Newsnight is run by children on a fool’s errand. Paxman

Newsnight, it’s redundant.  Who said so?  Ian Katz, the editor of Newsnight.

Well, sort of.  He tells us that the political interview is dead, has been for nearly 30 years.

Thatcher killed it, of course, oh and Kinnock.  But Kinnock doesn’t count politically, he’s a never was, so Guardianista Katz can rag him without upsetting the fellow travellers.

Oh hang on, news of the political interview’s death is slightly premature….

There are notable exceptions of course, most recently James O’Brien’s patient, forensic unravelling of Ukip leader Nigel Farage…..

and of course….

…. Russell Brand’s Newsnight diatribe against politics and politicians was watched more than 10 million times on YouTube alone and it’s hard to imagine that the spavined state of the political interview has not been a major contributor to the mood of suspicion and disgust that Brand so powerfully articulated.

So that’ll be an interview by James O’Brien who lied about and smeared Nigel Farage in an odious hatchet job and one with a drug addled half-wit who wants a revolution but doesn’t know what should come after it.

And just how self-reverential is Katz?…O’Brien being tried out as a guest interviewer on Newsnight recently and Brand interviewed by Newsnight’s Paxman, sort of, as Paxman giggled his way through it and refused to tax Brand with anything more difficult than what flavour of bubblegum he liked.

Katz lays out the problem..nothing original or new here……point scoring journalists out to show up a politician who consequently goes into lock-down resulting in a combative but uninformative interview that most people will be familiar with…

The unacknowledged truth is that half a century after the bristling exchange between Robin Day and prime minister Harold Macmillan that reshaped the relationship between politics and the media, the broadcast political interview is stuck.

[There is]  a safety-first ethos that conspires to make even the most interesting political figures seem dull, and rewards those who prove themselves to be “a safe pair of hands” with the highest offices in the land. 

Increasingly, the most senior political figures don’t simply stonewall their way through tough interviews, they avoid them altogether.

Ironically Katz quotes Evan Davis, the master of the point scoring interview that tries to humiliate and belittle the politician…any wonder they are reluctant to be interviewed.

Davis tells us that the political interview has  reached a Mexican stand-off where neither interviewer nor politician gives way : “The political interview is in a low trust equilibrium and it’s sort of stuck there.”

I imagine when you snigger your way through an interview, making fun of the politician, ridiculing him, is there any wonder you don’t get the trust?

Katz complains that politicians shut down and refuse to be candid and less defensive. He complains that interviews are impossible in such circumstances.

But isn’t that the job of the interviewer, to create an atmosphere conducive to trust and a level of familiarity in order to coax the truth out of an unwilling guest..failing that to lay out the facts for the audience and let them decide even if the politician won’t fess up.

Asking a question 12 times when the interviewee is obviously not going to give an answer is just stupid not great or courageous journalism.

Katz, after the longest moan in history comes up with the answer:

1.  Both broadcasters and politicians need to acknowledge that the interview is a transaction that must yield something useful for both sides – and especially the audience.

2.  We need to make a genuine attempt to explore and illuminate the dilemmas politicians face, to recognise that government is not a choice between good and bad policies but most often a search for the least worst option.

3.  We need to try harder to understand what makes politicians tick.

4.  Finally, one that follows from the first three: we broadcasters need to give interviews – at least some of them – the time to breathe, even if that means putting up with more boring, snoring bits.

Snooze. Does Katz write Ed Miliband’s policy statements?

You might have thought 30 years after the ‘death of the political interview’ he might have come up with something more original and less banal…otherwise the whole piece is an enormous waste of time….perhaps he should give up on interviews on Newsnight and allow guest speakers on to vent their spleen unfettered by the liberal constructs that stifle true political discourse in this country.

Geert Wilders recent speech in the Dutch Parliament comes to mind. [H/T Is the BBC biased?]

Geert Wilders: “War Has Been Declared against Us”
A Speech in the Netherlands Parliament

Ruffle a few feathers.

BBC had ‘deep liberal bias’ over immigration, says former news chief

Nothing’s changed since 2004.

Here’s the BBC explaining, or rather explaining away, the immigration problem:

Q&A: Calais migrant crisis explained

Immigrants are just wonderful the BBC tells us…they all want to work, they speak English better than the natives…and they don’t want any welfare handouts at all…..

Why is the UK seen as a target?

It’s long been suggested that many migrants think they would have a better life in the UK as well as access to better benefits.

In fact migrants have quicker access to housing and benefits if they stay in France.

The British Red Cross agreed that it was a myth that migrants wanted to come to the UK for the benefits.

The charity also said that many of them have been taught or know English, and want to use the language.

Trouble is that’s all hogwash….and the BBC knows it…here it misses out a crucial part of the Mayor of Calais’ reasoning as she threatens to close the port:

Calais mayor Natacha Bouchart has previously threatened to shut down the port unless the British government did more to stop the problem of illegal immigration.

And not just in that article but this as well:

On Tuesday, the Mayor of Calais said she would blockade the port unless Britain helped to control the migrants.

Wonder why the BBC avoids this:

Calais Mayor Natacha Bouchart has long argued that Britain’s “generous welfare system” is the real cause of the migrant crisis in her town.

As for welfare……even as they wait in France they demand it….

“We do not want to live like animals but as normal human beings,” the letter says, stating they want “access to decent living conditions regardless of whether we are documented or not”. Last night one migrant, Younes Sajadi, said: “This would be a sensible solution to our situation.

Besides being given “houses in Calais with respectable hygiene, freedom from police checks, and three meals a day”, the migrants also want “negotiations between France and the United Kingdom” to ensure their arrival in Britain as soon as possible.

The BBC dodges around the question of benefits here:

‘In fact migrants have quicker access to housing and benefits if they stay in France.’

The BBC suggests only that they might get benefits faster in France (Migration Watch says:  In short, it is far easier to gain access to unemployment benefits in the UK than anywhere else in the EU15. ….so not true then…good old BBC) but avoids talk of how much…..and it looks like the UK government is the most generous with the handouts, the Mayor of Calais is correct….which is why immigrants flood here.

Update: H/T  The Beebinator in the comments who saw this plea from immigrants in Calais:

If we ask for asylum in France, they will make us wait many months before we can have access to a a shelter, whereas in England, in Germany, in Holland, they give us a house, we have access to school, to proper food and dignified conditions of life. France leaves us in the streets for more suffering.

“Our benefits are some of the most generous in Europe.”?

The UK was found to have larger than average “social assistance schemes, including housing and family benefits, as well as unemployment assistance” …but several other nations offered better benefits in other areas.

So housing, family and unemployment benefits are more generous in the UK then….all the major welfare benefits.

More Than 370,000 Immigrants On Benefits

Immigration to Britain ‘cuts Romanian unemployment’

It seems we are the most generous to those in low paid work as well:

From Migration Watch:

Comparison of UK Benefits with those of the EU14

The UK is far more generous than most other EU15 countries in topping-up low wages by just over 80% through in-work and housing benefits. This makes employment in the UK a very attractive for migrants from less wealthy EU member states, especially after adjusting for differences in the cost of living.

Access to unemployment benefit is also much easier than in other EU countries.

So, benefits are more generous and paid faster than most if not all other EU countries but the BBC tells us it is less generous and paid slower.

Everyone knows the huge problems associated with immigration and that’s not including social breakdown and intercommunal conflict.

The headlines have just been full of the massive cost to schools as the population grows enormously and we have just had the latest immigration figures….and they don’t tell the whole truth as they don’t give the net figure for foreign nationals coming here….the net overall figure is reduced by large numbers of British nationals emigrating…so the actual number of foreigners arriving on these shores is in fact a lot higher than the overall net figure…for instance the last immigration figures told us that 212,000 immigrants arrived here as a net figure…but the real net figure was something like 270,000 foreigners came here  if you took away foreign departures from foreign arrivals.

We’re being lied to and the BBC is still amongst those lying to us.

You might like to read this from NewsWatch:

BBC ‘ignores key immigration reports’

The BBC tells us they are being fair on immigration and indeed, they allow one of the chief correspondents to shout it from the rooftops. But meanwhile, when hard evidence is produced to show that this is not the case, they either ignore it altogether – or say it’s wrong. How very, very Animal Farm. 

Time for another one of these…..the floor’s yours….

Last week sometime, somewhere on the BBC I heard them tell us that 95% of scientific research data was still unanalysed, lying in drawers and filing cabinets, on computer hard drives, waiting to be checked out.

Who knows what they will find.  It makes you wonder about the stuff they claim they have found…..if their conclusions are only based on 5% of the data.

As an example of this WUWT brings us this:

1960’s satellite imagery of polar ice discovers “enormous holes” in the sea ice

In the Arctic, sea ice extent was larger in the 1960s than it is these days, on average. “It was colder, so we expected that,” Gallaher said. What the researchers didn’t expect were “enormous holes” in the sea ice, currently under investigation. “We can’t explain them yet,” Gallaher said.

“And the Antarctic blew us away,” he said. In 1964, sea ice extent in the Antarctic was the largest ever recorded, according to Nimbus image analysis. Two years later, there was a record low for sea ice in the Antarctic, and in 1969 Nimbus imagery, sea ice appears to have reached its maximum extent earliest on record.

They finish off  this video with the comment that if you don’t understand the past how can you understand the present, how can you understand the future?

Astonishing that scientists today clearly didn’t know the true state of the Arctic and Antarctic even as recently as the 1960’s….and yet they still managed to compare modern ice extent with the past…and predict the future.

Harry’s Place records that

Anti-semitic incidents reach record level in July 2014

One anti-Semitic incident was missing from those statistics.

At a time in history when the Middle East is in flames and running with blood and the Israel/Palestine conflict is oft cited as the catalyst for all other conflicts you might think it was an incendiary move by the BBC when it decided this was the perfect time to add fuel to the flames by broadcasting a series that sides with Islamic terrorists and promotes the destruction of Israel.

The BBC thought otherwise.

‘You know what “clue” is in Ancient Greek? It’s “thread”.

One thread to pull it all together.

And all I have to do is find it.’

So said MI5’s Hugh Hayden-Hoyle in the BBC’s ‘The Honourable Woman’.

Many, if not all, reviews of the series have declared that it is an immensely complex and deeply plotted piece but in reality it is quite simple…once you find the thread, the message it wishes to impart.

That thread that pulls everything together for the BBC’s ‘The Honourable Woman’ is  the terrible things Palestinians are prepared to do, forced to do by Israeli tyranny and oppression in the writer’s eyes, in order to establish a Palestinian state….the thread throughout the series is that ‘price for a nation ‘.

The politics of the programme were pretty much ignored by the reviewers, not bothering to ask if there was a message in the tale, possibly as any genuine assessment would not paint the BBC in a good light,  though one reviewer declared that Palestinians would be upset as ‘once again they find themselves cast as the villains’.

The series did indeed revolve around a Palestinian group kidnapping and murdering its way to its intended goal, a Palestinian state, with the connivance of the USA and a rogue UK MI5 officer.

However….such unpleasant actions, we were repeatedly told, were the inescapable and tragic result of decades of Israeli terrorism, murder and lies against the defenceless Palestinians who had no other weapons but terrorism…a narrative echoed by sympathetic BBC reporters in the recent Gaza conflict…though that is somewhat turning the truth upon its head….the Israelis being the ones who have suffered 70 years of terrorism, attempted invasions and ethnic cleansing.

Here you can see that narrative in black and white as a Palestinian excuses her duplicity and the murder of the Jewish Stein family…..

Atika:

I lost all my family.
All my family.

Have you seen the hills? What they’re building? Every day and every day? What you try don’t change anything for my people.  We need so much more.

Nessa:

What else can I do? Do you need me to die? Me?

Atika:

Oh, no. No….But if it’s the price for a nation I’m sorry to tell you, yes.

Here is the BBC laying out the Palestinian’s case for mitigation and absolvement for their use of terrorism……an analogy where the writer uses the Palestinian’s murder and rape of Nessa Stein’s family as a metaphor for what the Jews have supposedly done to Palestine…and in turn turning the Palestinians into ‘animals’, uncultured and violent…just one more reason to hate the Jews…..and in the end Nessa, being told these ‘truths’, agrees and accepts ‘her’ guilt saying ‘I deserve it‘….Nessa is ‘Israel’ here….the writer making her the guilty symbol of the Israeli state, and making her agree that Israel is to blame…..

Zahid Al-Zahid (Fatah commander):

Do you know who I am? I am Kasim’s grandfather.
My son raped you.
On my orders.
Mine.
One of my soldiers, also, he killed your father.
On my orders.
What I have ordered goes beyond all imagining.
So I must ask you if there was a knife on the table between us here what would you do? Your brother is dead.
My orders.
The hatred you feel for me right now only matches what I have felt for your people all my life.

I know you won’t take it because you think you are better than me….More cultured, more sophisticated, more human.
And I hate you all the more because you have never stopped to think why that is.

 

Nessa Stein:

No, I have.
I have.
And I know the answer.
And I’ve known it since I first asked and after every dreadful thing that’s happened since and the answer’s always the same.
I deserve it.
All of it.

So that’s the message from the BBC…the Jews deserve everything they get from the Palestinians…all of it.

A message reinforced when Atika, as she lay dying, spat out the demand to ‘Get off my land!’

This long drawn out BBC series set in Israel/Palestine, ‘The Honourable Woman’, has been a blatantly pro-Palestinian State tract all along….with the message that Israel is an illegitimate state that should be erased from the map….a message silently bolstered by the camera lingering on a map in a Palestinian official’s office showing ‘Palestine’ as including the whole of Israel….

One of the few comments that touches slightly on the politics of the programme is this as the Guardian applauds Blick’s apparent  skill in negotiating the political minefield:

Does anyone perceive Blick taking sides? I thought he walked a difficult tightrope with real skill. Calling for equality of opportunity with the statement: “Terror thrives in poverty. It dies in wealth,” felt powerful without being contentious.

The Guardian tells us that the writer, Hugo Blick, also the producer and director,

Chose no sides and offered no political resolution.

That’s clearly not true…he sided with the Palestinians and his political resolution was a one state solution…in other words the end of Israel and the erasure of a Jewish homeland and safe haven.

As the conflict in Gaza commenced the BBC no doubt thought that The Honourable Woman could have its place in the BBC battle order as it agitated against the Israeli state…..it is a ‘weapon’ of war as much as any gun or bomb…it is a ‘smart bomb’ delivered into thousands, if not millions, of homes around the world bearing not high explosives but a poisonous message….a message delivered by the BBC on behalf of Hamas, Fatah and all those who wish to ‘wipe Israel off the map’.

That explosive message is that Israel, the ‘Jewish state’, should be dismantled and the Palestinians allowed to take the land of Israel….needless to say the BBC glosses over what would happen to the Jews, merely implying that all would be peace and harmony as the love and understanding flowed between the two peoples.

The smart bomb that is intended to target the secure walls of the Israeli ‘house’ whilst not killing the occupants, merely forcing them to flee into exile, once again.

Hugo Blick declares he has no axe to grind, the series is apolitical….

The Honourable Woman is a work of fiction and yes, it does look at real and current politics in the Middle East but, I am certainly not offering any actual, specific answers to such a complex and emotionally provocative issue except to explore what happens to fictional characters who do.

My political sympathies and/or ideologies are not relevant to the story which stands on its own particular platform.

However he admits that he has a strong interest in those politics…..

Here this fascination comes from a lifelong interest and careful consideration of the real world conflict that serves as a back drop to this story – but necessarily it only goes so far as to relate to the motivations of my fictional characters.

It is important that viewers and critics watch the entire series – as intended – before making judgements on the characters or story arc because great care has been taken to explore this complexity.

The series though had threaded through it continuous slurs against Israel and apologia for Palestinian atrocities.

As Nessa Stein was being raped by her Palestinian captor we saw that he needed to take drugs to enable him to carry out the crime.  Essentially we were being told he is a decent man driven by circumstances and unable to do it unless off his head on drugs.  As he went to rape Nessa he waved photographs of his wife and child, killed by the Israelis, in Nessa’s face as yet more proof that it is the anguish and mental pain caused by those evil Israelis that excuses his actions.

Blick’s tale is a shallow, naive allegory of the Middle East…Nessa Stein’s zionist, arms dealing father is the old Israel, or rather the Israel that it still is, ‘armed and dangerous’, whilst the daughter, Nessa Stein, that ‘Honourable Woman’, is the new Israel, or rather the ‘one state’ solution where the walls are taken down and there are no barriers any more between the Jews and the Palestinians and everyone lives happily everafter.

The father is killed off, Blick signalling his belief that Israel should be destroyed as a state….Blick admits that the conflict is embodied within the characters…what happens to the characters a metaphor for what happens in the conflict…. ‘In The Honourable Woman the conflict is used as a creative device – a reflection of the internal conflict of the central character.’

Nessa tells us that strong walls were needed for Israel to thrive at its birth, and that’s what her father offered, strong walls for a fledgling nation….but those walls aren’t needed now.
She goes on, telling us that Israel’s GDP in the previous year exceeded $220bn…a fledgling nation no more….the Palestinians on the other hand had a GDP of only $4bn.
She tells us ‘What a difference a wall makes.’

Which wall would that be Mr Blick?  Could he possibly be making a not so subtle allusion to the Israeli security barrier?  It must come down!

Nessa goes on to reveal that ‘I believe in Israel’  but there needs to be ‘fundamental change….the greatest threat to Israel is Palestinian poverty, terror thrives in poverty, it dies in wealth…..The strongest wall we can help Israel to maintain is one through which equality of opportunity can pass.’

Blick is saying that that wall must come down, it must be breached, he is saying Israel must be destroyed as a Jewish nation.

And Blick is not above using Jewish stereotypes…the moaning wife of Nessa’s brother being an archetypal ‘Jewess’ whilst the Jewish businessman, Shlomo, wanting the contract for laying communications cables, is the Pub ‘humorists’ idea of a Jewish businessman…brash, rude, loud and obnoxious….add onto that a racist talking of that ‘Palestinian bastard’ and subliminally suggesting that Arabs are ‘fucking camel jockeys’….oye vay!

It should also be noted that the BBC was happy to screen this programme despite it involving the kidnapping of a Palestinian child.  No cultural sensitivities, no postponing of the broadcast, at a time when a Palestinian teenager has indeed been kidnapped and killed.

The Guardian certainly liked what it saw and applauded its ‘relevance’…check the link they provide:
‘This new eight-parter is among the most exciting TV events of the year (pace the World Cup). The opener didn’t disappoint, weaving not one but two whodunnits – the suicide/murder of Samir Meshal and kidnap of Kasim – around the most intractable political issue of the day (it could hardly feel more timely) and the life of the woman in the middle.’

There were some nice anti-Semitic touches in this episodes that must have played well with some.

We had one character called ‘Yaniv Levi’ described as that ‘horrible, horrible Israeli terrorist’ (there are of course so many of those)….whilst the Palestinian ones were all conflicted and anguished, driven to do ‘horrible things’ by dire circumstances forced upon them by the cruel world.  The Israeli ‘terrorist’  seemed to be just a gratuitous creation designed purely to suggest it is not only Palestinians who are capable of such things.

Levi was made to look as unattractive as possible with copious amounts of body hair, slumping fatly in a track suit with a Star of David made up of rifles that the camera lingered over for some reason whenever he came into shot……some sort of message there?  He was later described as ‘an Israeli attack dog….he always has a price….what Jew doesn’t.’

Good old BBC, feeding the stereotype and making up a few new ones.

And what to make of the Stein group’s logo?  Looks remarkably like a rocket launch from Gaza with someone cheering it on.  Just a coincidence I’m sure…..it must mean something else entirely……

The Palestinian commander ordering the rape and killing is from Fatah not Hamas…why Fatah and not Hamas in Gaza?  Fatah being the BBC’s least favourite Palestinian terrorist group….the BBC once dismissing Hamas’s murderous rampage in 2006 when it threw Fatah members off roof tops and dragged them from hospital beds to shoot them in front of their families as merely ‘clearing out a corrupt and violent Fatah’.  That’s OK then.
The Fatah commander gloried in the ‘poisoning’ of the Stein bloodline with Palestinian blood….

‘The grandson of Eli Stein with my blood in its veins…first I ordered his death and now I take his heritage….how great is his defeat!’

A clear message…the Palestinian militants have fought the Israelis and killed many but the real battle will only be won by destroying the ‘heritage’, the bloodline, the purity of the Jewish state by flooding Israel with Palestinian people…the ‘right of return‘…in other words destroying the Jewish nature of the Israeli state…the whole reason for its existence….that second phase can only begin when Israel drops its guard, its military defence (represented by the death of the arms dealing father) and more importantly the will to defend itself….this loss of will is represented by Nessa taking over the company with a completely different mindset and attitude and who believes that if only the Jews and the Palestinians could work and live together all would be well…there would be no ‘Israel’ but a one state solution…..a Palestine from the river to the sea…in other words Israel is wiped out.

A nice bit of pro-Palestinian propaganda from the BBC.

The Palestinian nanny, Atika, tells us that she is ‘A stranger in her own land….but we learn how to wait’….clearly the thought is that  the tyrannical Israel cannot last forever.

Nessa proclaims that Atika is ‘The Wandering Arab’…not once but twice to reinforce the message…this is an allusion to the ’Wandering Jew’, Blick trying desperately to make clever associations and to turn the Palestinians into victims of Israeli oppression and tyranny….The Wandering Jew was forced to roam the world homeless and scavenging for a living…..Atika dramatically states ‘It is what the world has made me.’  Not really though…it is what the Palestinian leaders have made her.

When Nessa and her brother Ephra are at a family party the camera lingers on a group of Jewish men who cheer the news on the TV that ‘Israel will not negotiate with terrorists’…..Nessa says to Ephra, who initiated the change from arms dealing to ‘promoting peace and reconciliation’ for his father’s company, that ‘Pappa would be proud of you.’….Ephra looks disdainfully at the cheering Jews and says ‘Yes I think he would have been.’   Quite clear what message the writer intended to impart to us.

The Israeli Ambassador is played as if he were a Gestapo officer from the war….very reminiscent of so many WWII films….Just another coincidence I’m sure….good to have a Jew acting like a Nazi!

Blick also introduces a device into the programme seemingly just so that he can accuse Israel of being a racist state running an apartheid system.  He creates an unnecessary storyline where Israeli ex-military are given preferential treatment when applying for university courses…to the detriment of Israeli Arabs.

‘What I discovered, it seems that the, erKidma Academy, ‘funded by the Stein Foundation, ‘is running a discriminatory selection process ‘against Israeli Arabs and in favour of Israeli military veterans.   Education is a meritocracy by function.   As soon as you use it as a tool ‘for social engineering on race grounds you’re simply creating an apartheid system.’

This was, as said, just an excuse to malign Israel by proclaiming it an apartheid state (repeated for reinforcement of effect as with the ‘Wandering Arab’ line) despite being in reality one of the most democratic and open states in the Middle East…and one where Christians can consider themselves safe…not something they could do anywhere else in the Middle East.

The character played by Igal Naor, Shlomo Zahary, was a pantomime Jew, a stereotype set up to be portrayed as shifty, money grabbing and untrustworthy….Blick summarises him as someone ‘who could always smell a deal.’…what does he mean about our stereotypical Jewish pantomime villain?

Blick has a clear message to impart…Israel is a racist, apartheid state that oppresses the Palestinians who are forced to react in the only way possible for them with terrorism,  but Israel will eventually be overwhelmed by a flood of returning Palestinians to ‘their own land’ when Israel’s will to defend itself militarily is broken and the ‘purity’ of the Jewish state is leavened by the demographic reality of that mass of Palestinians making a Jewish state meaningless and impossible.

‘How great would be their defeat?’  

Some at the BBC are already planning the obituary.

‘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.