As the sorry history of The London Bombers shows, they have left us a country that cannot tell its own stories; a land so debilitated by anxiety and stupefied by relativism that it dare not meet the eyes of the face that stares back at it from the mirror.
James Delingpole must be having a day off as he lets the BBC slip one past him like a Bullfighter distracting the bull with his red cape before plunging in the hidden sword.
The BBC has broadcast a programme about a convert to Islam who goes on to be a terrorist, The Attack: Terror In The UK, of which JD says…
How refreshing it is to find the BBC doing its job and giving us the unvarnished truth for a change instead of handwringing about the perils of Islamophobia. Simply, soberly, realistically, the drama-documentary charted the likely course of such an attack, from the radicalisation of one of the perpetrators in prison to the purchase of the guns to the moment in the mall just before that first sharp crack.
It was all chillingly plausible. The black inmate — Joseph, quickly redubbed Yusuf — being lured to Islam for the security, protection and consolation it offers in prison; his Yardie contacts outside being reluctant to sell guns to ‘Jihadi John nutters’ — ‘but if it’s a business ting, dats cool’; the helplessness of the overstretched security services, as they try to keep tabs on the hundreds of suspected terrorist plots being planned at any given time.
Converts certainly play a part in terrorism but it’s not converts leading ISIS, not converts who did 7/7, not converts who did 9/11, not converts who led Al Qaeda, not converts who led Al Nusra, not converts who lead the conservative MCB, not converts who lead CAIR, not converts who lead Hamas, not converts who lead Hezbollah, not converts who lead the Iranian Revolutionary Council, not converts who rule Saudi Arabia. Not converts who put into action the Trojan Horse plot.
But the BBC has chosen a convert to show how ‘Muslims’ are radicalised…but again..how many converts who turn to terror come out of prison?
Would it not have been more enlightening to show how a Muslim born into the ideology with all his family and friends and Muslim influences around him comes to be radicalised? Using a convert, one in prison who joined Islam looking for ‘protection’ as part of a ‘gang’, is a deliberately designed narrative intended to separate the ideology itself from terrorism and violence, the convert drawn down a path by pressures and circumstances that had nothing to do with the actual ideology.
The BBC couldn’t do that if it was to use a proper Muslim…it would have to investigate how Islam influenced his world outlook, how its teachings guided his actions, how the discussions at home or with friends about Israel, America and the war in Iraq or Afghanistan fed his grievances about the West, how preachings in the local Mosque built his Muslim identity and separated him from the rest of British society, how other Islamic educational and propaganda groups fed these grievances, how the media such as the BBC also fed him the same narrative about Muslims being victims of the West and of an Islam under attack.
The BBC can’t and won’t do that because it still wants to promote the idea that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam nor the Muslim community whose ideas, beliefs and conspiracy theories are the swamp that the monsters come from.
Only yesterday the BBC were looking at a report into radicalisation and immediately the Muslim’s best friend, Phil Mackie, the one who denounced the Trojan Horse plot as a hoax, a result of racism, paranoia and Islamophobia, leapt in to say that it was rubbish, out of date and that the real threat was the Far Right.
The BBC also curiously cheered on a play yesterday about radicalisation that had been shelved due to criticism that it was Islamophobic and a publisher didn’t want to be the next ‘Charlie Hebdo’ but was now on course to get an airing. This from the BBC that stopped a production of a programme about the radicalisation of the 7/7 bombers because it told the truth about the causes of that…such as outlined above….Muslims were doing their ‘Islamic duty’ in fighting Jihad….such truths are considered by the BBC to be Islamophobic…
Nick Cohen noted the whole sorry saga in 2008…
Self-Censorship And The BBC
It looked at those very same attitudes that silently endorsed extremism in our midst:
- It makes no sense until you understand the moral contortions of the postmodern liberal establishment. In the past few years, the Foreign Office, the Home Office, the West Midlands Police, the liberal press, the Liberal Democrats, the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Lord Chief Justice and the Archbishop of Canterbury have all either supported ultra-reactionary doctrines or made libellous accusations against the critics of radical Islam. All have sought to prove their liberal tolerance by supporting the most illiberal and intolerant wing of British Islam, and by blocking out the voices of its Muslim and non-Muslim critics as they do it.
- As the sorry history of The London Bombers shows, they have left us a country that cannot tell its own stories; a land so debilitated by anxiety and stupefied by relativism that it dare not meet the eyes of the face that stares back at it from the mirror.
Cohen’s article was based upon a film the BBC commissioned but never made, one about ‘The London Bombers’ of 7/7…..not made because it was deemed ‘Islamophobic’.
- The reporters convinced the families of three of the four bombers to cooperate. By the end, they agreed that the BBC’s account of their sons and brothers’ lives and deaths was accurate. Cafolla submitted five versions of the script. He was working up to a final draft when the BBC abandoned the project.
- The official reason is that the drama didn’t make the grade. The script is circulating in Samizdat form, which is how it reached Standpoint, and every writer and director who has read it disagrees. The journalists, however, say that BBC managers told them they were stopping because it was “Islamophobic”.
But there is one more important revelation that the BBC would not want to gain general acceptance…..that ‘radicalisation’ is not due to foreign policy as is so often claimed on the BBC, but is a result of other influences:
- The London Bombers, one of the most thoroughly researched and politically important drama-documentaries commissioned by British television. A team of journalists, at least one of whom was a British Muslim, reported to Terry Cafolla, a fine writer who won many awards for his dramatisation of the religious hatred which engulfed the Holy Cross school in Belfast.
- The reporters spent months in Beeston, the Leeds slum where three of the four 7/7 bombers – Sidique Khan, Hasib Hussein and Shehzad Tanweer – grew up. Unusually for journalists working within BBC groupthink, they didn’t find that the “root cause” of murderous rage was justifiable anger at the “humiliation” America, Israel, Britain and Denmark and her tactless cartoonists had inflicted on Muslims.
- Instead, they inadvertently confirmed the ideas of Ernest Gellner, the late and unjustly neglected professor of anthropology at Cambridge. In Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (1992), Gellner asked why a puritanical version of Islam was in the ascendant when godlessness was flourishing everywhere else. His answer was that Wahhabism and its ever more zealous theocratic variants could appear as modern as secular humanism. They represented the pure religion of scholars and the city, which would free Muslims from their peasant parents’ embarrassingly superstitious faith. Accepting fanaticism was a mark of superiority: a visible sign of upward mobility from rural idiocy to urban sophistication.
