Obama not also claiming these lost boys for his virtual family then?

The BBC is in a bit of a quandary….a mixed race killer who likes the IRA (one of the BBC’s favoured terror groups)…..they can’t avoid mentioning the IRA but perhaps, as with the Hispanic George Zimmerman, they can pass Harper off as purely white and settle for rolling their eyes in disgust at the white race…never mind that the mass killer Chris Harper Mercer is mixed race…half black…this is his aunt apparently…

In fact the BBC manage to avoid mentioning his race at all, which is unusual for the BBC…..if he’d been white/white you can guarantee it would have been mentioned, repeatedly…they had to settle for ‘conservative/Republican’ to try and damn him.

Though the BBC mentions that and his penchant for the IRA they don’t mention his link on his MySpace page to this fellow Mahmoud Ali Ehsani who has some interesting photos, and captions to go with them…one being ‘“my brave soldiers keep on fighting for the liberation of Palestine against Israel. fuck Israel. Kill the Jews. jews are the only infidels.”  The rest all tag the ‘brave’ Mujahadeen…should add Mercer says he’s not himself religious…..

Now Harper isn’t a Muslim so why avoid mentioning the link whilst mentioning all the other interesting connections on his Myspace page?

I’m wondering where the campaigns are to call this man a terrorist as with the white supremacist Dylann Roof?

Today also brought another BBC sleight of hand where they duck an inconvenient fact.  Remember ‘Clockboy’ and the BBC’s endless reports on him?

It looks like they are less keen on another 14 year old Muslim schoolboy’s talents…the BBC merely reported on the news bulletins that he had been discovered due to his behaviour at school but didn’t expand on that.  They slipped in this less than expansive and informative comment buried deep, deep in their web article…

The court previously heard the teenager had been referred to the authorities by his school on several occasions for threatening behaviour, including telling one teacher he would “cut his throat and watch him bleed to death”.

The BBC then tries to explain away his actions…

The youth had found an online jihadist community through his first smartphone which “filled a void” caused by problems he was having at school and at home as well as a degenerative eye condition.

Poor lad…I’m sure the teacher would have had a Robert Fisk moment as their throat was being cut and think...’I deserve this, I’m white, privileged and have the blood of countless natives on my hands due to Western colonialism’….

“It doesn’t excuse them for beating me up so badly but there was a real reason why they should hate Westerners so much.

“I don’t want this to be seen as a Muslim mob attacking a Westerner for no reason. They had every reason to be angry – I’ve been an outspoken critic of the US actions myself. If I had been them, I would have attacked me.”

The Telegraph is more thorough and revealing about his threats…the boy had threatened far more than just slitting the throat of one teacher….

A two-day sentencing hearing was told on Thursday that the youngster, who had a troubled family life, had frequently threatened to kill his teachers, including one who he told he would “cut the throat”.

He told another “you are on my beheading list” and said he had moved “above” another teacher.

He threatened a teaching assistant with a pair of scissors and told another “your time has come”.

Why totally ignore that in news bulletins and minimise it to the extreme in the web report?

Perhaps the BBC thinks people might make a connection between how they reported so sympathetically on the ‘clock’ that looked like a bomb and the claims of injustice and islamophobia that must have inspired the reaction to it and the BBC’s latest reports as they look and see a 14 year old Muslim boy in the UK threatening to behead teachers and the BBC downplaying his threats.  It would then be obvious that even 14 year olds cannot be so easily dismissed as potential ‘Jihadis’ and therefore the reaction to ‘Clockboy’ could be seen as entirely justified and wise… his clock did after all look like a bomb…..

‘After years of trying to make sense of extremism, I want to understand the lives of ordinary Muslims, to go behind the walls and dispel the mystery and suspicion felt by non-Muslims on the outside’

The BBC has just broadcast what can only be described as a very provocative piece of pro-Muslim propaganda for the East London Mosque which has a well deserved reputation for extremist teachings (any search on Harry’s Place will confirm that…or Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph).  The BBC programme by Robb Leech was deliberately naive, shallow and very restrictive in its scope as to what it investigated in an attempt to avoid and downplay ‘Muslim’ issues.  As said the ELM is well known for its extremist associations and it looks like the BBC has set out to whitewash those concerns and paint a picture of brave British Muslims under siege from both government and the media….Leech repeatedly suggesting that the racism of the 70’s was back in the form of ‘Islamophobia’….and yet he made little, no, attempt to delve into the most controversial aspects of Islam that give rise to very serious and credible concerns about its teachings preferring instead to concentrate on how Islam segregates women….an issue but hardly the one that is relevant to radicalisation and joining ISIL.

Rather astonishingly even Mishal Husain on the Today programme (08:47) found Leech’s narrative of Muslims under siege not credible saying, when Leech and a Muslim guest from the Mosque suggested that Muslims were being unfairly targeted, besieged, as likely subjects of radicalisation, that that was because most terrorists were Muslims.  Leech jumped in to say his brother had been radicalised proving that it’s not just Muslims being radicalised…Husain pointed out the obvious flaw in his argument…his brother, the Jihadi, had converted to Islam and then been radicalised.

Leech is always keen to claim that his brother converted to ‘an extreme form of Islam’…he ‘hastens to add’.  However there is no moderate or extreme Islam, there is just Islam….as any Muslim would have told him.  However Islam, everyday, conservative Islam, is extreme in relation to a Western society….something Leech was trying to hide.

Leech’s programme was simply a long, disingenuous piece of highly misleading film that gave a very one-sided view of the Mosque and Islam.  Where were the critics of the Mosque, where were the claims about what the Mosque had been doing, where were the indepth explorations of Islamic teachings?  Nowhere to be seen.

Leech gave us a film that said Muslims are lovely people, just like you and me, yes they may have ‘conservative’ values but you know what, live and let live, we must ignore such alien and scary beliefs and values being fostered in our midst.

Here’s a taste of Leech’s thoughts…

The general reaction in Britain to Islam…it’s another form of racism comparable to what happened in the 70’s….it makes Muslims feel different….hmmm…the whole film showed them to be different…because their religion taught them to be that way…..an Imam in the programme said if not submit to God, the teachings of the Koran and Hadith, then Islam is compromised….so to be a good Muslim you must be fundamentalist….that seemed to pass Leech by.

We heard that the families of the three ‘Jihadi Brides’ were ‘just normal East London families’ and that Leech was ‘just as puzzled as the families as to why the girls were radicalised’…he was ‘struck by how ordinary the families were’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54R4gdaxdoI

Unfortunately we know that at least one girl’s father was a radical himself…Leech slipped round to his house for an explanation….apparently the father knew nothing about it, he had no idea the protest was radical…despite all the flags, banners and chants of death to America and no’s to democracy.

Leech tells us that ‘It’s not hard to see how a man like [the father] might feel lost and seek identity and empowerment in a protest whether extremist or not.’  WTF! Really?  Is Leech really saying that for some reason the father is ‘lost’ and that that is an understandable reason to become a ‘radical’?  Does Leech really believe that the man had no idea what he was doing at that protest?

We then heard from Leech’s mosque guide that ‘Young people are MADE to feel not part of Western society so of course there is an attraction to something which welcomes them, invites them to join and makes them feel valued’   OK…except it is Islam that tells them they are not part of Western society, and why is an ELM official justifying and almost endorsing radicalisation?

We then had an Imam come on to tell us that the ELM was progressive, it is the media that is wrongly portraying it as extreme, that Muslim values were the same as British values…Leech declaring that he didn’t even know what British values were…thereby trying to suggest perhaps that they didn’t exist and therefore Muslim ones can’t be ‘alien’ to British society.

Leech says ‘I can see how Muslims can feel victimised by government policy and besieged by the media.’  The Imam prefers ‘moral clarity’ to ‘interference from government’  i.e he wants Muslims to be left to follow their religion whatever form that may take…without ‘draconian‘ laws restricting their fundamental beliefs.

Leech again sympathises uncritically with Muslims saying ‘I understand the predicament that Muslims find themselves in, under constant siege they lack the confidence to have a loud and clear voice.’  That is just complete rubbish…there is no more vocal and aggressively loud and demanding group than the Muslim community and government is constantly pandering to those demands with money, influence and political positions handed out to placate them.

When Ofsted visits the school at the mosque Leech is shocked that they ask the pupils how they felt about the Islamic state and if they support its views and actions….Leech thinks this is only being asked because they are Muslim…and therefore is unjustifiable…hmmm…yes it is being asked because they are Muslim, because, as Mishal Husain pointed out, most of the terrorists are Muslim.  Leech thinks this is forcing Muslims to ‘prove they are British’…and that’s ‘not a good thing’.  Curiously, paradoxically, at the end of the film he asks exactly the same question to some young Muslims…and they all denounce ISIL….have they proved to him they are British?

Leech concludes that any radicalisation, such as with the three Jihadi Brides, was purely a social media phenomenon and nothing to do with the Mosque…or indeed Islam….we are told the girls didn’t even go to the ELM and yet that’s not true and the first port of call for the families is….the ELM.

Leech is constantly confronted by evidence of fundamentalist, conservative Islam, especially amongst the young, and yet he manages to dismiss the importance of that and suggests that it has nothing to do with ‘radicalisation’ or that it may pose a problem for a Western, democratic, liberal society.

He talks to three youths who are part of their college Islamic society and are devout Muslims….we know that such societies are ‘hotbeds’ of Islamic fundamentalism and yet Leech doesn’t have any recognition of that….he makes absolutely no connection between the strong conservative Islamic values held by the young Muslims and potential radicalisation.

Finally he concludes that the level of conservativism on display at the Mosque maybe ‘alien and scary‘ to non-Muslims but these are normal British people with British values….so he seems to know what British values are when it suits his narrative…apparently they come from the Koran.

He tells us that (I paraphrase) ‘What I’ve seen is a community under siege, the younger generation suffers racism because of their faith just as their parents did for the colour of their skin.  I don’t believe the mosque is a hotbed of radicalisation.  The people here are British with British values, values which mean accepting and celebrating our differences together’.

Lovely sentiments….pity Islam doesn’t teach that. Pity Leech doesn’t actually do a proper investigation of the mosque, its activities and its associates and the real meaning and teachings of Islam.

This whole programme was badly misconceived….firstly we have a film maker who is unable to separate his own feelings from the reality and instead of analysing that reality gives us his own naive, sentimental and overly sympathetic interpretation of events.  The film didn’t get anywhere near a genuine investigation of the claims about the ELM’s association with extremists, nor did it explore Islam and why its teachings alienate its followers from a Western society and may lead to radicalisation.  Instead we had an uninformed, misleading rant against the government, the media and non-Muslim society putting the blame for alienation and radicalisation squarely at their door.

The BBC is highly irresponsible in producing such a one-sided and deliberately misleading programme that paints Muslims as victims of a racist society and thus incites radicalisation by encouraging that feeling of alienation and ‘disenfranchisement’ we are so often told they suffer from….which the BBC ‘proves’ that they do.

Christian and Muslim refugees should be housed separately, says German police chief

As attacks on Christians in asylum seeker centres increase and religious groups clash, Jörg Radek says refugees should be separately accommodated based on their faith

Muslim migrants threw 12 Christians overboard to their deaths because they were not praying to Allah when they asked God for help when their dinghy suffered a puncture

Well, the BBC did all they could to spin Corbyn’s “straight-talking” speech, didn’t they? I note they casually dismissed the fact that a section of it was written years ago for Neil Kinnoch. I note they overlooked he read out directional advice from the autocue. Straight-talking? Anyway, here’s a mid week open thread and the last one of this month!

 

‘As a man he suffers from a fatal incoherence of the intellectual pretensions.  He has wonderful dramatic ideas, but doesn’t have the drive or grasp to make a team of them.  His politics seems to me to be founded in a real imagination, sinister and very odd…too much smiling insinuation….and a continuous impersonation of reality out of illusion and fantasy combines with dark sideswipes at the ‘evil’ Press in a pseudo display of critical integrity.  What a dim muddy glow there is lighting this goldfish bowl of the English intelligentsia…they are a damply steaming compost of bile, saliva, & disntegrated copies of the Communist Manifesto…the pustulence of their own canker, the fungi that sits & swells & sweats & stinks wherever Socialism is gathered together.’  Ted Hughes on Jeremy Corbyn and his grandiose mewlings.  Or that’s what I believe Ted Hughes would say if he were still with us.

Corbyn and McDonnell.  What to make of them?  We are assured, and they work hard to present themselves as such, that they are hail fellows well met…and yet, that’s not true is it? Even as you watch or listen to the faux bonhomie, the reassuring tones and little quips intended to prove they are human you get an uncomfortable feeling that all is not just so, that something else lurks beneath.  Both Corbyn and McDonnell come across to me as rather sinister, their attempts at grooming us with their pleasant spiel reminds me of the German soldier in Saving Private Ryan as he spoke quietly and reassuringly to the American soldier he was killing by slowly pushing a bayonet into his chest…

Listen to the BBC and you’d have an entirely wrong perspective on these two.  The BBC downplays or ignores their radicalism and their unpopularity.  Listen to the BBC and you’d think they really were the face of a ‘new politics’ with a groundswell of popular support from around the country.  And yet, that’s not true.  Corbyn has nothing new to offer in the content of his politics nor in the way that he serves that politics up.  His support comes from a very vocal, very active group of militant supporters who hijacked the leadership election…even the Labour supporting New Statesman acknowledges Corbyn and his policies are not popular amongst the majority of Labour voters and even less so amongst potential Labour voters…so much for Corbyn himself claiming he has the support of the majority of people in the UK….

Corbyn claims his is a new politics, a line that the BBC seems all to happy to echo rather uncritically despite curiously also acknowledging the new politics seemed to have little substance….

In an era of growing disillusion towards politics, voters might like Mr Corbyn’s attempt at straight-talking, honest politics. But voters also like to know what politicians and parties believe in. At some point, the Labour leader’s policy blossom will have to bear fruit. And that is when the reckoning will be had.

‘Straight-talking, honest politics’?  You have to be kidding.  It’s all spin, it’s all theatrics..starting with PMQs last week.  The BBC just doesn’t seem to have noticed….in fact the BBC goes along with Corbyn that his image problems are all a result of the nasty right wing press…

For example, many voters – if they have read anything about Mr Corbyn’s economic policy from his opponents in the press – might think that all he wants to do is raise taxes and print money. Unless the Labour leader acts to challenge that impression soon, it might prove harder to dispel in later months.

Why  for instance has the BBC completely ignored the fact that a good proportion of Corbyn’s speech was lifted from something written in the 80’s and rejected by Labour leaders for decades as the Spectator, amongst many others (not the BBC), spells out?

Revealed: ‘unspun’ Jeremy Corbyn used a four-year old reject speech for Miliband

An off-the-peg speech then, regurgitated from the reject pile of history.  New politics?  Same old same old and the same old politics of spin.

What was the one factor that made Corbyn so attractive in this era of jaded voters according to the BBC?  It was that he had remained unchanged for decades, his ideology and politics and the causes he championed stayed the same for 30 years.   This was the man of conviction who spoke the unvarnished truth as he saw it and the voters had been crying out for such a man who would break the mould and bring in a new age of principled, straight-talking, honest politics.

Except that’s not true is it?  Immediately upon taking office all that conviction and honesty went out the window in an attempt to ‘fool’ the voters that he was not the Marxist ogre he had always proclaimed he was.  He dumped his ‘straight-talking honest politics’ and presented us with a ‘moderate’ face designed to reassure us that the 30 years of championing Communism can be brushed aside, he didn’t really mean it, or rather he did but he doesn’t want you to know he did….honest.  He now gets upset when reminded of his past utterances and blames the dark forces of the right-wing press for any mis-apprenhensions the Public might have about him and his ideas…never mind that they are his ideas.  The New Statesman recognises the deceit…..

In the short term, Corbyn will doubtless compromise on his policy agenda, in order to prevent an immediate revolt by more moderate Labour MPs. We should not be fooled. He is a principled socialist. His long-term aims remain. He is a leopard whose spots have never changed, and never will. In a way, that is to Corbyn’s credit….However, that is not remotely what most of Labour’s other leading MPs want. They believe in capitalism. 

How exactly is such a dishonest stance to Corbyn’s credit if he intends later to implement his extreme policies to the full along with presumably having ‘dealt’ with recalcitrant MPs who oppose him?

The BBC takes a similar stance…it’s clever politics……

Now on one level this is smart politics. If this week is designed to reassure voters frightened by what they read in the papers, why should Mr Corbyn rush his fences? Why establish positions in the early flush of electoral success that he might come to regret?

So Corbyn should not mention his long held politics of conviction in case he comes to regret it later….and yet he was voted in on the basis of that politics…like Syriza….is he now selling out…like Syriza?   Note once again the BBC is spinning its own anti-Press line, the same one that Corbyn uses….’voters frightened by what they read in the papers.’  So we shouldn’t believe 30 years of Corbyn ‘honest’ rhetoric then?  It was all an act?

Here is an issue that the BBC has conveniently decided not to explore which reflects upon Corbyn’s honesty…the issue of the asteroid…..Corbyn started his speech by dismissing this as the rabid anti-Corbyn Press making stuff up about him,…and yet it was true……both Corbyn and McDonnell signed up to a Parliamentary motion that welcomed the destruction of the earth and mankind by an asteroid….

Why would Corbyn be suddenly so embarrassed about his past, a past that he has kept alive right up until he had to put it into action in the real world?

“No, sorry commentariat: this is grown up, real politics where real people debate real issues.”

Not so much.  Why would he be embarrassed about such as this?….

“Our job is not to reform capitalism; it’s to overthrow it.” No wonder he has appointed a shadow chancellor whose Who’s Who entry declares his ambition as “fermenting the overthrow of capitalism”.

Corbyn continually attacks the right wing press and blames them for his image problems and yet, as the Spectator shows, the Press is waning and it is the left wing BBC that has enormous dominance of the news narrative….and that last quote came from the lefty New Statesman.

The BBC has been all too ready to accept the narrative that Corbyn is the face of a new politics, a man with integrity, compassion and conscience who has tapped into a widespread feeling across the country and who is attracting voters of all persuasions.

On Monday it was pretty much a Labour love-in on the BBC with hardly a critic in sight….Polly Toynbee and someone from the left wing Demos in one interview and then a whole programme devoted to what Labour thinks of itself..naturally there wasn’t much dissent on open display…..the only bit of reality came when a vox pop showed that the vast majority of voters questioned thought Corbyn was hopeless….the BBC news then picked out the pro-comments and an equal number of anti to give the impression that there was some kind of balance in Corbyn’s support.  Is this Miliband all over again with the Public hating him but the BBC insisting they all love him really?  The Telegraph notes….

One Labour MP ruefully told me that her party “failed to win the last election because we had a joke of a leader, and now we’ve elected an even bigger joke.”

Sure the BBC asks Labour: Straight talking or old politics? but they suggest, as mentioned, Corbyn is the victim of the right-wing press and not his own failings, his own extreme positioning, or his own compromising of that position.

The BBC is somewhat comfused as to who the speech was aimed at…his core support or the country…Jeremy Corbyn: Speaking to the hall not the nation  and yet he talked more of values than politics clearly aiming at the whole country not just the activists or Labour MPs….

“It’s because I am driven by these British majority values, because I love this country, that I want to rid it of injustice, to make it fairer, more decent, more equal.

“And I want all of our citizens to benefit from prosperity and success.”

Shadow education secretary Lucy Powell told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Mr Corbyn wanted to show that “people have nothing to fear from him” as he shares their values, which he will set out in his speech.

“I know that is a bit boring for people because we always want to see the rabbit out of the hat on the new policies, but that is exactly the kind of new approach to politics that I welcome,” she said.

After all why talk to those clearly already convinced about your radical brand of politics?  He was out to reassure us that he wasn’t so radical really.

And why has the BBC failed to challenge this claim?…..

And he attacked the “commentariat” for reporting “splits” in his top team, saying “this is grown-up, real politics where real people debate real issues”.

To a standing ovation, he added: “Cut out the personal abuse, cut out the cyber bullying, and especially cut out the misogynistic abuse.

“Let’s get on with bringing real values back into politics.”

It’s all about the values…..so why did he hug this speaker immediately after she abused the Tories as Nazis?..

And what of Unite leader, Len McCluskey’s comments in a similar vein, Unite being a big backer of Corbyn?…

Union chief Len McCluskey compares Tory strike laws to ‘wearing red triangles at Dachau’ under the NAZIS in furious rant at Cameron’s ‘fascist dictatorship’

Mr McCluskey said: ‘Whatever the law says, I’ll be on the picket line when Unite members are on strike and I will not be wearing the armbands with the red triangle, like the trade union prisoners.

‘Remember that’s what the Nazis did to trade unionists in the concentration camps at Dachau.’

A new, more respectful, value-led politics?

The BBC is not getting its hands dirty, it is standing back and offering up warmed-over pap that presumably is intended not to raise any hackles at Labour HQ.  The analysis is pretty anodyne and dodges the real dirt that would show Corbyn to be a complete fraud who has abandoned his principles for short term gain and who far from being straight and honest is spinning the politics in a way that Alastair Campbell would be proud of.

A Biased BBC reader draws this nugget to my attention…

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34346621

I was particularly incensed by the following paragraph:

“You may be familiar with the history of the 1967 Middle East War – a short, sharp conflict in which, Israel captured land from Egypt, Syria and Jordan in a series of lightning operations.”

No mention of why Israel went to war or the threats of annihilation that the state was facing. Also, the implication that the war was Israel’s fault. In particular, it was Jordan that attacked Israel in 1967 after they were warned to not to.

Here’s a nice image from the Labour Party conference. As you can see, the Union Flag is being taken down and replaced with the Red Flag so beloved of the comrades. Funny how the world class BBC missed this one…

Well, as Labour gathers in Brighton, I am sure we will not be short of instances of BBC bias and here is where you detail it! Over to you.

Student union blocks speech by ‘inflammatory’ anti-sharia activist

A human rights campaigner has been barred from speaking at Warwick University after organisers were told she was “highly inflammatory and could incite hatred”.

Maryam Namazie, an Iranian-born campaigner against religious laws, had been invited to speak to the Warwick Atheists, Secularists and Humanists Society next month. But the student union blocked the event, telling the society that Namazie’s appearance could violate its external speaker policy.

“We have a duty of care to conduct a risk assessment for each speaker who wishes to come to campus. There a number of articles written both by the speaker and by others about the speaker that indicate that she is highly inflammatory, and could incite hatred on campus.”

The student union’s policy says external speakers are “not permitted to encourage, glorify or promote any acts of terrorism” or “spread hatred and intolerance in the community” and “must seek to avoid insulting other faiths or groups”.

Namazie said she hoped to go ahead with the event if Warwick changed its mind. “The student union seems to lack an understanding of the difference between criticising religion, an idea or a far-right political movement on the one hand and attacking and inciting hate against people on the other,” she wrote on her blog. “Inciting hatred is what the Islamists do; I and my organisation challenge them and defend the rights of ex-Muslims, Muslims and others to dissent.”

Namazie, who has written for the Guardian, is the spokesperson for One Law for All, a group that campaigns against sharia and religious laws, and a member of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain and the Worker-Communist party of Iran.

In 2005 she won the National Secularist Society’s prize for secularist of the year, presented by the Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee.

Some thought-provoking articles that reflect on how the left/liberal agenda has undermined society and commonsense leaving people unable to cope with the real world and which silences free speech and honest debate…

Declining Student Resilience: A Serious Problem for Colleges

Students are increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life. Recent examples mentioned included a student who felt traumatized because her roommate had called her a “bitch” and two students who had sought counseling because they had seen a mouse in their off-campus apartment. The latter two also called the police, who kindly arrived and set a mousetrap for them.

Faculty at the meetings noted that students’ emotional fragility has become a serious problem when in comes to grading. Some said they had grown afraid to give low grades for poor performance, because of the subsequent emotional crises they would have to deal with in their offices.

Obama: P.C. Culture on Campus Leads to “Coddled” Students

President Barack Obama on Monday waded into the debate on political correctness saturating American colleges, forcefully rejecting the idea of tailoring curriculum or cutting funding based on the sensitivities of students.

During a town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, Obama described liberal college students—the kind of students who ban speakers from campus due to their political beliefs, at least—as “coddled.”

“I’ve heard of some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative. Or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African Americans, or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women,” he said, according to The Hill.

“I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of views.”

The culture of political correctness itself has generated a massive reaction, from liberal journalists, comedians, and researchers.

The Coddling of the American Mind

In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.

Something strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The New Yorker about law students asking her fellow professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress.

Political correctness is killing freedom of speech

Ladies, gentlemen, people of indeterminate gender.

There are two reasons you should be freaked out by political correctness.

The first is that it prevents people from saying what they want to say, from expressing what they believe to be true. And it is fundamentally illiberal to stop people from expressing their beliefs and their ideas.

And the second is that it prevents the rest of us from hearing those ideas and deciding for ourselves if they are good or bad. It infantilises all of us through denying us the right to weigh things up, to argue over them, to be the arbiters of what is right and what is wrong.

Instead it gives that role to a dictatorship of do-gooders, who decide on our behalf what words and thoughts are fit for public consumption.

Political correctness: How censorship defeats itself

On its own terms, political correctness is self-defeating. It drives away potential supporters, and substitutes linguistic change for social change. It replaces the desire to reform society with the desire to reform manners, and fails to understand that practised hypocrites and seasoned manipulators can meet the demand to observe correct form with ease. Indeed, they will welcome political correctness because it gives them new opportunities to intimidate and control…..Spastic too was once a euphemism that became an insult. In 1994, the Spastics’ Society changed its name to ‘Scope’ because children were ‘shouting you big spastic’ at each other in the playground. No good did the substitution do. As current dictionaries of slang report ‘scopey’  is now ‘a byword for spaz’.

The BBC’s Samira Ahmed asks a fundamental question about the migrant crisis...but in The Big Issue magazine and not on the BBC….

Most refugees are men – we should be asking why

“Just as in East Germany, looking at gender opens up a legitimate question about how you build a strong and stable society”

One of the most intriguing anecdotal demographic phenomena of the 1990s was what happened to East Germany’s young women; how many upped sticks and headed west in search of opportunity. It was, Germans told me, overwhelmingly men who stayed put when their obsolete industrial jobs disappeared, and in some cases nursed a grievance against foreigners. The rise of far-right extremists in the East seemed correlated with that demographic change.

Polling here shows a large number of Britons, the majority even, are at best cautious about taking in refugees from Syria because of the fear of conservative Islamic attitudes. Some readers might want to dismiss this as a cover for racism, just as in the 1930s the Daily Mail warned of the “threat” of so many Jews coming from Hitler’s Germany.

But just as in East Germany, looking at gender opens up a legitimate question about how you build a strong and stable society. Where are all the women refugees? According to the latest UNHCR figures, 72 per cent of the numbers arriving in western Europe so far in 2015 are men, 15 per cent children and only 13 per cent women. A BBC World Service reporter a few days ago described on air the unease he and female colleagues felt when they tried to interview women refugees, only to be uniformly refused permission by their men.

So where ARE the women refugees? Some men will have planned to establish themselves and then bring families over safely. But talking to lawyers dealing with the influx of young male Afghan migrants here a decade earlier, it seems in many cases families spend money on the people they value most. And that’s not the women.

When we talk of compassion and doing the right thing in these humanitarian crises, perhaps we ignore gender at our peril.

Interesting that Samira Ahmed, a Muslim woman, should think this is an issue that is important enough to raise questions about …but….she does so not at the BBC but in ‘The Big Issue’ magazine.  Why?  Why not the BBC?  Is it just that she had the opportunity to write this in the Big Issue, perhaps somebody there asked her to do it, or is it an issue that is close to her heart but which the BBC has decided is one that isn’t to be aired by them due to its ‘inflammatory’ nature in that it raises serious questions about, not just immigration, but Islam itself and its respect or otherwise for women (as we looked at yesterday)?

Has the BBC explored this issue?, I haven’t seen it, or is this just another example of the BBC hiding uncomfortable truths because they would make people even less inclined to support immigration which the BBC is a powerful cheerleader for?

An interesting and very relevant consideration that is coming into focus very quickly is that Turkey is possibly heading towards civil war (and where are the cries of outrage, ala Israel, about Turkey’s massive military strikes against the PKK?) and yet the EU, itself heading towards a split, is trying to bribe the Turks to stop the flow of migrants by allowing Turks much freer access to Europe…all 75 million of them…..and note Islamist Turkey is helping the Islamic State because it is the enemy of the Kurds……the same Islamic State that is driving migrants towards Europe.

And here’s something from the Commentator, written by ex-ambassador Charles Crawford, to chew on and consider when listening to all those BBC journos wittering on about open borders, the horrors of the nation state and the joys of mass immigration of people who follow the religion of peace:

Open Borders? Meet national Identity

Migration crisis? Not good. Rapidly getting worse. Maybe World War Three starts not because one country grabs another’s land, but because in too many places simultaneously international borders just start to melt?

The dramas of fences and quotas and agonising personal stories now playing out in different parts of Europe and along other international borders raise existential questions at the heart of human identity. Do national and cultural identities exist? If so, how to defend them if they come under challenge?

Let’s look at another question. Do the lights in your home go on or off when you flick a switch? Yes, there’s electricity. But that electricity supply (and the fact that your house has a switch) comes from the fact of a reliable and identifiable legal order.

Everything you see around you has been invented and created somewhere in the world thanks to myriad contracts enforceable under local laws and supporting international agreements.

Those legal systems exist only because they are attached to a territorial jurisdiction. England’s laws apply in England. Cross into Scotland or hop over to France, and different laws apply. This is often overlooked when people talk about an EU without internal borders.

Yes, an EU citizen and a non-EU citizen with a Schengen visa can drive to and fro across continental Europe without producing a passport. But the EU member states’ respective invisible legal jurisdictions remain 100 percent in place.

If tens or hundreds of thousands of young Arab Muslims are unwilling to fight for their own country but instead demand to live in (say) Germany or Sweden or the UK or USA, what assurances of loyalty to their new host country and its values can and should be asked of them as part of the admission process?

How then to respond if they then form tightly-knit and ideologically extreme communities and start to resist their generous hosts’ hospitality?

As the modern democratic state’s control over its own vital rules frays, our smug political elites stare aghast at the philosophical and practical confusion their fecklessness has created.

And in one country after another, angry populists start to win leadership positions by playing on legitimate public concerns that if the state under current management is unable to do its most basic job — to protect its own borders, and choose and enforce its own values — the law-abiding citizens of that state need to look at more drastic solutions.

Not good. Rapidly getting worse.

Maybe World War Three starts not because one country grabs another’s land, but because in too many places simultaneously international borders just start to melt?