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Melanie Phillips has a must read piece in the Daily Mail today on the media’s coverage of 9/11 in Britain.
Not surprisingly, Phillips highlighted the upside down thinking that we’ve become so accustomed in the Guardian.
In the Guardian the esteemed thinker Francis Fukuyama,whose earlier thesis that the global triumph of democracy had brought about the end of history was not altogether borne out by the events of 9/11, marked the anniversary by dismissing al Qaeda as ‘a mere blip or diversion’, with the US ‘overreaction’ to 9/11 turning anti-Americanism into ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy’ – the murder of almost 3000 Americans in the attacks on New York and Washington clearly being inspired by a ‘blip’ that had nothing to do with anti-Americanism.
Also in the Guardian, Mehdi Hasan identified the ‘preachers of hate and division’ — not as Islamist fanatics but as those who warn against them. The only victims mentioned in this article were not the murdered Americans on 9/11, nor the Muslim and other victims of Islamist terrorism across the world, but Muslims in Britain who were now apparently too terrified to speak in public for fear of being labelled an extremist (with the exception, it seems, of Mehdi Hasan).
There’s much more. Read the whole thing here.
h/t Benjamin W
In November of 2009, CiF Watch exposed (Guardian moderator) “BellaM” engaging in an ad hominem attack on Melanie Phillips in her capacity as a Guardian staff member:
As we noted, “Her comment spurred post after post of mouth-frothing denunciation of Melanie Phillips in the now infamous Ed Husain thread that we reported on in our post Two Minutes Hate: Melanie Phillips bashing on the Ed Husain thread.”
Further, we noted, the the real name of “BellaM” turned out to be Isabella Mackie, and that Mackie was the maiden name of the wife of none other than Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger. Isabella Mackie used her mother’s surname when taking a job at the Guardian’s website to disguise the fact that she was the daughter of the paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger.
As The Jewish Chronicle reported at the time, the Guardian issued an official statement acknowledging that BellaM’s actions were inappropriate and noted that they “reminded BellaM of the paper’s guidelines that staff posting on the site ‘should uphold a high standard of civility and avoid any behaviour that might bring the Guardian’s good name into disrepute’”. [emphasis mine]
So, given this background, it was intriguing to see the Guardian’s recent report on Phillips’ counter-attack against those (in the blogosphere and on Twitter) attaching some sort of significance to the fact that she was mentioned in the purported manifesto of Norway terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik - a list which also includes Winston Churchill, Bernard Lewis, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, John Locke, and George Orwell.
The story quotes Phillips:
“A concerned reader has sent me a post by Sunny Hundal on the Liberal Conspiracy blog,” Phillips wrote. “Hundal brings us what he clearly considers to be the most important news about the Norwegian atrocity. This is that, in the ‘manifesto’ reportedly published by the terrorist suspect Anders Behring Breivik, two of my articles are quoted.
“Golly. Is Hundal suggesting that my writing provoked the mass murder of some 93 Norwegians? Doubtless with one eye on the law of libel, he piously avers: ‘There is no suggestion that his actions were inspired by Melanie Phillips, nor am I making that claim’.”
Phillips is further quoted:
“”In fact, there are only two references to me or my work in its 1,500 pages … Why has he singled me out in this way? It looks like yet another crude attempt to smear me. … The supposed beliefs of Norway massacre’s perpetrator has got the left in general wetting itself in delirium at this apparently heaven-sent opportunity to take down those who fight for life, liberty and western civilisation against those who would destroy it.”
So, yes, the Guardian quoted Phillips fairly, and didn’t in any way legitimize the lunacy of suggestions that her writings somehow influenced the Norway shooter’s actions.
Finally, however, not mentioned in the otherwise fair piece was the fact that the blog in question, Liberal Conspiracy, which smeared Phillips, also just happens to be part of the elite group of partner blogs within the Guardian’s Comment Network, and the particular blogger at Liberal Conspiracy who wrote the post, Sunny Hundal, also just happens to be a Guardian contributor.
I can only wonder what BellaM thinks of all of this.
Related articles
- Should the British Spectator Bow to Lawfare? (cifwatch.com)
- Without a trace: CiF completely purges comment from thread (cifwatch.com)
- A curious deletion by the ‘Guardians of Hamas’ (cifwatch.com)
- Curious deletions under Greg Philo’s surreal assertion, at CiF, that UK journalists are afraid to criticize Israel (cifwatch.com)
- The AV Referendum and Planet Guardian (cifwatch.com)
You don’t have to agree with Melanie Phillips on every issue to acknowledge that she is a truly indispensable and courageous voice in contrast to the moral cesspool of anti-Zionist commentary so ubiquitous in the UK, and I ask that you continue supporting her by visiting her new site, here:
http://www.melaniephillips.com/
I’d also highly recommend reading her book, The World Turned Upside Down, which you can purchase at Amazon UK, here, or at Amazon US, here.
As Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks said:
“With ferocious courage, Melanie Phillips challenges a series of myths and irrationalities that have achieved canonical status in the contemporary world. If civilization depends on the ability to give dissenting voices a hearing, then The World Turned Upside Down may well be one of the most important tests of Western civilization in our time.”
Here’s wishing Phillips well at her new site where she will, undoubtedly, continue truly speaking truth to power.
This essay was written by Melanie Phillips and published in The JC
For a moment I thought it was a Purim spiel. The Guardian devoted an entire story last weekend to the claim that I was being investigated by both the Press Complaints Commission and the police. The Bedfordshire police.
My crime apparently lay in what I had written on my Spectator blog about the massacre of Udi and Ruth Fogel and their three children, 11-year-old Yoav, four-year-old Elad and three-month-old Hadas, who had their throats cut at home in the Samarian neighbourhood of Itamar while most of them were asleep.
I had written about the moral depravity of the Arabs who almost certainly committed this atrocity – and also the savagery of the Palestinian Authority whose institutions incite hatred of Jews and the murder of Israelis, and which honours such murderers by naming streets and squares after them.
The complaint was that I had thus accused every single Arab in the world of being savage and depraved. This was totally absurd. As was obvious from the context, I was referring specifically to those Arabs behind the atrocity and those who incite and glorify such deeds
The complainants also airbrushed out of the picture the unstoppable torrent of deranged, Nazi-style vilification of Jews which pours out of the Arab and Muslim world and which fuels the genocidal hysteria behind such attacks. All of this, plus the fact that the Arab world has been murdering Jews in the land of Israel for more than nine decades in order to drive them out, means that to refer to “Arab moral depravity” is more than justified.
Read the rest of the essay, here.
A Guest post by AKUS
By now many reading this will have read, or been informed about, Richard Goldstone’s semi-apology in the Washington Post on Friday, April 1 (Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes) for his role in defaming Israel via the infamous “Goldstone Report”.
At the request of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Goldstone led an inquiry into the events of Israel’s “Cast Lead” action against Hamas in Gaza in December 2009. The report has been used ever since as a primary document for the condemnation of Israel, and as recently as last month formed the basis for six more resolutions condemning Israel at the UNHRC.
(The irony of this inquiry and the continuing focus of the UNHRC on Israel’s imagined transgressions can hardly be lost on those witnessing the current war in Libya – and the regime’s vicious assault on anti-Gadaffi forces – given that Libya was one of the primary instigators of the Goldstone report).
Melanie Phillips, in her inimitable style, has adeptly dissected Goldstone’s attempt to shift the blame for his failures, but I will content myself by pointing out just five of the ways in which Goldstone admitted that his report was inaccurate, or based on false information or no information at all (for which he blames Israel), that Israel (but not Hamas) has actually implemented his request to conduct inquiries (which it would have done anyway, as a matter of course) and his revelation that the UNHRC is hopelessly biased against Israel:
“If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document”.
“The allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion. While the investigations published by the Israeli military andf recognized in the U.N. committee’s report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy.”
“Israel’s lack of cooperation with our investigation meant that we were not able to corroborate how many Gazans killed were civilians and how many were combatants. The Israeli military’s numbers have turned out to be similar to those recently furnished by Hamas (although Hamas may have reason to inflate the number of its combatants).”
“We made our recommendations based on the record before us, which unfortunately did not include any evidence provided by the Israeli government. Indeed, our main recommendation was for each party to investigate, transparently and in good faith, the incidents referred to in our report. [The UNHRC independent investigator] McGowan Davis has found that Israel has done this to a significant degree; Hamas has done nothing.”
“I had hoped that our inquiry into all aspects of the Gaza conflict would begin a new era of evenhandedness at the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted.”
In light of his latest article, his admission of his naiveté, to say the least, and his retractions, is it any wonder that Israel decided to have nothing to do with this hanging judge?
Evidence of Goldstone’s high opinion of himself is never absent for long in his column. He apparently believed that he, a South African Jew would have influence with Hamas.
In fact, he was carefully selected by the cynical rogues at the UNHRC because of the credibility he would provide precisely because he is a Jew, who, despite his actual record, claimed to have been an opponent of apartheid, the accusation so commonly leveled at Israel:
At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel. That comparatively few Israelis have been killed by the unlawful rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza in no way minimizes the criminality. The U.N. Human Rights Council should condemn these heinous acts in the strongest terms.
It apparently took an investigation committee of independent experts led by Mary McGowan Davis to cause the supposedly independent Goldstone to reconsider. An alternative explanation is available here: What made Goldstone change his mind about the Gaza war report? A third is that since it appears he will not be offered a job he treasured at the UN, he feels betrayed and decided to turn on his former sponsors.
When Goldstone issued his infamous report, the Guardian did not hesitate to use it to darken Israel’s name.
(I have appended a list of some of the numerous columns the Guardian published about the report, or that reference the report.)
They even had Goldstone himself, in the role of the classic useful idiot, contribute an article on CiF explaining why “as-a-Jew” he felt compelled to take on the task that Mary Robinson, the former Irish President and frequent critic of Israel, refused, saying that it smacked more of politics than of human rights when she realized that she would simply be a tool in the hands of the automatic anti-Israeli lobby at the UNHRC.
Here is an excerpt from Goldstone’s article that appeared on “Comment is Free” on October 21st, 2009. I emphasize the classic claim of the “as-a-Jew”, which makes people like Goldstone so useful:
I would have been acting against those principles and my own convictions and conscience if I had refused a request from the United Nations to investigate serious allegations of war crimes against both Israel and Hamas in the context of Operation Cast Lead.
As a Jew, I felt a greater and not a lesser obligation to do so. It is well documented that as a condition of my participation I insisted upon and received an even-handed mandate to investigate all sides, and that is what we sought to do.
The Guardian, which would have pounced on any other report Goldstone might have issued that contained anything, no matter how small, that could be used to condemn Israel once again, has not republished Goldstone’s April 1 retraction. It took until April 3rd to bring his mea culpa to its readers’ attention in an article by Conal Urquhart. Urquhart, married to a Palestinian supporter named Kirstie Campbell, who worked for the British Red Cross in Gaza and is now a spokesperson for the UN World Food Programme (UNRWA), is apparently relieving Harriet Sherwood while she is back in the UK (though the relief at being spared more of her fatuous articles may be shared by us and the Guardian editors equally).
Note the language in these excerpts from Urquhart’s article:
Judge Goldstone expresses regrets about his report into Gaza war
However, in a new article in the Washington Post, Goldstone appeared to backtrack from some of his findings.
He wrote that subsequent Israeli military investigations had confirmed some of the report’s findings but also indicated that, “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” by Israel.
According to Urquhart, Goldstone only “appears to backtrack” when, in fact, Goldstone flatly admits that the report’s core findings were false (of course, Goldstone claims the blame lies with Israel for not cooperating with him).
Urquhart also brushes aside Goldstone’s retraction of the most damaging accusation he made – that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. Instead of writing “but also indicated that, “civilians were not intentionally targeted” the words “and stated” is the correct summary of Goldstone’s most important retraction.
The second article (as I write this) is by Aluf Benn of Ha’aretz, who now appears to have been added to the Guardian’s stable of reliable Israeli writers who can be trusted to cast a negative view on anything that Israel does “as-an-Israeli”.
The Guardian headlines the article in a way that makes it appear to provide valuable and much-needed guidance for what it continues to spin as criminal behavior typical of Israel:
Despite its flaws, the Goldstone report has changed Israel’s behaviour in Gaza
In 2009, Goldstone portrayed Israel and Hamas as morally equal; in 2011, he grants Israel, which conducted hundreds of inquiries over its military behaviour in Gaza, a higher moral stance than Hamas.
This is obviously good news. But it’s doubtful whether the Israeli inquiries, few of which have led to indictments and convictions, would have been carried out without his report and its threat of referral to the Hague. Moreover, the fear of another incriminating report serves as a powerful deterrent against a sequel. Israel has changed its behaviour in Gaza, favouring pinpoint strikes in response to rockets and mortar bombs. But it would not forget and forgive the reprimand from the South African judge, even after his public about-face.
It is simply not true that Goldstone’s report forced Israel to carry out investigations into its soldiers’ behavior during Cast Lead. Israel carries out investigations after every major military action and it was reports, mostly later shown to be false, in the Israeli press that led to the excessively large number of investigations (compare, for example, Israel’s 400 inquiries with the negligible number the Allies have carried out in Iraq). The report is also seen as a deterrent against Israel repeating Cast Lead – but there is no mention of it acting as a deterrent to the terrorists running Gaza, or Goldstone’s apology for thinking that it would:
Compare the version that Aluf Benn wrote for the Guardian with what he wrote in Ha’aretz:
Goldstone retraction shows West’s changed attitude toward Israel in light of Arab world turmoil
Israel achieved a major public relations coup this weekend, comparable to the United Nations rescission of its notorious resolution equating Zionism with racism. South African Judge Richard Goldstone, who came to symbolize more than anyone else the efforts to delegitimize Israel as a civilized and law-abiding country, has now retracted his allegations that Israel had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during Operation Cast Lead.
In his opinion piece published in Friday’s Washington Post, Goldstone underlined Israel’s clear moral superiority over Hamas, saying the Israel Defense Forces did not intentionally hit civilians in its operation in the Gaza Strip, while Gazans by contrast did in fact deliberately hit Israeli civilians.
Goldstone also acknowledged being naive in thinking Hamas would conduct itself as a law-abiding government and investigate allegations of its own war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by those firing rockets and mortar shells from the Strip into Israel. He has come to the understanding, however belatedly, that Hamas is not interested in humanitarian laws or human rights, but rather only in waging war against Israel.
The Guardian has delighted in spreading the worst lies about Israel. It was instrumental in spreading the Al Durrah libel, the “Jenin Massacre” libel and the lies about the Mavi Marmara affair. It used Goldstone’s report as a primary source for spreading the lies about Israel after Cast Lead – that Israel deliberately targeted civilians, that most of the dead were civilians (now denied by Hamas itself!), that it used Arab civilians as human shields during Cast Lead, that it targeted schools and mosques for no reason (even UNRWA’s John Ging retracted that accusation after the Guardian immediately spread the initial reports that Israel had shelled a school).
Will the Guardian finally admit that the source for true and accurate reporting about Israel and the Palestinians come from the IDF and Israeli government sources? One of Israel’s great strengths, and not a small factor in its resounding defeats of powerful Arab armies, has been to tell the truth about what is happening on the battlefield. In the end, the truth comes out, whether it is pictures of destroyed tanks spread across miles of desert in Sinai or the realization by Hamas that claiming that it is counter-productive to claim that the majority of those killed during Cast Lead were civilians. Now the truth about the infamous Goldstone report has emerged from the pen of the very man responsible for it. Goldstone has finally realized that he was nothing but a useful idiot, played by those who needed a Jewish Judas sheep to lead, they hoped, Israel to the slaughterhouse.
It is past time for the Guardian to take down its “Gaza page”, left in place to provide fodder for those who wish to ignore Hamas’ attacks against Israeli civilians and show a one-sided, biased view of Gaza, and admit that they were wrong. They were wrong about Al Durrah, they were wrong about Jenin, they were wrong about the Mavi Marmara, they were wrong about Cast Lead, they are wrong about Hamas, they are wrong about Gaza, and they were wrong about Goldstone. They are wrong about Israel, and it is beyond time for them to admit it, and issue their own retraction, let alone publish Goldstone’s.
That being said, Goldstone has done damage to Israel and Jews of historic proportions. There will be those who continue to cite his report, or selected portions from it, as if he had never published his retraction. He is a man who has placed himself outside the Jewish community, and should be rejected by all Jews. In an earlier time, Jewish communities would have issued a cherem against him – a rule decreeing that he is no longer recognized as a Jew, nor welcomed where Jews congregate. His is a name that will go down in the long annals of Jewish history with a few select others who betrayed their people in order to try to win praise and position among those who would destroy us.
(Here you will find a partial of articles and letters from the Guardian referencing Goldstone’s report either above the line or below the line, even on matters that have little or nothing to do with Israel. The sheer volume, written by one member after another of the rogue’s gallery that the Guardian employs directly or on contract to demonize Israel, is indicative of the obsession with Cast Lead and support for Hamas that permeates the Guardian’s reporting about Israel and, in fact, the Middle East.)
H/T Melanie Phillips
We recently posted on the creation of an important new organization in the UK, British Muslims for Israel (BMI) – a project of Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy- and its courageous director, Hasan Afzal.
As Phillips astutely noted:
“[BMI] was set up to counter the dangerous notion which is gaining ground that Israel should cease to exist at all; that Muslims get a better deal if they live in Israel rather than Saudi Arabia; and even that he [Afzal] would happily volunteer to be involved in Israeli hasbara – or public relations — in the face of the ‘sophisticated internet campaign to delegitimise Israel’.
If they go on in this vein, not only will these Muslims show they are very much more enlightened, decent and rational than so many others in the British intelligentsia – they will be doing rather better at hasbara and show rather more courage in openly saying what so desperately needs to be said than the Jewish community itself.“
Here is Afzal’s recent interview on Israeli television (Channel 10).
(Though it begins in Hebrew for the first 30 seconds, the interview is in English)
Here’s Melanie Phillips‘ interview yesterday on Israeli television, where you’ll see her doing what she does best: Speaking truthfully, fearlessly and delegitimizing the delegitimizers.
Besides being pretty unforgettable in itself, the name of regular ‘Comment is Free’ contributor Inayat Bunglawala will be familiar to anyone who has read Ed Husain’s 2007 book ‘The Islamist’.
In the book Husain describes his associations with the Islamic Society of Britain (ISB) and in particular, one of its members, with whom he attended weekly meetings.
“Inayat introduced me to the murabbi, or instructor, a middle-aged, clean-shaven Palestinian called Abu Luqman….
…..Abu Luqman told us that, during his youth, he had been a student of the firebrand Palestinian cleric Shaikh Ahmed Yasin. One of the reasons these gatherings were so valued was because we believed Abu Luqman was a true Palestinian, trained by Shaikh Yasin and a member of Hamas. Abu Luqman’s deep and powerful hatred of Israelis and Jews was unmistakable. Many time he promised destruction of the state of Israel and the return of Muslim control of the Holy Land. I sat there and accepted this. The Palestinian hatred of the Jews, as occupiers of Palestine, that I had detected in Nabhani was equally strong in Abu Luqman. Neither Inayat nor myself questioned any of this. Jew bashing was an acceptable part of the Islamist curriculum though not necessarily accepted throughout the ISB…
….Among Islamists I was a ‘brother’. I was not to dispute our unquestioned perceptions: hatred of Jews, Hindus, Americans, gays, the subordination of women…..
…every Wednesday night Inayat would pick me up and drop me off after a session of Koran recitation, religious discussion, anti-Semitism, and good food.”
Ed Husain may have moved on since those days in the latter half of the 1990s, but Inayat Bunglawala remains one of many who have embraced that peculiarly British form of Islamism which has evolved – due in no small part to the naivety and negligence of the British government and society – over the past few decades.
British Islamism is able to function and grow largely unfettered within broader society in part because of the fact that many of its proponents are British born, educated, eloquent people who understand the system and know how to use it to their advantage. Without such attributes, they would have been unable to achieve the level of entryism into government-funded think-tanks and commissions, universities, community organisations, political bodies, media and other mainstream institutions which is all too evident today.
But alongside their ability to play the system like a virtuoso with a violin, British Islamists continue by definition to remain loyal to an ideology which rejects many of the basic values of the society in which they function.
Inayat Bunglawala is a prime example of this phenomenon. Despite his values being revealed as anything but liberal once one scratches the surface, he is provided with a platform to spread his views by the Guardian and other British newspapers because he makes the ‘right’ noises on specific subjects such as democracy. As media secretary for the Muslim Council of Britain – a self-appointed body which has been the recipient of considerable amounts of public money – Bunglawala is part of an organisation which tells the British public what it wants to hear on subjects such as the 7/7 terror attacks, but at the same time objects to Holocaust Memorial Day, campaigned against the law on the glorification of terrorism on the grounds that it was “unfairly targeting Muslims and stifling legitimate debate” and opposed the publication of the ‘Danish cartoons’.
The legacy of Bunglawala’s days with the ISB is all the more evident when one examines some of his own writings. In fact, one could almost feel sorry for a man who is so obviously consumed by an obsession with Jews, Zionists and ‘Jewish power’ that he appears to see them behind every tree. Nowhere is this pathology more apparent than in Bunglawala’s virulent opposition of many years’ standing to one journalist and writer to whom he appears to relate as though she were some kind of evil arch-enemy from a Bond movie.
Here is Bunglawala writing about Melanie Phillips’ review of Ed Husain’s book:
“Upon the book’s official launch, there appeared a number of very positive reviews of Husain’s book from the likes of Melanie Phillips, David Cohen of the London Evening Standard and David Aaronovitch of The Times.
Melanie Phillips, in particular, was especially fulsome in her praise:
“Muslims like Husain need our support, encouragement and protection… ‘The Islamist’ should be sent to every politician at Westminster, put on the desk of every counter-intelligence officer and thrust under the supercilious nose of every journalist who maunders on about ‘Islamophobia’”
Phillips is, of course, renowned for her pro-Israel tirades, her anti-Muslim bigotry and her loopy belief that Iraq really did have WMD’s except that they managed to spirit them away to Syria just in time so that the Americans could not find them. Now what would cause such a staunch Zionist like her to display strong support for Husain’s book?”
Oh dear! All those Jewish names approving of Husain’s book: very suspicious in the weird world inhabited by Inayat Bunglawala.
“Still, it will no doubt be welcomed by the warmongering sections of the present government and perhaps even help explain how the book came to receive such generous plaudits from Melanie Phillips and Co.”
Admittedly, the prospect of delving into Bunglawala’s mind in order to try to understand just what gets him going about Melanie Phillips is not an attractive one, but the background provided by Ed Husain perhaps provides some clues.
Ms. Phillips is, of course, anything but the personification of a subordinated woman. She is highly intelligent, articulate and even delightfully feisty. One may agree or disagree with her ideas, but one cannot deny that she knows how to communicate them and is not afraid to do so. She is also a proud Jewish Zionist. Not only does she decline to conform to the prevailing politically correct social mores and the English way of ‘not rocking the boat’, but (horror of horrors!) she refuses to be ashamed of her beliefs, her identity and her opinions. In addition, Ms. Phillips is also a very well-known and highly successful journalist, writer and broadcaster.
For Inayat Bunglawala she must be the living proof of the fiction of ‘Jewish control of the media’ with which he was indoctrinated in his youth.
However, it would take nothing to persuade Bunglawala of that even if Melanie Phillips did not exist. In an article well worth a re-read written in 2007, Christopher Hitchens described Bunglawala as follows.
“…Blair’s government has appeased leading Muslim apologists by inviting them to join “commissions” to investigate the 7/7 attacks, and thus awarding them credibility well beyond their deserts. A preposterous and sinister individual named Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a man with a public record of support for Osama bin Laden, was made a convener of Blair’s task force on extremism despite his stated belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are “Zionist controlled.”
By this, Hitchens is referring to Bunglawala’s infamous ‘Tribe of Judah’ remark in which he stated that:
“The chairman of Carlton Communications is Michael Green of the Tribe of Judah. He has joined an elite club whose members include fellow Jews Michael Grade and Alan Yentob…[They are] close friends… so that’s what they mean by a ‘free media’.”
Such a ridiculous – if not downright medieval – statement is infinitely less incongruous in 21st century Britain if one considers the figures by whom people such as Inayat Bunglawala and those of his ilk are influenced – their role models.
According to The JC, quoting the Telegraph:
“In January 1993, Mr Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, the satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman “courageous” – just a month before he bombed the World Trade Center in New York. After Rahman’s arrest in July that year, Mr Bunglawala said that it was probably only because of his “calling on Muslims to fulfil their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere”.
“Five months before 9/11, Mr Bunglawala also circulated writings of Osama bin Laden, who he regarded as a “freedom fighter”, to hundreds of Muslims in Britain.”
And here is Bunglawala employing his regular Guardian slot to chastise the British Home Office for excluding Islamist hate preachers from the UK- all in the name of ‘freedom of expression’.
Of course the type of preachers whom Bunglawala so earnestly champions are precisely the sort of people who lay down the racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic ideologies so prevalent among Islamists, but his professed enthusiasm for freedom of expression appears to come to an abrupt end when it is employed by a female, Jewish, Zionist, British journalist to describe the murderers of three Israeli children in a particular manner.
Then – and only then – Bunglawala feigns dismay and offence and promptly trots off to the Press Complaints Commission and the Bedfordshire police to lodge complaints against Melanie Phillips, with the Guardian in tow.
I am quite confident that Melanie Phillips is perfectly capable of looking after herself on this and other issues. I am also hopeful that the Press Complaints Commission and the police will view Inayat Bunglawala’s complaint with the necessary gravity it demands. As for Bunglawala himself, whilst he (like many who share his ideologies) is undoubtedly a product of a combination of British inertia and apathy mixed with unrestricted Islamist indoctrination, one cannot but stand in awe of this latest display of his remarkable ability to deftly exploit the system his ideology seeks to destroy.
What is disturbing about this incident is the Guardian’s continuing role in accommodating Islamists such as Bunglawala who do nothing to hide their disdain for the liberal values which are the footings of British society. That Bunglawala and his colleagues at the MCB identify with racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic and misogynistic role models such as Qaradawi or Zakir Naik should no longer come as a surprise to anyone in the UK. That the ‘world’s leading liberal voice’ should continue to provide such people with a platform which consolidates their claims to mainstream legitimacy should.
However, as Ms. Phillips herself has observed, we appear to live in a ‘world turned upside down’.
This is cross posted by Fraser Nelson at The Spectator
It’s a funny old world. I have now been contacted by two journalists informing me that Bedfordshire Police are investigating The Spectator. Why? Because of the Melanie Philips blog where she referred to the “moral depravity” of “the Arabs” who killed the Fogel family in Israel. CoffeeHousers can judge for themselves if they agree or disagree with her language and views – but should this be illegal? The Guardian has written this story up, claiming The Spectator is being investigated by the Press Complaints Commission. This is untrue. The PCC tell me that a complaint has been lodged, but that’s as far as it has gone. They investigate only if they believe there is a serious prospect that their code has been breached, and it hasn’t. Our blogs, as well as the magazine, adhere to the PCC code.
But all this raises an interesting point about freedom of speech. It baffles me why the Bedfordshire Police – who presumably have plenty real crime to solve – should have to sit down with a print-out of Melanie Philips’ blog and decide whether to prosecute The Spectator for printing her remarks. It’s not their fault: laws have been passed which means that (for example) Tony Blair faced a six-month investigation from the North Wales Police when they read in Lance Price’s memoirs that he had been rude about the Welsh. In a way, I felt Blair deserved it – because it was under him that such daft laws crept their way into the system. Under him that Britain started to become a country where people are prosecuted for what they say, rather than what they do.
Just over a year ago, the Crown Prosecution Service put out a statement saying that they had decided, on balance, not to prosecute Jan Moir for her remarks about Stephen Gately. This again conjured up another mental image: of CPS officials, all bent over a page of the Daily Mail and working out whether the author should be put in jail. Again, think of the other crimes going on in Britain – the other demands on the CPS time. How did we get to this point? The Bedfordshire Police are not expected to be a local Stasi. Last time I checked, this is not East Germany. To me, the idea of being imprisoned for what you say, or what you tweet, is deeply sinister. And one which should raise more protest than it does.
The Spectator is in the firing line quite a lot because we are in the business of serving up cask strength opinion – and have been for 183 years. We hire brilliant columnists, and give them freedom to say what they want. We were rude about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, we offended people calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1957 (ten years before it happened), hardly an issue goes by without some kind of controversy. We don’t sanitise, or homogenise. It is our columnists’ honesty that gives their articles force. When I meet readers, I head one plea more than any others: “don’t tone down Rod”.
We are proud to be associated with columnists of the intelligence and eloquence of Rod Liddle, Matthew Parris, Taki and far, far more. When Jan Moir was in trouble, Matthew Parris rode to her defence in The Spectator – you don’t have to agree with what she wrote to defend her right to say what she thinks. This is a British liberty. We are proud to have the greatest stable of bloggers of anywhere, and proud that Melanie Philips is one of them. Those who find her opinions not to their taste have the option of not reading her blog.
The last piece Melanie wrote for the magazine was about the freedom of speech. I recommend it to CoffeeHousers. We have no First Amendment protection in this country, and we’re suffering from it. Freedom of expression under attack in Britain, from our notorious libel laws to this new phenomenon of police forces being asked to investigate what people put on their blogs.
PS: The last time we really bowdlerised a Taki column was five years ago – he was telling tales about the depravity of one Jeffrey Epstein. And how true that story turned out to be.
PPS: CoffeeHousers should go easy on the Bedfordshire Police, they have probably filed this complaint in the same drawer as UFO sightings. But it’s interesting to see how easily the media is manipulated. Here’s how it goes:
1) Inayat Bunglawala, chair of Muslims4UK, gets angry about what he reads on Melanie’s blog.
2) Complains to the PCC.
3) Complains to the police.
4) Phones up The Guardian and says “The PCC are investigating The Spectator!! Story!! Police too!!
5) The Guardian duly writes it all up, on its website.
6) The Independent follows up The Guardian.
7) An inverted pyramid of piffle is thus constructed.
This is cross posted by our friends at Fresno Zionism
Not everyone is a Star Wars fan, but we are all familiar with the double standard under which it is just fine to accuse ‘Zionists’ of every despicable behavior imaginable, while it is considered inappropriate — and often dangerous — to talk about the Arab and Muslim propensity to terrorism.
For example, a newspaper in the UK has had a complaint filed against it at the Bedfordshire police department because it published a piece by Melanie Phillips containing this:
Today the massacred Fogel family was buried in Jerusalem. And as anticipated, the moral depravity of the Arabs is finding a grotesque echo in the moral bankruptcy and worse of the British and American ‘liberal’ media – a sickening form of armchair barbarism which is also in evidence, it has to be said, on the comment thread beneath my post below.
Overwhelmingly, the media have either ignored or downplayed the atrocity – or worse, effectively blamed the victims for bringing it on themselves, describing them as ‘hard-line settlers’ or extremists. Given that three of the victims were children, one a baby of three months whose throat was cut, such a response is utterly degraded.
The complainant, the head of an organization called “Muslims4UK,” Inayat Bungalawa, said
Her words went far beyond just denouncing the killings. It was a far more generalised racist outburst against Arabs as a whole.
Well, Bungalawa has a blog of his own, called “Inayat’s Corner,” and a filthy little corner it is indeed. Here are some quotations I found there without looking very hard:
(3/11) The Israel lobby views any progress made by UK Muslims in this country’s political life as being against their interests. The only permissible Muslims are those who are prepared to remain silent about the crimes perpetrated by the apartheid state of Israel.
(2/11) Robert Halfon [a British MP] – you are a total and utter coward, much like the members of the murderous Israeli Defence Forces. Whereas the IDF like to hide inside their tanks while firing shells at little children, you hide inside the House of Commons while making your libellous comments.
(10/10) David Cameron spoke out against any calls to punish Israel for its continuing occupation of Palestinian lands, its illegal Jewish settlements, its cruel and barbaric treatment of the besieged and repeatedly bombed people of Gaza and its known stockpile of nuclear weapons.
(9/10) Four Israeli land-thieves killed
All the main news outlets are currently carrying the story of the killing of four Israeli colonist-settlers yesterday by the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, near the Palestinian city of Hebron.
(5/10) It is not difficult to imagine that the UK govt’s reaction would have been rather different if it had been, say, Iran that had massacred a group of aid volunteers [on the Mavi Marmara].
If we had the kind of hate speech and libel laws here as they do in the UK (thank goodness we don’t), I’d file a complaint against Bungalawa on behalf of Israel and the IDF.
Almost everything he says is anti-Israel, but I’ve excerpted only those quotations which appear libelous. He is also remarkably rude to Melanie Phillips — perhaps she should sue him too?
H/T Elder of Ziyon:
More and more, the story of the Palestine Papers is not what may have been revealed in the negotiations but, rather, the Guardian’s capacity to distort almost any nugget of information in a way which confirms their worldview.
In “Papers reveal how Palestinian leaders gave up fight over refugees” written by Ian Black and Seumas Milne – another perfect example of what Melanie Phillips aptly termed the Guardian’s tendency to try to seem “more Palestinian than the Palestinians” – was this:
[Tzipi] Livni told Palestinian negotiators in 2007 that she was against international law and insisted that it could not be included in terms of reference for the talks: “I was the minister of justice”, she said. “But I am against law – international law in particular.”
Except that, as the following transcript shows, the document clearly contradicts this characterization of Livni’s’ remarks.
Livni opens the meeting: I would like to suggest that we will continue according to what I tried to at the beginning of the session yesterday, but unfortunately while doing so we ended up in some sort of a discussion. At the end of today’s meeting the minimum that is required is some sense of the six or seven points that you stated that need to be in the document. Just [a] list [of] what is agreed or not agreed. Put aside the core issues for now, just have a list of agreed and not agreed, in points. If we have this agreement… let’s not include the areas of disagreement now.
Ahmed Qurei: We can finish tonight the subjects – the preamble. What are the components. Not the language or the nice words etc. We should focus on three things in the preamble. One is the terms of reference [“TOR”]. The three core elements in addition to the [nice] language. One is the TOR. Second is the 2 state solution. Third is the Roadmap [“RM”]. Is there anything to be added to the preamble?
Livni: No – it’s ok. And what we called before some good words. The basic idea of where we are going. End of conflict, [the goal is] to find a way to do so… something like this.
So if you want to summarize the positions, this is something we did in our former conversation. When it comes to the TOR we want reference to 242, 338, the RM and other agreements agreed between the two sides. You added, and this is the problem, the API [Arab Peace Initiative], international law, 1515, 1397, and 194. And we wanted the three principles of the Quartet.
[more discussion of what should be included in the Terms of Reference and Preamble for the document]
Qurei: International law?
Livni: NO. I was the Minister of Justice. I am a lawyer…But I am against law — international law in particular. Law in general.
If we want to make the agreement smaller, can we just drop some of these issues? Like international law, this will make the agreements easier.
Livni’s “I am against law” remark is merely signaling that she does not want any reference to legal issues, or international law, in the joint (ceremonial) statement, so that a final peace agreement will be easier to achieve.
In other words, the Guardian buried the lead of this particular story which should have read something like: “Document shows Tzipi Livni flexible, and committed to achieving a peace deal.”
Beyond burying the lead, the Palestine Papers reveal the Guardian doing what they do best: burying facts which contradict their preconceived conclusions.
Melanie Phillips, in this interview with the Israel Broadcasting Authority, does what she does best: Provide a brutally honest and penetrating analysis of the moral inversion at play in the debate over the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict as well as the broader issues relating to radical Islam’s war against the West. Phillip’s latest book, The World Turned Upside Down, is simply required reading for those who seek to really understand the intellectual currents which rage beneath the surface of the most pressing conflicts of our time.
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Guest/Cross Post
Hadar Sela
Britain’s own ‘Lord of the Flies’
August 17, 2011 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: Guardian, Guest Post, London Riots, Melanie Phillips, Muslim Brotherhood, Peter Hitchens, Seumas Milne, UK Riots, William Golding | by Guest/Cross Post | 41 comments
A Guest Post by AKUS
The premise of “Lord of the Flies” is that a group of boys marooned on a desert island during a nuclear war become brutal savages. Comfortably middle class, they rapidly lose their civilized state and become a mob that turns on one their own, Piggy. In a world long before Facebook, Twitter, or Blackberries, the boys find a conch shell which serves the same purpose of gathering the boys together.
Consider the murdered Piggy as an allegorical figure representing today’s British society, and the book is a prophetic vision of what happened in Britain last week. Given the setting of the novel, the one aspect Golding could not foresee was the way in which British adults joined what have been labeled “feral youths” in the looting and mayhem. The mask hiding the failed policies of the last decade or two has been ripped aside, revealing the some nasty truths about British society.
Those of us who have lived with terror in Israel could feel deep sympathy for the victims – the average citizens – of nights of terror in Britain. But as the riots played out in horrific comparison with the contemporaneous peaceful demonstrations for social equality in Israel there was also grim Schadenfreude directed at Britain as a society which has become the global center of organized anti-Israeli, and all too often, anti-Semitic, activity.
The looters were quickly labeled “scum”, “criminals”, “feral youths”, and so on. We saw street interviews with shocked Britains surveying the results of years of policies that, as Melanie Phillips so brilliantly summarized in her article Goodbye to the Enlightenment, were systematically put in place to destroy (“remake”, the perpetrators would claim) British society. The result she pointed to could be the premise for Golding’s book, with the societal collapse due, not to nuclear war, but deliberate removal of every norm that over millennia was found to make societies work:
(By the way, when it comes to fatherless families, the USA is trending in the same direction and for many of the same reasons).
Like Lords of the Flies on Golding’s Island, feral Guardianistas went on a verbal rampage to justify the destructive philosophies they espouse. The commentary ranged from the absurd to the ridiculous. The pickings are too rich to list them all here, but three columnists stood out more than most.
Following Phillips article, Jane Clare Jones, (“a doctoral student in philosophy, specialising in feminist ethics “– who knew that ethics had genders?) dodged the real issues and instead attacked Melanie Phillips and a conservative columnist, Peter Hitchens , for good measure, for “laying the responsibility for violence perpetrated mostly by young men at the door of women”. We are to believe that Phillips was blaming the issue of fatherlessness (more of a solution, apparently, in Clare Jones’ view, than a problem) on the mothers rather than the often unknown fathers, which is simply not true.
Phillips, according to Clare Jones, is a threat to the very concept of feminism, at the heart of which, we are apparently to understand, lies the single mother. Clare Jones, indeed a “well-healed media feminist”, typifies the very destructive lunacy that Phillips protests, and the people responsible for the destruction of a society that once gave the world so much.
There was the Egyptian Mona Eltahaway, one of the Guardian’s most vicious critics of Israel, who fatuously compared Cameron to Mubarak. Yes indeed – what is next for Britain? Will Cameron’s secret police reopen the torture chambers in the Tower and imprison the Moslem Brotherhood? Verbal hysteria has rarely reached this level.
So we might truly understand the dialectical underpinnings of the riots, the Guardian’s resident Bolshevik, Seamus Milne, was called in to interpret the riots as a grand “Failure of Capitalism in Britain”.
Of course, the riots represent the failures of multiculturalism and the welfare state – the antithesis, one might justifiably claim, of “Capitalism Run Wild”. CiFWatch already noted readers’ unprecedented opposition to Seamus Milne’s lunatic article. His article drew the most vehement response we have seen on CiF – currently 2,548 readers believe that Milne simply does not “get it”.
The Guardian’s responses to the riots reveal once more, if proof were needed, that there is something seriously wrong with the way Guardianistas, and not a few Britains, view the world and their society. With respect to the Guardian, this is most evident in its constant attacks on Israel. The Guardian even makes a point of running articles written for it by spokesmen of the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah whose ethos is one of murder, misogyny, intolerant religious fanaticism and terrorism aimed at the destruction of Israel. They have clearly stated their desire to bring about a second Holocaust. I imagine the Guardian would indignantly claim that it does not support that ethos and the actions it leads to. But, in fact, by its editorial policies and actions, it does.
The Guardian supports anyone and any group dedicated to the destruction of Israel, the only country in the Middle East that comes close to actually living the values, in many cases, of a liberal society that supposedly the Guardianistas hope to achieve in Britain. If the argument is one of opposition to Israel’s use of military force to protect itself, or the occupation of the disputed territories, how hypocritical does that sound when Britain is involved, for example, bombing civilians in Tripoli day and night when it has done nothing since the Lockerbie bombing to attack Britain? If Israel responded to every terrorist attack the way Britain has operated in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, Gaza and the Palestinian areas of the West Bank would be empty wastelands.
Many noted that the riots drew attention to a previously acceptable event that illustrates the sickness at the heart of the attacks on Israel. One of the cheerleaders at a recent Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) conference was Jody McIntyre, now dropped like a hot potato by several newspapers that previously thought it rather fun to run his nasty anti-establishment blog. When he shrieked: “we [must] set the streets of London alight” at the PSC conference he was loudly applauded. A little later the mob actually set London alight. Hopefully McIntyre will now recede into the obscurity from whence he came
It was fun when it was politically correct to aim the taunts, protests and violence and calls at Israel. However, when the call to destroy London was aimed not as a backhanded protest at Israel, or Britain’s imagined support for Israel, but at Britain itself, this did not sit well with the great British public.
The questions I would have for the papers that have dropped McIntyre’s blog, for those supporting the PSC’s 300 member groups, and especially for the Guardian, are:
The riots gave a clear answer, in my opinion, and after the riots, nothing will ever be the same in Britain. Which way it goes remains to be seen.
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