Listen to this, Marr’s ‘Start the Week’, and you will hear some outlandish stuff though standard fare for the BBC.
First an ‘ex-Muslim radical’, Maajid Nawaz, who helped found Quilliam along with also ex-Muslim radical Ed Husain….having read the books and heard them speak I conclude the ‘ex-radical’ may be a bit premature…they seem to still aim for the same ends just with a softly softly approach.
Then an Observer/Guardian journalist, Robert Chesshyre, who blames Thatcher for WWII, the Black Death and the end of the Roman Empire.
Then ex diplomat Christopher Meyer who tells us that East Europeans want a return to Communism because it was such a simple life style and so er ‘communal’.
Tory Liz Truss was also on but was far too polite to make any radical suggestions and catch anybodies interest.
Nawaz made some BBC pleasing noises….white racist thugs drove him to become a radical Islamist (and not a violent and empire building religious ideology)….he first thought he was targeted because of his race but when the Bosnian war began he realised that it was really his religion that was the problem.
He goes onto claim that it is a battle of ideas and not race that is now the driving force behind attacks…and that evidence of this is proven by Sikhs joining the EDL in an alliance against Muslims….a ‘new form of intolerance’.
One long practised by Muslims.
But he also upsets the BBC apple cart, though ignored by Marr….by saying that the EDL is not racist…it is fighting the ideology of Islam…a battle of ideas….and that in Islam Mosque and State are one body…there is no separation between them……both concepts apt to ruin the BBC’s day as the BBC presents the EDL and all ‘Islamophobes’ as purely racist without any reason for their dislike of Islam, and that radical Islamists have politicised Islam…when Islam has always been about politics.
I personally think people like Nawaz and Husain are merely conducting the ‘war’ in another form…the intent is to promote Islam and spread its influence and power by using willing, if naive, aides in the Establishment who channel money and give credibility to groups such as Quilliam….Nawaz and Co are following the injunction that ‘the ink of the pen is more powerful than the blood of the martyr’….a phrase Mehdi Hasan likes to use.
Everything Nawaz says has a hidden agenda.
Look at his response to Marr’s question….‘What do you make of people coming here and living in sub groups not speaking English and unable to communicate with the majority culture?’
Nawaz…‘Communities that are victimised respond in a way which is understandable…a siege mentality, they isolate themselves…they are victims and may become extremists…it is the majority society that has placed these limits on their aspirations and social mobility.’
The answer…not that they refuse to join in because of their religious convictions and social mores but that they hide from a racist wider society….they are victims….and then become radicalised.
Chesshyre pipes up…‘If Id been black or Asian I’d have been radicalised also…very dangerous to have isolated sub groups.’
He continues…‘…Christian evangelism is a political ideology dressed up as Christianity…and Islamism is a response to a very aggressive Western pro-Democracy Christian movement…if Christian evangelism were to diminish would Islamism diminish?’
Nawaz….‘Islamism emerged as a resistance movement against colonialism and attempts to merge mosque and state…a mirror image of the Reformation where Church and State were separated.’
Really? Self serving rubbish….Islamism began in the 7th century with the man who dreamt up the Koran….Mohammed…..Islam has always been a ‘complete way of life’ encompassing every single aspect of life from social, religious to political….there has never been a separation of mosque and State.
Nawaz at face value served Marr’s purpose…white Racists, police, secular society and Christians are to blame for the creation of Islamic radicals….it’s not their fault…and certainly not the fault of the religion of peace.
Let’s be clear….Islam is all about politics…in fact more politics than religion, it has always been violent and intent on converting the whole world to its ideology…and Muslim isolation has nothing to do with the rest of society shutting them out…they made that choice themselves due to culture and religion.
All of this was intended to serve the BBC narrative…however it backfired hugely as Nawaz undercut the fundamental BBC line about EDL racism by admitting it was a ‘battle of ideas’. The other pillar of the BBC Islamic narrative is that Islamists are ‘political’ Muslims, a new form of Islam which leads to violence …all other Muslims are non political ‘moderates’….but Nawaz admits that Islam has always been a union of Mosque and State….in other words if you get Islam you get the politics too…and the ‘Laws’ i.e. Sharia.
Chesshyre is another star performer straight out of the BBC ‘stable’ guaranteed to offer up the Party Line.
He claims Thatcher ‘shook us to our detriment…miners were no longer wanted, they were abandoned as have been the ‘underclass’ and problems we have today with the ‘underclass’ grow out of that abandonment…they are surplus to requirements.’
Marr jumps in and chunters on about the banks and the ‘loads a money’ culture apparently invented in the 1980’s.
Chesshyre goes onto say there are similarities between then and now…nothing has changed…the Big bang released the Bolinger culture.
When he returned to Britain in 1987 he claimed everything had changed in society because of Thatcher…we were less caring, less sympathetic, a less pleasant place to live, harsher.
Of course that is rubbish…what had changed was that people had become better off financially right throughout society…as income studies show…yes the rich got richer but so did everyone else….and the poor got more welfare.
Chesshyre made comparison with a book by J.B. Priestly, ‘English Journey’ in which he travelled throughout England in the 1930’s.
Chesshyre claims this showed us a Utopian England that was ruined by Thatcher and her industry destroying policies.
First off Thatcher didn’t destroy industry…the unions and bad management and cheap overseas competition did for that…when the Tories left Office manufacturing was around 22% of GDP, by the time Labour left Office it was 11%.
And was the past such a golden era…lets look at some quotes from the prefaces to that book:
1. ‘In the autumn of 1933 when Priestley made his rambling journey across England, the country was in the depth of the Great Depression. Things were as bad as they were because Britain had lost its mastery of world trade. The prosperity of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth century, which stemmed from a tremendous increase in wealth from coal, cotton, iron and steel, as well as ship building and railways, was over. After the First World War, the world neither needed our products nor heeded our advice.
By 1933 half of Lancashire’s pre-war overseas trade in cottons had vanished, never to return. A similar shrinkage appeared in the overseas trade of other industrial products. We became bewitched as one foreign country after another became independent of our supplies. Step by step Blackburn, the thriving cotton town in which I grew up, became known as ‘dole town’.
As he made his way further north to the mining villages of the Durham coal pits, the situation became more desperate. County Durham, he called ‘a nightmare sprawling among the muck’. Northern shipyards and marine shops were empty; shipyards had been idle since the end of the war. Newcastle he thought might have been carved out of coal, a black steaming mass surrounded by people without work.’
2. The second England was a much grimmer place : ‘the nineteenth-century England, the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways…slums…sooty dismal little towns, and still sootier grim fortress-like cities’. Finally, there was ‘the new post-war England…of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations…of giant cinemas and dance halls and cafes… But what Priestley identified most sharply of all was the ‘North-South Divide’ long before that term came into common use : in the South reasonably civilised and prosperous places in which to live; in the North places of wretchedness, decay and deprivation. And although there is bitter condemnation about this latter state of affairs the book is full of the common warp and weft of daily life, the determination of individual human beings to make the best of things, the diverse tapestry that was England in the 1930s.
3. In his fiction he was not good at inventing villains. In his non-fiction he had no hesitation in condemning the Nazis when the time came as out and out villains; but here he blames the baser aspects of human nature for the mess and squalor the Victorians created and left scarring the countryside – greed, selfishness, pomposity and hypocrisy. I have often felt we needed much of the 20th century to pass before we could escape from the cloying influence of the Victorians. And he looked back joyfully to the vigour and merriment of the 18th century, for all its faults. And this is another of his themes, that life should be enjoyed.
That final comment is of course the most telling…Priestley looked back to his own ‘golden age’…that of the 18th century….just as Chesshyre looks back to his own Utopia, but one built on dreams and half remembered ideas and memories…..it never existed….and ‘progress’ has brought enormous change and benefit.
Thatcher’s Big Bang brought enormous success to the City and huge rewards to all, ones that flowed into the Chancellor’s coffers…..by 2000 the economy was thriving and in ‘profit’…..it was not ‘Capitalism’ that ruined it all but greed and recklessness of a few and the tax and spend of the Labour government.
And what of Casino Banks so beloved of the BBC, Miliband and Vince Cable?….well it was high street banks making bad loans to people wanting mortgages essentially that pre-empted the crash not huge investment banks ‘going for broke’ so to speak. The investment banks then bet on those loans…in the US they knew some loans would be ‘bad’ but they ‘knew’ that only a proportion of the market would collapse…more than compensated for by the areas that didn’t….they judged wrongly…..the whole market collapse right across the US….maybe bad judgement….but based on previous experience…or recklessness with all their eggs in one basket….but some perspective is needed on this…..and more thought rather than knee jerk ‘populist’ soundbites and subsequent bad laws and regulations by equally craven politicians.
Opposed to tyranny? The same BBC that gave copious support to Saddam Hussein and cost the lives of British troops? The same BBC that even now spreads Iranian misinformation about its nuclear intentions and when the sabres start rattling does all it can to ensure public opinion pressurises government not to attack Iran? The same BBC that ran a campaign to free terrorists from Guantanamo but ignored the hundreds of genuine political prisoners on the other side of the fence in Cuba? The same BBC that eulogises Castro and the mass killer Che Guevara…not to mention the various Islamic terrorists excused and quietly applauded for their anti-Westernism? The same BBC that refuses to criticise probably the world’s most dangerous religion and yet feels otherwise free to denigrate all other religions but mostly Christianity? The same BBC that hankers after Marx and his acolytes but pillories Neocons? The same BBC that aims to see the destruction of the only true democracy in the Middle East, Israel, and replace it with an Islamic Fascist state run on grounds that would make Hitler blush? The same BBC that refuses to admit that there is an Islamist war on Christians in Nigeria?
