Interesting to see someone thinks as I do about New Labour.  I constantly hear on the BBC and elsewhere that Blair and Co were right-wing whilst I was always of the opinion that Blair was in fact extremely left-wing and smashed those left-wing  policies into the British Establishment, culture and society…yes he cosied up to the banks but even Lenin told us that Capitalism was a necessary part of establishing Communism…it needed the funds Capitalism provided in order to fund the revolution…and of course we had the massive expansion in tax/borrow and spend…so very old socialist Labour.  Blair turned democratic government upside down with his sofa powered cabinet, the evisceration of the civil service, the attempts to undermine just about every national institution and the infiltration of those institutions with Labour placemen and women…never mind the huge project to ethnically cleanse the British population and change not only its physical makeup and identity but also the political views and outlook that the population would then hold..for example importing millions of Europeans would probably ensure any referendum on Europe keeps us in Europe, whilst Labour’s open door to world immigration meant that grateful immigrants were likely to vote for Labour.  Blair’s apparent centrist politics were a means to an end.  The reality can be judged by what he actually did.

Peter Hitchens thinks Blair’s New Labour was as much a menace as Corbyn’s brand of far-left politics….

The hard-Left menace we ignored

The continued rage about Jeremy Corbyn’s rather dated Leftism baffles me. Most British journalists weren’t (as I was) members of the Labour Party in the 1980s. In the months before I quit, I used to be angrily called to order by the chairwoman of my local party. She was cross with me for (as she put it) provoking too much heckling from noisily pro-IRA, ban-the-bomb types.

Meanwhile, the real Left worked by stealth. That is why our political media never understood that the Blairites were in fact far more Left wing than Jeremy Corbyn. The Blair faction’s ideas came from a communist magazine called Marxism Today. The magazine, in turn, got the ideas from a clever Italian revolutionary called Antonio Gramsci. He wanted a cultural revolution, a Leftist takeover of schools, universities, media, police and courts (and of conservative political parties too). That is exactly what New Labour did.

An astonishing number of senior New Labour people, from Peter Mandelson to Alan Milburn, are former Marxist comrades who have never been subjected to the sort of in-depth digging into their pasts that Jeremy Corbyn faces. Why is this? Is one kind of Marxism OK, and the other sort not? Or is it just that most political writers are clueless about politics?

 

The BBC has always opposed a change to the licence fee funding model on the grounds that subscription would be technically too difficult and would cost too much…..not to mention of course that the licence fee is easy money at the moment and a guaranteed source of income regardless of what they produce and who watches.

On the other hand it has decided that it is technically feasible and presumably financially sound to make viewers of the iPlayer abroad sign in with a special code….how then is that model not transferable to British viewers in the UK who can choose to pay a lump sum up front or pay on a subscription basis daily/weekly/monthly or per programme?

From the Mail:

The BBC is planning to allow licence-fee payers to access its iPlayer abroad, it has emerged.

This would enable British holidaymakers to watch award-winning programmes – including The Great British Bake Off, Strictly Come Dancing, and Match Of The Day – on sunny, foreign beaches.

At present, the licence-fee-funded iPlayer is supposed to be watched by only UK TV viewers.

Under the proposal, licence-fee payers could be given a secret code to log on to the iPlayer while abroad – but this code would be designed to expire within several weeks, according to The Times.

This would prevent non-licence-fee-paying expats from illegally using the code, it is reported.

A BBC spokesman told MailOnline in a statement: ‘While there are a range of technical and legal complexities, this is an area where we’ve already started work and agree with the idea of licence fee payers being able to access programmes on BBC iPlayer when they’re on holiday overseas. 

‘We’ll carry on considering how this can be made to work.’ 

Late with this…..the floor is yours….

The BBC’s ‘Sunday’ carries on as usual with its unusual world view that is at so odds with everyday folk.

We had a piece on the pages of the Koran found at Birmingham University.  The BBC did ask some very awkward questions for Muslims that these Koran pages raise…such as the carbon dating may show that this Koran may show that ‘Islam’ may have been in existence before Muhammed, the man who allegedly ‘invented’ the Koran…which is kind of awkward.  However the carbon dating was only done on the paper used for the Koran, and there was no control reference material to compare the dating process results with….so there could be few genuine conclusions about this Koran either way really.   Anyway all that was dismissed by someone expert from Birmingham who said, in his opinion, that he didn’t think that any of that was true….the Koran couldn’t predate Muhammed.  Yes…‘in my opinon’ or ‘I think’.…..a valuable ‘expert’ insight.

We then had a Muslim councillor from Birmingham tell us that this showed the Koran was unchanged for 1400 years…’unlike’, he slipped in, ‘other religions’.  Now that is kind of aggressive isn’t it, a bit unnecessary.  Why mention that?  If I was a Jew (Though I believe the Torah is itself unchanged and considerably older than the Koran) or Christian living in Birmingham I would be thinking that this councillor clearly has no respect for other religions and looks upon them as false….therefore what does he think of ‘us’?    Curiously the BBC didn’t ask, or didn’t broadcast the question and answer, about the questions raised of the authenticity of the Islamic narrative about Muahmmed and the Koran.  Possibly the answer was somewhat detrimental to the tolerant image of ‘Islam’..much as the ‘unlike other relgions’ is.

We also had a piece that portrayed East Germans as prejudiced, backward hill-billies who hated religion and immigration…and hating immigration and religion was a bad thing, not allowed in the BBC’s view (an irony really when the BBC has spent so much time and effort trying to smash and discredit Christianity despite the lip service of Songs of Praise).  Who did the BBC have on to discuss the issues, and it all related to immigration of course, a Christian and a Muslim, Rev Dr Christophe Tylermann and Dr Riem Spielhaus, no other voices appeared to put any view other than the one that said East Germans were essentially racist,  atheist barbarians….unmentioned went Hungary, which I suspect was the real target.  Curious how you are not allowed to have anti-immigration views.

We also had on Alister McGrath, an extremely aggressive Christian (a fanatical convert from Atheism justifying his own personal journey?) who steamrollered Atheism, shouting it down in effect, ironic in that he attacks Dawkins for being an ‘extremist’.  The presenter seemed to be in happy agreement with him as he claimed and wished for the end of Atheism….the presenter suggesting Atheism perhaps, as a ‘movement’, was a ‘busted flush‘ and asking when we might expect the ‘funeral of the new Atheism’.  Colourful eh?

McGrath said that Atheism was a ‘hopelessly outdated way of looking at things’….unlike the 2000 year old Christian world view?  No explanation of what Atheism actually represents and why it critiques religion, and no reasons why religion is good for the world, better than Atheism.  We also heard that there was no contradiction between science and religion.  Somehow that doesn’t seem to be the real picture does it?

No voices putting the other side here which would have been fascinating given the aggressive, bombastic nature of McGrath.  Christopher Hitchens is well missed.

The BBC also looked at this  ‘Bishop Michael Nazir Ali, expresses his concerns on the latest stage of the government’s plans for ‘countering extremism’ which will be discussed at the Conservative Party Conference this week’  which I’m sure we’ll hear a lot of as it is a narrative that the BBC seems all too ready to follow…that it is the government’s anti-extremism programme that is driving radicalism itself….a BBC narrative that we have just looked at.

The BBC was sure that Clockboy was the victim of  injustice, prejudice and misperceptions perpetrated by a society that has been polluted by an Islamophobic narrative driven by the right-wing press.  It seems that ‘Chopperboy’ in the UK may also be a victim of similar prejudice, his threats to behead and murder so many people merely an articulation of his rage against a society that doesn’t value or accept  him.

The BBC’s Domininc Cascianni tells us the boy was angry with his teachers and that the threats to kill were merely a negotiation tactic to pressure them to allow him to phone his mum.  Sweet.

“I felt angry, very angry with all of them,” the boy has since said of his school, according to defence submissions.

“I just wanted to get excluded. You couldn’t run away, it was secure with locked doors. The best way to get out and go home was to threaten staff with beheadings.

“I found the more I did this the more free time I had and I could get home on my phone.”

Of course family circumstances meant he was ‘vulnerable’ to exploitation….and he took up a deep interest in ‘foreign affairs’.  Really, he was a scholar? Does Casciani really mean he was watching beheading videos on the internet and soaking up the anti-Western propaganda that pours out from Muslim sources, and not just the recognised ‘extremist’ ones, propaganda that pumped out images of Muslims being killed…though not who really kills them…as it is usually other Muslims, the same people pumping out that propaganda ironically….of course he could just have been watching the BBC’s coverage of the Middle East, that would warp anyone’s understanding of the world….

A boy who attempted to incite a man in Australia to carry out an Anzac Day “massacre” has become the the youngest person in the UK to be convicted of a terrorism offence.

But could more have been done to challenge and stop the development of his violent mindset?

The boy’s slide into extremism began more than two years ago, at a crucial period in his development.

His parents had separated, he changed schools, and he was developing a deep interest in world affairs.

It’s always someone else’s fault….there doesn’t seem to be any recognition from Casciani that it might well just be that the boy was so disposed as to want to do these things and follow that path willingly and that his perceptions of the world have been long shaped by a narrative he has been brought up with all his life…Islam.  It is remarkable that there is no mention by Casciani of the role of Islam in his ‘indepth’ exploration of the issues….surely that is at the heart of this…the explicit Islamic obligation to fight for the religion.  To fight for the religion against those who allegedly attack it.  So you have to ask is Islam under attack?  Unfortunately if you watch news from organisations like the BBC which give credibility to the Jihadi narrative, such as Iraq was an illegal war against Muslims, a ‘crusade’ as the BBC often called it, and that Mulsims in the UK are under an Islamophobic assault, then the narrative of an Islam under attack is all too easy to believe and then act upon especially when reinforced by bloody videos purporting to show Western forces slaughtering Muslims.

The major factor in the boy’s extremism is his religion.  It’s an unavoidable conclusion…only Muslims are fighting in the name of Allah.  The connection is undeniable.  Which is why the BBC presumably avoids that connection.

Casciani scripts a long tract explaining away the boys behaviour blaming the anti-radicalisation programme for its ‘failure’ and then disingenuously asks…

Did Channel make mistakes? Could it have done more or were its officials simply confronted with someone they could not turn around?

He has the grace to add this get out clause after having spent the majority of the piece blaming Channel and the authorities….

Well, we don’t really know.

Casciani could ask ‘What did the Muslim community do to change its own anti-Western narrative, to change the Muslim grievance narrative about Islamophobia, to change the Islamic religion itself and its extreme teachings all of which fed the boy’s mindset?’  But no.  That’s not open for discussion.  Casciani knows who is at fault and its not Chopperboy himself that’s for sure.  He’s the real victim here.  In reality the only thing he is a victim of is a theology that predisposed him, primed him, to be a martyr for the cause.

Just a note to the BBC that seems entirely unaware that Corbyn is not Churchill……

Massed cheerleading from the hard-core believers is not the same as mass popularity.

On another note…try replacing Black Cabs (BC) with BBC in the narrative in this video and see if the sentiments are the same….a group that doesn’t want competition ...’it’s just protectionism…the last closed shop’…and ‘is it not always going to be the way that the ones who had the monoploy in the past are the ones who are going to resist…there’s never going to be a moment when you’d welcome [change and competition]?’

Sounds familiar.  Roll on Charter Review.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The BBC then tries to explain away his actions…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a taste of Leech’s thoughts…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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