As we noted back in April, Owen Jones,
perhaps the best known leftist commentator in Britain, “still looks
like a high-school kid” even though he’s 34. Maybe it’s because
his brow hasn’t been furrowed by deep thoughts. Although he is
considered highly influential, it’s impossible, we wrote, to grasp
why “anyone, anywhere, could possibly be influenced by him.”
Owen Jones
But there he is, this Oxford grad who
is the son and grandson of Communists, constantly pontificating in
the pages of the Guardian and all over British TV, endlessly
reiterating his one-dimensional, ideologically lockstep message that
“capitalism is a sham” and “socialism is our only hope.” He
is constantly condemning Islamophobia, which he has called “a
European pandemic” and “the most widespread…form of bigotry of
our times,” but won’t breathe a word in criticism of Islam or in
acknowledgment of the ongoing worldwide oppression of Christians
Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, women, gays, and others in the name of
Allah.
A gay man, Jones is eternally on the
lookout for the slightest hint of right-wing homophobia, but simply
refuses to talk about the fact that sharia law orders the execution
of gays. Appearing on Sky News after the June 12, 2016, jihadist
massacre at the gay Pulse nightclub in Orlando, he was mainly
concerned with shutting down any mention by his host and fellow
panelist of the atrocity’s Islamic roots, and when they refused to
be silenced, he walked off in a now-famous huff.
Jeremy Corbyn
Jones was also a devout fan of Hugo
Chávez and Fidel Castro. And – oh, yes – he’s an ardent
follower of Jeremy Corbyn, the anti-Semite who led the Labour Party
to a historic defeat in the UK’s December 12 parliamentary
elections. In the hours after the loss, Jones tweeted that voters had
abandoned Labour because of its wishy-washy position. A few days
later, in his post-election column,
Jones presented a longer list of reasons for the loss, citing a
series of misguided strategies and tactics. This supposedly
influential voice of the left had utterly failed to recognize that
the problem was a pure matter of ideology: the sometime reformist
party of the working class had, quite simply, been taken over by
radical elites who live in a north London bubble, who look down on
the proles, and who love the idea of socialism even though they’ve
never, of course, lived in a socialist country or seriously studied
the subject.
British PM Boris Johnson
And Jones is one
of them. Which is the only reason any of these people read him and
take him seriously: because he shares, and affirms, their own
shallow, puerile worldview. “I don’t think anyone on the left
should regret our enthusiasm for the transformative programme on
offer,” Jones wrote in his column. “These are the right policies
for the country and the planet, and a bad campaign hasn’t changed
that.” While Labour, he asserted, needed to win back elderly
voters, it must not give up “the progressive social values that are
articles of faith to its young supporters.” Which is to say the
hip, privileged, urban young, many of whom have never had a job, run
a business, or paid income taxes, and who have embraced a certain set
of political propositions not because they know anything about the
actual lessons of modern history and economics but because adherence
to those propositions is derigueur in their social
circle.
How could the Tories have won such a
massive victory in the British parliamentary elections? After all,
the Labour Party was headed by a man who speaks of Hamas and
Hezbollah as “friends”; who has praised Hugo Chavez and his
successor as president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro; who is a
longtime admirer of the Communist regime in Cuba; who is an ardent
supporter of the Palestinian cause; and who is widely viewed as a
dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite.
Jeremy Corbyn
Most sensible observers considered the mass defection of working-class voters from Labour – resulting in that party’s worst showing in an election since the 1930s – a thumbs-up for democracy and patriotism and a rejection of the far left. Not everybody cheered Jeremy Corbyn’s loss, however. In a post-election letter released by a group called the People’s Campaign for Corbyn, over 100 members of Britain’s artistic community, some of them quite high-profile, paid tribute to Corbyn, praising him for his “humanity, courage and insight” and for “raising political awareness in our country to a level not seen since the end of World War II.”
Ken Loach
Among the signers of the letter was
film director Ken Loach, who, as we noted earlier this year, “has
belonged to the Workers Revolutionary Party, the Socialist Workers
Party, and the International Marxist Group, has been involved with
Jeremy Corbyn and with the bilious Jew-hater George Galloway, has
campaigned for a number of boycotts of Israel, and has condemned
efforts to address anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.” In 2002,
when 11 directors from around the world were asked to contribute a
segment to a film, 11’09″01 September 11, about the
reactions to the 9/11 atrocities in their own countries, Loach chose
to diminish the jihadist attacks by focusing on another September 11
– namely, the US-backed Chilean coup of September 11, 1973, in
which the Communist-allied Salvador Allende was ousted and replaced
by Augusto Pinochet.
Brian Eno
Another signatory was musician Brian
Eno, who has a long record of criticizing Israel and whose 1978 song
“RAF,” as we noted in 2016, “incorporates ‘sound elements
from a Baader Meinhof ransom message made by public telephone at the
time of the Lufthansa Flight 181 hijacking.’”
Among the other signers: Nigel Kennedy,
a violinist whose onstage image has been compared to that of Liberace
and who condemned Israel during an appearance on a BBC Proms
broadcast in 2013; Alexei Sayle, a standup comic who, after
joining the pro-Soviet Young Communist League in his teens, decided
that the USSR was “going soft” and thus switched to Maoism and
the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and, at 67, still says he holds to
the politics of his youth; and John Rees, a leader of the Stop the
War Coalition and of Respect, who at the time of the Iraq War called
on his fellow socialists to “unconditionally stand with the
oppressed against the oppressor, even if the people who run the
oppressed country are undemocratic and persecute minorities, like
Saddam Hussein.” In other words, Saddam, apparently by virtue of
being a person of color and an enemy of the West, counted as an
oppressed person, even if he was, in fact, one of the world’s most
notorious oppressors.
Saddam Hussein, victim of oppression
Such is the kind of thinking that goes
on in the heads of those who lined up to declare their solidarity
with Jeremy Corbyn. As unsettling as it is to know that there are so
many people with such ideologies in roles of cultural power in the
UK, it is comforting to know that ordinary UK citizens, in
overwhelming numbers, recognized these views as totalitarian and
un-British and rejected them decisively on December 12.
For decades,
the British have been brainwashed by their government and media into
revering two of their country’s biggest bureaucracies: the National
Health Service (NHS) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
Nigel Lawson
Retired Tory MP Nigel Lawson once said that the NHS is “the closest thing the English people have to a religion.” Google “our precious NHS” or “our beloved NHS” and you’ll get a gazillion hits. Grown people in responsible positions talk about the NHS as if it were a living creature…or a demigod. Last year, seven decades after its establishment, an MP wrote on Facebook: “Happy 70th Birthday to our precious NHS.” This June, when the prospect of a new US-UK trade deal raised fears of health-care privatization, Rachel Clarke, a famous doctor and writer, tweeted: “I can’t think of anything worse than our precious NHS in the clutches of American capital.”
Rachel Clarke
It’s one thing to appreciate your doctor or celebrate the advances of modern medicine. It’s another to talk in this borderline worshipful way about a government bureaucracy. This is especially the case when the bureaucracy in question is far from being all it’s cracked up to be. For all the glowing PR the NHS gets, a study last year showed that it “has among the lowest per capita numbers of doctors, nurses and hospital beds in the western world….only Poland has fewer doctors and nurses than the UK, while only Canada, Denmark and Sweden have fewer hospital beds.” Its record on treating people with potentially fatal maladies is nothing less than horrific: such patients often have to endure perilously long waiting times for urgently needed tests, treatments, operations, and follow-ups.
Admittedly, although America may have
the best world’s doctors and hospitals, its health-care bureaucracy
also has its problems – but you don’t find anybody in the U.S.
crowing about it in the way Brits have been trained to crow about the
NHS.
Michael Buerk
All of which brings us to Michael
Buerk, a longtime newsreader for that other supposedly beloved
British institution, the BBC, who said recently that fat persons with
obesity-related ailments should be refused the care they need and
should instead be allowed to die in order to save money for the NHS.
“Who is to say longevity is the ultimate goal in life?” Buerk
asked, and encouraged his fellow Brits to see the early death of
their untreated overweight countrymen as “a selfless sacrifice in
the fight against demographic imbalance, overpopulation and climate
change.”
Such views, of course, are not unusual. Indeed, the NHS itself, like socialized medical systems in other countries, routinely refuses certain treatments to patients who, for reasons of age or weight or whatever, are considered expendable. When politicians and bureaucrats publicly discuss such matters, of course, they lean heavily on euphemisms and circumlocutions. What sets Buerk apart from them is the refreshing frankness of his macabre, Hippocratic Oath-defying enthusiasm for what we are not allowed to call “death panels.”
It is interesting, by the way, that
neither Buerk nor any of his old colleagues at the BBC have suggested
that that frankly superfluous and outrageously expensive broadcasting
service, whose “news” programs have long since consisted largely
of left-wing propaganda, be defunded as a “selfless sacrifice”
and the money spent on more important things.
Back in 2016 we spent five full days on
the British historian E. J. Hobsbawm, who had died four years earlier
at the age of 95. As we noted then, Hobsbawm’s demise was followed
by a tsunami of praise. In the Guardian he was described as
“arguably Britain’s most respected historian of any kind”; the
New Yorker called him “refreshingly serious—intellectually
curious and politically engaged,” a man who “was in it to change
the world.” The Independent told its readers that he was
“one of the greatest British historians of the 20th century.”
The obituarists for these and other
prominent media did not ignore the fact that Hobsbawm was a lifelong
Communist – a passionate admirer and fierce defender of Stalin who
even, in a 1994 TV interview, expressed support for Stalin’s murder
of millions. What they did was find ways to minimize it, or excuse
it, or even praise it. One necrologist spoke of Hobsbawm’s “Marxist
ideals.” Another depicted him as a victim of anti-Communist
prejudice. Can you imagine any of these publications referring
seriously to “Nazi ideals” or “anti-Nazi prejudice”?
A.N. Wilson
The novelist A.N. Wilson was almost
alone in explicitly condemning Hobsbawm for his politics, pointing
out that “if some crazed Right-winger were to appear on BBC and say
that the Nazis had been justified in killing six million Jews….We
should be horrified, and consider that such a person should never be
allowed to speak in public.” But what happened to Hobsbawm after
that interview? As we wrote in 2016: “His career soared. He was
offered (but rejected) a knighthood. Later he accepted from Tony
Blair the title Companion of Honour. Oxford gave him a prize worth
half a million pounds. As Hobsbawm got older, the media increasingly
described him as the country’s greatest living historian. All this
despite the fact, as Wilson pointed out, that Hobsbawm never learned
the lessons of the century he had lived through.” Nor was he even a
good historian: his books, as Wilson bluntly put it, were Communist
propaganda. He “quite deliberately underplayed the Soviet Union’s
attack on Finland in 1939-40.” He was silent on the Katyn massacre,
in which the Soviets murdered 20,000 Polish soldiers. And he
“deceitfully downplayed the grim role of the Communists in Spain in
the Thirties” and “the forcible nature of the coups the Soviets
carried out in Eastern Europe after 1945.”
Richard J. Evans
If we’re returning now to the subject
of Hobsbawm, it’s because another famous historian, Richard J.
Evans, FBA, FRSL, FRHistS, FLSW, has published an 800-page biography
of him. Evans is best known for his three-volume history of the Third
Reich – which has been described as definitive – and for his
court testimony defending a writer’s characterization of David
Irving as a Holocaust denier. In all his writings on Hitler’s
regime, Evans has made it clear that he is not a fan. He sees Nazism
for the evil that it is. He does not buy into the notion that, in
writing about a Nazi, you can set aside his Nazi beliefs, or
contextualize them or relativize them, depicting them as just a minor
or incidental part of his personal makeup. You can’t conclude that,
his Nazi convictions notwithstanding, the most important thing about
him is that he was a devoted husband and father, a good friend and
neighbor, a man who loved his pets and was, as the British say,
clubbable. No, a Nazi is, first and last, a Nazi. Evans understands
that.
David Pryce-Jones
Confronted with the case of Hobsbawm
and Hobsbawm’s Communism, however, Evans is able to take a totally
different approach. In a blistering review of Evans’s book for the
June issue of the New Criterion, yet another historian, David
Pryce-Jones (who, as it happens, is also an FRSL), laments that
Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History makes Evans “look either a
dupe or a fool of the higher sort, in any case earning him a
reputation no historian would want to have.” Describing Hobsbawm as
“the foremost Communist apologist in the Britain of his day,”
Pryce-Jones observes that if Hobsbawm had been a Nazi, “Evans
surely would have thrown his doctrine back into his face. Instead, he
defends the indefensible with this hagiography.” Although Hobsbawm,
after joining the Communist Party as a student at Cambridge, “never
deviated from the Party line,” Evans “can still write this utter
absurdity: ‘there was no sense in which [Hobsbawm] was an active or
committed member of the Party.”
Josef Stalin
As for Hobsbawm the man, Pryce-Jones, who is now 93 and who actually knew Hobsbawm, provides a valuable corrective: “In my experience, Hobsbawm was nothing like the genial and popular figure depicted by Evans.” At one dinner they both attended, Hobsbawm sang the praises of Castro’s Cuba; another dinner guest, a former British ambassador to Cuba, demurred, providing chapter and verse on Cuban perfidy, but to no avail. “All American propaganda, according to Hobsbawm.” There was more: Hobsbawm and Pryce-Jones just happened to be neighbors in a certain Welsh village, where, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Hobsbawm, like any half-mad local crank, “would stop to tell me at the top of his voice with expletives in front of surprised farmers how superior Communism was to the nationalism that replaced it.” Pryce-Jones concludes by underscoring a point that is somehow missed by people like Evans and the writers of Hobsbawm’s admiring obituaries: namely, that this was a man who, if the Soviets had conquered Britain and given him the power to do so, would have ordered them all sent to their deaths.
In late June, when the Guardian sent a reporter to cover the annual convention of the Communist Party USA, the article that resulted was surprisingly sympathetic. No, let’s revise that a bit: the level of sympathy would have been surprising had the piece appeared in some other British newspaper – say, the Telegraph or the Times. But it would probably be naïve to be surprised by a friendly account of a CPUSA clambake in the Guardian.
Written by one Eric Lutz, the article said nothing particularly negative about the party or its ideology. On the contrary, Lutz seemed to strive to present the CPUSA as a longtime victim of unfair prejudice. The subhead, for example, noted that the party had been “derided and feared for 100 years.” The first sentence called the party “one of American politics[’] biggest historical bogeymen.” Lutz quoted, without comment, a line from a CPUSA official’s convention speech in which he assured America that “the [C]ommunist [P]arty isn’t out to hurt you….It will set you free.”
Moreover, Lutz seemed pleased to be able to state that the party was looking to “a brighter future…at a moment in American politics in which democratic socialism and progressive ideas are increasingly finding a home in the mainstream of the Democratic party.” And when he reported that convention delegates “sought to send the message that their party has been the most consistent champion of [progressive] ideas [and] has been on the right side of some of the most consequential ideological battles of the last hundred years,” there was no indication whatsoever that Lutz wasn’t totally convinced. Neither he nor his editors found it necessary to remind readers of the hundreds of millions of human lives snuffed out by murderous twentieth-century Communist regimes. In a time when the vast majority of mainstream news media in the U.S. and Britain seem incapable of reporting on Donald Trump or the Republican Party or Brexit voters without a condescending sneer, there was not a whiff of skepticism in Lutz’s report on the American Communists.
Far from it. Apparently to show that Communists have been in the vanguard of the advancement of black Americans, Lutz noted that the father of one convention speaker, Pepe Lozano, had “rallied Mexican and Puerto Rican voters to support Harold Washington, the first African-American mayor” in the 1980s. Lutz went on to quote, again without a hint of doubt or dispute, Lozano’s claim that the CPUSA had played a major role in “profound American struggles for democracy.” For anyone who knows anything about the subject, the very idea that American Communists ever sought to advance democracy is obscene on the face of it. Whole books – extremely well documented books, some of them based on Soviet archives – have vividly shown just how thoroughly controlled the Cold War-era CPUSA was by the Kremlin and just how determined the party was to crush liberty and destroy its enemies. For the Guardian to drop all these facts down the memory hole is disgraceful.
“Communism,” wrote Lutz, “has long been regarded with fear in the US, viewed as antithetical to American values and democracy.” The implication here, of course, is that Communism isn’t antithetical to American values and democracy. What to say about the fact that a sentence like this could appear, in the year 2019, in a major British daily? Is Lutz a fool or a liar? “[I]t can be striking,” he observed, “to hear Americans openly discuss their support for communism.” Not “appalling”; not “disgusting”; not “vomit-inducing” – no, “striking.” Imagine a writer for any major conservative newspaper reporting on a neo-Nazi rally in this way. Nazism is – as it should be – beyond the pale. Why does Communism – an equally evil totalitarian ideology, and one that caused even more deaths than Nazism did – still get this kid-glove treatment?
“Allied leaders were anti-Nazi, but not anti-racist. We’re
now paying the price for their failure.” That was the headline on an April 29 Washington Post op-ed by John Broich, an
associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University. His beef
with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt was that, yes, they led the
Western Allies to victory in World War II, but while they both delivered memorable
wartime speeches in which they eloquently adduced the enemy’s evil, they “rarely
attacked the core tenet of Nazism: the belief in a master race.” By way of
defending this assertion, Broich explained that in a recent class on World War
II,
I had my students pore through the speeches and letters of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the years around the war’s start in 1939, searching for his basis for opposing the Nazis. They found Churchill wanted to stand up to the Nazis’ expansionism, fight their anti-democracy posture and resist what he called (but largely left undefined) their anti-Christianity. What he did not do, however, was call for the destruction of the essence of Nazism: race supremacy.
FDR, too, according to Broich, “either failed to comprehend the basic nature of German fascism or chose not to rally Americans to oppose Nazism as Nazism. In his prewar correspondence, he made no secret of his dislike of Hitler and his belligerent regime, but like Churchill, he never framed his opposition to Germany as a rejection of race hierarchy or race nationalism.” Broich then went a step further, citing America’s racial segregation laws and FDR’s placement of Japanese-Americans in internment camps during World War II as evidence that when it came to racism set in system, Roosevelt’s America and Churchill’s Britain were scarcely better than Hitler’s Germany. Which, of course, is an obscene view to teach to college students or to preach to newspaper readers.
Let’s be clear: Jim Crow and Manzanar were deplorable. But even
to hint at moral equivalence between the Western Allies and the Nazis is
insipid.
Winston Churchill
After reading Broich’s article, we turned to Andrew Roberts’s
recent bestseller Churchill: Walking with
Destiny. The book’s first reference to Hitler appears on page 95, in a
passage about Churchill’s attitude toward Jews. Churchill, Roberts tells us, was
a “philosemite” – an active admirer of the Jewish people. In 1904, he denounced
a bill that would have restricted immigration by Russian Jews because, in his
own words, it sought “to appeal…to racial prejudice against Jews.”
Churchill’s philosemitism was not just a public stance but a
private conviction: Roberts lists several Jewish causes to which Churchill generously
contributed (and this at a time when he and his wife, Clementine, were having
trouble making ends meet). It was, Roberts writes, Churchill’s deep respect for
Jews that enabled him, in the 1930s, “to spot very clearly and early on what
kind of a man Adolf Hitler was.” In other words, Churchill, far from being
unaware of or indifferent to Hitler’s antisemitism, recognized his evil earlier
than others did precisely because it expressed itself as Jew-hatred.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Broich’s charge against Churchill, then, is a calumny. As
for FDR, it’s absolutely true that he was the president who rounded up Japanese-Americans,
turned away Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, and chose not to bomb the railroad
line to Auschwitz. Yet while FDR was a Democrat and a so-called progressive,
Broich made a point of linking his racist views and policies to the present-day
American right, rather than to today’s left, whose obsession with group identity,
fondness for segregation (e.g. gay-only and black-only dormitories), and mounting
antisemitism (as reflected in the recent Nazi-style New York Times cartoon showing Donald Trump as a blind Jew and Benjamin
Netanyahu as his guide dog) is very much in the “progressive” tradition.
Muhammed Najati Sidqi
Compounding the duplicity and offensiveness of Broich’s op-ed was his attempt to draw a moral contrast between, on the one hand, Churchill and FDR and, on the other hand, one Muhammad Najati Sidqi, “a Palestinian leftist activist” whom Broich praised for recognizing Hitler early on as a racial supremacist. In fact Sidqi wasn’t just a “leftist” – he was, though Broich omits to mention this fact, an out-and-out Communist – a devotee of a totalitarian ideology every bit as evil as Nazism. Sidqi studied in Moscow at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (Ho Chi Minh’s and Deng Xiaoping’s alma mater), was a regular contributor to the Communist newspaper Mundo Obrero, and is today memorialized by the Najati Sidqi Competition, a literary prize awarded by the Palestinian Minister of Culture.
This is the man whom Broich held up as morally superior to
Winston Churchill and FDR.
Interestingly, it was not until the end of his op-ed that Broich mentioned, parenthetically, our other wartime enemy, the Japanese Empire – whose subjects, like Hitler’s, were guided largely by a conviction of their own racial superiority. Given that the orthodox view in today’s humanities departments is that all whites are racists and that non-whites can’t be racists, Broich deserves a thumbs-up for even daring to mention Japanese racism, however fleetingly. But what a low bar to have to clear!
He still looks like a high-school kid –
in fact, he’s 34 – but he’s been called “by far and away the
most influential left of centre commentator” in all of Britain. To
read him is to be baffled by the thought that anyone, anywhere, could
possibly be influenced by him. The son and grandson of card-carrying
Communists, he’s the ultimate knee-jerk ideologue, who, in his
columns for the Guardian, his zillions of tweets, and his
endless TV appearances, never comes out with anything remotely
surprising, nuanced, perceptive, or thought-provoking. As we noted
when we first wrote about Owen Jones on August 2, 2016, he has
actually written the following sentences: “Modern capitalism is a
sham.” “Democratic socialism is our only hope.” These two
statements are at the core of his belief system. He is a fan of Cuban
Communism and for a long time was a staunch defender of chavismo
in Venezuela.
There’s more, to be sure. Jones is
gay, and never tires of railing against right-wing homophobia; at the
same time, however, he’s a big booster of Islam, and consequently a
sworn enemy of right-wing “Islamophobia.” But what about the fact
that sharia law calls for gays to be executed, and that several
Muslim countries do indeed punish homosexuality with death, while
others prescribe long prison terms and/or various forms of torture?
Well, when confronted with those facts, he had this to say: “I’m
done with people only mentioning LGBT rights when Islam is involved.”
The big walk-off.
This self-contradiction came to a head
in June 2016 when a jihadist killed dozens of people at a gay
nightclub in Orlando. Discussing the massacre on Sky News, Jones
attributed the murders to the perpetrator’s homophobia, but refused
to discuss the Islamic roots of that homophobia, claiming that to do
so would be to diminish the atrocity’s horror. Jones further
insisted that neither the host of the Sky News program, Mark
Longhurst, nor his fellow panelist, Telegraph journalist Julia
Hartley-Brewer, were, as Hartley-Brewer later wrote, “entitled to
venture any opinion on any issues arising out of this crime because
we were straight and therefore could not presume to care as much
about the deaths of 50 gay people as Owen.” In short, to quote our
own summing-up of the exchange, “Jones was trying to use his gay
identity to shut down any effort to link this mass murder to Islam.”
Pressed on his refusal to face the simple fact that Islam has a
problem with homosexuality, Jones walked off the show, later
asserting that he’d done so because Longhurst had “repeatedly
refused to accept that this was an attack on LGBT people” –
which, as Hartley-Brewer put it, was “a blatant flat-out lie.”
Katie Hopkins
Jones’s walk-out drew many other
media comments. In the Spectator, Rod Liddle, wrote that “the
reliably idiotic left-wing columnist Owen Jones had a temper
tantrum,” storming off the TV set because neither Longhurst nor
Hartley-Brewer “would accept that the tragedy [in Orlando] was all
about Owen.” In the Mail, Katie Hopkins drew a clear line in
the sand: “Until Islam is tolerant of gay rights, we cannot
tolerate Islam….LGBT rights or Islam….It is a binary thing.”
Fellow gay writer Douglas Murray tweeted: “I’m sorry for Owen
Jones. I would also feel guilty if I’d spent my life covering for
the ideology that just killed 50 LGBT people.”
Douglas Murray
What happened on that Sky News show,
of course, was that Jones was confronted with the irreconcilability
of his pro-Islam and pro-gay stances. A more mature and honest
commentator would have felt compelled to acknowledge this conflict
and to do some serious rethinking. Instead, Jones sought to distract
the TV audience from his predicament by throwing a fit and lying
about his interlocutors. You might have thought that this pathetic
display would have put a dent in his growing fame. On the contrary:
it only enhanced his celebrity. Too many British newspaper readers
and TV viewers, apparently, prefer his self-referential,
ideologically reliable, and often hysterical commentaries to the
views of more sophisticated, intelligent, reflective, well-informed
people.
Margaret Thatcher
Anyone who expected that Jones, after his Sky News crisis, would actually work out his self-contradictions on Islam and homosexuality has been sorely disappointed. Incredibly, nearly three years after the Orlando massacre, he’s still toeing the same exact line. “Muslims and LGBTQ people should stand together, not fight each other,” read the headline on his Guardian column for April 11. In the piece, he took on a current controversy in Britain, where primary schools have announced plans to introduce “LGBTQ-inclusive education” and Muslim families have protested, in many cases successfully pressuring the schools to withdraw their plans. Jones harked back to “Section 28,” the long-dead law introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1988 to prevent the “promotion of homosexuality in schools.” Section 28 was repealed in 2003, and the prejudices that gave rise to it have almost entirely disappeared from English society – except, of course, in the rapidly growing Muslim community, where the reigning views of gay people are far more chilling than those held three decades ago by even the most bigoted member of Thatcher’s government.
British Muslims protest “inclusive education.”
But Jones is
still unwilling to go there. Anent the ongoing Muslim campaign
against “LGBTQ-inclusive education,” he writes: “The dangerous
conclusion to draw from this saga is that Muslims and LGBTQ people
are on a collision course.” But Islamic doctrines being what they
are, how can he deny that these two groups are in fundamental
conflict? As has been the case for years, Jones, being unable to
honestly address this question, instead dodges it entirely and makes
this move: “That is certainly the battle cry of ever more
emboldened Islamophobes, who never talk of LGBTQ rights except when
it becomes convenient artillery in their bigoted war on Muslims.”
Note the wily wording here: Jones doesn’t exactly deny that being
gay is a capital crime under sharia law; he just shifts ground,
shoving Islamic homophobia out of the way and changing the topic to
right-wing “Islamophobia.” There should, he insists, “be bonds
of solidarity between two oppressed groups who are liable to have had
abuse yelled at them on the streets by the same people.” But how
often are Muslims in Britain actually victims of public abuse – and
how often are Muslims the abusers? Is a gay person in Britain more
likely to be harassed or beaten up by a Muslim or by a right-winger
of British extraction? Jones doesn’t dare to ask these questions,
the honest answers to which would upset his base, threaten his
Guardian gig, and slow his meteoric rise to the top of the
commentariat pack.
Vanity
Fair apparently found
the whole thing delightful: “With make-your-own mojitos and stylish
sunglasses, the future King of England proved that diplomacy can be
fun.” The occasion in question was a four-day Cuba trip in late
March by Prince Charles and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. As VF
put it, they “decided to mix work
and play,” seeing the island’s “nicest sites and activities”
(translation: their hosts took them on what used to be called a
“Potemkin tour”), “embrac[ing] Cuba’s love for vintage cars”
(as if the superfluity of junky 1950 vehicles were a product of taste
and not of necessity), “spoke to artists about their response to a
tornado that hit Havana in January” (these were, of course,
government-approved artists, not dissident ones who are languishing
in jails as political prisoners), and “met with activists who work
on issues connected to domestic violence” (again, they certainly
didn’t meet with pro-democracy
activists).
Charles, meet Che.
Town and
Country was so excited
by the royal drop-in that it ran a glossy spread featuring “the
best photos” of it – for example, an image of the heir to the
British throne posing in front of that famous mural of Che Guevara in
Havana. Interesting, isn’t it, how these high-class magazines
devoted to capitalist comfort are so charmed by one of the world’s
few remaining Communist dictatorships? Town
and Country, by the way, was one of
several publications that included a photo of a bench with a statue
of John Lennon seated on it. Nobody bothered to comment, however, on
the appropriateness of the Lennon figure: for the fact is that the
end result of the political views articulated in Lennon’s anthem
“Imagine” is always a terror state like the Castro’s.
Imagine there’s no Windsors.
Then there were
the British newspapers. The Express
focused
on a supposedly whimsical part of the tour, when Charles and Camilla
were shown how to use a large press to crush sugar cane to make
mojitos. In a classic photo op, the Prince of Wales tried his hand at
the press, quipping, apparently to the delight of the press
contingent on hand, that he was certainly “cheap labour” –
riotous humor for somebody visiting a country that is, in essence, an
island prison. The august Times was
presumably amused too, running a headline
about the wonderful success that had been achieved by the royals’
“mojito diplomacy.”
Making mojitos.
Recall that when
Donald and Melania Trump visited Britain last summer, Prince Charles
and his older son, Prince William, both refused to meet him, obliging
the Queen to greet the President and First Lady alone. When Charles
referred to the Holocaust in a speech and lamented the fact that
hatreds of the kind that motivated the Nazis are still alive and
well, many observers got the distinct impression that he was alluding
to Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban.” Prince Harry, Charles’s
second son, has also publicly badmouthed the American President.
Curious how key members of the House of Windsor are so eager to be on
jolly good terms with Caribbean tyrants but don’t mind insulting
the elected leader of their country’s strongest ally and protector.
How time flies! It was over two years ago that we wrote about Russell Brand, whom we were about to describe as a “British comedian” before we realized that it’s been a long time since we actually heard him say anything funny.
Russell Brand
No, Brand has long since transcended mere comedy. As we noted on June 8, 2015, he’s been more comfortable the last few years “posturing as a crusading champion of the downtrodden and a heroic enemy of The System.” His 2014 stand-up show was entitled Messiah Complex, for which this world-class egomaniac should at least get credit for truth in advertising. The show was a tribute to some of his heroes, among them Che Guevara. And the book he published the same year was called Revolution, in which he expanded upon his enthusiasm not only for the “morally unimpeachable” Che but also for Fidel Castro.
Sharing pearls of wisdom from his latest masterpiece at Carlton House Terrace, London, October 14, 2017
Lately Brand has been busy plugging a new book about his history of addiction. The book’s publisher describes it as a collection of lessons learned from “fourteen years of recovery” from addiction to “heroin, alcohol, sex, fame, food and eBay.” The author himself calls it a “manual for self-realization,” adding, with an uncharacteristic touch of what sounds like – can it be? – humility, that his “qualification” to offer up these life lessons “is not that I am better than you but I am worse.”
The Sermon on the Mount?
But don’t worry: that quote notwithstanding, Brand appears to be as much of a crusading know-it-all as ever, no less convinced than before that – despite his admitted inability, over a period of years, to stay on track and keep his own house in order – he takes a back seat to no one when it comes to diagnosing the planet’s ills. In other words, while he’s escaped dependency on booze and drugs, he’s still hooked on himself. And the media, perversely, can’t kick the habit of reporting on his every pearl of wisdom. On October 25, for example, the BBC’s website carried a story headlined “Russell Brand: Society is collapsing.” (It’s not every day you see a headline like that on any website’s “Entertainment” section.)
“People,” Brand told BBC scribe Steven McIntosh, “are starting to recognise that the reason they feel like they’re mentally ill is that they’re living in a system that’s not designed to suit the human spirit.” They’re frustrated over having to “work 12 hours a day,” over having to “live in an environment that is designed for human beings from one perspective but not from a holistic perspective,” over the fact that they’re “[b]reathing dirty air, eating dirty food, thinking dirty thoughts.”
The people Brand is apparently talking about are those who live in the Western world today; and the system in question is therefore democratic capitalism. Given Brand’s heavily documented enthusiasm for Castro, Che, and other Communists, we can only suppose that he is unfavorably comparing life in the West today with life under various Communist countries, past and present. Donald Trump’s recent speech to the South Korean parliament drew a striking contrast between the freedom, prosperity, and respect for the individual that characterize life below the DMZ with the deprivation, fear, and despair of life under the tyranny of the Kim family regime. Brand’s comments to the BBC are apparently a through-the-looking-glass version of Trump’s speech. Yes, the British funnyman appears to be saying, South Korea may look okay enough “from one perspective,” but life in places like Cuba and North Korea is better holistically. Got that?
Two Brand heroes: Corbyn and Chávez
Brand told McIntosh that he had no intention of going into politics, but that determination didn’t keep Brand from penning a Huffington Postpaean last May to Labour Party chieftain Jeremy Corbyn. Now, Corbyn is a guy whom even many Labour stalwarts consider to be way over the line. Corbyn, an enemy of NATO and fan of Castro’s Cuban Revolution and Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, is a Communist in all but name; but for Brand, he’s a man who combines “principles” with “common sense and compassion,” who has kept his “integrity perfectly preserved,” and who is, all in all, a “caring socialist leader” who has kept it together despite being the target of a “hegemonic narrative singularity.” No, we don’t know what that means either.
When we saw the headline and subheads of a July 1 article in the Daily Mail about an unsettling development at Salford University, the first thing we did was look up Salford University, because we weren’t even sure which country it was in. It turns out to be in England – specifically, in Manchester. In fact, Salman Abedi, the suicide bomber who took 22 lives at that Ariana Grande concert, was a student there.
The Mail story was about another Muslim student at Salford – one Zamzam (yes, Zamzam) Ibrahim, the president of Salford’s Student Union. Zamzam, a recent recipient of a Bsc degree in Business and Financial Management, was elected to her Student Union office in March. She has also been elected to a leadership position in the National Union of Students (NUS). During her campaign for the latter office, she claimed that there had been a 41% rise in anti-Muslim hate crime in the UK since the Brexit vote and opposed the “PREVENT” strategy, a UK government policy that is intended to keep terrorist events from taking place and that Zamzam calls “racist.”
Zamzam Ibrahim
But that’s nothing. The Mail discovered that during the last few years, Zamzam has shared a good many strong opinions on social media. Specifically, she has expressed a desire to “oppress white people,” has said that she considers “friendship between men and women…un-Islamic,” and has wished that everyone would read the Koran, because it would lead to “an Islamic takeover!”
After the Mail‘s discoveries were picked up by other news media, another British newspaper, the Independent, gave Zamzam space to defend herself. She argued as follows. First, she’d made the comments quoted by the Mail back in 2012, when she was only 16; they were, in other words, the “adolescent comments of a young girl” who was “struggling with my view of the world and my place in it” and “grappling with the deep injustices I could see around me and trying to figure out how I could make the world a better place.”
Second, the Mail had “twisted” her comments “to make them seem far more sinister than they ever were intended to be.” Third, she has since grown up, and the comments cited by the Mail “do not reflect my views today.”
One reader who commented on Zamzam’s article noted a couple of important details in her piece. First, an apparently deliberate error: in 2012, she was 18, not 16. Second, some of her offensive messages don’t date back to 2012 – they’re only a few months old.
Another reader noted that Zamzam, although given plenty of space by the Independent, hadn’t explicitly rejected any of the assertions she’d made in her social-media messages. Instead, she’d made use of the opportunity to slam the image of Islams served up by the “right-wing media” and to play the victim – not just any victim, mind you, but one belonging to an intersectional bonanza of officially recognized identity groups: a woman, a black, and a Muslim.
Zamzam with unidentified friend
“The question to Zamzam,” stated the reader, “is whether she has changed her beliefs in this period or she continues to hang onto them. Has she for example changed her views on whether males and females can mix in public and private places?….Does she for example still feel that Muslims are the oppressed and not the oppressors of Jews, Christians, yazidis, Armenians, converts to other religions, disabled and LGBT communities and many others living in their midst?”
Indeed, those are the questions. It seems clear even from Zamzam’s Independent article that she still views Muslims as an oppressed group. What, one wonders, did she post on social media after a student from her university committed that massacre at the Ariana Grande concert? We’ve tried to find out, but without success, because Zamzam – who, in every picture and video we can find of her, is wearing a hijab – appears to have deleted her social-media accounts.
