‘What is important is not what the creator
of an idea of genius may mean, but what this idea
becomes in the mouth of whomever transmits it.’
Adolf Hitler

The BBC has allowed Will Self to go freerange on ‘A Point of View’ yet again…. a questionable deceit from the BBC which uses such platforms to push ideas it cannot openly endorse in its own right under the ‘impartial’ BBC brand.

Self has a go at undermining George Orwell, dismissing him as the ‘Supreme Mediocrity’.

As Orwell predicted:

Considerations of prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain historical figures, while at the same time bringing their achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed.

Orwell is despised for his popularity…a popularity, like Kipling’s, based on his plain, simple, common use of language that whilst conveying complicated messages is simple and clear for the reader, a popularity based on not being afraid to scorn and criticise those in power whilst standing up for the man in the street.

Orwell is more popular than Will Self could ever hope to be.  That is probably all the explanation you need to understand his attack on Orwell…but we’ll credit him, humour him, as genuinely having some intellectual concerns about Orwell as he seeks to consign him to Room 101.

Why might that be a good idea for a left leaning BBC?  Orwell, despite being a ‘lefty’ is more than happy to criticise the left and draw attention to its ‘Supreme nastiness’ reminding us that…..

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.

Self of course lives up to that ‘duty to snigger’ by having a pop at Orwell, thereby confirming, rather than undermining, Orwell’s insight.

Self’s attempt at undermining has shallow foundations, if that’s possible. He bases his whole extravagant, convoluted concoction on a single line, the meaning of which Self contrives to butcher until it fits his narrative.

“It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.”

Self declares that language is not constructed but a spontaneously evolving outburst of joyous communion that enables us to interact with other cultures and peoples as we merge and mix words and meanings from around the world to remake English into an multi-ethnic mashup no longer ‘owned’ by the English…but oh so much more expressive, beautiful and thrillingly alien than the staid clarity and correctness of proper grammar and spelling.

All tosh of course….spoken language has always been different to the written, and especially formal language used in official documents or speech….a formality necessary if all are to understand.

Self takes issue with that:

Orwell – it’s said by these disciples – established once and for all in this essay that anything worth saying in English can be set down with perfect clarity such that it’s comprehensible to all averagely intelligent English readers.

The only problem with this is that it’s not true….

 

Trouble is…it is true.

There needs to be a universal, official version of any language to enable all those diverse people to communicate…something the BBC doesn’t seem to understand.

The Arabs know it…spoken Arabic being considerably different across the Middle East and North Africa whilst written Arabic is the same and readable by all who can read Arabic.

Even in Britain ‘English’ has always varied enormously in words and dialect in various regions and towns.  Go to Bolton and you’d be hard pushed to follow what’s being said (and that’s the original natives not the ‘settlers’)…but their newspapers are the same as in London.

Orwell isn’t saying language doesn’t change  in the natural flow of events, what he is saying is that effort should be put into preventing those with vested interests intent on political intrigue from manipulating language to suit their own purposes and to reverse a decline in language that results in a loss of easy clarity and understanding.

Language of course does have a natural growth, but it is also shaped consciously by us for our own purposes….the Left being past masters at reinventing and redefining words and language to reinforce their politics…..’Gay’ for instance, or ‘people of restricted growth’, ‘Black’, and definitely not ‘Person of colour’, chairperson, the ‘religion of peace’, terrorist/freedom fighter etc etc etc

We could of course quote Orwell in support of that…. political language was generally intended:…

“to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

But Self doesn’t agree….he likes the natural, organic growth of language as an explanation for change…

Well, in fact, as Noam Chomsky’s work on universal grammar established to the satisfaction of most (although the idea of a universal innate grammar goes all the back to Roger Bacon), language very much is a natural outgrowth of the human brain, which is hardwired for its acquisition and use.

 

That’ll be the Noam Chomsky who wrote ‘Manufacturing Consent‘, a book relaying the manipulative practises used to get us to do what ‘authority’ wants us to do, the Noam Chomsky who said this…

The right to lie in the service of power is guarded with considerable vigour and passion.

There is a complicated system of illusions and self deception that are the given framework for most discussion and debate. And if you don’t happen to take part in this system of illusions and self-deception, what you say is incomprehensible.

Here are some brief notes that lay out his thoughts on the subject of language and its misuse to enforce or encourage a certain line of thought…..

Politics and language…words can convey concepts beyond their meaning.  Words can be made to mean what you want them to mean.
Language can be misused to enforce ideology…war department/defence department.
Phrases can be used to block all thought and understanding, to indoctrinate and control thought…freeworld, national interest, free enterprise, mercenaries, terrorists, freedom fighters.

Well meaning intellectuals and opinion formers who get it wrong by creating a system of doctrines and beliefs that undermine independent thought.

Use of emotive language.
You can use language to shape, form and control our perceptions and understanding of reality….manufacture their consent…they think they are  telling you what to do but in fact you have manipulated their thoughts to align them with your own policies.  Public’s role is merely to ratify these decisions.

So yeah…Noam Chomsky…good choice to back up Self’s musings on the organic growth of language….not.

Here a university tries to control our thoughts and ‘eliminate the prejudices of a society’ by changing the language it uses:

The idea that ‘among the things that language perpetuates are the prejudices of the society in which it evolves’ is still central to our understanding.

In its responsibility for all members of the University community, the University aims to eliminate sexist and other discriminatory language from all University publications and discourage the use of such language in published and unpublished material and in the speech of its staff and students.

 

 

Here again is that use of language to control thought and perceptions in action:

The Power of Language to Create Culture
Culture change in nursing homes is incomplete without language change.

Learning from other fields, we have seen how words matter and can be sources of both good and harm. What a person is called creates expectations about their behavior and sets the limits on how much growth and individual identity is deemed possible by those who serve them. Our analysis of the traditional terms that have characterized speech in the aging services work place reveals culturally embedded ways of talking that infantilize, subordinate, marginalize and otherwise dishonor elders. We present many examples of changed vocabularies that reflect the values of some of the new cultures developed to combat these tendencies. These cultures reflect new assumptions about elders and their roles in society, and as such replace dehumanizing language with language that communicates honor, inclusion, partnership and equality of elders and those who serve them.

So it can be seen that Orwell was right….language can be created and manipulated deliberately and is not purely a natural ‘outgrowth of the human brain, which is hardwired for its acquisition and use’ as Self proposes.

Then we get to the paydirt, the real reason Self and the BBC try to twist the knife into Orwell…race and multi-culturalism….Orwell is dismissed as a racist little Englander harking back to a non-existent golden age……we must instead glory in the corruption of the English language inflicted upon us by those of different heritage….

The trouble for the George Orwells of this world is that they don’t like the ways in which our tongue is being shaped. In this respect they’re indeed small “c” conservatives, who would rather peer at meaning by the guttering candlelight of a Standard English frozen in time, than have it brightly illumined by the high-wattage of the living, changing language.

Orwell and his supporters may say they’re objecting to jargon and pretension, but underlying this are good old-fashioned prejudices against difference itself. Only homogenous groups of people all speak and write identically. People from different heritages, ethnicities, classes and regions speak the same language differently, duh!

 

 

Orwell’s answer to that might be:

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

 

As the language changes your society changes.

Can’t say you weren’t warned by Orwell…..

“The Principles of Newspeak”

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression  to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day.

By coincidence, from the Telegraph today:

The self-loathing of the British Left is now a problem for us all

We cannot give in to despair. Instead we could listen again to George Orwell, who once said that, however silly or sentimental, English patriotism is “a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing intelligentsia”. Orwell wrote those words seventy years ago. It is time we paid attention, and turned the tide.

Scuttlebuck pointed this article in the Independent to us:

Rotherham child sex abuse scandal: Labour Home Office to be probed over what Tony Blair’s government knew – and when

The Independent on Sunday can reveal that a House of Commons committee is to investigate what Tony Blair’s Home Office knew about the Rotherham scandal as far back as 2001 after more evidence emerged about his government’s efforts to pacify Muslim communities.

Meanwhile, a former minister claimed he was threatened with the sack by his then boss, the foreign secretary Jack Straw, for calling on Muslims in the UK to choose between the “British way or the way of the terrorists” after a 24-year-old from South Yorkshire tried to bomb Israelis in a bar in Tel Aviv in 2003. Former Foreign Office minister Denis MacShane said he was forced to agree to a “grovelling climb-down” over his remarks because he was warned it risked upsetting community relations.

“Jack Straw spent an inordinate amount of time cossetting his Muslim constituents in Blackburn. He had brought in an official from the Muslim Council of Britain to advise the FCO on outreach to Islamist outfits like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt,” he said. “To attack their values was heresy. I was told I was close to being fired as a minister unless I signed some grovelling climb-down, which, as a coward, I did.”

Labour MP John Mann is asking for a similar investigation for Shaun Wright for ‘misconduct in public office’:

Police Commissioner Shaun Wright should face a criminal investigation over the Rotherham child abuse scandal, a Labour MP has said.

John Mann told Sky News he is writing to Home Secretary Theresa May asking for police to investigate Mr Wright with a view to bringing a case of misconduct in public office against him and others responsible for childcare while hundreds of children were abused.

I would have thought that by extension an investigation into Labour’s immigration policy would also be in order…to include those in the media who covered up Labour’s deceit and lies to the Public.

The Left’s, and Labour’s, attempt to ‘rub the Right’s nose’ in multi-culturalism has had dramatic and disastrous effects on British society and politics…from riots, to rapes and terrorism at the worst end of the scale.

It would be difficult to prove this was a deliberate policy unless it is evidenced by a paper trail but how much of that is there?

What we know comes from Labour’s Andrew Neather…despite the BBC refusing to report his explosive revelations that Labour’s open border immigration policy was known to be destructive but they went ahead for political reasons regardless of the consequences.

How Labour threw open doors to mass migration in secret plot to make a multicultural UK

Paying the price for a decade of deception

The BBC is deeply involved in all these cover ups…despite its much heralded ‘independence’ it is in many respects a tool of the government with regard to social control, feeding us misinformation designed to reassure us that nothing is happening….the ‘religion of peace’, ‘immigration is beneficial’, ‘the science is settled’, are just some of the happy thoughts the BBC feeds us to keep us quiet, placid and obedient.

Perhaps asking the government to investigate its own propaganda vehicle might be a bit on the optimistic side but you never know…do you.

This was mentioned by Klingon in the comments and noted by Craig at ‘Is the BBC biased?‘ and I think it goes to the heart of everything the BBC does and why it gets it so wrong, so it is worth emphasisng again and again.

Writer Kay Mellor is interviewed in the Guardian about her career when she makes an astonishing comment about the BBC’s attitude….

Kay Mellor: ‘Steven Spielberg rang me up in Topshop’

One of her regrets, she says, is a drama she wrote about Asian men grooming and sexually abusing underage white girls (“I was watching it unfold”). But a changing of the executive guard at BBC1 in 2008 meant it never got made. “I don’t think people believed it. One very senior person said to me ‘this does not go on’.”

That surely must have been purely due to a deliberate, wilful desire not to ‘rock the multi-cultural boat’ as Denis MacShane might say….Mellor must have made her case for the programme and laid out any experience and evidence she had to base such a programme upon….but they didn’t want to know.

The BBC sweeping uncomfortable truths under the carpet.

One other comment she made is also of note, this from only a couple of weeks ago:

Mellor made her name with Band of Gold, about prostitutes in Bradford. It was developed for BBC1, but Alan Yentob, then channel controller, did not want it. “No one knew who I was. I was a working-class girl from Leeds, writing about prostitutes. I used to harass [Yentob] at awards ceremonies, asking him to read it.” She adds that he “has since apologised”. The experience makes her wonder “how many young men and women are out there who could write something brilliant, yet they don’t get seen or heard?”

Just how many working class writers get through the privileged portico of BBC House?  I imagine, like presenter Stacey Dooley, they only succeed if they show the requisite amount of social conscience and compassion for the downtrodden…..if you write something that doesn’t fit the socialist, multi-cultural template you’ll be stuck in that garret for an awful long time.

Despite having left Gaza three weeks ago Donnison is still banging the drum for Hamas and looking to undermine the Israelis:

Curiously he doesn’t link to this:

Abbas blames Hamas for prolonged battle with Israel

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accused Hamas of needlessly extending the fighting in the Gaza Strip over the past two months, causing a high death toll.

Abbas told Palestine TV in remarks broadcast Friday that “it was possible for us to avoid all of that, 2,000 martyrs, 10,000 injured, 50,000 houses (damaged or destroyed).”

He does bring us this:

Which reminded me of this:

The Propaganda Power of Images

How the Nazis Used War Rubble as Propaganda

As the Allies marched inexorably northward through Italy during World War II, the Nazis set to work photographing the rubble of damaged historical buildings and artwork. The images were supposed to prove that their enemies were cultural barbarians.

The images bear witness to the slow shift away from art preservation and toward Nazi regime propaganda undertaken by the German art historians active in Italy during the war. Despite their efforts, many of the monuments and buildings they sought to protect were destroyed by the Allies. The Germans themselves were pushed ever further into northern Italy. Before long, the German military and the Nazi propaganda machinery recognized the potential of using the destroyed buildings to portray the Allies as culturally insensitive barbarians….

Before long the unit once responsible for protecting Italy’s cultural heritage began delivering images of emotional images depicting devastated palaces, churches reduced to heaps of rubble and shattered sculptures. Accompanying text ensured that the message of the images was not misunderstood. Often, the images were produced by photographers belonging to so-called propaganda companies and they would end up in brochures depicting sites both before and after their destruction.

The famous German art historian Ludwig Heydenreich also took part in the propaganda war in Italy. He had hundreds of pictures taken and wrote contributions for brochures on “the war against art” in which he spoke of the “enemy terror attacks.

I get the impression Donnison is a lightweight who just wants to be liked and, like George Galloway, is willing to sacrifice his integrity and professionalism, taking the lazy route to popularity by saying things he knows will get him the most plaudits regardless of who it is that is applauding him.

He knows that to publish anything that might make Israeli actions in anyway jusitified would be the kiss of death as not only would he be deluged by a torrent of left wing and Muslim abuse, his colleagues would surely cut him dead.  He certainly gets abuse from pro-Israel supporters but he can salve his conscience by readily dismissing them as nutters, racists and Islamophobes…as indeed he did.

Here is an example of his desperate, needy, cry for approval…proclaiming life is so #wrong  and it’s an #unfairworld:…

….BUT did he ever offer his body armour and helmet to anyone in Gaza?  No?  Life so unfair and wrong!…..

Little Boy In Gaza Dresses Up As A Journalist ‘To Survive’

One of the most incredible pictures to come out of the savagery in Gaza was posted on Twitter on Thursday. Taken by Swedish Radio correspondent Johan-Matthias Sommarström, the image shows a small Palestinian boy who had dressed himself as a journalist with a “home made flak jacket”.

Sommarström said he was approached by the boy as he returned to his hotel after a day of reporting in the beleaguered Strip. “I’m a journalist,” the boy told Sommarström, who loaned him his helmet to complete the look.

Speaking on Swedish Radio, Sommarström later said: “For me the picture is a powerful example of children’s strong will to survive. He has seen us journalists go in and out of the hotel, he has seen that we survive. I think that in his pretending play he wants to be like us, someone who survives.”

Absolutely nothing to do with BBC bias…..just some appalling examples of vigilante Britain…when democracy, media and police fail to protect this country’s values and culture.

The man who grovelled before Saddam and praised his indefatigability, the man who praised Jihadists  attacking British troops, the man who wanted to turn Bradford into an Israeli Frei zone has been punched in the face.

George Galloway taken to hospital after street attack

George Galloway has been taken to hospital with a suspected broken jaw after he was attacked on a London street, his spokesman has said.

The Respect MP was posing for pictures with people in Golborne Road, Notting Hill, when a man allegedly set upon him. Police were quickly at the scene and arrested a man.

The MP’s spokesman said he had bruising and was in “a pretty bad shape”.

He said the alleged attacker had been shouting something about the Holocaust.

And another example of thuggish, racist violence by the Kurdish ‘EDL’ presumably….

Police arrest two men after Kurds in Sheffield clash with Gaza demonstrators who were waving flag linked with Islamist extremism

Police arrested two men following clashes in Sheffield which were sparked by men holding up a flag allegedly linked to Islamic extremism.

The group were said to have been carrying a black and white standard – versions of which are sometimes used by the Islamic State – during a demonstration against the conflict in Gaza on Saturday.

Members of the Kurdish community are then said to have approached the men, who were reportedly of Pakistani-origin, before ripping up the flag.

Some interesting climate stuff via Bishop Hill that keeps us informed of the climate change media ‘environment’ putting much into context:

Richard Black has resurfaced, you can’t keep a good man down.

He is now running the ‘Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit’…an independent, impartial think tank (No sniggering) that:

 ‘supports informed debate on energy and climate change issues in the UK.’  (OK you can snigger)

Of course it does.  Richard Black being well known for his intelligent and impartial reports whilst at the BBC…any suggestion that he was a climate activist masquerading as a journalist would be very, very wide of the mark.  Really.

Who else is there at this august body bringing us informed debate?  The Team is made up of media, PR and communications specialists and someone who has worked for the UN advising it on climate.

So not looking too impartial, or scientific, so far.

Who funds this vital think tank might also give us a clue as to the  direction it really takes….

‘All of our funding comes from philanthropic foundations. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the European Climate Foundation, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, and the Tellus Mater Foundation.’

The European Climate Foundation (ECF)  is a supposedly independent body….but you might suspect it was a part of the EU……it

‘was established in early 2008 as a major philanthropic initiative to promote climate and energy policies that greatly reduce Europe’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and to help Europe play an even stronger international leadership role to mitigate climate change.

The group of philanthropists who founded the ECF were deeply concerned over the lack of political action and the lack of general public awareness around the devastating future consequences implied by climate change. They formed the ECF – a ‘foundation of foundations’ – to collaborate in ensuring the necessary transformation from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy.

We do not consider applications for activities outside the scope of EU climate strategy.’

So presumably the ECIU is acting on behalf of the EU climate strategy?  Follow the money!

Tellus Mater was founded by Jamie Arbib who invests in renewable energy and wants to drive government policy in that direction:

He is interested in driving new business models that align incentives and reduce the barriers to adoption of resource efficient technologies.

He founded Tellus Mater out of frustration at the perverse incentives, regulations, business practices and behaviour that prevent adoption of these technologies.

The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment  needs no introduction and is a well known climate change campaigning organisation….home to the greater spotted Bob Ward, not a scientist, just another media PR monkey like Black.

‘Climate Resistance’ looks at this in more depth:

Does the UK Need Another Climate ‘Unit’?

Bearing in mind all those climate PR experts hammering away at the coal face of our ignorance the below from the BBC might indicate we should take everything the ‘Lobby’ communicates to us about climate with a large pinch of salt:

Everything We Know Is Wrong

The programme tells us that much scientific research and published findings may be ‘novel and interesting but not necessarily true.’

It tells us that financial and career incentives drive scientists to do research and claim results that don’t hold up to inspection.  The findings are hyped and distort the scientific process.

There are no results, we are told, that you can’t make seem plausible….and that is ‘close to fraud’.

Here is the blurb from the programme:

Every day the newspapers carry stories of new scientific findings. There are 15 million scientists worldwide all trying to get their research published. But a disturbing fact appears if you look closely: as time goes by, many scientific findings seem to become less true than we thought. It’s called the “decline effect” – and some findings even dwindle away to zero.

A highly influential paper by Dr John Ioannidis at Stanford University called “Why most published research findings are false” argues that fewer than half of scientific papers can be believed, and that the hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true. He even showed that of the 49 most highly cited medical papers, only 34 had been retested and of them 41 per cent had been convincingly shown to be wrong. And yet they were still being cited.

Again and again, researchers are finding the same things, whether it’s with observational studies, or even the “gold standard” Randomised Controlled Studies, whether it’s medicine or economics. Nobody bothers to try to replicate most studies, and when they do try, the majority of findings don’t stack up. The awkward truth is that, taken as a whole, the scientific literature is full of falsehoods.

Jolyon Jenkins reports on the factors that lie behind this. How researchers who are obliged for career reasons to produce studies that have “impact”; of small teams who produce headline-grabbing studies that are too statistically underpowered to produce meaningful results; of the way that scientists are under pressure to spin their findings and pretend that things they discovered by chance are what they were looking for in the first place. It’s not exactly fraud, but it’s not completely honest either. And he reports on new initiatives to go through the literature systematically trying to reproduce published findings, and of the bitter and personalised battles that can occur as a result.

As an example of that you might like to look at something Black and his ‘Black’ propaganda unit has produced as their initial offering to a sceptical world (and one snapped up by the Guardian, of course)…

Nearly half of the UK population (47 percent) think either that most climate scientists reject the idea that human activities such as fossil fuel burning are the main driver of climate change (11 percent), or that scientists are evenly split on the issue (35 percent). Several recent studies [ Cook et al, Tol, Verheggen et al] show that more than 90% of climate scientists agree that the main cause of climate change is human activity.

Interesting that Black references ‘Cook et al’….someone whose work Bishop Hill and others have been examining and found wanting for a long time..and yet Black uses him as proof for his conjectures….and not just Black…he’s in good company…despite the dodgy provenance of the ‘research’:

More on Cook’s 97%

Duarte is again openly referring to the paper as fraudulent. Yet this paper was cited approvingly by Ed Davey and Barack Obama. And the Institute of Physics is standing by it. Shameless, every one of them.

Not a good start for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit bringing us duff intelligence that is famously wrong.

Still, good to see the BBC looking at science with the blinkers off for once….and so far nobody at the BBC seems to have referred to the Black propaganda unit yet…early days though, it only started life two days ago (still didn’t stop Guardian getting on board):

Right, I’m off to Stockholm for the weekend but here’s a fresh Open thread to detail the bias!

Radicalisation and what causes it is the big question of our age apparently and many people have the answer.  That answer, we are told, has nothing to do with Islam, and all to do with Western foreign policy.

They don’t want to talk about an Islamic link.

That sounds familiar….after nearly two decades of denial we are starting to get the truth as to why so many girls were abused and nobody in authority did anything.

The reason was because they didn’t want to talk about the race or religion of the offenders.

But now the denials and cover ups are being dragged into the light and we now know that great harm was done by allowing the abuse to continue because people were afraid to challenge the behaviour of racial or religious minorities.

In 10 years time will we be having the same conversations about how Islam and radicalisation was reported and the failure, due to fears of racism or ‘islamophobia’, to get to the real root of what causes radicalisation?

Douglas Murray thinks so:

We exacerbate the problem on all sides when we refuse to tackle or even address the problematic things in the Muslim faith in the same way that we would with any other faith. We assist the claims of the extremists by failing to provide any counter-narrative (ranging from the possibility that what Muhammad did then is not permissible now, all the way through to ‘this didn’t really happen – it is a kind of metaphor’). And we simultaneously heighten the suspicion from many non-Muslims who can see that there is a problem and become increasingly frustrated at the interminable effort to shut discussion down.

All very strange.

All I would add is that I suspect that in the years ahead the line ‘Another beheading: nothing to see here’ is going to become increasingly difficult to hold.

In a later post we will look at the BBC’s, and other’s, approach to reporting claims that foreign policy radicalises Muslims but first some more examples of the ‘Establishment’ attempts to downplay the Islamic connection to what is happening in the Middle East and around the world.

In Mehdi’s Muddle we started to look at the various attempts to put a gulf of separation between Islam and the so-called extremists or radicals.

In this post I illustrate that with some more blatant examples where the violent and cruel ISIS Caliphate isn’t compared by commentators to the original birth of Islam which swept violently across the Middle East 1400 years ago and is a pretty near perfect replay of that, but who, once again, deny any such connection to Islam, instead preferring  to compare it with European society….trying no doubt to say…look ‘we’ were just as bad once…so don’t judge Muslims.

Janet Daley compares ISIS not to Muhammed’s brutal conquests and colonisation but to European Anarchism:

Isil: the world must tackle this mass psychosis
Take away its success and the glamour will go, leaving only a rump of fanatics

We are not engaged in a religious war. This is not a confrontation between Islam and the West….the activities of these terrorist criminals hacking their way through northern Iraq have nothing to do with the Islamic faith.

It is more important than ever to say that this is not a struggle between “our values” and those of medieval fundamentalism, or Islamist extremism.
The contest is not modern liberal democracy versus the Dark Ages. This is to impose meaning on what is, in truth, meaningless. There is nothing coherent or comprehensible at the heart of the homicidal Isil frenzy. It is just what it looks like: psychopathic nihilism.

There is not even anything particularly Middle Eastern in the Isil mode of operation. In fact, the gratuitous violence and promiscuous mayhem of its onslaught resembles nothing so much as 19th-century European anarchism, whose objective was simply to create the maximum amount of indiscriminate chaos with the vague intention of undermining the existing order.
The infamous taunt of al-Qaeda, which it boasted would always guarantee its victory – “You love life, we love death” – was a widely held sentiment in the anarchist movement.

The BBC itself has a go at denial and once again links to the nasty Europeans:

A Point of View: Isis and what it means to be modern

Although it claims to be reviving a traditional Islamic system of government, the jihadist group Isis is a very modern proposition, writes John Gray.

Although it claims to be reviving a traditional Islamic system of government, the jihadist group Isis is a very modern proposition, writes John Gray……claims that it wants to restore an early type of Islam, leads many of us to see it as trying to bring about a reversion to mediaeval values. 

To my mind, this gives too much credence to the way Isis views itself. There’s actually little in common between the horribly repressive regime it has established in parts of Iraq and Syria and the subtle Islamic states of mediaeval times, which in Spain, for example, exercised a degree of tolerance at a time when the rest of Europe was wracked by persecution.

Isis shares more with this modern revolutionary tradition than any ancient form of Islamic rule. Though they’d hate to hear it, these violent jihadists owe the way they organise themselves and their utopian goals to the modern West.

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian does the same, denying an Islamic link to the urge to build a Caliphate and instead suggesting a comparison with European Barons:

This Islamic State nightmare is not a holy war but an unholy mess

It isn’t religious zeal but the collapse of state power that makes the clash in Iraq feel like a return to the dark ages.

It is tempting to believe this is indeed the curious fate of our supposedly modern era – that we are being drawn back to a medieval or pre-medieval world of holy war and wholesale slaughter in the name of religion.
Yet neat though it is to see return to holy war as the motif of our age, it might be wrong. The rolling advances of IS – brutal and laden with treasure, conquering one city or stronghold after another – may indeed resemble the world of several centuries ago but not in the way we’ve imagined. It is instead a story that is both ancient and very modern.
According to Toby Dodge, the scholar of Iraq at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), what’s driving IS, or at least making its phenomenal success possible, is not pre-modern religious zeal so much as a pre-modern absence of state power. The state structures of both Iraq and Syria have all but collapsed. The result is a power vacuum of a kind that would have been recognised in the lawless Europe of seven or eight centuries ago – and which IS has exploited with the ruthless discipline of those long ago baronial warlords who turned themselves into European princes.
Islamic State may wrap itself in the flag of jihad, but its success owes more to medieval lawlessness than medieval religious enmity – helped by the very 21st-century decline of the global behemoth. Our world is being shaken, but the persistence of religion is more a symptom than a cause.

Curiously in 2005 Freedland was emphatic that there was a link to Islam and the terrorist’s ideology…in fact it was the only thing that made sense of their actions:

It’s not only about Iraq

The animating ideology of the caliphate helps explain al-Qaida actions that otherwise make no sense

For those who opposed the 2003 conflict, it is tempting to cast Iraq and the whole panoply of US-UK actions after 9/11 as the decisive factor in the bombings. There is certainly no shortage of evidence.
Peter Taylor, the veteran documentary film-maker who spent decades studying Northern Irish terrorism, has just completed a BBC series, The New Al-Qaida, which starts next Monday. After a year spent talking to Muslims in Spain, Morocco, Pakistan, the US and the UK, he says: “The one word that comes out loud and clear is Iraq. There is no question that Iraq is the prime motivating factor.”

So Iraq is central. But it is not the whole story.
For, as Taylor explains, al-Qaida is not like Eta or the IRA
Its aims are rather different. Central to its ideology is the reintroduction of the caliphate, an Islamic state governed by sharia law that would stretch across all formerly Muslim lands, taking in Spain, Morocco, north Africa, Albania, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, as well as Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines. Plenty on the left tend to skim over this stuff, dismissing it as weird, obscurantist nonsense – and imagining it as somehow secondary to al-Qaida’s anti-imperialist mission.
That’s a big mistake. For it is this animating idea which helps to explain al-Qaida actions that otherwise make no sense.

In other words, al-Qaida has a programme that predates and goes beyond Iraq. It seeks to end all western presence in those lands it deems Islamic.

This is the ideology that defines al-Qaida and which explains why it was in business from 1993 and not just 2001 and after. Tellingly, those who monitor Islamism in Britain say the big surge in growth of extremist groups came not after 9/11 or Iraq but in the mid-1990s – with Bosnia serving as the recruiting sergeant. In the same period Chechnya, Kosovo and Israel-Palestine all came into play – again predating Iraq.
But that message is not only about Iraq, Afghanistan or even the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza – and we delude ourselves if we think it is.

The next post will examine the issues around foreign policy and try to untangle the rights and wrongs of the justifications for Muslims attacking the West…..the BBC’s failure to challenge such a narrative, indeed it being the cheerleader for that narrative being so opposed to the Iraq war and Guantanamo, means that it is important to ask questions about Muslims justifications based on foreign policy and ask whether the BBC’s approach has led to more radicalisation and terrorism.

Yesterday we looked at the Left mobilising to close down all talk of race or religion in regard to Rotherham and it is pretty much all I heard today from the talking heads on the BBC.

We’ve been told that those in authority didn’t really know what sex abuse was, they didn’t realise these girls were being abused…no, seriously.

We were told the girls were reluctant to talk about it….except for all the times they went to the authorities and were ignored.

We were told the girls themselves didn’t know they were being abused…they thought being raped by multiple numbers of strange men, beaten up and having petrol poured onto them was part of a normal loving relationship…seriously.

It was all the girls fault if you look hard enough.

And race…well race had absolutely nothing to do with anything.

A couple of weeks from now the truth will be out…it was the racist police setting up Pakistani men in a honeypot sting operation, entrapping them, unsophisticated, naive, trusting men enticed into taking drugs and drink by undercover, hardened 11 year old floozies on the police payroll.

They’ll be demanding damages next.

Dan Hodges in the Telegraph thinks we are being taken for mugs…as we said yesterday when the BBC produced a programme asking how to tackle this problem but seemed more intent on explaining away the real issue,  the fear of being called racist:

Rotherham child abuse: the liberal Left is circling the wagons over the race question

It’s happening again. It is happening in front of our eyes. The denial. The deflection. The deceit.

All of the toxic impulses that contrived to allow the systematic abuse of thousands of children in Rotherham are again being redeployed in the face of the damning, incontrovertible evidence of the nature and scale of that abuse. Hear that sound? That low rumble? It is the sound of liberal wagons again being circled.

We had a good example of this today from Nicky Campbell, (27 mins 45 sec) no surprise there I suppose.

A calller named Robert suggested that those people in authority charged with looking after these girls and responding to allegations of abuse, but who failed in that duty of care, should be investigated and dealt with.

Nicky Campbell didn’t think that was a good idea….

‘Witch hunts are unattractive.  What we need to do is get to the root cause of why this happened in the first place.   The worry is that the focus is too much on the people who were utterly incompetent, uncaring and indeed callous for whatever reason, not rocking the multi-cultural boat is what Dennis McShane said about it.

I’m just worried, and many people say this, that there is not enough focus on the men who are still free and the victims who are still suffering and this becomes a media circus about, well you know, ‘we want your head’.’

Robert gave Campbell a good earful and wasn’t having any of it, Campbell wasn’t happy but didn’t really have a come back.

Astonishing that Campbell thinks those in charge should not be held to account.  1400 girls, in one town, abused over 16 years.  And those in charge knew and did nothing.

Dan Hodges has noticed this tendency to try and divert attention from inconvenient facts…not investigating those in authority means you don’t have to explain why race was an issue here…….

Another popular line-to-take was deployed on Channel 4 News last night by Javid Khan, the chief executive of Barnardos. Confronted with the charge his charity and other charities had shied away from issues of ethnicity in this case he responded by attempting to shy away from the issue of ethnicity.

“Whether it’s been part of the problem in Rotherham or not, the issue here is the vulnerability of children,” he said. “The reason why this [focusing on race] is so unhelpful is that it takes attention away from the victim.”

It is not focusing on race that takes attention away from the victims of Rotherham. It is ignoring it that takes attention away from the victims. Race is the reason they were victims. The racial element of these crimes is the explanation for how they came to be perpetrated on such a staggering scale for such an unbelievable period. “How could this happen?” people ask. Because the victims were white English girls, and their abusers Pakistani and Kashmiri men, is the answer.

The name of the game now is defending cosy progressive preconceptions.

The cry “we must focus on the victims” is classic communications chaff. Don’t look to cast blame. Don’t look to find answers. And above all, on no account find answers that may challenge the liberal status quo.

The BBC is slowly taking control of all the media, inculcating new recruits with the BBC ethos…another university succumbs:

Former BBC news editor to lead new journalism degree

A former Editor of the BBC Ten O’Clock News has joined the University of Essex as its founding Professor of Journalism.

Jonathan Baker, who left the BBC earlier this year after more than 30 years in news, is the University’s first founding professor for more than 20 years in a new curriculum area.

Mr Baker has held a number of senior positions across BBC television, radio and newsgathering, including Executive Editor Radio News, World News Editor and Head of Newsgathering. He was Editor of the Nine O’Clock News when it moved to its present, later, slot.

Between 2010 and 2013 he was Head of the BBC College of Journalism, responsible for delivering all forms of journalism training to more than 8,000 BBC journalists in the UK and overseas.

At Essex, he will be responsible for developing an innovative curriculum for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, and seeking accreditation from the National Council for the Training of Journalists and the Broadcast Journalism Training Council.

Just another ‘friendly’ place to go to get an ‘independent’ report on BBC bias…or lack of?