Monthly Archives: February 2012

Imagine David Attenborough’s version of Proud and Prejudiced. He’d most likely take the anthropologist’s view of the inhabitants of Luton. He’d examine Islamist Sayful, the dominant male, and peer at the female of the species, squawking as they flock together in their black head-to-toe plumage; the males, beards glistening luxuriantly, displaying. He might scrutinise the indigenous tribe, their dull appearance enlivened by the odd tattoo, and perhaps allude to its vigorous attempts to defend its miserable territory, driven by a fear that the invading species threatens to drive it to extinction. Would David have used the word ‘misguided’ to describe Tommy Robinson as the C4 narrator did early on in the programme? Would he have warned the audience to distrust his emphatic protestations that the EDL wasn’t based on racism?

There was no need for any explanation from the narrator regarding the Islamist inhabitants of Luton. They did exactly what it says on their tin. They behaved like the ludicrous cartoon characters they obviously were.
However much the programme makers wanted to portray the EDL as the ideological equivalent of the radical extremists, Tommy Robinson and his fellow EDLers wouldn’t play ball. They persisted in conducting themselves within reasonable bounds of respectability, forcing the filmmakers to resort to simply telling the audience that they were liars. A stupid childish drunken episode was mustered up, which somewhat dented Tommy’s credibility, but a couple of shots of tattooed, chanting shaven-headed men giggling as they behaved badly hardly amounted to the ideological equivalent of the religious rabble hell-bent on imposing their will upon a hitherto complacent majority.

I realise that this was not a BBC programme, unlike the Stacey Dooley’s strangely blindfolded effort aimed at BBC3’s youth orientated audience. But it is alarming that the press have almost unanimously swallowed the moral equivalence that the programme makers were driving at, apparently taking it on board wholeheartedly. The BBC’s continual portrayal of Islam as if it embodies righteousness on a par with applehood and mother pie plays no mean part in this tectonic swindle.
Take the Huffington Post. (please) Mark Hawker thinks the Jihad is a mere war of words. But he reveals a little more about the tint of his lenses when he continues: “Their anger at UK foreign policy is understandable, in my view.” So that’s his opinion filed in room 101.

But the Telegraph?
Andrew Marszal’s review was a diatribe warning us not to fall for the lies of Tommy Robinson. His final paragraph tells us what, in his opinion, was the most chilling thing the film had shown:

”But perhaps the documentary’s most chilling moment came when Robinson, out on a drinking binge, began doing “humorous” impersonations of Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in a bomb blast and gun rampage in Norway last year. Breivik claimed to be an EDL sympathiser – a disturbing reminder of how high the stakes in this quarrel really are.”

No mate. I’d say Andrew Marszal in the Telegraph writing such tripe is a much better reminder.