Labour, The Ugly Duckling

The Victoria Derbyshire show   (45 mins) finally admitted that there maybe some suggestion that both the Bank of England and the Labour Party may have had some involvement in fixing the Libor.

Well no I tell a lie…they raised the matter only to conclude as soon as they could that Labour were in no way involved…Jonty Bloom came on to dismiss all allegations and assure us that Diamond was merely trying to deflect criticism and blame.

No mention at all of Labour’s Shriti (I don’t remember anything)Vadera and her possible involvement which had the potential to be the smoking gun in all this affair.

Then onto PMQs ( a continuation of the VD show  1 hr 59 mins)…and the Labour Luvvie Richard Bacon….who sounded as if he was going to burst into tears at any moment, the bottom lip quivering and the sound of bitterness in his voice as he contemplated Labour being finally brought to book.

He opened the show with a downplaying of Labour involvement…they ‘clearly made some mistakes’, but carried on with an  assertion that …well Labour’s not to blame because if the Tories had been in power they would have done the same…they wanted ‘light touch regulation’…’entirely consistent with Conservative ideology’…sooo disengenuous!….so there!  Boo Hoo!

We probably all know the famous Brown speech in 2007 when he told us we were in a golden age and that he wanted even more of a light touch regulatory regime and a financial industry based on risk.

The BBC have steadfastly refused to quote Brown on that throughout this saga…but look…what did the sulky Bacon come up with? A quote from Cameron: ‘The lessons from the City are clear. Low tax. Low regulation. Meritocracy. Openness. Innovation. These are the keys to success.’  

Funny that…13 years of Labour and all we get from the BBC/Labour Tag team is Thatcher and now Cameron quotes.

The lesson we can take from all this is that it doesn’t matter what Labour actually did because if the Tories had been in power they might possibly have done  the same…definitely maybe they would.

Labour could ship out all the immigrants it allowed in and ‘send them back home’ because if the BNP were in power they would have done the same?

For 13 years we had an ‘Ugly Duckling’ Labour government…but under the BBC’s careful care and nurture it has grown and flourished into a shining example of compassionate and thoughtful government, making mistakes but always with the best of intentions.

You can trust Labour is the message….give them another chance.

I am almost certain we had a Labour government for 13 long years…but the memory is fading…I’m sure they would have been great.

 To be fair Martha Kearney interviewed Shriti Vadera  (10 mins)where we of course heard that Vadera knew nothing and did nothing….but….yes she had expressed some concern about the Libor…but…it was Labour’s job to do so.

The question that immediately springs to mind is that…yes it’s the government’s job to be ‘concerned’ but then to do something about those concerns…the question is what did Labour and Vadera do?

But Kearney let that rather important question go.

 

 

 

White Trash

Yesterday the BBC reported on the recommendations in a report into child abuse of those in children’s homes by sex gangs. 

This is what the BBC reported:

A working group will consider why some local authorities send children to homes outside their own borough whether such placements can meet children’s needs how well the quality of care is monitored whether areas such as Rochdale where there are high concentrations of children’s homes are really the best “places for bringing up our most vulnerable looked after children”.

And that was what I heard on the radio as well.

Reference was made to this report having come about due to the sex abuse case in Rochdale but no mention was made of the significant way in which victims were chosen.

No mention that a change in cultural attitudes might also help.

Which is odd really as the Children’s minister talking about the report made specific mention of the relevance of race and culture in this report:

‘Social workers and the police must not let political correctness get in the way of investigating the grooming of vulnerable children, a minister said yesterday.

Tim Loughton said ‘ethnicity’ had been a factor in the scandal of recent cases involving gangs of mostly Asian men grooming and abusing young girls.

‘The point the Government is making absolutely clear is that we have got to make sure that the police and social services and other enforcement agencies are using the right tools to nail these perpetrators, regardless of their culture or ethnicity.

‘This has been going on for years under the radar. People didn’t come forward and report it, the police – for whatever reason – didn’t investigate it, or certainly didn’t investigate it sufficiently for cases to be brought to court that then stuck.’.

It would seem that the BBC are not too keen to help the police with their inquiries preferring to sweep a crucial element of such cases under the carpet…in effect hiding the evidence and allowing the abuse to continue by staying silent on the reasons for it…not asking questions and therefore not ensuring a particular community starts asking its own questions about what values it should hold.

In effect the BBC is saying ‘we care more about promoting a utopian dream of multiculturalism than we do about young white girls being drugged and fed alcohol before being raped.’

Dennis The Menace

Dennis McShane has managed to evade having his collar felt by the boys in blue for claiming £125,000 for a garden shed…sorry, ‘office’,  says Guido.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guido also says McShane employed his own brother, Edmund Matyjaszek as an interpreter.

I have never looked at McShane’s background in detail before but reading that on Guido a lot became very clear….along with a quick look at Wikipedia.

McShane is an ardent Europhile…so much so that in a BBC interview he stated that Eurosceptics were ‘xenophobic, stupid, little Englanders’.

Much about his attitude and Labour’s immigration policy might also be explained when you realise McShane is actually Polish by descent…and worked for the BBC to boot!

‘MacShane was born in Glasgow[3] as Denis Matyjaszek, to an Irish mother, Isobel MacShane, and her Polish husband, Jan Matyjaszek.

MacShane married Polish-born Liliana Kłaptoć in 1983, with the relationship lasting only a few years. In 1987, he then married Nathalie Pham, an interpreter of FrenchVietnamese origin.

After graduating from Oxford with a 3rd class degree, he worked for the BBC from 1969 to 1977, including as a newsreader and reporter on Wolverhampton Wanderers for BBC Radio Birmingham. He changed his surname to his mother’s maiden name at the request of his employers. He was fired by the BBC after using a fake name to call the radio phone-in programme he worked on at the time. During the call, MacShane accused leading Conservative politician Reginald Maudling of being a crook, with the MP threatening to sue as a result.’

 

When the BBC give a great deal of airtime to such people and their pet projects it might be an idea to flag up certain defining characteristics about them that influence their decisions….if they want a lot of Polish people to come to this country perhaps it might help to know what informed at least part of their decision, i.e…they are Polish themselves.  Similarly with Turkish entry to the EU….  Boris Johnson wants Turkey in the EU…he is of Turkish origin.  Osborne’s brother converted to Islam, and many others in the ‘Establishment’ have similar family ‘links’…no chance of any move to limit the encroachment of Islam then.   The BBC are concerned about the Right Wing leanings of think tanks or lobbyist’s connections to big business but fails to highlight what motivates certain politicians…unlike Bob Diamond of Barclays(ex) whose motivations for releasing information connecting the Bank of England and Labour to the Libor scandal was questioned thoroughly today.

 

BBC’s Hollande Daze Sauce

Compare this from the Daily Mail:

‘New French President Francois Hollande – elected on an anti-austerity platform – was yesterday told ‘unprecedented’ cuts were needed to plug a gaping hole in the country’s budget.

France’s accounting watchdog warned the government needs to find £35billion in savings over the next two years to drag it out of the ‘danger zone’.

Didier Migaud, head of the country’s Cour des Comptes audit body, said repairing the battered public finances was ‘crucial’ and must not be delayed.

‘It will require an unprecedented brake on spending and higher taxes,’ he said.’

 

To this from the BBC:

‘ His government would go ahead with plans to hire thousands more teachers and police, as well as creating 150,000 state-aided jobs. The moves are some of the other election pledges made by newly elected President Francois Hollande.

He also said he would not be introducing austerity measures, and that a number of summits – on social issues, the environment, education – would be held in the next few weeks.

“The path towards budgetary stability is the one that we highlighted and it is the one that we will take. I am calling for seriousness and budgetary responsibility”

Auditors warned this week that the French government needed to fill a hole of up to 10bn euros in this year’s budget to meet targets to cut the deficit.

Last week, it was announced that France’s public debt rose by 74bn euros in the year’s first quarter, bringing French public debt to 89% of GDP.’

Seems that someone is reluctant to admit too loudly the possibility that France’s much vaunted new spend, spend, spend President might have to cut back on a bit of that spending.

My Word Is My Milibond

 

The BBC tells us this:

‘Documents seen by the BBC on Monday indicate ministers in the last Labour government held discussions with banks about policies which would allow the Libor rate to fall.

Speculation about how much the government of the day knew prompted a statement on Tuesday evening from former Labour minister Baroness Vadera of Holland Park.

She said she “has no recollection of speaking to Paul Tucker or anyone else at the Bank of England about the price setting of Libor”.’

 

 

Miliband…all fur coat and no knickers?

I listened to Campbell and Derbyshire this morning…and of course the news bulletins….but  don’t recall any mention of the fact that the Labour Government may have given Barclays the nod to manipulate the Libor.

I think Peston was onto it on Monday…but a deathly silence seemed to descend upon 5Live at least. 

This has the potential to be THE story….Miliband has been scurrying around demanding criminal procedures against Barclays and a full-on inquiry…..if the allegations are true Miliband and Labour should be toast…if only for his denial of truth and attempt to deceive everyone with highly opportunistic political statements.

They may well have mentioned it but the fact that I did not notice would say a lot….that it was downplayed and essentially ignored.

A lack of facts didn’t stop the BBC giving Miliband endless airtime to make his accusations and presumptious demands.

 

The BBC should now be nailing Miliband to the floor with questions.  Maybe Balls suspects the guns are going to be turning on them…I believe he is denying all knowledge..’I was education minister at the time!’

However if so, perhaps he could explain why the exam boards were rigging the education system and destroying a generation’s life chances…to put it in BBC talk.

 

 

 

And why Miliband as Environment minister saddled British industry with a target to cut CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050…a ruinous demand that no other country was stupid enough to implement.

 

Hopefully tomorrow in PMQs Cameron will wipe the floor with Miliband and the BBC will be forced to open that can of worms.

 

What would Jesus Do?

What would Jesus do?

The alternative title was ‘Kristallnacht’ in light of the unremitting ‘pogrom’ against all bankers regardless of guilt in pursuit of a Socialist ideology of a  banker free world….with the Occupy storm troopers putting boots on the ground and a Goebbels like media riding shotgun behind Miliband.

 

To save you reading all of this I’ll give you a quick precis….Exam boards have been rigging the market for their exams leading to a dumbing down of exams and the resultant narrowing and truncating of pupil’s education and destruction in trust in their qualifications and therefore reduced job prospects and a commensurate damaging effect on the economy.

And yet there are no opportunist Milibandian calls for a judicial inquiry or cries that this has damaged our schools’ reputation world wide etc.

How different a reaction to the banks rigging the market….surely no more important than education, education, education?

However it seems no one is really interested in the kids when they’ve got bigger fish to fry.

 

Ed Miliband receives his certificate of education.

A funny old world where the massive chorus of outraged politicians and media commentators shouting to the rooftops about scandal and rigging the financial markets to the detriment of ‘the public’ have marched Bob Diamond out to the firing squad and told him to shoot himself.

We’ve been told the bank’s actions have been unprecedented.. a shock to all…a scandal of historic proportions…who knew! who knew!

Really? I would imagine fixing of the Libor has been going on since its inception…as have all the other dodgy financial scams that the banks have (yet again) been caught at recently.

Let’s ask ourselves ‘what would Jesus do?’ Two thousand years ago he was tipping over the money lender’s tables……so not a new problem then with bankers and financiers….and yet it comes as a surprise that bankers are involved in shady practises?

The BBC have singularly failed to join the dots on this and gone solely with the banker bashing narrative. They deserve to be bashed…but it was ever thus. Who doesn’t remember the old black and white films from the 20’s and 30’s where the desperate widow was being evicted by the greedy banker?

The BBC’s highly focused reporting and commenting on essentially one aspect of a society in pursuit of its chosen victim…not so long ago it was Murdoch…..means that other ‘culprits’ , such as Brown, Miliband and Balls, are allowed to escape and an overemphasis is placed on Barclays which suffers enormous damage whilst others get off scot free.

Look at this story which has gone not unreported but reported without exclamations of shock and horror and cries for judicial inquiries from the opportunist flim flam artist that Miliband is turning out to be.

Exam boards are ‘rigging’ the market to sell their products….meaning exams are being ‘dumbed down’ , made easier, so that more schools will buy them with a resultant increase in pass rates and a leap up the league tables and….

“a public loss of confidence in exams such as GCSEs and A-levels”.

…leading to pupils with a narrow and truncated education, leaving them without the jobs they could have obtained and employers either importing skilled immigrants or restricting their production and therefore the country’s economy.

Is not the rigging of exam papers and the dumbing down of education  a national scandal that equals and maybe surpasses Bob Diamond and his nifty footwork with the Libor?

And yet this comparison passes the BBC by….it simplifies to the point of stupidity which results in a massive distortion of the news and the relative importance of a story.

Sure the bank scandal is big but not unusual or unexpected in reality…we all know it went on since the first ‘bank’ was created.

Examine the claims that the banks manipulation of the Libor may have cost people money whether in pensions or mortgages or otherwise.

Labour instigated a massive printing of money, Quantitative Easing, to stabilise the economy. This resulted in a devaluation of the pound…and inflation….it therefore cost everyone, rich and poor, a lot of money (remember the BBC reports of the ‘poor’ being hit by Tory VAT increases…but no such squeals here). Not only that but interest rates are being held down…making savings a worthless prospect especially if you rely on savings to fund your pension from the interest on them….all of which continue now…with the prospect of another interest rate drop and more QE.

And yet such serious consequences go pretty much unremarked by the BBC…..no comparison to the Libor…in principle it is the same thing…rigging the interest market…only it was being done by the Labour government to cover up its own massive failures in financial regulation and overspending.

And yet Labour get away unscathed…Miliband claiming today that ‘Yes we failed to regulate properly and we’re truly sorry…but hey, we’ve learnt from it and we’ve learnt lessons for the future…let’s move on and so vote us in!’

‘Sorry’ isn’t enough….Labour have brought the economy to the brink of complete ruin and go unscathed legally and without public scrutiny by the BBC…no trial by media inquisition here. Let’s face it Bob Diamond resigned…’sorry’ didn’t cut it for him, he had to go.

In fact he sent a letter to his staff yesterday in which he made the same claims Miliband made….‘What went wrong happened on my watch…and I’ve learnt lessons and so it is up to me to put things right.’

And now he’s gone whilst Miliband and Balls are still there and basking in the lime light from the unquestioning BBC.

As I’ve said the banking scandal is massive with important consequences but it should be looked at in  respect to other events and in relation to history, neither of which is happening, leading to a highly febrile atmosphere and media lynchings…all of which the BBC is supposed to prevent by a measured, balanced and accurate reporting of events.

 

 

 

 

The Campbells Are Coming

Jeremy Vine, BBC R2, has a new book out in which he relates many a story about his contacts with the Blair spin machine….Alastair Campbell and Mandelson….ALL SERIALISED IN THE DAILY MAIL:

A piece in the Sunday Express ‘Cross Bencher’ reveals that the much vaunted BBC independence is easily sidestepped by the vigorous use of threats.

Vine’s new book ‘pulled no punches’ in describing events and Alastair Campbell, also with a book to plug, decided he should be on Vine’s show and emailed him demanding an appearance….‘You have no choice in the matter of my coming on to your show to promote my latest volume of truth.’

Arrangements were immediately made and Campbell duly made his appearance on the Vine show a week or so ago.

Even if tongue in cheek it does show that influence not only allows you to shoulder your way onto the BBC but also you get a free advert for your book.

Independent my *****.

Now that little diversion is out of the way we can look at what Vine said in his book.

It makes for interesting reading.

“At any point, Peter would be involved in about 20 highly personal run-ins with political journalists… The BBC’s Nick Jones pointed out the way Alastair Campbell and Mandelson worked as a pair — the baseball bat and the stiletto. ‘If they don’t like your story, Campbell screams down the phone at you while Mandelson quietly goes to the Director-General,’ he said.”

Nice to know you can just have  a quiet chat with the Director General if you have a complaint and want it sorted out….just how many of those did Mandelson have with the BBC DG to influence the narrative of BBC output?

Of Mandelson:The charm was still there. But it was simply the scabbard on the rapier. If you helped him, he’d pump you up. If you crossed him, he’d run you through.

And by the way, if you think history has done him a disservice with its dark and menacing caricature, I’d agree. He was far more dark and menacing than that.’

 

…and look at this little story….it suggests that somewhere in the BBC the Labour Party has a helping hand who is willing to prevent uncomfortable truths emerging to the inconvenience of Labour when Prescott reveals that there was a ‘Blair Labour Party’ and a ‘Prescott Labour Party’:

‘Yes, fine,’ I (Vine) said. ‘I’ll just be asking you about the speech, if that’s OK.’

‘OK, hang on.’ Prescott was stooping to see his reflection in the lens of the camera, running his hand across his fringe. ‘Actually, I got Tony to sign my copy of it.’

‘Really?’ I asked. Prescott was staring at himself in the lens, straightening his tie. ‘Yes. So I had a record of the moment he gave my party a stuffing.’

Campbell took a step forward. ‘That’s not for you.’

Nick Jones, a political correspondent who never went out without a full set of spanners to insert into the spokes of any party press operation…. eyes boggled. Within hours, he was on air saying: ‘At least one Shadow Cabinet member has described Mr Blair as “stuffing the party” with this speech . . .’
Retribution was swift. Campbell bulldozed into the press room. With dozens of journalists looking on, the communications chief berated my colleague, veins jumping in his temple, calling his story ‘b******s’ and ‘a load of f*****g c***’ and asking him how he dared report it when he had no way of knowing it was true.

‘But this is terrible,’ I told our producer. ‘Prescott himself said that thing about stuffing the party and we’ve even got it on tape.’

I went to the edit suite to fetch it. Everything was exactly as it had been left the night before. But where the tape had sat on a top shelf, my hand now probed a gap: it had vanished.

To this day, I have no idea what became of it.’

 

Finally the best is saved till last.

The BBC insists that Murdoch was the power behind the throne, if not the King himself…however Murdoch has said that he was often ‘summoned’ to Downing St much to his inconvenience, and Vine reveals the truth about how scared labour was of the Press:

‘The New Labour crew fought with unmitigated ferocity for control of every single paragraph, printed and spoken, hand-to-hand, tooth-and-nail. And they were very good at it.’

Does that sound like a Party that would roll over and play dead for Murdoch?

Murdoch was the messenger boy who jumped ship and they’ve never forgiven him for it.

God Bless the Scallywag Rupert Murdoch

The mother of a British soldier in Afghanistan didn’t stick to the narrative in so many ways this morning on Nicky Campbell’s show (42 mins in,  Judy from Bracknall) in which he asked

‘Is the future of Afghanistan worth the price our troops are paying?’.

That question alone should tell you all you need to know about the BBC’s attitude throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The only time Campbell and Co are interested in British troops is when they come home injured or in a body bag…and can then be used by the BBC to tell us about the ‘cost’ of this war…and ask as Campbell has: ‘is it worth it?‘…before shoving a microphone into the face of a grieving wife or mother to demand if she is ‘angry’.

However today Campbell was shaken. The mother revealed she had once been a BBC employee and was loyal to it…but no more, not since 2003.

Why? Because the BBC had offered no support to the troops…the BBC had been entirely negative and only reported the bad side to the war…they had let the troops down.

She did have her hero though proclaiming:

‘God Bless that scallywag Rupert Murdoch because the Sun has supported the troops throughout’

Campbell was taken aback and suddenly she was no longer welcome….Campbell declared ‘well we’re not going to talk about the BBC.’

BBC presenters never do want to talk about the BBC, and are highly reluctant to accept that it is even remotely possible that the BBC could be at fault.

Humphrys was similarly silenced into a spluttering confusion a couple of years ago when an army officer came on and denounced, unexpectedly for Humphrys, the BBC’s dire coverage of Afghanistan which was consistently downbeat and negative. Humphrys found it harder to brush off the comments of a respected officer who knew what he was talking about…but he did try.

 God Bless Rupert Murdoch.

Jihad Is Our Path…Yes Really.

 

 

Allah is our goal; the Prophet is our guide; the Quran is our constitution; Jihad is our way; and death for the glory of Allah is our greatest ambition.

The BBC doesn’t like to frighten you with tales of Islamic jurisprudence but a good story’s a good story and needs to be told.

Are you sitting comfortably?  Then we’ll begin.

The BBC, and many others, wax lyrical about the moderate Muslim Brotherhood and comment favourably upon the new Egyptian President for his ‘liberal’ concessions to allow Christians and women the right to not live in fear of oppression or discrimination.

“We Egyptians, Muslims and Christians, are advocates of civilisation and construction.”

“We will also work to make the Egyptian system of ethics… in addition to human values particularly in freedoms, respect for human rights, maintaining rights of women and children.”

An Indian news site does the work and reports what the BBC don’t:

“The Quran is our constitution, the Prophet is our leader, jihad is our path and death in the name of Allah is our goal,” Morsi said in an election speech to Cairo University students.”

 

In the UK it takes Harry’s Place to shed some more light  upon what the future might really hold for Christians and women…and the Jews, revealed in an election speech by Morsi:

Mohamed Morsi: [in the 1920’s, the Egyptians] said: “The constitution is our Koran.” They wanted to show that the constitution is a great thing. But Imam [Hassan] Al-Banna, Allah’s mercy upon him, said to them: “No, the Koran is our constitution.”

The Koran was and will continue to be our constitution.

The Koran will continue to be our constitution.

Mohamed Morsi: The Koran is our constitution.

Crowds: The Koran is our constitution.

Mohamed Morsi: The Prophet Muhammad is our leader.

Crowds: The Prophet Muhammad is our leader.

Mohamed Morsi: Jihad is our path.

Crowds: Jihad is our path.

Mohamed Morsi: And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.

Crowds: And death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration.

Mohamed Morsi: Above all – Allah is our goal.

[…]

The shari’a, then the shari’a, and finally, the shari’a. This nation will enjoy blessing and revival only through the Islamic shari’a. I take an oath before Allah and before you all that regardless of the actual text [of the constitution]… Allah willing, the text will truly reflect [the shari’a], as will be agreed upon by the Egyptian people, by the Islamic scholars, and by legal and constitutional experts…

Rejoice and rest assured that this people will not accept a text that does not reflect the true meaning of the Islamic shari’a as a text to be implemented and as a platform. The people will not agree to anything else.”

 

 

Rejoice, rejoice, let the bells ring out…until the Muslim Brotherhood destroy the churches.

 

Then there is this is from Cranmer:

These are the kind of double standards practised by the fascist left both in Britain and Holland: Ignore the evils preached by Islamists but prosecute the non Muslims who reveal them.  

Amsterdam Gets a Harsh Lesson in Islam 101 Posted by Bruce Bawer Jun 29th, 2012

In January 2009 a Dutch court ordered Geert Wilders to be prosecuted for offending Muslims and inciting anti-Muslim hatred.

The complaint was based not on slurs, as such, but on factual statements made by Wilders, in his film Fitna and in various public venues, about Islamic beliefs and about actions inspired by those beliefs.

In June 2011, after a prolonged legal ordeal that cost Wilders greatly in time, money, and emotion, and that represented a disgrace to the tradition of Dutch liberty, he was finally acquitted.

In February of this year, the Islamic Students Association at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam invited Haitham al-Haddad, a British sharia scholar, to participate in a symposium, but when some of al-Haddad’s sophisticated theological statements about Jews (the usual “pigs and dogs” business) and about other topics came to light, members of the Dutch Parliament spoke out against the invitation, a media storm erupted, and VU canceled its plans.

Whereupon a venue in Amsterdam called De Balie, which sponsors debates, talks, plays, and sundry cultural and artistic events (and whose café is a good spot to grab a late-morning coffee), stepped in and offered al-Haddad their stage.

At the event that ensued, al-Haddad spelled out, and defended, many aspects of Islamic law, including the death penalty for apostates. Because of this specific statement about executing apostates, al-Haddad was reported to Dutch officials for having broken the same laws that Wilders had been put on trial for violating.

The other day, however, judicial authorities announced their determination that al-Haddad had not committed any offense and would therefore not be prosecuted for his remarks. Why? Supposedly because he had placed conditions on the death penalty for apostates.

I was curious to know exactly what he had said, so I searched for the debate on You Tube. Lucky me, there it was, all 76 minutes of it. I will recount it in some detail here because I think it provides a window on one or two bemusing aspects of the European mentality in our time.

As the event began, Yoeri Albrecht, director of De Balie and the evening’s host, explained that he’d decided to invite al-Haddad because it’s “important to discuss the position of Islam in the West.” He told the cleric that he was “very happy that you agreed” to come and wished him “a warm welcome.”

Albrecht had invited two other men to join him and al-Haddad onstage. One was Kustaw Bessems, a journalist associated with the Labor Party; the other was Tofik Dibi, a young Dutch-Moroccan Marxist, university student, and member of Parliament for the Green Left Party who has publicly protested against Wilders and who represents himself as an advocate for a modern, progressive Islam. Two members, in short, of leftist establishment parties; neither Wilders nor anyone else from his Freedom Party was asked to join the debate.

Bessums noted early on that while he finds al-Haddad’s views “despicable,” it was he who had personally taken the initiative to find an alternate venue after VU’s cancellation, because he believes in free speech (as if free speech means that fanatics have an automatic right to a platform).

Dibi’s questions for al-Haddad were a tad challenging, but his manner was respectful, even deferential. The imam, for his part, didn’t beat around the bush.

Dibi: “Do you have more right to speak about Islam than other Muslims?”
Al-Haddad: “Yeah, of course.”

Dibi: “Do you allow yourself to doubt?”

Al-Haddad: “There are certain things in Islam that are clear. No one can doubt them.”

Albrecht, for his part, sounded almost astonished when, having finally grasped al-Haddad’s key point, he said: “Outside of Islam, there is no truth?”

Al-Haddad: “No.”

Albrecht: “Could you understand that a lot of people would be afraid of this kind of thinking?”

Al-Haddad: “There is something called truth. There is right and wrong.”

When al-Haddad admitted that he supported stoning for crimes like adultery and apostasy, Albrecht exclaimed: “You can’t be serious!”

The host seemed to be genuinely gobsmacked. (Incidentally, the “conditions” al-Haddad had reportedly placed on the death penalty for apostates, and that had purportedly saved him from prosecution by the Dutch judiciary, were as follows: an apostate could not be executed until his case was handled in a Muslim country by a sharia judge.)

It emerged that earlier that day al-Haddad had refused to let a woman sit beside him on a TV show.

Asked now about women’s rights, al-Haddad insisted that men and women, being different, have different rights; that obliging women to wear headscarves is not an act of oppression any more than parking rules in Britain are; and that “women’s rights” need to be viewed in context.

A woman in the audience was given an opportunity to express her own shock at al-Haddad’s views on women: “I am really amazed at the way you think!” For a while, Albrecht gave up his seat onstage to her. “Who gives you the right,” she asked al-Haddad, “where do you get the right, to discuss women’s rights?”

I was shocked too. I was shocked that in the year 2012, these Dutch infidels – intellectual infidels – professed to be shocked, and indeed gave every indication of being sincerely shocked, when they heard a recognized Islamic authority spell out basic facts of Islamic belief.

These are the same basic facts that Geert Wilders has been talking about for years. It was for daring to speak these facts – for, in effect, reporting on the same barbaric beliefs and practices that al-Haddad was now not only describing but defending – that Wilders had been hauled into court on charges of having insulted al-Haddad’s faith.

Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wilders – all of them had been reviled around the world as Islamophobes for stating these same facts. But on that evening at De Balie it was almost as if none of these critics of Islam had ever opened their mouths.

By the end of the evening, al-Haddad had made it absolutely clear that he supported the gradual implementation of sharia law in the West – starting with relatively innocuous-seeming stuff like divorce tribunals and Islamic finance, then moving bit by bit into ever more serious territory.

One particularly depressing development was that after an hour or so of listening to al-Haddad, Dibi admitted that he had caught himself feeling that al-Haddad, being a scholar, must be right about Islam after all.

I’ve often felt that a major reason why less observant, essentially secularized Muslims like Dibi are so hesitant to speak out against the likes of al-Haddad (aside from sheer terror) is that some small voice deep inside whispers to them that he’s the real thing – the good Muslim, a man whose pious certitude, and unwavering devotion to the Prophet shame their own co-optation by infidel decadence.

It was at around this point that Geert Wilders and the Freedom Party entered the discussion – indirectly, to be sure.

“Some people in Parliament,” said Dibi, “I don’t want to name the party again, think that men like yourself are slowly colonizing the West – they’re pretending to be nice, pretending to be intellectuals, but secretly they are trying to take over.”

Al-Haddad asked Dibi if he had allowed himself to be brainwashed by such silliness.

“No,” Dibi was quick to insist, “I don’t believe that” – even though he had just spent over an hour listening to al-Haddad confirm these very warnings.
Dibi’s next question suggested that he was, indeed, after the evening’s workout, a torn, confused, and, yes, cowed young man: “Are you slowly, step by step, trying to implement sharia as a scholar?”

“Yes,” the scholar replied, “if the people request it.”

Certainly the audience at De Balie that evening was packed with sharia fans. They cheered al-Haddad’s attacks on the West; they applauded his praise of Islamic law. Every outburst of boisterous support for the imam’s ugly sentiments only reaffirmed things that Geert Wilders has been saying for years.

But nobody at De Balie that evening – including Bessons, who from beginning to end made clear his utter hostility to al-Haddad’s views – even wanted to mention Wilders’s name.

The video of the discussion. 

“Peace for us means the destruction of Israel.
We are preparing for an all out war, a war which will last for generations.”
~ Yasser Arafat ~