Deliberately So

Deliberately So

>> SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2011

I wish somebody else had written this because it’s about the usual, and believe me, I don’t want to be repetitive. But needs must.

Anyone who heard R4’s Saturday Live this morning will know what I mean. The studio guest was ‘comedian’ Mark Thomas who has walked the length of the separation barrier in Israel /Palestine. Saturday Live’s genial host, exceedingly left wing Reverend Richard Coles, was all ears.

Not wishing to appear one-sided, Mr. Thomas took a moment to explain that the Second Intifada was very bloody, before lapsing into a melodramatic chronicle of the Palestinian suffering caused by checkpoints and the wall. Meanwhile, Stockholm Syndrome sufferer John McCarthychimed in with a trail for Excess Baggage, the following programme, which he hosts. McCarthy regularly devotes much of ‘Excess Baggage’ to recommending idyllic holiday destinations such as Damascus, and eulogising over Arab hospitality. Which they duly demonstrated by holding him hostage for several years.
While Mr. Thomas was underlining the unnecessary suffering caused by checkpoints and the barrier, McCarthy interjected with his twopence-worth - “Deliberately so.”

Much as Mark Thomas’s ‘comedian’s cockerney’ portended a preconceived political agenda, I still hoped this might have been tempered by his eye-opening adventure. But his eyes had remained blinkered. Barriers are bad, and must come down, he surmised. Bombs still go off, proving the wall doesn’t protect Israelis as they claim. Here I’m assuming that I’m preaching to the converted, much as the BBC consistently does from the opposite perspective. Please, if you’re not sure what I mean, you need go no further with this.

Mark Thomas is anxious to tell us that his escapade was solely motivatedby a devilish, naughty-boy, ‘ooh I am awful’ spirit, and a genuine, healthy curiosity.
But, same as anyone else - you knew it all along - he was merely exploiting ‘our’ hatred of Israel to make a few bucks out of his book, Extreme Rambling. Upcoming gigs seem to be doing rather well.

Funnily enough, he’s written an article for the paper that laps up, with gusto, any morsel of anti Israel rhetoric that comes along. It features an account of a rather moralistic encounter with the late Juliano Mer-Kamis, whose Jenin based inspirational theatre project purportedly channelled would-be suicide bombers’ hatred into the performing arts. Mr. Thomas didn’t disclose that their success rate was dubious. Nor that poor Mr. Mer-Karmis was thenceforth summarily dispatched by some raving Salafist murderers.

On his journey Mark Thomas spoke to Israelis as well as Palestinians, but predictably the list he provides on his website comprises only Israeli pro Palestinian organisations such as ‘Jews for Justice for Palestinians’. There is a deep well of such bodies in Israel. Sadly, not so on the other side.

Also on the programme was an interview with ex Guantanamo Bay guard Brandon Neely who is enduring severe pangs of guilt and regret about the inhumane treatment he unthinkingly meted out to former inmates. The Rev’s introduction alluded to the WikiLeaks revelations about innocent detainees, with nary a whisper about the accompanying revelations that explained why we were involved in the war on terror in the first place.

I have a great deal of sympathy with innocent people caught up in wars. Unfortunates who are in the wrong place at the wrong time do suffer unfairly and unjustly. If inhumane treatment is a tacitly approved practice, that should stop. Should our sympathy for those who are inconvenienced, ill treated, or who suffer loss and pain obscure our sympathy for the intentional victims of Jihad who are never coming back to tell the tale? No it should not.

Ultimately such people are victims of the same terrible thing; the collateral damage that stems from a wicked ideological fanaticism that sets out to overpower and subjugate, or dispose of, unbelievers and those who don’t belong. Deliberately so.

BBC GREEN CREED SERMON...

>> FRIDAY, APRIL 29, 2011

Bishop Hill has unearthed this gem, a presentation to the Cambridge Science and Policy Group by Sarah Mukherjee, the BBC's former environment correspondent, who in her time at the corporation filed hundreds of alarmist, hell-in-a-handcart reports. Admittedly the delivery was some time ago, but her lecture is a major statement of the BBC's green creed, and an insight into the madcap and deeply biased thought processes that are involved. It therefore deserves further airing.

The main contentions across 76 minutes of unrestrained greenie bias are that, without a doubt, the science of climate change is proved; that Climategate was a load of nonsense perpetrated by the tabloid press (and the scientists involved have been fully absolved), that we are not doing enough to counter the climate threats facing us, that politicians - despite having passed the climate change act (which commits to 80% CO2 reductions by 2050) - have shamefully reneged on their commitment and - horror of horrors - they will dare to start mining coal again soon. She clearly wants us to go back to the stone age. It's exactly the same agitprop fervour that permeates the work of Roger Harrabin, Richard Black and the whole phalanx of other BBC activists, the difference being that she has left the corporation and lets rip with a splenetic stream-of-consciousness prejudice that surpasses almost anything I have heard on this topic to date.

BBC prejudice is also writ large in that there's no doubt of her main targets, identified by the contempt in her voice and her braying, annoying, stoccato laugh. One by one in the firing line are the Tories, the Daily Mail, and Boris Johnson (the latter, I concede, a pretty easy target on this topic).

Actually, having listened to Ms Mukherjee, what alarms me most is that this presentation is so substandard that it defies belief that she was allowed to present to such a supposedly august body. Her homily is both deeply condescending and contains not a shred of hard evidence that climate change (whatever it is) is a genuine threat. Instead, she makes vacuous assertions such as "climate change....it takes 30 years for something to happen". Shame on Cambridge that - no doubt because of its own prejudices about climate change - it has abandoned its normal intellectual high standards.

Nonsense like that characterises all the outpourings of Black and his cohorts; but still the BBC ploughs relentlessly on.