This Week was worth watching. After Andrew Neil's scathing remark about the previous programme and the BBC’s non-user-friendly scheduling of his own show, I have to agree with some of the comments on Guido - that a great deal of it was cringeworthy.
Before you go, I’ll just explain that it’s about the BBC, impartiality and interviewing strategies.
It explores the recent car-crash interviews from which the two Andys emerged, moderately bruised, to fight another day. Remember Andrew Neil’s quote which appeared towards the end of
my previous post?
“It’s part of my contract that I don’t join any political party in their campaigns… it’s also part of my contract that I don’t have to be in favour of antisemitism. But I don’t get involved in your campaign. My job is to test your campaign.”
The general principle is:
‘I am here to ask questions and get answers and I have no politics of my own’,
but, and it’s a big but, them thar politics always show through.
Off you trot. Do come back when you’ve finished, and tell us all about it. It’s just up your street.
(I think I've been temporarily taken over by Joyce Grenfell) Not now, Sidney!
Update:
Look out! I dozed off during Question Time (who were those people?) But I awoke, refreshed, to see Andrew Neil. Blimey!
You’d almost think someone had been coaching Portillo’s sidekick (Who was that person?) No, not Sandra Oh! but Melanie Onn! (So confusing, a kind of Oh No!) Andrew Neil is obviously bruised. You’d almost suspect that Melanie Onn had been coached by “the team” to feed Andrew Neil by alluding to the US abortion issue as a ‘dark ages’ type of a thing, just so that Andrew Neil could bring up his Ben Shapiro ‘demolition jobbie’ all over again, but this time do so in that dismissive, ‘laughin’ at myself’ manner, as in ‘I haven’t a care in the world’ to show that.... he. ain't. bovvered.
But I think he’s rattled. Because they even dragged in Galloway to opine about the state of broadcasting and the art of interviewing. Admittedly they hung it on the hook of the death of Brian Walden, but to me, it looked like damage limitation. By the BBC, and by Andrew Neil. And wasn’t he welcoming to the point of smarmy to Galloway? (Whom I have to concede, on this occasion, spoke sense.) I do hope we don’t have to see much more of him and his hat in future. (Obsessive attachments to wearing hats and big overcoats indoors signals deep insecurity verging on mental illness) While they were at it they also had a go at Andrew Marr.
And wasn’t Ian Austin good? He didn’t get nearly such a warm reception as GG, but his despair at Corbyn’s leadership and at his former colleagues’ spineless acquiescence was heartfelt and long-awaited.
If This Week is past your bedtime and you didn’t see it, do catch it on your Listen Again facility.
(Do stop doing that, Sidney!)
Following the update to the previous thread to the effect that there suddenly seems to be a move to persuade the world that ‘the‘the prophet Mohammed’ (to distinguish him from any other ordinary Mohammed/Mohammad, and not to imply that he’s everyone’s prophet) - that the Muslim prophet whose image must not be reproduced, is forgiving and would rise above criticism with a smile. Well, maybe not with a smile.
"The prophet just rose above it"
Mehdi Hasan said it on Question Time, and later on This Week the Muslim ‘comedienne’ Shazia Mirza said it again. What is going on here? Has there been a memo from Allah?
That Question Time was bad enough. The lowlight was Anna Soubry’s announcement that these nothing-to-do-with-Islam terrorists weren’t ‘racist’ because they killed everyone indiscriminately. She hadn’t even heard of their coincidental propensity to accidentally target Jews. This is a tory M.P.
People must have voted for her.
David Starkey by the way said some brave things, but we knew - and so did he - that he was only there to make sparks fly. He kind of looked resigned to it. I don’t think he enjoyed being controversial as much as he used to. All the fun seems to have gone out of it. And he made a couple of slips, which didn’t help. At one stage he mentioned ‘Ahmed’, which was either Starkey’s ‘generic-Muslim name’ for Mehdi, or directed at the questioner, ‘Hamid’. Naturally Mehdi assumed the former, and chalked up another point with a smirk.
I don’t want to base my argument purely on ad homs, but Mehdi is such a clown that it’s hard not to. His over-the-top gurning and exaggerated pronunciation of anything Moossslim is parodic to the point of, well, slapstick.
“My prophet, when he returned to ‘Mukka’ in triumph, he forgave all the people in that city who verbally insulted and physically abused him earlier on in his life.” - That’s the kinda guy he was.
Everything every M.P. on that panel said was highly offensive. Are we expected to vote for these people? It’s my right to be offended.
As a matter of fact, I thought their ultra PC remarks about teacher/pupil sexual offence court case was bordering on bonkers. Starkey was right. Why didn’t someone ask the social worker in the audience who spoke so vehemently about adult responsibility ‘at what precise point does a ‘child’ become and ‘adult’?
Yes indeed the teacher was in a position of trust, which he abused, and yes he was in a position of ‘power’. He was found guilty. Remember, though, the girl was over the age of consent, old enough to get married, and no doubt a young woman’s passionate infatuation and sexuality, which many an adult male (M.P.s no exception) knows very well, puts her in a position of power too,
Enough of that off-topic aside. I feel like poor Judy Finegan begin-agin. Where’s Richard?
Somehow I’m living in a world where no-one is allowed to speak the truth. No-one can acknowledge reality. What is to become of us?
Which brings me to This Week. Now I should be a fan of Andrew Neil by rights. But somehow I’m not. He’s the nearest thing we’ve got, and I suppose one should be grateful for small mercies, but what about his unfunny joshing about that ‘Birmingham is a Muslim no-go area” debacle? Ha very ha. Not.
Neither Andrew Neil, Diane Abbott, Michael Portillo nor the unfunny comedienne nailed it. None of them properly got to grips with Nabila. Her point, which they failed to accept, was that any depiction of the prophet (Muslim) is offensive to Nabila and thousands upon thousands of her co-religionistas.
Even if one were to draw a stick man, and label it “The Prophet Mohammed” it would offend her. If one were to put a turban on a smiley emoticon and caption it ‘Mo” she would be hurt.
It doesn’t matter whether the cartoon-Mo was depicted in his ‘all forgiving’ mode - even though his all-forgivingness is something Mehdi, Shazia and the-man-who-forbade-the BBC-to-air-the-Hadith-that-says-he-wasn’t insist is one of the prophet’s most outstandingly humane characteristics - that is irrelevant and beside the point.
None of these outraged Muslims care one iota about the content of the cartoon save for the fact that it depicts an image said to be that of the Muslim prophet Mohammed.
We may find that hard to take seriously. And we do.
Portillo protesting that the cartoon was well meant, Nabila arguing that any depiction of Mohammed was a deliberate provocation, Portillo and co reiterating that a well-meant cartoon depicting Mohammed was no excuse for outrage, Nabila arguing that everyone depicting the prophet is being knowingly inflammatory, everyone saying that ‘giving in’ would appease radical Islam. Round and round in circles, and letting Nabila get away with alleging that no-one would dare publish an antisemitic cartoon. That’s the funniest thing anyone said all day. Shazia could have livened up her act with it.
