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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Racial Profiling in the British Media


In my last blog I contrasted the United States of Europe with the United States of America. Now I will examine how the British media stigmatizes and perpetuates stereotypes.

The British thinking classes are uncomfortable within their own skin. They are obsessed by history and its concomitant tales of dishonour and betrayal.  The slave trade and the class system were an abomination but we overcame both of them. We have successfully exported the slave trade to the sweat shops of China and Africa and we pretend that the widening social gap has nothing to do with an entrenched class system.

We afflict ourselves with sack-cloth and ash over a past we cannot leave behind.  We salve our consciences with liberal values and a mode of speech that has been reviewed and passed by modern day commissars of thought by means of clichéd words and phrases.

We would never question the victimhood of our immigrants or the bigotry of our welfare recipients and we would certainly not judge the ethical failures of our newest British Subjects because to do so would be expressing a moral equivalence with which ‘we’ (as a society) are fundamentally opposed.

Moral relativism is used to describe the differences in moral judgements that are applied across separate cultures.  But it is the excuse amongst liberals and the Left everywhere that they make for ethnic cleansing and genocide when it is committed by regimes labelled as either developing nations or left-wing.  It is something ugly and immoral that excuses every heinous crime committed by the right kind of regime. We used to call them “The Third World”.   We now think this is condescending and prefer to use the term “The Developing World” to set apart and make an excuse for every nation whose crimes against humanity we want to excuse.  The Developing World bizarrely matches the wealthiest Muslim nations to the poorest countries on earth and it wholly dismisses all of their behaviour even when it would clearly be unacceptable to our consciences to accept it in our own homes.

But for some inexplicable reason, the British media is largely incapable of taking anything other than an unconscionable polemical stance when dealing with Jewish issues.  We may speculate that it takes its cue from those higher up that non-existent class pyramid.  There is a split along left / right lines which again, we could consider is based on history.  After World War 2 those people classified ‘right of centre’ had to confront their moral failures because, fascism was portrayed as exclusively right wing and therefore, it and it alone was responsible for the twentieth century’s atrocities. The left and its liberal allies never found the necessity to confront the bloodthirsty ideological underpinnings of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot; they revered the insidious Malaysian racist Mahathir Mohamad and worshipped both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.

We excused Bin Laden his devotion to a death cult because to describe him and his fellow Muslims as evil was to judge them by our standards and (in our relativistic moral universe) this, we could never contemplate.

In the USA, film has done more to break down barriers than any law enacted by our elected legislators.  Without the celluloid media, not even an army of police could have removed the obstructions raised by society to discriminate against black people and, let us not forget them, Jews as well.

The Jewish stereotype has been mostly discarded through sitcoms such as ‘Rhoda’, ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends’ which portray overtly Jewish characters within a mainstream American setting without denigrating them as religious oddities or ethnic curiosities. They are All-American schleps, schlemiels and shemozzles – which is why these last three words, have entered American vocabulary.

The barriers within British Society are the blind prejudice that our media celebrate and they do not encourage integration.  Some years ago a colleague was talking to me about a program he had viewed the previous night. It starred a famous Anglo-Jewish comedian. By my work associates comments I realised he was unaware of the comedian’s religious antecedents (which had never been a part of his stand-up routine). “A person has no right to hide behind someone else’s identity,” he cried out in disgust. It should not have come as a surprise to me.  It is the stereotypical response of an influential section of British society and it has been encouraged over many centuries. From Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, William Shakespeare’s Shylock and Charles Dickens's Fagan through to Caryl Churchill’s contemporary blood libel ‘Seven Jewish Children’, it is a recurrent theme of British theatre that what applies to Jews applies to no other people; or would not be permitted to apply to any other people.

Perhaps this explains the disproportionate focus on Zionism and Israel that a prejudiced liberal – left coalition conveys through its literature.  Jews are not supposed to fight back. They do not defend themselves against the angel of death. Fly on the Wall programs are gratuitously offensive because their entertainment value is shallow and they pit contestants against each other in a self-absorbed and vacuous exercise of cringe-worthy posturing. Seemingly innocuous programs like Channel 4’s current drivel “Jewish Mum of the Year” are one such kind of stereotypical programming offered by the ‘liberal’ British Press to perpetuate a rigid (monolithic) caricature of Judaism.

State Television and Radio remain effective means for teaching values as defined by society.  We should use them to discourage prejudice and educate against odium. Once more our British media betrays us.

4 comments:

  1. i have often said that the only way these people get away with it is because the jewish community let them. they should actually consider launching a class action or some sort of legal case to challenge this type of institutionalised behaviour. it really is the only way to credibly effect what is embedded within the media's assault upon israel and by proxy jews because rationality, logic and reason don't appear to have any effect.

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  2. You are right. But the British system does unfairly discriminate against Jews - an example - there was an outrageous article in the national press (years ago) - it was against a member of the Jewish community - but in the way it was written / expressed it tarnished the whole community and not just the individual. When I complained to the Press Complaints Commission they told me not to bother them because only the individual had the right to complain about the article and not the group.

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  3. yes, i empathise, i have written countless letters to the sydney morning herald and the abc here in australia but they no longer even respond to me.
    however if i sent a solicitors letter, detailing i would be suing for libel, hate crimes or discrimination, they would retract their lies.
    especially if it was a class action on behalf of a community. this is why the press fear the muslims, they have created so many councils and committes that the media, including publishers fear another satanic verses type indecent. howard bloom wrote a fantastic piece on how he found it really hard to get published because the publishing companies all had to submit any works that mentions islam to a committee of islamic people and they proofread everything, any anti islam piece was not published out of fear.
    this lasted for decades and probably still exists.
    i also find the double standards unbelievable. journalists are brainwashed, their ability to critically think is sucked out of their minds at university and they are processed into zombies sprouting the same ideology that their professors write about, this is why illan pappe is a middle east professor at leeds university.
    the education system is broken, if you had any type of libertarian values at university you would fail. it's smarter not to get a degree and learn to think for yourself. i can't believe the islamist apologisers that bark on about cultural relativism and how iran is demonized by the west and israel is this, and that, it's always the jews, it always has been and always will be, which is the only reason why israel has a right to exist in my book, until the rest of the world can guarantee our safety.

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  4. It is even worse at Art school - I wrote about this in "Art and the Decline of Society" (13 June this year) Anyone who wants a classic education will be sidelined and if they do not conform - removed from the school. It is cultural terrorism. It is a if we are joyfully rushing towards the dark ages!

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