Things I don't want to see

Things I don’t want to see on TV (or read online or in the press.)

1) Do people really care what Boris Johnson did under the dinner table twenty years ago? Back then the killer look was an effective way of dealing with creepy things like that.

Norman Smith is in Manchester. He likes to use his own brand of flippancy to spin the news. He thinks Boris’s irrelevant, electioneering-motivated promises about 'busses' is sheer deflection from the far more serious matter of inappropriate thigh-squeezing. In the studio, Joanna Gosling jokes chummily, “He likes busses” 

If that ain’t Naga style editorialising I don’t know what is. 

Don’t you just hate it when people you quite like say really stupid things?

2) Take, for example, Brendan O’Neill. He’s written about Naga-gate over at the Spectator - You’ve probably read it by now. Everything he’s written is negated by his opening remark, which is that Trump’s abbreviated (quote-mined)  tweet was racist. Fortunately for my continuing sanity, most of the btl comments took him to task over this. 

To elucidate: Trump’s tweet was crude but he was trying to say to those dear ladies that they’re in no position to criticise. In playground language, “you can’t talk!” or, “If you can do any better, go ahead, let’s see you do it.” He sees their ‘holier than thou’ criticism of the US as disloyal and unAmerican. Simples.  And surely it’s not automatically racist to allude to someone’s geographical ‘ancestral’ origins nowadays, is it? 

3) Here’s another one. I really admire Rachel Riley for what she is doing to raise awareness of the alarming tsunami of antisemitism that’s sweeping the world. She’s putting her popularity, her beauty and intelligence to good use; making the best of her assets by devoting them to a worthwhile cause. 

However, I was disappointed to see that she too has used the Corbynista “all forms of racism” appendage in her anti-antisemitism speech at the Algemeiner  “J100 list” ceremony.

If you read her full speech you might notice that she alludes to people who have stood up against antisemitism, specifying: “Jews, Christians, Muslims. People of all faiths and people of none.” 

Fair enough if she’s praising religious and non-religious groups (including Muslims) who condemn hatred of Jews. But is she? it’s not clear whether she actually means ‘people who fight antisemitism’ or if she’s merely empathising with everyone who has suffered from ‘bigotry.’ 

Further on she declares her support for a bill in the UK Parliament to make online hate a criminal offence.

“….material that incites violence against women, against Muslims, indeed against any group they seek to target with their bile, to make them civilly and criminally liable for the content they recklessly allow to be published there.

This skates perilously near to blasphemy-law territory. I want her to at least acknowledge that much of the problem emanates from Islam. Rachel Riley came to the party surprisingly late in the day. She only noticed antisemitism after the “Enough is enough’ protests. So where was she during the 2014 anti-Israel crescendo? I may have got this wrong, but I can’t help being disappointed.

4) Criticism of the BBC. That’s another area that’s full of stupid stuff. Not only the ‘complaints from both sides’ meme - people saying the BBC is too right-wing - but eg., on rare occasions on our ‘sister’ blog when a commenter cites or links to an antisemitic website or makes a hideous, white-supremacist type of comment. The Biased-BBC comments field fills up fast, so the admin team (if there is such a thing) has its work cut out, but these things need to be flagged up so they could at least be challenged.

5) Last but not least, I’m puzzled by the fact that so many erudite and knowledgeable writers and bloggers who are brave enough to criticise Islam and the Islamisation of the West are terrified of being associated in any way with the artist formerly known as Stephen Yaxley Lennon. 

He’s working-class, and self-educated (to a pretty remarkable degree) on the subject of Islam. He’s reckless, impulsive and can be his own worst enemy, but I can’t quite work out whether he’s earned the disdain of people I admire merely because of class prejudice or for some other reason beyond my ken. After all, some of these people have been on ‘journeys’ themselves - commonly from the political left to the right rather than from skinhead to the Oxford Union if you see what I mean. But a journey is a journey. 

So, these are five examples of the things I don’t want to see on TV or read online. Maybe this post itself is something you don’t want to read either; but if you have been reading, 'thanks for your time' as they say on TV,  and be thankful that I’ve only got up to number five.