Letterbox gate

This hooha about ladies dressed as a pillar-box has seen the BBC pushing the correlation between antisemitism in the Labour Party and “Islamophobia” in the Conservative Party. There is no real correlation; only fakes.

The Corbynites insist that the antisemitism crisis has been confected to discredit Jeremy Corbyn, while your average puzzled onlooker observes as letter-box-gate is increasingly inflated, hour by hour, for the purpose of vilifying Boris Johnson, who, according to the BBC, is cynically courting the populist vote en route to the top job.

Many believe the Labour Party’s anti-Israel rhetoric is a cynical way of courting the considerable Muslim vote en route to Number Ten.

On the one hand we have Nazi-like antisemitism in the Labour Party (emanating from the hard left and Judaeo-phobic Muslims) which is either being flatly denied by camp Corbyn, or dismissed by foolish left-wing politicians and media pundits as justifiable opposition to the policies of the Israeli government. (Which always comes under the heading “What Israel is doing”)

On the other side of the coin, it is argued that the very concept of ‘Islamophobia’ is false and that opposing or criticising Islam is not a psychological condition but a rational response to the creeping Islamisation that the BBC appears to be foisting upon us, which we have to pretend is fine or be deemed racist.

Genuine anti-Muslim bigotry may be a real phenomenon, but being flippant about pillar boxes is not it. 

Why should we have to pretend that extreme Islamic garb is unremarkable? It’s ludicrous, impractical and medically inadvisable. Extreme fashions come and go; piercings, tattoos, crippling high-heeled shoes, all statements, like “Look at me. I’m a bit of an idiot.” 

Wearing the Islamic, 'extreme modesty' costume in public is equally impractical, inappropriate and idiotic, but with an implicit message: “Look at me!  I’m more pious than you, and unlike you, I’m virtuous and modest. You are debauched and immoral, but I am good.“ 

Evan Davis is a gay man, don’t forget. Why does he bat for the homophobic brigade? The way he handled Newsnight (6/8/18) is as baffling as watching while pre-Corbyn, formerly Blairite MPs silently cling to the sinking ship. 

The item on letterboxgate followed a short item about antisemitism, so was asking for a BBC style link containing false moral equivalence.

“Labour isn’t the only political party that descended into hate speech. Boris Johnson wrote a piece for the Telegraph this morning about a ban on women wearing burkas and nikabs in Denmark. He came down clearly against such a ban, but in the process managed to say about Muslim women wearing them, quote. ‘ it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letterboxes. He separately said they looked like bank robbers.”

Evan leaned forward and gazed intently into the camera.

“Now you have to ask yourself how would that have sounded if something similar was said by Jeremy Corbyn, of orthodox Jews.

No! you do not have to ask yourself that. There is no equivalence. Boris was defending a legal right to wear this uniform but was acknowledging its blatant, undeniable ludicrousness. With humour. 

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, has a long and troubling record of Judaeophobic behaviour which is being unearthed in an ongoing series of revelations. If he made a disparaging remark about the appearance of religious Jews it would have a completely different and more sinister significance.

  

For the record, Haredi Jews do dress in eccentric garb and yes, it may indicate a wish for separateness, and it may give out some sort of “don’t come near me” vibe. It’s not as if this hasn’t been lampooned and described in flippant and derogatory terms many times by all and sundry, but have we heard defiant accusations of racism from that community? They’re probably so insular that they ain’t even bovvered.

Remember that time @JeremyCorbyn appeared on PressTV and said that the Israeli government and Israeli embassy are “very assertive towards all journalists and the BBC” and as proof of this said “there is a bias towards saying . . . Israel has a right to exist”. No? Here you go... pic.twitter.com/9Jy8l1VKHT

— The Golem (@TheGolem_) August 7, 2018

My old man's a bus driver ('e wears a bus driver's 'at)

“Well, there’s been a pretty sharp reaction to the Johnson column” continued Evan, as he brought Alex Forsyth in to reiterate the stuff outlined above. They cited such authoritative bodies as The Muslim Council of Britain and the ubiquitous Sayeeda Warsi (who was on radio 4 again this morning with Peter Hennessy) to underline their point, and as there was no-one available from the Tories, they consulted Mohammed Amin, Chair, Conservative Muslim Forum, who was duly outraged. Outraged by letterboxgate. Suffice it to say that one attribute that couldn’t be ascribed to Amin is GSOH.

Earlier on I saw on TV an animated lady in a full face veil fiercely expressing her indignation through a slit in her costume. Now you come to mention it, she did look as though she was dressed as a letterbox. 

They never will

The BBC is still dutifully addressing the Labour Party’s antisemitism problem. Not exactly addressing. It seems more accurate to say they’re paying lip service to addressing it. They’d like to get to the bottom of it, or they’d like you to think they’d like to get to the bottom of it. They never will though. Not while they’re still broadcasting such biased reporting about Israel from the likes of Jon Donnison and Paul Adams.

I think Jon Donnison’s addiction to ‘the people of Gaza’ is unhealthy. Kind of obsessive-compulsive. At first, I thought he had been banished by the BBC because his bias was getting too obvious; on the verge of bringing the BBC into disrepute. (joke). One could easily assume he’d been sent down under for a spot of rehab and was now deemed well enough to return to the Middle East.

But no. He hasn’t been sent back to Gaza. He’s bringing those heavily slanted reports about his favourite topic from here and he’s somehow wangled Nazi Ghazi Hamas Hamad past the Beeb’s quality control to vouchsafe that there wasn’t a single drop of violence during the peaceful protests along Gaza’s border with Israel (apart from a few packs of lone wolves.)

Paul Adams had already resurrected the story about Gaza’s mental health problems, which has been spun, with a cunning combination of innuendo and omission, to place the blame on Israel.  

On Sunday’s Newshour this story appeared yet again. Fathi Harb’s self-immolation was pitched as the desperate response of a man driven mad by Israel’s blockade.

Adams didn’t recount the words Fathi allegedly cried as he burned, but mumbled something about the “struggle to make a living”. Bizarrely, the pronunciation of the deceased’s name, “fatty”, made the whole thing sound all the more surreal.

Ynet News:

A 20-year-old Palestinian father of two from Gaza set himself on fire Saturday night in the city's Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, all while cursing the strip's Hamas rulers who he apparently blamed for his family's poverty and the dismal economic situation in Gaza. 

Eye witnesses saw the man dousing himself in flammable liquid shouting "damn the government" before lighting himself up. Video footage of the incident shows the young man burning alive and screaming in agony with passersby rushing to put out the flames. 

Fathi's family and associates emphasized that he does not suffer from mental illness, but noting he was distraught over his brother's injury in one of the "March of Return" demonstrations at the border with Israel, which are organized and promoted by Hamas.

If the BBC are genuinely puzzled about surging antisemitism they are playing a ridiculous game of “innocent Face” 

We heard Yvette Cooper speaking to Martha Kearney this morning. She thinks the whole thing would go away if they merely “adopted the full definition,” with all its examples.

“Because it does still, rightly, allow people to criticise Israel for the deeply damaging things it is doing.”

What are these deeply damaging things, I wonder? Are they fag-ends and tidbits overheard from the kind of reporting we’ve just been discussing mixed together with ‘facts’ and statistics regurgitated straight from “the Palestinian Ministry of  Health”. (Hamas)

There was an amusing rant from a former member of Trump’s team this lunchtime. She had a good old go at Mark Mardell.

“Dr. Betsy McCoy was an economic advisor to President Trump when he was President Elect and she joins me now from New York. Hello there!”

“Hello I must say I’ve been listening to this previous interview and the bias is so evident, so appalling, that your narrator used the word  ‘treason’, which even the ‘witch-hunter himself, Robert Mueller has not used. It’s quite shocking, I hope your listeners know what an incredibly biased presentation that was.”

Yikes! Joan Rivers lives!

Talking of Yvette Cooper, did you see Ed Balls strutting his stuff last night? At least his enjoyable film gave these deplorable the space to show that they were not quite so deplorable after all. 

Ed, on the other hand, was positively Gallawayesque in his lycra costumes. (Wow, he’s got hefty since Strictly) He said he was there to listen and learn, but my impression was that he failed to do both. He’s turning into a positive Anne Widdecombe; the Yin to Widders’s Yang. 

I suppose people do change when they leave politics but I can’t help thinking of Yvette’s face, all fired up with indignant righteousness, condemning hatred of the Jews while insisting on retaining the freedom to condemn Israel for “what it is doing” to the Palestinians. 

Compare and contrast

For fans of 'compare and contrast' pieces, here's a breakdown of how the UK's three main broadcasters' news websites are reporting one particular story this evening:

Headlines

ITV: Banning face veils 'is not the answer' says Boris Johnson

SKY: Boris Johnson mocks women in burkas who 'look like bank robbers'

BBC: Boris Johnson faces criticism over burka 'letter box' jibe


First three paragraphs

ITV:

Boris Johnson has hit out against calls to ban face-covering garments like the burka in public places. 

The former foreign secretary said Denmark was wrong to impose fines for wearing the burka or niqab in the streets. 

But he came under attack for saying Muslim women in burkas "look like letter boxes" and comparing them to bank robbers.

SKY:

Boris Johnson has compared women who wear the burka to "bank robbers", but argued against banning them in Britain. 

The former foreign secretary said he found the covering worn by some Muslim women "oppressive" and questioned why they would "go around looking like letter boxes". 

He added it was "weird" and "bullying" to "expect women to cover their faces".

BBC:

Former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has been accused of Islamophobia after saying Muslim women wearing burkas "look like letter boxes". 

He said he was against bans on face-covering veils in public places, in his Telegraph column, but added that they looked "absolutely ridiculous". 

The Muslim Council of Britain accused him of "pandering to the far right".

Structure of reports (by paragraphs)

ITV:
1-2 Views of Boris Johnson
3 Views of critics of Boris Johnson
4-5 Background reporting
6-8 Views of Boris Johnson
9-10 Views of critics of Boris Johnson
(Tweet from critic of Boris Johnson)
11-16 Views of Boris Johnson

Total for Boris Johnson -  11 

Total against Boris Johnson - 3 (& 1 tweet)

SKY:
1-9 Views of Boris Johnson
10-17 Views of critics of Boris Johnson
18-19 Government's view

Total for Boris Johnson -  9 

Total against Boris Johnson - 8 

Government's view - 2

BBC:
1 Views of critics of Boris Johnson
2 Views of Boris Johnson
3-11 Views of critics of Boris Johnson
(Tweet from critic of Boris Johnson)
12- 19 Views of Boris Johnson
20-26 Views of critics of Boris Johnson
27-28 Government's view

Total for Boris Johnson - 9 

Total against Boris Johnson - 17 (& 1 tweet)

Government's view - 2

How bad is it?

I think I might have mentioned this before, but I haven’t watched much TV recently. The media’s treatment of the antisemitism crisis in the Labour Party makes for excruciating viewing. Of course, that’s not the only reason I’ve stayed away. There’s also the matter of the BBC’s aggressive ‘diversity’ policy, where every other presenter is Black, Asian or minority ethnic, or a woman.

Many of whom must have been employed purely on the grounds of race, identity or gender. 

The Victoria Derbyshire show, hosted by Reeta Chakrabarti gave us a shocker a couple of days ago. BBC Watch has transcribed much of it. This is an example of the BBC plumbing new depths.

It must have been their aggressive diversity policy that possessed the BBC to bring in a young lady named Katy Sian to opine on left-wing antisemitism, and outrageously, to present her as an authority on the topic.

A respectful Reeta Chakrabarti treated Ms. Sian as if she was a disinterested arbiter and expert, whose contribution to the discussion was necessary for the purpose of counterbalancing the allegations of the two Jewish guests, whose lack of objectivity needed to be put in its proper perspective.

The reality couldn’t be further from the truth.  This lady may well be an expert on racism, but her specialty is ‘Islamophobia’. Listening to this inarticulate and slow-witted woman speak, the mind truly boggles at the idea that she’s involved in a university in any academic capacity at all. But I guess that says something about the sorry state of universities these days.

A cursory Google comes up with enough information - surely the commissioning editor was aware of this - to show that she’s not an authority on “racism” at all. She’s a left-wing, pro-Islam, anti-Israel activist. So, the BBC brought an important debate on antisemitism in the Labour Party down to the lowest possible level.

Sikh blogger SikhSangat describes Katy Sian as “an Islamist apologist and ‘academic crackpot,’ “ and

“a left-wing author who likes to think of herself as an intellectual on racism but in reality, she’s a pseudo-intellectual racist.“ 

She supports CAGE, sources her Tweets from the Guardian and her Twitter banner picture is of PLFP hijacker Leila Khaled. 

Reeta Chakrabarti generously gave her the last word, which she took advantage of to make this  plainly antisemitic announcement:   ”to critique Israel’s settler colonial state is not antisemitic.”

Open Thread

New open thread. This cat is shocked, shocked, by something s/he's xe's just seen on the BBC.

Best of frenz

Ha! By pure coincidence, Rod Liddle has produced a perfect analysis of Ahed Tamimi’s conversation with Krishnan Guru-Murthy on yesterday’s Channel 4 news.

“The present crisis within the Labour party reminds me of the time when I was filming a television documentary in Palestine a few years back. One after another the interviewees lined up in that flyblown, arid landscape. Grizzled old thugs from Al-Fatah. Sinister bespectacled little Hamas factotums. Peasant farmers, middle-class teachers, landowners and scruffy teenagers in Barcelona shirts. In front of the camera they all said the same thing: ‘Jews are our frenz. We have no quarrel with Jews. Only the Israeli state!’ And then, when the camera was turned off, they all said the same thing. ‘There is a reason nobody likes them, isn’t there?’ And ‘Nobody will tell the truth because they control the media.’ And ‘The United States and Britain are run by Jews.’

This happened not once but every time, with every interview, once the camera was turned off. A deep, immutable and deranged hatred drawn directly from a sacred text.”

I don’t know which is worse P.R. for prisoner welfare. Ahed’s weight gain or Tommy Robinson’s weight loss. Yes, I do. I think it’s marginally worse to be afraid of being poisoned by your enemies than being fattened up by them.

Of course, the MSM’s take on the Tamimi family enterprise is grossly one-sided. Palestinian demands are treated as if they’re perfectly reasonable. What exactly does justice for the Palestinians mean?  “Palestine” must be a multi-cultural one-state-for-all, as it was before 1947. Jews are our frenz.

Natalie Haynes Doesn't Stand Up for (Dead) Christopher Hitchens

Natalie Haynes, standing up

One Radio 4 series I've always rather enjoyed is Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. 

It's in its fourth series now and I've heard and, up till now, enjoyed every episode of it.

It's USP is that it's a BBC programme about Classical Greece and Rome presented by a former stand-up comedienne. 

I like quirky Natalie's enthusiasm for the classics. She makes me smile and, every so often, laugh even. And her enthusiasm spurs me into exploring things I've not explored before. 

It's not hard to see it as classic old-fashioned BBC: Inform, educate and entertain. 

But it's also very contemporary BBC. 

Its mock-amateurism-plus-experts is just for starters in that respect...

This week's episode talked about Phryne, the beautiful Greek courtesan who inspired the great Athenian sculptor Praxiteles of Athens to create a trend-blazing full-sized female nude, the Aphrodite of Knidos (which aroused at least one Athenian male to embarrass himself to the point of disgrace and suicide), and who was tried for impiety.

According to tradition, at her trial her lawyer Hypereides (the Michael Mansfield of his day), with the trial seeming to be going against here, disrobed her and showed the jurors her naked body and, "out of pity", the jurors acquitted her. 

Alas poor bare-breasted Phryne (her name a Tommy Robinson-style moniker that meant 'Toad') struggled to retain her position as the episode's focus. Her champion Natalie Haynes usurped her place and spent a remarkable amount of time ranting....yes, ranting....about herself and how upset and hard-done-by she felt personally about a Vanity Fair piece by the late Christopher Hitchens called Why Women Aren't Funny.

We were in full feminist rant mode here. 

And, to my shocked astonishment, Natalie banged on and on, and joked on and on, about how she's still alive while he's dead.

She really did. 

(He died of cancer in 2011). 

And the ruder she got about her aliveness and his deadness the more BBC audience whooped and clapped.

Now, why did that BBC audience whoop and clap rather than gasp, groan and boo (or stay stonily silent)? How do I know? But...

Phryne (as Aphrodite)

Probably they did so because they - or the most vocal parts of 'they' - felt that it's the right thing to do when you're in such an audience and faced with such jokes: applaud a right-on feminist rant from a BBC comedienne because it sounds like the right thing to do, and whoop and clap even harder if you think it reaches Frankie Boyle levels of offensiveness against a deserving target, even if you know next to nothing about that target or his views {and even when the jokes come nowhere near Frankie's jokes, quality-wise}. You're a BBC Radio 4 audience after all. That's what you do.  

So, am I just being a snowflake here? Shouldn't I just laugh along with Natalie here?

Yes, she's not died from cancer yet but Christopher Hitchens has. (You go girl!) And he upset her with a provocative article in an American magazine and now he's dead. (Karma!). What's to object to?

And BBC Radio 4 must have thought the same way. They gave this edition of the programme a pass.

Tommy Robinson derangement syndrome

I was puzzled by the Spectator’s decision to republish Douglas Murray’s piece about Owen Jones, which was first penned in August 2014, during Israel’s infamous retaliatory action against Hamas.  A 4th anniversary, perhaps? Owen Jones was lying, plain and simple.

I can’t quite tell if the article has been updated, but not to worry, it’s still as pertinent as it was the first time around. Owen's steadfast refusal to acknowledge his mistake is a prime example of someone so blinded by an ideological obsession that “there is simply no evidence that will ever persuade (a conspiracy theorist) that he or she is wrong” as Melanie Phillips so eloquently put it in her unfortunate recent attempt to hoist herself with her own petard. ( I mentioned it yesterday, but I think I got away with it) 

Never mind. Douglas Murray’s piece about Owen Jones led me (I’m a sucker for being led by stuff like that) to read littleOwen’s latest effort, particularly as it concerns “Tommy”. Unfortunately, not the deaf dumb and blind kid who sure plays a mean pinball, but another legend, namely one ex-EDL founder whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon.

I don’t know why people derive such satisfaction from uttering that name. Is it something about the “Yaxley” that gets them so angry? It does sound a bit exotic. But it’s “an English toponymic surname” derived from a place in Cambridgeshire. Or, is it the “Lennon”? It could be the effrontery of appropriating the hallowed name of a sainted Beatle. 

Sometimes a middle name is included in the narrative, “Christopher”, uttered in implicitly scathing tones, as if to say “what? That low-life “tanning salonista*" Tommy Robinson is getting above himself with all those highfalutin double-barrel and unnecessary middle names? 

(* Marina Hyde’s description; more of which later.)

So back to Owen Jones, whose piece is headed:

“The far right is at its strongest since the 1930s, and the media is helping" and tagged: The far right.

I’m not 100% sure whether this piece is a parody. It could be a “false flag” thing. But if you read it in a Stockport accent out of one side of your imaginary mouth as if you were Owen Jones, you’ll probably conclude it’s real. I’m not sure whether doing this makes the actual content more, or less ludicrous, but it’s probably genuine Owen, with the unintended comedic element, heightened by the portrait of the author, top right, with his school uniform-like outfit making him look even more prepubescent than usual.

Here’s the opening sentence: 

“The far right is on the march, and it is being legitimised and enabled by parts of the mainstream media.”

On the march, eh? In all its goose-stepping glory. Who’ve we got? 

Raheem Kassam, Piers Morgan, Steve Bannon, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Jacob Rees-Mogg. (Hmm, what about Stephen Rees-Mogg? How would that sound? Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Rees-Mogg?) Farage and Oswald Mosley. Those were the bad guys.

The good guys are:

Possibly Nicola Sturgeon, Ash Sarkar (leftwing Muslim writer, since you ask) and last but not least Lady Sayeeda Warsi.

The piece itself mainly consists of ad homs, so it’s hardly worth Fisking. On the other hand, Marina Hyde’s piece, which is in a broadly similar vein, is positively beggin’ for it.

Her piece is headed:

The dark stars of the far right compete to bask in the glory of Tommy Robinson and oddly, tagged “Celebrity”

Her bad guys are:

Katie Hopkins, Raheem Kassam, Nigel Farage, Gerard Batten (UKip) Steve Bannon, Ezra Levant, Geert Wilders, Boris Johnson, Jacob rees-Mogg, Arron Banks.

So, a little more imaginative than Jones, but equally predictable. Not that I can personally boast unpredictability as a trait. In fact, as I start to Fisk, I’m reminded of that phrase “It takes one to know one” because I recognise the habit of using excessively emotive and disparaging language to express 'passion' in the most effective way possible because I do the same thing myself in my own bloggeringly amateurish way.

Marina Hyde does it with a vengeance. She has a list of scornful adjectives for the English Defence League founder, one of which I have already mentioned. Yes, it's ‘tanning salonista’. Apparently, he once had a tanning salon business. We’re talking ‘lowlife’ here - the kind of business the Kray twins might have.  “Stone Island Roderick Spode” is an inference I’m less familiar with, but following the link provided I find Spode is one of PG Wodehouse’s parody fascists. Perhaps someone can help me with “Stone Island”. Let’s assume it’s not flattering. 

Also from that link, a useful tip. 

“Because this is the book in which Bertie Wooster teaches us one of the best and most effective ways of beating fascists: you stand up to them and you point out exactly how ridiculous they are.”

Must pocket that one. If only I knew an effective way to point out how ridiculous I find the whimpering of Owen Jones and Marina Hyde, when there are real, existential threats behind all this myopic left-wing Islamophillic apologia.

Anyway, alongside “salonista" and “Stone Island Roderick Spode” comes: “ a criminal in fact called Stephen”, “a narcissistic shit”, and “a thug”. So Marina doesn’t think much of celebrity Robinson.

A true Fisking involves demolishing an article paragraph by paragraph, but I don’t think we’ve got the space. I’d be up for it if I thought you had the appetite. But seeing as it’s the Guardian, maybe it’s outside the remit of this blog. 

Marina has a few nicknames for the other characters too. Abu Hopkins, for instance, who thinks she’s “the Winnie Mandela to Robinson’s Nelson”. Geert Wilders is filed under “Eurotrash” and “Kassam is just a nebbishy shitposter”

As if trying to ingratiate herself with, I don’t know, people who use swear words with gay abandon, she introduces hers as if she wants her readers to think she’s a regular guy rather than a prudish snob. You know, to make like she’s getting on down with the shitposters. 

(Nebbish - origin Yiddish; meaning - innocuous, ineffectual, weak, helpless or hapless unfortunate." 

Shitposter? Urban dictionary, he say: “shitposter” - a person who regularly submits terrible or nonsensical posts to an internet forum. )

Gosh, that could be me.

Then there’s the bit about the mortgage fraud, where she scoffs at the idea of Tommy Robinson suffering mental torture and pretending to be a nebbishy wimp when he’s really a hardened criminal, and guilty of what she calls a “hefty” mortgage fraud. That’s really lazy journalism. 

The trouble is, if you overlook the over-the-top disparagement, some of the stuff she says is perfectly true. You can’t argue with the bit about his weight loss. Why, if we all went on a diet of a tin of tuna and a piece of fruit per day, it would solve the world’s obesity crisis in a couple of months. But we wouldn’t choose to have to do so because we were shit-scared (see what I did there Marina) of being poisoned by those who were out to get us. As Marina says: 

“And yet, his BMI seemed to me – how to put this? – rather healthier for a man of his stature than what he’d carried in a few months ago.”


I quite agree. His face did look decidedly gaunt, but he could easily have withstood the loss of another few pounds round the middle. He was hardly emaciated, and probably in better physical shape at the end of his ordeal than at the beginning. 

I did think it was worth comparing this with certain comments about the apparent weight gain of poor imprisoned Ahed Tamimi while she was incarcerated in an Israeli prison, and evidently much more trusting of her jailers’ culinary abilities, despite being convinced that they're out to get her.

And of course, it’s true that Tommy Robinson is guilty of the Hello Magazine syndrome. Sorry, OK Magazine.

“Robinson is the sort of man who made sure a camera was on hand to record what you might think would have been the day’s most intensely private moment – his reunification with two of his young children – and promptly put the footage online. This is the EDL version of flogging your wedding to OK! magazine, and should be judged accordingly.”

However, this misses the point. Recording all this stuff is par for the course. It’s his MO. You might as well criticise the Kardashians for being "the sort of family" that makes sure a camera is on hand whenever they etc., etc. It’s part of the job. No, it’s not part of the job, it IS the job. Yes, it is a shame that the little boy was so upset, but there you go.   Marina knows this because she says:

“packaging it, in order that the emotion might be immediately politicised is a helpful reminder of what you’re dealing with.” 

And she has the answer, which seems to be: 'if you don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen'.

“you shouldn’t keep nearly causing mistrials of child rapists then, should you? Once may be regarded as unfortunate; twice is a thug’s strategy to subvert justice.”

That’s one way of looking at it, “nearly” being the operative word, and not very far from saying “Don’t rock the boat” or “He had it coming”, or what was it Naz Shah reportedly said/shared/liked 

“Rotherham sex abuse victims should ‘shut their mouths for the good of diversity’. If Tommy Robinson had kept his mouth shut, none of this bad stuff need have happened to him and his family. 

Kind of short-sighted principle I think.

Now for something completely different. Different but exactly the same. From the Guardian to The Times. Here we have Janice Turner. Well, really!  We ignore Tommy Robinson at our peril (£)

What is this “Peril?” (to sound rather like Tubbs.) Here we go again, and Janice is even more disparaging than Marina. She’s more left-wing, more Islamophillic, more contemptuous.

“the veneered smile of Robinson: the girlfriend-beating football thug and mortgage fraudster, too thick or arrogant to grasp contempt laws understood by any free-sheet trainee, who risked derailing complex trials and denying alleged rape victims justice.”

Wow. Veneered smile? Oh, does she mean the sparkling new teeth that replaced the natural ones, which he was separated from whilst in prison? How very narcissistic of this thug to have a veneered smile. I wonder if Janice does any gratuitous swearing.

“Robinson’s supporters do not care about his crimes, that their diamond geezer hero is really called Stephen Yaxley-Lennon and ran a sunbed shop.”

No, I don’t actually care that his real name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon-Rees-Mogg any more than I care that Marina Hyde’s dad is called Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams. And, I don’t even care that this working-class lad ran a sunbed shop. (At least it’s not a tattoo parlour) 

Why should I care about that? Why should anyone? Why does Janice Turner think we should? 

It sounds quite enterprising. Would she rather he was on Job Seekers’ Allowance or universal credit? Would that be more honourable, d’you think? 

He could throttle an imam on Luton high street and his YouTube hits — already between 400,000 and a million views per video — would only soar, his martyr myth burn brighter.

Why on earth would she say such a thing?  It’s weird. I can’t even be bothered to go into it. Still, I didn’t quite get what the actual “Peril” is? I might have assumed it was Islam, but Janice Turner doesn’t see it that way. I think, for her, the peril is “right-wing populism.”

What is it about these people? Complaining that people turn a blind eye to mortgage fraud and other heinous crimes such as being in possession of a double-barrel surname when it’s they who are turning the deafest, dumbest and blindest eye to the creeping Islamisation of this rudderless Isle.  

Come on! 

Mark Easton commits a statistical blunder

If you were listening to Radio 4's Today yesterday you might have heard an hourly report by Mark Easton on the latest press release from the Trussell Trust, Britain's largest food bank provider, on 'holiday hunger' among school children, plus - if you were up early enough - an interview with Mark Easton on the same subject during which Mark stressed the "growing seriousness" of the problem and the "real concern" over it:

It's estimated that the additional cost per week per child for a family is somewhere between £30 and £40, so you can see that a family perhaps with, you know, 2-3 children this is a very, very significant extra cost and there is real concern that that in those circumstances families cannot cope...

In his hourly news report he said much the same:

Around one and a half million children are eligible for free school meals in the UK but outside term time struggling families must find an additional £30-40 a week to feed each child. Many resort to food banks.

This sent eyebrows rocketing skywards on social media (h/t Guest Who at Biased BBC): 

Ed Wilson: £30-40 per week to feed a single child? On the same stuff as the rest of the family is eating? Really?
ЭrþlySky: £30-40?!? What are they feeding the kids? We eat very well at home and it’s nothing like that number. And how many meals am I adding - only lunch and I’m not paying the school to do it. So on balance it’s costing nothing more. Or am I missing the point?
Ed Wilson: We're definitely missing something. These are children on free school meals, so it is additional cost, but £30-40 per week per child, with not even a marginal reduction for each extra child, is hard to believe.

This prompted a reply from Mark Easton himself:

Mark Easton: Trussell Trust says £30-40 extra for one child but I've checked their original source https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/news-events/news/2017/03/inquiry-into-why-children-are-going-hungry/ … and it should be for a family of four.  My report has been amended. Thank you for alerting. 

Ed Wilson replied: 

That makes more sense. Thanks.

It was good of Mark to commit to correcting his report and to thank the folk on social media who, as Ed Wilson himself put it later, had employed "the sanity of crowds" and ЭrþlySky duly added:

Thanks for checking. It’s important to present accurate findings when dealing with something so important & emotive as child food poverty. The issue matters, so credibility is really important. Trussell Trust should be challenged on this. Too much no nonsense is put out.

But then the doubts set in as, on reflection, it began striking people that this reporting error on Mark's part could be revealing of something rather more troubling. 

The conversation resumed: 

Jen: And yet they continue to broadcast the same report without correcting!
ЭrþlySky: This is the essence of #FakeNews. Once mistruth is out there it takes on a life & legitimacy of its own. ‘But the BBC said’ or ‘I heard on the radio’ ‘a charity reported’ and complete nonsense becomes a ‘fact’. The question to ask is why don’t journalists check first? I wonder whether journalists who already have a certain political leaning lose the critically reflective insight to intuitively spot when the ‘facts’ are dubious. And people wonder why listener numbers are dropping!

 And others were now thinking the same thing:

Proper Democrat: My point was directed at a professional journalist, urging him to be highly sceptical of every "fact". Unless journalists do this (and stop being willingly complicit, in many cases, in parroting "facts" which chime with their personal opinions) then we all are in big trouble.
Ed Wilson: I agree. The sanity check or sniff test should have made that number look silly.
scratchal: It seems these so called reporters don't have any common sense and feel they can say what they want with zero consequences.  They have one job, report the actual news correctly. This alone affects the credibility of the majority of announcements based on 'data'.

 And yet others waxed sarcastic at Mark's expense:

Iconoclast: To be clear you actually believe it costs £40 per week to give an average child lunch?
Ross Grant: Unquestionably it seems. Maybe that’s pasta with truffles on in Islington.

This raises at least two interesting questions: 

Was Mark Easton engaged in churnalism here, so to speak 'copying and pasting' a Trussell Trust press release without properly checking - i.e. without verifying its statistics?  

And was Mark Easton blinded to the obvious faultiness of the statistic he was using simply because it chimed with his personal political leanings?

1948 and All That

A guest post by Loondon Calling...

References to the year 1948 have rained down upon us like stair rods in the BBC’s output recently. Of course, it is the 70th anniversary of the founding of the NHS. That cannot have escaped anyone’s notice. 

However, as I mentioned recently in the open thread on this site, 1948 is also the 70th anniversary of the implementation of the post WWII Attlee Labour Government’s 1947 Transport Act, which led to the nationalisation of the railways and road haulage industries. This anniversary seems to have been missed by the BBC. 

Another 70th anniversary this year is the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell - though it wasn’t actually published until the following year. This particular anniversary has proved somewhat problematic for the BBC and their well-oiled smoothly efficient publicity machine. It was in November last year that the Martin Jennings sculpture of a standing Orwell was unveiled amid a slightly embarrassed awkward silence. The muted coverage appeared on the BBC News website: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-41886208 

Under the headline … ‘Why George Orwell is returning to the BBC’ …. are a series of nervously compiled snippets compiled by Vincent Dowd which confirm the BBC’s disquiet. 

The reason for the BBC’s uncertainty is over how to honour George Orwell’s memory, and whether or not to claim him as one of their own. It is a dilemma. Dowd’s article makes reference to Orwell’s time at the BBC: 

… ‘For decades, its staff have delighted in the suggestion Orwell took his notion of absolute hell from two years spent at the BBC. 

Near the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith finds himself trapped in the Ministry of Love's Room 101, "many metres underground". 

He must face the worst thing in the world (which turns out to be a rat). Since the book came out in 1949, some have suggested it was Orwell's comment on a similarly-numbered room at Broadcasting House, where he had to tolerate endless dull meetings.’ … 

A statue of Orwell had been considered for many a year by the BBC. The idea was rejected by former DG Mark Thompson in 2012, but it was only when the new DG Tony Hall arrived that the project took off. Funding for the statue, we are told was from a trust, backed by many notable elite friends of the BBC such as Ian McEwan, Andrew Marr, Ken Follett, Rowan Atkinson and the Kinnocks. 

The near life-size bronze statue of Orwell is by sculptor Martin Jennings. The late Gavin Stamp said of it in Private Eye in 2017: ‘Orwell "surely deserves better", .… "The great man is depicted holding a fag, dressed in a crumpled suit and standing like a music hall artist about to crack a joke. The plinth is pathetic. ... No hint here of Orwell's ambivalent relationship with the BBC.”’ 

The BBC’s half-heartedness in this project is at first glance no more than a wasted opportunity, but beyond that, it tells us more about the BBC’s commissioning group’s desperation to grab onto Orwell’s shirt tails than it does about Orwell himself. Orwell’s belief was in a genuine awareness of social injustice and a genuine commitment to democratic socialism. It is as a pale reflection of his deeply held beliefs that the BBC commemorate Orwell - from a message that has been diluted and corrupted by retelling in the closed world of the BBC left liberal elite - Champagne socialism. 

What the BBC miss completely is the reality of Orwell’s predictions laid out in 1948 in Nineteen Eighty-Four. His fears over Big Brother, the Thought Police etc are being played out by the BBC right here right now. Orwell might have been 30 or more years out in his timing, but nevertheless, his foresight was unnervingly accurate. ‘No hint here of Orwell's ambivalent relationship with the BBC.’ … writes Stamp. No hint either of the hypocrisy of the BBC commissioning group and the irony that they should see fit to ‘adopt’ Orwell as their own. They stumble over privilege. Like themselves, Orwell enjoyed a privileged upbringing winning a scholarship to Eton before passing entrance exams to enter the Imperial Police Force in Burma. 

The Orwell statue epitomises the struggle for identity that the BBC face. The left-wing agenda, as handed down by the BBC to us, the proles (to use the Nineteen Eighty-Four parlance), the hapless licence-payer, by their own privately educated elite privileged group of pseudo-socialists, falls well short of the real thing - when compared to the self-inflicted experiences of Orwell as he lived for a time the life of the underprivileged. By absorption, the BBC might hope to emulate Orwell - but they can’t. They would not put themselves in that position, and, as few if any appear to have come from genuine Labour-voting working-class environments, their protestations over equality, fairness and the like lack authenticity and commitment. 

What should have been the statue of a great man became a land-grab of Orwell’s intellectual high ground and socialist belief which the BBC have encompassed within their own putrescent swamp. 

Some of the responsibility for the damp squib must lie with the choice of sculptor. Jennings’s work consistently shows a tendency to caricature of the subject in a theatrical fashion rather than to craft a character study through a truthful representation. An inappropriate jauntiness has been applied to the 2007 figures of John Betjamen and Philip Larkin, which, as with the Orwell figure, detract from the viewer’s ability to relate earnestly to the character on display.

Not Liking the Video

The Mr Bean-like Jewish man in that BBC Teach video

Loyal readers may recall a post from May entitled "Don't Hate the Debate" which linked to a video from BBC Teach, "suitable for teaching 14-16s", on the topic of immigration.

It was so overwhelmingly pro-immigration that I asked (rhetorically, of course), "Does the BBC really think that this video demonstrates its impartiality?"

Well, after complaints, the BBC has decided that the video doesn't demonstrate its impartiality and has withdrawn it.

A BBC spokesman said:

Don't Hate the Debate is a series of films designed to help teachers enable classroom debates about topical issues. Each film includes a real debate between four young people, all giving views on a topic. While we believe the film did convey the broad elements of the immigration debate, we accept further efforts could have been made to involve contributors with a more diverse range of opinions, so we removed the video.

Well, yes. All four of the young people in this video did agree with each other. In fact, they could hardly have been more like-minded. It's good that the BBC has acknowledged that they got that wrong.

However, what they don't acknowledge in that statement is that the narration of the video was just as biased.

Here's a bit I quoted in that May post:

It looks as if Migration Watch had a hand in getting the video withdrawn. Here's their press release on the matter - worth quoting in full for what it has to say about Sir David Clementi, the current Chairman of the BBC:

The BBC have withdrawn an educational video after intervention by Migration Watch UK. 

The YouTube video in question, produced by BBC Education and aimed at GCSE students aged 14-16, purported to be a debate about immigration, but Migration Watch UK challenged its lack of balance and a number of factual inaccuracies. 

Chairman Lord Green of Deddington wrote to Sir David Clementi, Chairman of the BBC, pointing out that the video failed to provide an objective analysis of the immigration debate and therefore did not meet the BBC’s own impartiality guidelines. 

The head of BBC education responded on 5 July and said that the BBC would withdraw the video with a view to re-editing. She added that 'further efforts could have been made to include contributors with a more diverse range of opinions'. 

Commenting, Lord Green of Deddington, Chairman of Migration Watch UK, said: 

"It is refreshing that Sir David Clementi saw immediately that the material was unacceptably biased and ordered its withdrawal and revision. We have offered the BBC our assistance in producing an accurate and unbiased teaching aid on a very topical and important issue."

It appears that the video will eventually resurface in a revised form. It will be interesting to see how it is changed and how much of the original narration survives.

What the BBC puts into schools is an area that may need looking at more closely.

Of Balloon Sleeves, Sandwiches and 'Newsnight' Presenters

Marie Le Conte and that dress (camera angle probably just how she'd like it)

I was watching the discussion about UK politics on last night's Newsnight, which (thankfully) had less predictable guests than usual and, as a blogger about BBC bias, I (predictably) Googled the guests and found French freelance writer Marie Le Conte and her likeable Twitter feed. 

On that Twitter feed she told the world a very short story, which I thought I'd share will you (just for the sake of it):

A VERY SHORT STORY

Before... 

So I'm in Edinburgh for the Fringe, right. I'm dressed like someone who's in Edinburgh for the Fringe. Meant to come back tonight and go straight home. 

BUT! 

Got a phone call from Newsnight. Do I want to come on to talk about Macron and May? Yes I do! But I'm not dressed for TV. Fine, I'll run to H&M to get some black dress.

I go to H&M but the selection is piss poor, I'm running out of time. 

So. 

I pick up a wildly reduced flowery dress vaguely in my size, pay, run to catch the train.

It is now a few hours later, I am nearing London, I go put on the dress in the loo. 

Guys, guys. 

HAD YOU EVER SEEN BALLOON SLEEVES THIS BIG? 

I look like a minor Medici got into Florence Welsh's pants and what they produced was an Oompa Loompa raised in Kew Gardens... 

Help. 

Anyway tune in later to watch our discussion on what May and Macron can gain from this dinner but also maybe to watch me...accidentally take flight?

After... 

MY ACCIDENTAL BALLOON SLEEVES WERE MOSTLY OUT OF SHOT. Praise the lord!

Anyhow, back to business (if we must)...

The discussion itself featured four guests. They looked at the plight of Theresa May's Conservatives and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour, with special reference to Brexit (as regards the former) and antisemitism (as regards the latter). 

I think it's fair to say that there was only one pro-Brexit voice on the panel and only one pro-Corbyn voice on the panel - so that's two 3:1 situations. Whether that somehow balances things out I'm rather doubtful...

...but at least the discussion was hosted by Mark Urban, who played a pleasingly understated role.

He didn't grandstand for personal glory but kept a low profile, letting his guests speak and debate among themselves. Nor did he target one guest for different (hostile) treatment because of their point of view. 

In contrast, just try Emily Maitlis on Monday's Newsnight. She hosted a Brexit-related discussion with three guests. The guest selection fell 2:1 against 'the hard Brexiteer' but that rather paled into insignificance in the light of how Emily treated her three guests. Only one of them got a barrage of challenging questions and repeated expressions of incredulity (complete with dramatic gestures) from the Newsnight presenter - and, no, it wasn't the man warning about the plight of the British sandwich after Brexit. Yes, inevitably, it was 'the hard Brexiteer' (Marcus Fysh MP) who was on the receiving end of this James O'Brien display of non-evenhanded interviewing from Ms. Maitlis.

Has Emily actually been possessed by the ghost of James O'Brien? Should Mark Urban bring in some holy water and get her exorcised?

Of course, that edition of Newsnight was the one Emily Maitlis introduced by saying that the Food Industry is telling the Tories that "no deal means no sandwiches". Yes, seriously.

Turf Wars

A couple of links added by the Woman's Hour team to their website in relation to the above feature...

...prompted a strong backlash from several feminist authors and journalists. Here's a sample of their complaints:

Sarah Ditum: So irresponsible to give out links to Mermaids and All About Trans, without any resources for children who need differential diagnoses and critical support. Real life "gender identity" is not the simple stuff of heartwarming drama. There's no "just" about it.
AM Scanlon: A recent Victoria LIVE had a film about Mermaids & six GNC kids in the studio with no GC response. Zero balance.
Janice Turner: Mermaids is run by a woman who had her son surgically castrated in Thailand aged 16. An operation illegal here, now illegal in Thailand. It goes into schools promoting fallacy non conforming kids are in wrong bodies & need “fixing” with drugs. Yet BBC promotes as neutral charity. The BBC is supposed to uphold balance. The issue of transing children is hugely controversial with two sides. Why is the gender critical view not included? Especially given an epidemic of teenage girls believing themselves to be in “wrong bodies”.

Is the BBC uncritically pushing a single-perspective agenda on transgender issues?

Over time

Don't forget to bear this in mind whilst criticising the BBC!

Anyone wanting to complain about last night's A Point of View, where Michael Morpurgo was granted a 10-minute platform by the BBC to call for a second referendum to encourage us to stay in the EU, will doubtless get a fairly swift reply from the BBC saying that balance is provided over time and that the reason there wasn't an immediate right to reply was that (a) that's not the point of the programme and (b) that plenty of previous editions of the programme have featured similarly one-sided talks from the likes of Roger Scruton and John Gray putting the other, pro-Brexit point of view. And the BBC would be right to say that. Professors Scruton and Gray have delivered lots of splendid pro-Brexit pieces for A Point of View in the past couple of years, so it's hardly unfair to have Mr Morpurgo - and others - deliver some strongly anti-Brexit piece too. After years of getting it wrong, bias-wise, this programme is now getting it about right - if only on the Brexit issue. Credit where credit is due.

The BBC outfoxes Fox....just

...elves...breaking news about ourselves....breaking news about ourselves...breaking news about ours... 

Here's something from the BBC News Press Team.

(Please stand to attention and take your hands out of your pockets!)

That made me smile. 

Given how low an opinion BBC types have of Fox News, here's the BBC boasting that Katty Kay, Anthony Zurcher, Jon Sopel and Co. are just about equal with Fox News when it comes to being considered trustworthy by Americans. 

Not that they put it that way of course.  

Is the BBC Biased?

About ten years ago, when I was an occasional below-the-line commenter on Biased BBC, a pseudonymous here-today-gone-tomorrow fellow-commenter disagreed with a criticism I had made of the blog, (perhaps impertinent, but sincerely meant.) He replied to me with something like. “Why don’t you go away and start your own blog? No-one would read it.” 

I took that as a put-down rather than a genuine suggestion, and I found it rude and quite hurtful at the time, but in retrospect it was also funny, because obviously, Craig and I did eventually start a blog; admittedly, a comparatively obscure one, but the page view stats indicate that plenty of people read it. (Okay, so some of them are bots.)

The launch of this blog was delayed because of a long drawn out period of indecision over what to call it. We dithered over this for ages. We thought we should include ‘BBC’ and ‘Bias’ for the sake of search engine optimisation, but the title we settled on was deliberately worded in the form of a question.

We wanted to differentiate our blog from the Biased-BBC blog, which someone once described as having bagged “the best domain name evah”. That may be true enough, but we thought the assertive, ‘settled-question’ title invited rants from people who’ve heard or seen something on the BBC they personally disagree with, which seriously dents the blog’s credibility. I mean, there’s bound to be the occasional bias on the BBC in some shape or form; it’s just that a reasonable balance is required. As the saying goes: “remember! journalists are humans too.”

At the time, we saw our chosen title as a genuine question. At the risk of sounding like Jeremy Corbyn, we wanted a conversation. But we’ve all been on a proverbial journey, and nowadays it’s almost a given that the BBC is biased, albeit with minor disagreements about the precise nature of the bias. Overall, it’s generally accepted that the thrust of the BBC’s editorial bias is ‘left-liberal’ or ‘Metropolitan bubble’. You know, anti-British, anti-Brexit, and anti-Israel with antisemitic implications.

To date, the question in the title of this blog is still relevant, but in a completely different sense than the one originally intended. It’s no longer a genuine question, but it’s more appropriate than ever now, in the sense of that well-worn and unmistakably sardonic query about the religion of his holiness. Not to mention bears.  It’s sardonic. “Is the BBC Biased?  / Do bears shit in the woods?”

Originally we gave ourselves leeway by including the caveat “any other matters etc”. So it seems we’ve travelled, the long way round, from trying to discourage personal rants with little immediate connection to actual BBC bias, all the way to not only allowing such rants but giving them prominence, like I am about to do right now.

Melanie Phillips is a person you’d like to have on your side. Her defence of Israel is unparalleled in its eloquence and clarity. She can deftly deconstruct an argument and make her point with breathtaking precision and economy of language. Therefore it’s doubly disappointing to see that she has taken a strange and blinkered path over the Tommy Robinson fiasco.

It’s pretty obvious that she’s au fait with the legal intricacies of the case. She is married to an eminent legal beagle. He is even the BBC’s go-to legal expert. Perhaps this is why she can’t seem to see the wood for the trees over the Tommy Robinson affair, which is doubly puzzling because the media’s demonisation of “Tommy” bears quite a similarity to its demonisation of Israel. 

In her recent article, which she has titled: THE TOMMY ROBINSON CIRCUS OF FOOLS she falls into the very same elephant traps as the ones she so cleverly exposes and demolishes when they happen to have been laid by the anti-semites and anti-Zionists one might find in the Guardian.

The first alarm-bell rang over her use of pejorative language, which she criticises when she sees it used by others.  In the very first paragraph, she uses the term “crowing”. As soon as I read that word my heart sank.

”His supporters are crowing that this (his release) proves they were right all along.” 

If that word was the ‘giveaway’, then the general lumping together of ‘his supporters’ and the accusation that they were ‘crowing’, heralds the straw man she constructs next. A portrait of Robinson’s supporters as one homogenous bunch of brainless far-right football hooligans and thickos.

Now I haven’t been following Tommy Robinson’s output very closely. I haven't seen his ‘live-streamed’ broadcast, I haven’t followed his twitter timeline and I can’t argue authoritatively about whether his own claim that “I was merely reading from the BBC website outside the court" was true, partially true - or a complete load of cobblers. 

But I can say that out of all the Tommy-supportive articles I’ve read, not one of them has shied away from admitting that he was a very naughty boy, and that deliberately violating the court’s conditional discharge or suspended sentence  (or whatever it was that he was warned against doing) was utterly stupid and counter-productive. Ezra Levant for one has always said as much. 

However, in my humble opinion, with regret, I have to say I suspect that Melanie Phillips has misjudged this one by dwelling on legal intricacies to such an extent that the bigger picture has been obscured completely. I think a suitable expression would be that she has lost the plot.

Melanie says of the collective, brainless, conspiracy theorists that comprise Robinson's supporters  “there is simply no evidence that will ever persuade a conspiracy theorist that he or she is wrong.” 

Now, where have we heard that kind of thing before? It is a familiar lament, and it is only too true. Just not true of the bulk of Tommy Robinson's supporters - the majority I’d contend - of whom happen to fall outside the straw-man caricature she has tailor-made to fit her theory.

She states that these deplorables allege that

 “the state had locked him up to stop him speaking the truth about Islamisation, that he had done nothing at all wrong, it was a kangaroo court, it was a secret court, he was a political prisoner treated as an enemy of the state, he had been jailed because the state wanted him murdered in prison, Britain was now under the rule of sharia law, and so on and imbecilically on.”

If that’s not pejorative, manipulative and downright devious language I’m a Dutchman. Yes, Tommy has written a book titled ‘Enemy of the State’. I haven’t read it, but I have read enough about what has happened to this man and his family to know that he was, effectively, a political prisoner. I don’t see myself as an imbecile. Not particularly. This sort of exaggeration and spin is unworthy stuff from such a clever purveyor of logic, morality, and ethics as Melanie Phillips, whom I still admire.

Oh — and guess what. The state hadn’t “sentenced him to death”. It held him in solitary confinement to protect his safety. And Britain is not under sharia law; the courts have continued to uphold the rule of English law by addressing a serious procedural error, as from time to time they habitually do.

I have watched various film clips, mainly via that invaluable source of info, the comments section over at Biased-BBC, in which Tommy poses one particular question Melanie skirts around. Why was he moved from a relatively ‘safe’ prison to one with a disproportionate number of Muslim inmates? Thus leading to his solitary confinement ‘for his own safety.’ By accident, coincidence, or some other well-meant happenstance? 

Did he need to be incarcerated in a cell where shit and spit could be pushed in through the window? I only ask because I’d like to know the answer. 

And yes Melanie, you and Andrew Norfolk have been saying this stuff for years. And you’ve been marginalised for saying it and dismissed as “Mad”. Tommy Robinson has broken the law, kicked up a fuss, perhaps made himself into a martyr and brought the issue into the limelight. A bit like the suffragettes, when you come to think of it.

“Everything I wrote about all this was true. And yet Robinson is even now still being misleadingly supported by people who should know better, who are still claiming “kangaroo court”, “secret trial” and all the rest of the rubbish, as well as (after yesterday’s judgment) “vindication” and “victory”. Their arrogance is even greater than their ignorance of the English legal system and their consequent utter inability even to understand the words of a judge’s ruling.

Indeed, if you say so, some stupids may well be claiming the things you say - kangaroo court - secret trial etc. Every cause has its unfortunate followers. Even those that insist the BBC is biased.

Your last sentence says it all. 

“The current climate of ignorance, gullibility, and unreason is even worse than anyone could ever have imagined.”

And that is just as applicable to Israel-bashers, antisemites, Corbynistas, "literally Communists" and Guardianistas as it is to detractors of “ex-EDL founder Tommy Robinson aka Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon” as well as a few of those imbecilic, crowing, legally illiterate supporters.