From Media Matters via Avedon:
Blumenthal notes that, “Rush [Limbaugh] polls seven points lower than Rev. Jeremiah ‘God Damn America’ Wright and eight points below former Weather Underground domestic terrorist William Ayers.”
Media
More Morbid Fear Of Melanie Phillips
Here’s Tony Benn, (nee Viscount Stansgate), the last doughty remnant of the Christian socialists, giving a BBC newsdroid merry hell on the subject of moral cowardice and giving in to Israeli bullying:
He’s right, they’re scared – though I must admit if I had that shrieking Zionist harpy Phillips in my ear every five minutes I’d be scared too. I’d also change my phone number.
Facteiousness aside very little has been made – as yet – of the current BBC Director General, Mark Thompson relationship with the Israeli government or of his 2005 visit to Israel at governmental expense.
This cosying-up to a foreign leadership (and such a politically rabid one as that) is something a BBC DG has never done before, presumably on the grounds that it would compromise BBC impartiality and neutrality.
Of course the cosy tete a tetes he had with Ariel Sharon and sundry other Israeli political notables, those couldn’t possibly affect his impartiality or appear to impute an appearance of impropriety at all, no sir.
Maintaining Impartiality
I know the BBC has shot itself in the foot a number of times this weekend what with Gaza and all, but this beats everything yet.
Jonah Goldberg has a gig on on Andrew Marr’s Radio 4 discussion programme, Start The Week. Yes, really.
He’s going to discuss his new book, apparently;
The Los Angeles Times columnist JONAH GOLDBERG calls for a re-evaluation of fascism. He argues that by using the word as a synonym for anything that is undesirable, we are blinded to the examples around us of real fascism from both Left and Right wing governments. Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning is published by Penguin.
New? WTF? Someone at the beeb was wilfully misinformed.
Either that or Justin Webb’s been given editorial control. He must’ve met the Pantload on the Koolaid aisle in Safeway.
Akrem al-Ghoul, one no longer anonymous victim of Israel’s war on Gaza
The one thing that made the September 11 attacks so shocking was that they happened in the most media saturated country in the world. From day one we saw not just jittery footage of planes hitting buildings, but the fear and suffering of the people in the WTC and the Pentagon, as well as the despair and sadness of their family and friends. What makes it so easy to ignore the pain and suffering of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza, is that they happen to faceless victims, only mentioned as depressing statistics in easily skipped newspaper reports, not as living, breathing people who suffered equally as the WTC victims. There are fewer cameras pointed that way, they don’t speak English and their rituals seem strange to us, so we don’t accord them the same feelings as we do our own dead.
Which is why it’s “good” to see the article in today’s Independent in which Fares Akram, the newspaper’s correspondent in Gaza, talks about the death of his father, killed in a airstrike at the age of 48:
The phone call came at around 4.20pm on Saturday. A bomb had been dropped on the house at our small farm in northern Gaza. My father was walking from the gate to the farmhouse at the time. It was our beloved place, that farm and its two-storey white house with a red roof. Nestled in a flat fertile agricultural plain north-west of Beit Lahiya, it had lemon groves, orange and apricot trees and we had recently acquired 60 dairy cows.
It was the closest farm to the northern border with Israel. Ironically, we always thought the biggest danger there was not from Israeli troops, who usually went straight past if they were mounting an incursion, but from stray Hamas rockets aimed at the Israeli towns north of us.
But shortly before sunset on Saturday, as Israeli ground troops and tanks invaded Gaza in the name of shutting down Hamas rocket sites, the peace of that place was shattered and my father’s life extinguished at the age of 48. Warplanes and helicopters had swept in, bombing and firing to open up the space for the tanks and ground forces that would follow in the darkness. It was one of those F16 airstrikes that killed my father.
The house was reduced to little more than powder, and of Dad there was nothing much left either. “Just a pile of flesh,” my uncle, who found him in the rubble, said later with brutal honesty.
In the ten days since Israel started this war, it has killed over 500 people like Akrem al-Ghoul, including 30 or more today when tIsraeli artillery struck an United Nations run school. But don’t worry, it was a legitamite military target, because there were militants firing nearyby, or if there weren’t, I’m sure there were a lot of Potential Future Terrorists sheltering in the school…
If Clarkson’s Comedy Then I’m A Banana*
I do like a bit of close to the edge humour, but even I was shocked at the truck-driving segment of last night’s first episode of the new Top Gear series.
During a truck-driving challenge segment one Mr J Clarkson made repeated referrals to lorry drivers murdering prostitutes; presumably it was an allusion to Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper and the recent murders of sex workers committed by an Ipswich lorry driver.
Haha, how very droll I thought; no doubt HGV drivers watching are equally underwhelmed.
Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson has prompted more than 500 people to complain to the BBC about a joke he made on Sunday’s motoring show.
Clarkson, 48, was taking part in a lorry-driving task, when he joked about lorry drivers killing sex workers.
“Change gear, change gear, check mirror, murder a prostitute, change gear, change gear, murder. That’s a lot of effort in a day,”
he said.
The BBC said the joke had made “ridiculous an unfair urban myth”.
Lorry driver Steve Wright was jailed in February for killing five prostitutes in Ipswich.
Clarkson’s joke, made before the watershed, has now sparked 517 complaints.
But a BBC spokesman said that by Monday morning – before the incident had been reported on by newspapers and websites – there had been 188 complaints.
Sunday’s programme, which aired on BBC Two at 2000 GMT, was watched by around seven million viewers.
In a statement, the BBC said: “The vast majority of Top Gear viewers have clear expectations of Jeremy Clarkson’s long-established and frequently provocative on-screen persona. I think it’s a sacking offence to make light of the murder of anybody, never mind prostitute women who are vulnerable and criminalised .
“This particular reference was used to comically exaggerate and make ridiculous an unfair urban myth about the world of lorry driving, and was not intended to cause offence.”
No, it never is, is it?
This will no doubt be spun as another Ross/Brand-type media-manufactured attack on the BBC, but while not denying there was an increase in volume of complaints following media interest, nevertheless the complaints are entirely justified; Clarkson’s ‘joke’ was crass, puerile and just not funny. Making a joke of murder is bad enough but why pick on lorry-drivers? John Wayne Gacy was a part-time clown; does that make all clowns potential monsters?
Oh. Maybe better not to answer that one.
Nevertheless to traduce women, sex workers and lorry drivers in one brief, dumbass sentence takes a special type of Clarksonian insensitivity – the boorish, classic car driving, act like it’s still 1953 and your kind still rule the empire type of insensitivity. He’s not got very good antennae for modernity or shifts in the zetgeist, has he? Yes, we do expect that of him and it is part of his well-established persona: but that doesn’t mean he gets to be a complete arse on the public’s penny without somebody objecting.
Prostitutes and lorry drivers pay the license fee (and his grossly overinflated 2million in annual wages) too.
[*Why a banana?]