Presenting Lily Allen: rich brat, pop star, & social justice warrior

Lily Allen

Lily Allen is not terribly famous in the U.S., but in her homeland she’s quite the star. Born into a well-to-do showbiz family in London in 1985, she attended a series of posh schools which she was kicked out of for smoking and drinking. She became a drug dealer, got a record contract through family connections, and ended up hitting it big by posting her songs on My Space. Since then she’s pursued a busy recording and performing career – and insulted a long list of fellow artists and assaulted more than her share of paparazzi. But she’s also found time to lecture her inferiors about world affairs.

Hillary Clinton at the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen

On her Wikipedia page, one sentence after another is a head-scratcher. “On 1 October 2009, Allen and several other musicians released the world’s first digital musical petition aimed at pressuring world leaders attending the December 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen.” Digital music petition? What? “During the London assembly and mayoral elections in April 2016, Allen announced that she would be giving ‘half her vote to the Women’s Equality Party’ – by voting for them on the London-wide Assembly list but voting Labour elsewhere.” Who asked? “On 15 June 2017, Lily Allen became involved in a controversy over the number of deaths in the Grenfell Tower fire.” What kind of expertise does a dropout pop star have in such matters?

Grenfell Tower in west London after the fire

We looked that last one up. In an interview on Britain’s Channel 4 news the morning after the fire, Allen actually accused the government and media of lying about the number of fatalities, which at that moment was up to seventeen. Newsreader Jon Snow had to explain to her that, as is the case with many such tragedies, the figure being broadcast represented the number of bodies recovered so far, and that the death toll would surely rise significantly in the hours and days to come. But Allen didn’t back down: as far as she was concerned, there was a conspiracy afoot and she was a brave, lone truth-teller.

Allen in Calais

There’s more. In 2016, Allen visited the migrant camp in Calais, on the French side of the English Channel. The migrants are camped there because they want to cross the channel and settle in Britain, even though, as has been widely pointed out, they have no right under international law to enter the U.K. But that didn’t stop Allen from apologizing to one of the migrants, a teenage Afghan named Shamsher Sharin, on Britain’s behalf “for what we’ve put you through.” When a TV reporter challenged her during an October 2016 interview to, in effect, put her money where her mouth was, Allen said that “if these children are being displaced, of course, there’s room for people in my house. I’m going to take them in.” She backed the promise up with an Instagram post promising to take a refugee into her £2 million home in Notting Hill. When asked in January 2017 whether she had made good on her promise, however, she refused to answer. Soon after, the post on which she had made the promise disappeared from her Instagram feed.

To be sure, she had an excuse. Was it a good one? We’ll scrutinize it on Thursday.

Jon Snow: a history of inanity

 

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The Taj Mahal Palace and Tower in Mumbai during 2008 terrorist attack

Yesterday we discussed an inane tweet sent out by Jon Snow, a news anchor on Britain’s ITN, after the death, on June 5, of Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s sometime Foreign Minister. “Nice guy in a nasty situation,” wrote Snow.

This isn’t the first time Jon Snow has expressed sympathy for tyrants or their envoys. Interviewing Fu Ying, China’s ambassador to Britain, back in 2008, he grovelled pathetically, posing such hard-hitting questions as this one: “Do you think that somehow Western concepts of freedom and democracy are simply different from Chinese concepts of freedom and democracy?” In the same year, he described the perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai massacre as “practitioners,” not terrorists.

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Hugo Chávez

Then there’s Hugo Chávez. On the day the caudillo died in 2013, Jon Snow tweeted: “Whatever you think of Chavez, Latin America is far more its own continent today thanks to Lula [the former Brazilian president], Chavez, and others.” Westerners who write such things about thugs like Chávez think they’re standing up for Third World people against First World imperialism, but all they’re doing is exhibiting their own condescension, implying that the rabble in places like Venezuela are better off under gangsters who spout populist, anti-American rhetoric (and trash the economy and human rights) than under governments that provide them with more freedom and prosperity but (horrors!) may actually have friendly ties to the evil norteamericanos.

The same day, Snow also tweeted: “When I started working in Latin America the US was still killing leaders it didn’t like: Chavez is part of the order that put an end to that.” One of his Twitter followers, an obscure Texas businessman, had a sensible reply to that: “Whether you hate the US or not, the fact that Hugo survived is proof that the US is not killing those it opposes.”

Why can’t the top TV newsmen in the Western world be as clear-thinking about such matters as some businessman you’ve never heard of?

Snow job: A top UK journo’s sweet sayonara to Saddam’s sidekick

The tweet came on June 5. “Former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz has died in jail: Nice guy in a nasty situation – made no better by Bush/Blair’s Shock and Awe.” The author of the tweet: Jon Snow. He elaborated in another tweet. “I spent time with Tariq Aziz, interviewed him often..Christian that he was – they didn’t kill him, they just let him rot to death in jail.”

snow-01[1]Who’s Jon Snow? Now 67 years old, he’s a familiar face in Britain, where he’s been a news anchor for decades, previously on Channel 4, now on ITN. And who, for those who may have forgotten, was Tariq Aziz? Yes, he was the foreign minister for Saddam Hussein, one of the most monstrous dictators of modern times. But Aziz was more than that. For one thing, he was a very close friend and trusted confidant of Saddam’s; thanks, moreover, to his many appearances on CNN, the BBC, and other international news media, he was probably, for people in the English-speaking world, the most prominent apologist for Saddam’s tyranny. As one BBC presenter put it after his death, he was “the international face of Saddam Hussein’s regime.”

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Tariq Aziz

It will be remembered that many of the Western journalists and diplomats who interacted with Aziz found him personally charming. This was not unusual. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, was charming, too. So was Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s prewar Foreign Minister. (Molotov, his successor, was notoriously charmless.) Journalists and diplomats interacting with such persons need to be on guard against being taken in by their charm. Snow appears oblivious to this fact.

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Joachim von Ribbentrop

Snow’s tweets about Aziz drew criticism, much of it from other journalists. But he stood by his sentiments. “I can only say I interviewed him and got to know him quite well,” he told The Independent. “I think he was made the fall guy by the West. It’s a long time ago. He’s been in prison for a long time. There were plenty of people who needed to go to prison in that regime. He was one of the only ones who were picked off.” Apropos of the Iraq invasion and its aftermath, he added: “It’s an absolute tragic morass in which everybody has behave[d] badly. What was the idea of going in and smashing that place? It meant Christians couldn’t stay. It meant Jews couldn’t stay. He was picked off because he was a Christian. It’s all tricky stuff – so complicated.”

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Aziz with Saddam Hussein in happier times

One might prefer simply to back away from that mishmash of inane remarks, but given Snow’s prominence and influence, it is perhaps salutary to pause for a moment and notice what Snow is doing in his tweets and his follow-up comments. For one thing, he’s not denying Aziz’s involvement in Saddam’s unspeakable atrocities; he’s simply taking the view that since Aziz was only one of many vile creatures whose hands were soaked with the blood of tortured women and children, why jail him when others were allowed to walk away? For another, the reference to Saddam’s nightmare society of torture chambers and mass graves as a “nasty situation” is a world-class understatement. And by describing the situation in Iraq as a “tricky” and “complicated” one in which “everybody has behave[d] badly,” and by focusing on the purported offenses of “the West,” which in his description went in and “smash[ed]” Iraq and made Iraq’s predicament “no better,” Snow is playing moral-equivalency games of the lowest order.