Amazing disgrace

Last Sunday I started to write a post about something that had been mystifying me for some time. Of course, I didn’t finish writing it because, life.

Anyway, it turns out to have been spookily prescient. (Read your palm sir?)

The piece started off by expressing my disbelief and incredulity about how certain Labour MPs could sit there behind Jeremy Corbyn and not quit. About a dozen names came to mind, but the only one from my little list that turned out to be amongst the actual secret seven was Luciana Berger. I’d completely forgotten about Chuka Ummuna and I was barely conscious of the other six.

Surely these MPs have to do something, I thought,  even if only out of exasperation. How can they stay there? Hard, hard left; weak and woolly over Brexit. Another poll has found that everyone now realises that Jeremy Corbyn is antisemitic. So the Great anti-racist is a Racist. (Not that many people seem particularly bothered.)

I wittered on, stream of consciousness-wise, about splits. There are no winners, I mused.  Both factions are weakened; the main body is damaged and the breakaways struggle. Those who ‘stay and fight’ claim their over-arching concern is deposing the Tories.

There’s Brexit, and there’s antisemitism. The thing is, where does Monday’s long-awaited declaration of independence (Lexit?) (Cexit?) leave Labour’s remaining anti-Corbyn MPs? Desperately struggling to justify their position - but how?

For your information, here’s the list of MPs I got wrong. (with one exception) John Mann, Ann Clwyd, Joan Ryan, Wes Streeting, Liz Kendall, Anna Turley, Kate Hoey, Lisa Nandy and even Tom Watson. That’s not even counting Louise Ellman, Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth, the recipients of much of the abuse. 

How can they stay?

Anyway, that was Sunday. This is Tuesday.

**********

D’you wanna know the countries that have the worst record for persecuting Christians? 

Nigeria; Iraq; Uzbekistan; Lebanon; Pakistan; Egypt; Uganda; Indonesia; Saudi Arabia; Iran and last but not least, the UK!!.

Not Israel!!  Sarah Montague, Jonny Diamond and anyone who’s gullible enough to listen to them, put that in your pipe and smirk it.

*******

I heard Tim Stanley’s Thought For the Day this morning. It was about Shamima Begum. People who run away to join I.S. are following a perverse distortion of Islam, he opined. Hmm. He may have big ears, but he’s not listening. 

The best sense I’ve heard spoken in a long, long time on the BBC came straight afterwards, from an ex Jihadi bride who has found sanctuary in the US. Her interview with Martha Kearney contained the most sensible Thoughts for Any Day I’ve ever heard. 

The line wasn’t good. It was blurred and echoey. When ‘listen again’ is available I’ll listen again.

Meanwhile, here’s the gist of her wise advice: Shamima Begum has been brainwashed but she is intelligent and will mature in time. The Islamist belief - or should that be Islamic - (actually extreme versions of Christianity share this) is that this life is but a mere preparation for the eternal life to follow. They regard human life as of little importance (for the many, not the few, as the leaders’ longevity will attest.)

In many traditionally Islamic countries, extreme religiosity was beginning to decline, only to have taken up a bizarre resurgence in…Britain. 

Amazing disgrace. Extreme religiosity…. once was lost but now is found. It’s the families; it’s the communities; it’s Islam, stupid.

"Because why would anybody be opposed to it?"

If there's one area of BBC bias that's surely beyond question it's that the BBC has a pronounced bias in favour of social liberalism and against social conservatism. 

It has (institutionally-speaking) a progressive outlook on such matters - except, very occasionally, when they clash with the sensibilities of one particular faith group.

Tim Stanley of the Telegraph, a Catholic, noted that the BBC News website's report, Reform of 'archaic' divorce laws revealed, concerning the introduction of 'no fault' divorce, "includes no quotes from anyone opposed to it", adding that it "includes quotes from the Government, who proposed it, Labour, who wants it go quicker, and a lawyer who thinks it's a smashing idea".

Some people are agreeing with Tim, others disagreeing. Those disagreeing are all basically making the same point: "Because why should anybody be opposed to it?"...

...to which Tim is replying, "Not the point. BBC is state owned and has impartiality rules."

Another Tim, Tim Montgomerie (also a Christian), drew a broader point from this - not dissimilar to the one I was making at the start of this post, but with an added twist:

The scrupulous balancing by BBC News* of their reports according to a right/left axis completely misses eg the conservative/liberal debate. See Tim below. 

* BBC drama? Not so much.

I'm neither religious nor much of a social conservative, but the BBC undoubtedly has a major blind spot here. 

Yes, on programmes like Sunday Morning Live and The Big Questions, when they are conscious of the need to be balanced, they usually are balanced on such questions. But when reporting news stories like this I suspect it simply doesn't enter most BBC reporters minds that there might be people out there who don't approve of the socially liberal measure being proposed or introduced. 

And, so, I bet whoever wrote that piece about divorce law reform never gave a moment's thought to people who might oppose the reforms. "Because why would anybody be opposed to it?"

BBC partisans

The news about Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un's agreement to meet for talks has drawn some interesting reactions so far. 

So is the BBC being "partisan" over this? Well, all I can say is that their main BBC News website report about it waits for Paragraph 21 to devote one paragraph alone to citing someone giving President Trump credit.

And the usual suspects are being sour about it on Twitter. 

Anthony Zurcher's Twitter feed (so far) is particularly "partisan" and, yes, he gives North Korea all the credit for a possible "diplomatic triumph":

As for Katty Kay, well, she's been very quiet about it (so far), simply re-tweeting a rather sour comment from a former Clinton Era Democrat defence secretary: 

Take a look at Laura Bicker's prominent 'analysis' piece on the BBC News website, and you'll see that her take is just as jaundiced as Anthony Zurcher's.

Her write-up of South Korean president President Moon Jae-in's role is measured in tone and full of respectful language. He's the one she's giving credit to.

When she deals with Donald Trump, however, a disrespectful tone crashes in:

• "His administration has had very few victories, despite promising his voters there would "so much winning".
• "Reporters say he casually mentioned in the White House briefing room that he hoped they would give him credit for Kim Jong-un's offer. His voters certainly will".
• "...his Art of the Deal book will not be the guide he needs to deal with Kim Jong-un".
• and an expert whose quote begins, "Trump doesn't study or even read. He tends to fly wildly off script....".

How typical this is of the BBC's reporting of the story I'll try to find out after getting work out of the way today.

Update (17.15): And what's the first thing I see on my Twitter feed after getting in from work? This from the BBC's ever-so-impartial World Affairs Editor (his one tweet on the subject):

I can't help but think that if President Obama had done what President Trump has done John Simpson would be praising him as a peacemaker rather than damning him as a dupe.

#partisanBBCreporting.

Further update (20:28): From last night...

Who indeed?

Richard Dawkins is a dork

Richard Dawkins, Romana and K9

Click bait. Websites that include advertisements use it to help boost their hits and increase revenue. It even exists on blogs that don't advertise.

One of my old blogging chums Not a Sheep is a firm proponent of one its incarnations: the fifth rule of blogging. This is the art of putting up pictures of pretty women in various stages of undress in order to attract visitors to your blog. 

Without realising it, it turned out that I was pretty good at employing Rule 5 on my old blog. It may have been closed for five years but, nonetheless, thanks to Rule 5 it's still getting a ridiculously large number of visitors seeking out sexy images of Emily Maitlis and Jo Coburn. [To quote Duffman from The Simpsons, Oh yeah!]

Now, right-wing newspapers and magazines are increasingly employing another incarnation of click bait. It's not got an official name yet, but it needs one. So here it is:

Rule 234: To boost your website's potential and attract thousands of readers and comments, regularly post something nasty about Richard Dawkins.

Telegraph fopinjay (fop + popinjay) Tim Stanley has put this newly-named rule to superb use today, and the Telegraph is plugging it right at the very top of its homepage. 

They know it makes sense.

Posted at 12:15 pm today, it already has [at the time of writing, 20:15 pm] a corking 2,630 comments.

Tim gets things off to a cracking start, with the words:

Richard Dawkins’ insanity has now become an English institution...

Now, obviously, the sainted Richard is very far from insane, but it's a fine, provocative start from two-eggs-short-of-an-omelette Tim - fruitily rude, a little bit nasty, and absolutely guaranteed to keep the comments coming. 

Rule 234. 

Spongiform Tim (as he's universally known at Torygraph HQ) keeps 'em coming.

"Britain's nuttiest professor"..."Dick"..."nutjob 180"..."Celebrity atheists"..."yawnfest"...

As an offence-monger, by the way, I'm deeply offended by Tim Stanley's offensive use of imagery associated with mental illness, which is (a) a very serious issue and (b) should never be used to insult vulnerable scientists. I'm starting a Twitterstorm to demand his immediate sacking. 

No, actually, he should apologise, be reported to the police, arrested, convicted, sent to Saudi Arabia (PBUI), and flogged. For starters.

The comments generated by Tim Stanley and the Telegraph are the usual stuff about whether religion is good or bad....and on and on and on and on and on and on it goes. Job done.

If you're not a 'twitter or tweet' person, then here are a flavour of Richard Dawkins's latest whacky tweets (burn him!) - all from the past five days:

My nephew Nick Kettlewell took Andromeda photo. No telescope, just tracked Earth rotation w simple electric motor. 

Wankers? Is Boris right to blame sexual frustration & low self-esteem? 

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jan/30/boris-johnson-jihadists-wankers … … Might explain pathological hatred of women?

.@GeorgeBooth52 Oh yes, the poor wee studenty-poos mustn't have their little feelingsy-weelingsies upset, must they? Oh just grow up.

Decent, tolerant, multicultural, PC liberals: are we sleepwalking towards a violent, intolerant, freedom-despising  theocracy?

MT “@SecularSpeech: Students Union told us not to display Charlie Hebdo paper at refreshers fair at  Manchester ”. What do these priggishly officious offence-junkies think a university is FOR?   Manchester Student Union this time.

"Now it seems to be he the turn of liberals and Democrats to veer off into their own ideological fever-swamps": http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/liberals-and-the-illiberal-left/384988/

Can't RT all the myriad specific examples @StopGulfSlavery cites of cruelly treated SLAVES, mostly in Saudi Arabia. Horrible if true. Look.

Be suspicious of those who say "infinitely" when they mean no more than "very".

 Richard Dawkins retweeted

 Dörte Faatz @Bitch2410  ·  Jan 28

@RichardDawkins 

There are 2 main streams of Islam: 

1) HasnothingtodowithIslam &

2) HasnothingtodowithIslamatall

Richard Dawkins retweeted

 Robert @robert1z  ·  Jan 28

@RichardDawkins Spot on by Rod Liddle. Excellent piece. @spectator

Oh NO, they're beheading my book ['The Selfish Gene' - and, yes, they really did!] and are going to eat it. Quick, find a flag to rip up and an embassy to burn. 

How DARE you believe someone when he tells you clearly & explicitly what he really believes? http://smithandfranklin.com/current-issues/Believe-the-Terrorists-Religion-Violence-and-the-Power-of-Beliefs/9/14/74/html … Facts are Islamophobic

Michelle Obama goes some way to redeem the ignominy of her husband’s crawling to the odious Saudi regime. 

Think the problem is limited to tiny extremist minority? Polls quoted by @MichaelShermer may give you pause: http://smithandfranklin.com/current-issues/Believe-the-Terrorists-Religion-Violence-and-the-Power-of-Beliefs/9/14/74/html …

Update /rude interruption.

I might or might not be exercising my right to offend, but this one is even better. It contains strong language for which I take fool respnsiblty lol. Sue XX

The BBC told a fairy tale about Richard Dawkins. Now they've apologised. And they all lived happily ever after.

BBC Radio 4 Today producer just phoned me to apologise. Apology accepted. Now I'm off to snorkel near New Guinea.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 5, 2014

So, the BBC have been forced to apologise to Richard Dawkins. On bended knees.

I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.

Radio 4's Today misquoted the 'selfish genius' as saying that fairy tales are harmful to children and falsely implied that he wants to ban Santa Claus. It seems that they had borne him false witness.

Even though he hadn't said that, Today's report led to Chinese Whispers.

I know that for a fact as one Dawkins-hating family member (who shall remain nameless) was absolutely bursting to tell me about it this morning, and the Telegraph's Tim Stanley went off on one based on what he thought Prof. Dawkins said.

[No confession, no retraction, no apology yet from Prof. Stanley though. Get thee to a confession box, Tim!] 

Richard Dawkins actually believes that "fairy tales, as well as charming, can be good training in critical thinking."

It is fascinating, though, how such untrue memes [to use a Dawkins-inspired word] get about in the media, parts of which are just gagging, yes gagging, for any old Richard Dawkins story [cos it winds up their readers and generates clicks].

If I may draw an analogy, large parts of the media (and many of them the very same people) were also gagging, yes gagging, for anti-UKIP stories in the run-up to the Euro elections - and, yes, I do mean the Mail and the Telegraph. 

Nigel Farage and Richard Dawkins aren't obvious bedfellows but they share this in common: Both are often on the receiving end of some very dodgy reporting.

We've been here before with Richard Dawkins - see an earlier article we did, The Tabloid Reporter Delusion, which took down an earlier smear against him from the Daily Mail. 

Just because who don't like someone - and many people regard Prof. Dawkins as a devil and a fool - doesn't mean they deserve to be misquoted and smeared.  

Don't forget: Thou shalt not raise a false report: put not thine hand with the wicked to be an unrighteous witness.

Silly season

Pandering to attention-seekers is a very annoying trait of the BBC. Putting people like Owen Jones, Mehdi Hasan and Tim Stanley on our screens at every opportunity is a ratings-grasping ploy, the equivalent of an internet phenomenon I keep coming across, called ‘click-bait.’

Then there’s the Bongo Bongo Land thing, which Ed West has nailed, and the ‘is a 13-year-old too young to be called a sexual predator’ question, which is another multi-faceted issue rather than a suitable topic for knee-jerk politically correct outrage. 

We all know that the BBC’s charter obliges them to appear impartial, but I think that’s an unachievable goal. The BBC’s current interpretation of impartiality has had a bizarre outcome; a policy of banning value judgements wherever they see them, be they hiding behind stones or trees. (Then the stones or trees will call: 'Oh journalist, servant of the BBC, there is a value judgement behind me, come and kill it.'” )  

If properly adhered to it would oblige the BBC to give equally balanced non judgmental coverage to the utterances of, say, the devil incarnate and the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the case of the West versus Islam, the BBC would need to give equal credence to the president of Iran and the prime minister of Great Britain. Oh, wait! as they say on the internet.

Deciding which topics to highlight is of course a fundamental value judgement that all news editors have to make; therefore those they choose, and even more tellingly, those they ignore, are bound to reveal partiality while serving as a constant reminder of the impossibility of  achieving the charter’s aspirations. 

After much consideration, the inevitable conclusion is that this policy could only be truly realised if the BBC were to provide wall-to-wall blanket coverage of everythingeverywhere, or none at all. 

Blank screens would genuinely offer rolling 24 hour impartiality, but that’s quite silly, bearing in mind that we are forced to pay to watch the BBC on pain of imprisonment. If there were no BBC programmes at all, due to an ultimate, terminal avoidance of taking sides, who would pay for the upkeep of Broadcasting house, and all the gagging orders and stuff? 

When a subject upon which they patently do make value judgements raises its head, (say, the assumption that Israel and its inhabitants and politicians are inherently evil)  the powers that be simply pooh-pooh the matter with the one-size-fits-all Devil’s Advocate Defence. Peter Allen’s bosses assure us that’s what he was doing when a value judgement slipped through, and he accidentally said  ‘Israel always wreaks its revenge’’ and ‘it does it all the time!’  - the devil!

They say August is the silly season, and things are indeed looking silly but this is not confined to any particular month.

Tim Stanley came to my attention on a recent edition of Sunday Morning Live. He’s writing in the Telegraph about Tommy Robinson who, it seems, while trying to illustrate why the EDL objects to unlimited Muslim immigration on Twitter, linked - he claims inadvertently - to an antisemitic website. Stanley concludes, therefore, that the EDL and its leader must themselves be antisemitic.  

Tim Stanley is a proud Catholic, a convert no less, so condemning a whole group by association, or as people like to put it, “tarring with the same brush” the bad apples that discredit but don’t necessarily typify said group, might probably be something he’d best steer clear of. That’s disallowing Tommy Robinson the benefit of the doubt, for the sake of the devil’s argument. 

That is not to make a  “he of all people,” accusation, by the way; not the “he should have learnt the lesson,” philosophy, as in Lib Dem MP David Ward’s illogical advice to “the Jews” who he (Ward) believes are inflicting a holocaust upon the Palestinian people. His flawed logic seems to be that because the Jews endured a holocaust at the hands of the Nazis, they should have somehow learnt to sit there and take another beating from the Islamists, when anyone with a modicum of common sense would conclude that ‘once bitten twice shy’ is a far more logical response. Of course David Ward refuses to acknowledge the genocidal aspirations of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian Ayatollahs and the goals of assorted participants of Arab uprisings.  (Which is the elimination of Jews/Israel by the way.)

Accordingly, the unfortunate principle of Ward’s ‘lesson’ appears to be that Jews, as ‘experienced victims’ should sacrifice themselves on a morally superior altar - ‘empathy with the new victims’ instead of restraining an enemy from carrying out its murderous aspirations, to the extent that the well-taught, once-bitten Jews must let history repeat and allow themselves to be annihilated once again.

 Tim Stanley, as a Catholic, would no doubt object to the assumption that he and all Catholics are associated with and jointly guilty of deeds done by other Catholics, so can he really make a similarly unfair and sweeping assumption about the EDL on the strength of an ill-judged Tweet from Tommy R? 

I wasn’t impressed with Tim Stanley on Sunday Morning Live. The way he lolled in his chair in a disrespectfully supercilious slouch that says I’m so arrogant I can’t even be arsed to sit up straight didn’t help. And his bouffant hair. When he started eulogising about Muslim immigration I’m sure many people wondered in what English region of Bangladesh he resides. “I divide my time between London, Oxford and Los Angeles, with the occasional weekend in Washington DC.” So not Luton then.

Stanley has caught the attention of several other  bloggers. I now realise that although some say he’s written a decent biography,  he’s taken to full-time attention-seeking, the gratification of which I am duly furthering. 

Here’s a clever summary of Stanley from commenter ‘Sarka’ on SarahAB’s thread on Harry’s Place.

“Oh dear, I shall get lowdown here. Tim Stanley is terribly comic. He is a religious hobbyist - raised a Baptist, converted to Anglcanism, then to RCism. He claims he will die a Catholic, but he's still young and I'm not sure...He already finds cradle Catholics and many priests wimpy and liberal - and professes to shock at how many American Catholics disagree with church doctrine on contraception...

But Sarah, is there really any point in picking him up on his using secular as a dirty word? It's just part of the act (which is sort of cobbled together from bits of Evelyn Waugh, late Muggeridge, Longford, Piers Paul Reade etc etc...). He only does it to annoy because he knows it teases. It would be more to the point to suggest that his "orientalist" excitement about Europeans going off and going all romantically Islamic is quite revealing about his own religious tourism. As does the calculated grovel to Muslims now (which might be paraphrased as "Splendid fellow, Johnny Muslim...stands up for what he stands for, lesson to us all!" Though of course, if Stanley was going just for a young fogey image that would be more straightforward - in fact he seems to be trying for the impossible - i.e. a trendy cultural relativist Americanophile Islamophile culturally conservative going-to-the-dogsism...Very odd, but I guess this is the post-modern age so we can expect all kinds of weirdo fusions."

 As I started with click-bait: “Pandering to attention-seeking is a very annoying trait of the BBC. Putting people like Owen Jones, Mehdi Hasan and Tim Stanley on our screens at every opportunity is a ratings-grasping ploy,” which was an attention-grabbing beginning intended to captivate the reader before confronting him with material he might skip, I’ll end with the Bongo Bongo Land thing. 

People (ordinary folk like retired taxi-drivers) are saying that this country has turned into a place where "telling the truth turns you into a racist." Why, just such a fellow made that unsolicited observation this very afternoon, on hearing that the local day centre for the aged has had its funds cut.

Talking to someone who’s doing a stint in Cambodia I was told that everyone there is paid in cash because they haven’t got a tax system or anything. “How does the staggeringly rich leader come by his vast wealth?” I enquired. “Oh, he purloins the foreign aid.” came the cavalier reply. I don’t know if Cambodia qualifies as bongo bongo, but I’m sure Nigeria does.

The BBC doesn’t like people criticising the concept of this country doling out foreign aid when we’re feeling the pinch - and which organisation has been obsessing about Tory cuts and the hardships they’ve caused to all and sundry the minute the Labour party lost the election? Worse still, the crime of using the term  bongo bongo land, which has provided a convenient diversion from exposing the double standards alluded to above. Yes the offender might not be a credit to UKIP, but who is?

It’s silly, but it isn’t just in August though, is it.