“It’s quite reductionist,” she tells me firmly, “to call them ‘jihadi brides’. They’re facilitators, logisticians, propagandists. There’s more to these women socially, politically, psychologically, culturally, that we don’t understand and that we need to understand.”
Panorama has pulled, seemingly indefinitely, its film called ‘My Return from IS’ which would have told ‘the story of a British woman who is back in the UK after living with so-called Islamic State in Syria for more than two years before managing to escape with the help of her mother. She was arrested, but after extensive debriefing by counterterrorist officers the CPS decided there were no grounds for prosecution. `Fatima’ tells Panorama reporter Peter Taylor how the group has hijacked Islam, with men acting as cannon fodder and women used for cooking, cleaning and giving birth.’
As you might imagine it was most likely going to be a puff piece that portrayed the ‘Jihadi Brides’ as naive and well-meaning victims and the men as brave, if deluded, defenders of Islam under attack from Western aggression, men who didn’t understand the true, peaceful nature of Islam and who believed, wrongly, that they were carrying out its commands. Naturally that is a picture the BBC has always wanted to peddle but even a Muslim expert on radicalisation doesn’t accept that saying the Jihadi Brides were far more willing and active than the likes of the BBC would have you believe telling us “It’s quite reductionist,” she tells me firmly, “to call them ‘jihadi brides’. They’re facilitators, logisticians, propagandists. There’s more to these women socially, politically, psychologically, culturally, that we don’t understand and that we need to understand.”
The question stands though as to why the BBC pulled the programme? It tells us that it spoke to contributors to the programme and made the decision to cancel based upon ‘duty of care considerations’ but not expanding upon that.
You have to think that this may be related to the Darren Osborne terror attack at Finsbury Park and is a reaction to the news that the BBC drama ‘Three Girls’ was the catalyst for his descent into radicalisation….though why the programe wasn’t called ‘1,400 Girls’ is beyond me. Good I suppose that the BBC admits, in a very roundabout way, that its programme was in its way responsible for the attack because the BBC otherwise has signally failed to admit that its coverage was ‘the catalyst’ preferring to blame the Far-Right, social media and Tommy Robinson, who had little to absolutely nothing to do with the attack. The BBC was absolutely right to show the film, if years too late and an exercise in trying to make itself appear to be a leading campaigner against the abuse, when in fact it had covered it up for years….one of its own journalists admitting that he knew what was going on and asking why the police did nothing…but not thinking to ask why he himself failed to break the story which would have forced the police and authorities to act.
Douglas Murray in the Spectator believes the BBC may retreat back into those old ways of covering up crimes and other unpleasant behaviour by Muslims because it fears to report them may lead to anti-Muslim anger.
For the best part of a decade the BBC – like most other mainstream media – chose to ignore the issue of the northern Muslim grooming gangs. They didn’t know any of the victims, didn’t know the towns and somewhere along the way (subliminally or otherwise) made the decision that all this was just too horrible and delicate a story to wade into.
I know what people at the BBC and elsewhere will be thinking. Perhaps this vindicates the silence of all those years. Perhaps the public cannot be trusted. Perhaps they are indeed the sort of people who have in their midst people on a hair-trigger who are willing to hire trucks and drive them into crowds of people at a moment’s notice. Perhaps the censorship and silence were after all a good idea? Personally I happen to think not. But nobody should be surprised if the BBC reverts to ignoring crimes like Rochdale in the future.
Matti Freidman in the Atlantic notes a similar attitude when reporting about Israel as the reporters choose to side with the Palestinians….’This group of intelligent and generally well-meaning professionals ceased to be reliable observers and became instead an amplifier for the propaganda of one of the most intolerant and aggressive forces on earth.’
Orwell spelt it out years ago….“The argument that to tell the truth would be ‘inopportune’ or would ‘play into the hands of’ somebody or other is felt to be unanswerable, and few people are bothered by the prospect that the lies which they condone will get out of the newspapers and into the history books.”
That is precisely the BBC’s attitude. They believe that reporting such events ‘play into the hands of the Far-Right’ and thus should be censored and suppressed. But that attitude sacrificed 1,400 girls to the Muslim predators that groomed, raped and abused them under the noses of the media and authorities who held back from acting due to concerns about race and religion. It also of course does in the end serve to bolster the Far-Right as the story becomes massive and very toxic in a way that it never would have done if it had been nipped in the bud so many years, and so many victims, earlier. The censorship creates the very thing it is meant to stop…just as the media’s attempts to silence voices on immigration lead to the rise of the Far-Right across Europe as most other people are intimidated by the ‘liberal’ intolerance of their views and the labelling of them as racists making life for them very difficult.
The BBC has in fact been slipping back into its bad old ways of suppressing or indeed rewriting history in order to change people’s perceptions by providing an alternate truth, alternate facts. Reports of a Trojan Horse plot by Muslim conservatives to take over and Islamise secular schools was fully backed up by the evidence and several investigations and yet the BBC ignored or downplayed its existence when the story first broke and suppressed crucial evidence that confirmed that such attempts to Islamise schools were in fact official MCB policy as revealed in its 2007 guidance document to schools, drawn up by the same man at the heart of the Trojan Horse plot, that tried to pressurise schools into Islamising their curriculum, buildings and activities…in order to make schools more Islam friendly so that Muslim pupils could fully follow their beliefs and would feel more integrated…and thus, the implicit threat, would not feel alienated, marginalised and angry which may lead to radicalisation, extremism and terror.
The BBC always reported the plot as if it was something made up by Islamophobes and that the letter which outlined the plot was a hoax. The BBC’s Phil Mackie insisted that it was just fantasy, created by paranoid, racist Islamophobes…
Despite the plot having been proven the BBC is now working to discredit the story and you may hear several programmes that look at the subject and revise the facts the suit the BBC’s own agenda telling us that the letter was definitely a hoax and that there was no plot.
Recent events of course show why that narrative is not only wrong but dangerous as Islamists force a school to bow to pressure and Islamise itself.
Religious extremists are using schools to narrow children’s horizons and “pervert education”, England’s chief inspector of schools has warned.
Amanda Spielman said some community leaders see schools as vehicles to “indoctrinate impressionable minds” – with extremist ideology in some cases.
Ofsted inspectors are increasingly coming into contact with such extremists, she said.
She is asking head teachers to confront those who foster extremist behaviour.
The BBC naturally sides with those who would surrender to the extremists…‘is it the role of a head teacher to dictate who should and who should not be allowed to wear such an item? Even if they are in charge of uniform policies. By calling on head teachers to exercise a “muscular liberalism” in the face of ultra-conservative forces, she may yet stir up more opposition than she anticipated.’
Yep, let’s not make the extremists angry….do what they want us to do and all will be peaceful….and Kirsty Wark thinks ‘there may be a danger you conflate [islamic] conservatism with extremism’…Muslim of course, as the BBC always conflates conservatism, the blue kind, with extremism. However, Muslim conservatism is extremism in the context of any Western society…completely at odds with our values and beliefs.
The Trojan Horse Plot is true and the BBC reaction is the same old one of trying to suppress the truth in the vain hope of keeping the peace…..not realising that the extremists will never rest and that every appeasement just emboldens them to keep on demanding more….and of course there may well be a counter-reaction all the more violent as it has been suppressed for so long.
As mentioned above, it does seem that this is the true nature of BBC journalism now…
‘This group of intelligent and generally well-meaning professionals ceased to be reliable observers and became instead an amplifier for the propaganda of one of the most intolerant and aggressive forces on earth.’
