Who to believe (yet again)?

When I woke up this morning and read the newspaper front pages on the Sky website, I wondered which of them (if any) the BBC would run with. 

When I tuned into Today it became clear that they'd chosen to go with the Guardian's lead story about a grammar school performing a U-turn on ejecting its under-performing A-level students. 

(The Guardian and the BBC never seem very enamoured with grammar schools, so I wasn't surprised by that. Plus it is a bizarre story). 

Andrew Norfolk's latest scoop, the main story in today's Times, only got brief mentions in the programme's news bulletins.

This was the first full-length interview with Sarah Champion since she was compelled to quit her shadow cabinet post after telling the truth about Pakistani men being mainly responsible for the epidemic of grooming gangs which have afflicted so many towns and cities in the UK over the past couple of decades - a scandal Mr Norfolk of the Times so courageously took the lead in exposing. Ms Champion, having initially apologised for her choice of language but having subsequently received gazillions of letters of support, has now performed her very own U-turn and gone back to her starting point. She's now standing by her original statements and decrying the London-led Left's 'floppy' evasiveness on the issue.

Andrew Norfolk's piece certainly championed our Sarah, omitting her 'sucking up' to her Muslims constituents over Gaza in 2014, not to mention her inaction while the Rotherham scandal was actually happening. 

(I note in passing that the Sky News website has a fully report on this story while the BBC News website hasn't.)

That said, Today did focus on Andrew Norfolk's previous scoop.

Nick Robinson interviewed the Tower Hamlets mayor John Biggs and the self-same Andrew Norfolk over the 'white Christian girl put in the care of hijab/burka-wearing Muslim carers' story.

The Times itself has come out strongly in defence of Mr Norfolk's reporting but his enemies are still circling, swooping and pecking, and they seem to think they've got him. Are they right to do so? And was Today circling, swooping and pecking too?

Well, having had so little time to blog in recent weeks I've pretty much concentrated on this one story in recent days (to the exclusion of almost everything else), and I think that Mr Norfolk did overegg the pudding and wasn't as rigorous as he could have been with the details, and he has had to backtrack somewhat. Plus I believe he was wrong (at best) in at least one of the answers he's given to the BBC in interviews in defence of himself. 

But I also think that his critics have been employing every trick in the book to try and discredit him, and that his original (and subsequent) reporting was based on proper investigative reporting and on the views of a council insider (a whistle-blower?). Some of his points have been disputed and denied but not definitively refuted, and others (like the niqab/burka question) keep getting side-stepped.

What we have are contradictory accounts, and different events being reported, and people mixing them up and making five from two plus two (including the BBC). 

That he did also raise a genuine issue is shown by two pieces (h/t Sue) found beyond the BBC - namely at the Spectator and, again, in the Times - both of which provide a context for the Times's coverage: The same extremist imam who lost a libel case against the BBC after alleging that Andrew Neil libelled him has been caught encouraging Muslims to take children into foster care - an example of Douglas Murray calls "the end-point of diversity, where you have a different mono-culture asserting itself in the way it knows how".

It is, indeed, a fascinating story. 

How did Today do today? Well, I've read so such social media comment about it that I'm whirling like a dervish. One group raged at Nick Robinson for 'promoting Islamophobia' by even repeating the Times's claims to John Biggs. Others have claimed that Nick Robinson was deliberately trying to rubbish the story by trying to discredit Andrew Norfolk. 

Nick Robinson, replying to Mr Norfolk, insisted that the programme was being fair by inviting both him and the mayor of Tower Hamlets John Biggs onto Today to give both sides of the story, which is certainly true, and, to be fair, he gave both parties the space to say their piece. 

That said, Mr Biggs was interviewed for significantly longer than Mr Norfolk (8m 28s compared to 4m 53s for Mr Norfolk) and it was annoying that he had to tell Andrew Norfolk "we haven't got much time left". That probably came from on high though. After all, they had a two-minute final feature about a train to slot in before the pips. 

Moreover, as Sue might put it (and has done), in both interviews Nick was a little flimsy, but that's better than browbeating interviewees to death.

That said (again), as Enough noted on a previous thread, Nick & Co. seem to have lost sight of the fact that this is Britain, and see "cultures" as morally equivalent.

So there you go. It's all very complicated, isn't it?

Further thoughts and an update

Following my earlier piece, Craig has reminded me that Amina Lone, like the majority of her co-religionists, is "actively pro-Palestinian" on Twitter. Quelle surprise, as they say. 

No matter how outspoken a moderate Muslima may be in going public with her criticism of regressive cultural practices, she will still oppose Israel and Zionism. You can take the misogyny out of a moderate but you can’t take the antisemitism out of a Muslim. Or something. 

Do look at Amina Lone’s Twitter feed for a minute.  Here she says the deselection “happened in June not because of any recent interviews”.

It just shows how misconceptions (lies?) jet round the world before the truth (whatever that is) has time to put its burka on.

Even if her deselection is genuinely nowt to do with Sarah Champion’s aborted criticism of Muslim grooming gangs, the perception that it is has been generally accepted as truthful.

The trouble is that, true or false, it has had  little impact on the Labour Party’s standing, just as all the rest of the appalling stuff that pours forth from team Corbyn is ignored or glossed over by the MSM.

Also via the same timeline, note this series of tweets about the eyebrow brigade from “uberfeminist” including several foul-mouthed and embittered tweets by Nadia Chan. I wonder why Peter Kosminsky didn't base one of his characters on Ms Chan? His drama would have gained in authenticity what it might have lost in empathy.

*******

Here’s another P.S. This one is to Craig’s Andrew Norfolk scoop.

Click on the link to the paper review with Daisy McArthur and Tim Stanley. Did you spot Daisy McArthur’s immediate response to the story? She began with a preemptive caveat, presumably to head off the politically correct protests from her friends and colleagues that she assumed would be forthcoming.

“There’s a bit of me that thinks there…well, there’s a lot of me that thinks there is more to this story than meets the eye, and I suspect this might be the beginning of a number of stories in Tower Hamlets.  

The nub of the story is that this 5 year old little girl, you can see her picture on the front page there pixellated, has been placed, has gone into foster care taken away from her mother and has been placed um with a Muslim family who don’t speak English all the time at home and obviously you can see there in the picture wears a niquab or a burka. 

Now the controversy is that people will immediately think this is pandering to you know racist views - why shouldn’t you have one ethnicity tor one religion fostering another? Of course when you come down to it, if the child can’t make herself understood or doesn’t speak the same language as this family, if the child’s not used to somebody having their face covered, I think that is a serious, serious problem.

No Daisy. The controversy is not that, and by the way, what are these racist views to which you allude, prey? Oh, you mean people who suffer from that terrible affliction, Islamophobia.

Yes, it might indeed be less controversial if families could foster within their own culture. Yes, cultural considerations might have to take a back seat when needs must, but why must we turn this particular case on its head to test our own outrage? Are we so afraid of being accused of hypocrisy? 

Do we really need to defend our outrage at this scandalous scenario by bringing up the case of, say, the UKIP family who were allegedly denied the right to foster because of their politically incorrect values?   Whataboutery like that shouldn't even be necessary.

Please, what’s wrong with a bit of inconsistency in this case? Have we all forgotten? This is Britain for heaven’s sake, not Pakibloodystan.  Oh, I forgot; it was Tower Hamlets.

No go

The Today presenters thought it was hilarious. BBC ‘comedians’ used it as material for their cutting edge satire. Charlie Brooker featured it, mocking the very idea.

Someone as racist and deluded as Steven Emerson deserves to be laughed out of town, they chortled, in unison. 

He apologised, more abjectly than was strictly appropriate.

"There are no such things as no-go areas,” said he. “Birmingham is a beautiful city!”

Gatestone: Soeren Kern.

“In August 2007, researchers at Manchester University predicted that the number of native white Britons in Birmingham would drop by nearly one-fifth over the next 20 years, from 65% in 2006 to 48% in 2027. At the same time, the number of Pakistanis in the city would nearly quadruple, increasing from 13% in 2006 to 48% in 2027.”

(Not to mention Blackburn, Bolton, Bradford, Brent, Dewsbury, Leeds,  Leicester, Enfield, Newham, Redbridge,Waltham Forest, Luton, Manchester, Oldham, Pendle, Rochdale, Slough, Westminster? Wycombe)

The BBC is well aware of this trend. There was a Panorama about it in 2009. There was that Stacey Dooley documentary for BBC 3. There’s Tower Hamlets. The trial of Luftur Rahman is going ahead at this very moment. The BBC knows all this, despite its reports of the Tower Hamlets electoral fraud trial being comparatively subdued. Compared, for example, to this:

There is a no-go area though, obviously. It’s a bit ‘haram’ to scaremonger about Muslims and the rise of Islam. Some people like to call it ‘Islamophobic’, so they don’t go there.