What would the Met get in return for not looking hard at News of the World phone hacking?

You might not have noticed because most of the British press seems curiously reluctant to cover it, but earlier in the week, the New York Times produced some new evidence that the Conservative party's chief spin doctor Andy Coulson knew much more about the phone hacking scandal of 2006 than he was letting on. Maybe they were too busy covering allegations regarding William Hague's sexuality, and his emotional revelations about not being gay that came out at the same time, handily and totally coincidentally for the Conservatives' spin doctor. Ahem.

Winterval: The beast that wouldn't die!

Winterval.  It's probably one of the most famous PC Gone Mad myths there is.  Just like every teacher told the story of someone at their last school who leant on the back legs of their chair and broke their back to scare us into sitting properly, the papers have used Winterval alongside classics like Baa Baa Green Sheep to scare us into not thinking about things like inclusiveness or bothering to be polite to people if they're not white, male, British, straight or able-bodied for over a decade.

These 'they've banned Christmas' stories start earlier every year!

They don't actually.  Last year, the Observer reported on 2 November that Oxford City Council had banned all reference to Christmas in its WinterLight Festival (which was nonsense).  This year, it wasn't until the 13th that the Times managed 'Christmas lights switch-on ceremony renamed ‘Winter White Night’'.  Guess what?  It's nonsense!

The tabloids and right wing extremism

Just who are these blackshirted fellows?
The relationship between tabloid reporting and the increase in the BNP's popularity is an interesting one to look at.

The most violent country in Europe?

Bus stop outside Lidl in Penge High Street yesterday
"I'd like to think this [printing misleading headlines that bear no relation to the truth of a story] doesn't happen in the Mail - I'm not going to hold my hand on my heart and say it doesn't. It does happen in some areas of the media."
Paul Dacre, 2009

Give me that old time moral panic

I haven't got a DeLorean and I have no Libyan terrorist contacts to get the plutonium for the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to go back in time, but I still managed to go back to the 80s this weekend, just by reading the papers.

The Sunday Times takes us back to 1983 with 'Stop this debasing film', a headline that must have had subs reaching for their thesaurus to find an alternative phrase for 'Ban this sick filth'. The story covers the breaking news that 'SS experiment - Love Camp' was re-released uncut nearly three years ago. The film that apparently kicked off the original video nasty moral panic in 1982.

The article undermines itself right from the beginning, mentioning the internet in its opening. Even if the film disappeared from the shops, it would only take a couple of minutes to get hold of a copy online. That doesn't stop the paper using 1980s style misdirection with:

. . . the film SS Experiment Camp, which is on sale in the high street alongide [sic] U classified movies . . .

Yes, it's sold alongside U rated films, but since it's an 18, kids can't buy it.

The Express predictably sensationalises and exaggerates things further, going with the front page splash 'Outrage at sick nazi DVDs for sale'. Of course, this paper doesn't shy away from the f word of a quarter of a century ago, saying:

As the Government reviews the laws surrounding game violence, the Sunday Express today demands action to sweep this filth off our shelves.

Bloody hell, is it just me or is that Visage playing in the background?

The Express uses 'I spit on your grave', 'Cannibal holocaust' and 'Faces of death' to justify the plural in the headline, although none of these films are about nazis. If hacks at the paper had any clue, they'd have looked for 'SS Hell Camp', 'Ilsa she wolf of the SS' and 'Ilsa the wicked warden'.

Both stories miss the main thing that most people will notice first when watching most of these films. They're so embarrasingly bad you're more likely to laugh than be sickened. You can see more realistically depicted violence on the average episode of CSI. Here's the opening line of a 5 star review of SS Experiment - Love Camp on Amazon:

This film is so bad I have given it five stars as you really have to see it to believe that film-making can be so atrocious.

They were all made on stupidly low budgets over 30 years ago. Despite the Express calling them "extreme reality" films, they're about as realistic as an episode of Thunderbirds directed by kids with a twenty quid budget. This is what the BBFC apparently had to say about giving the film an 18 certificate in 2005:

"The content of the film is in fact very mild and poorly executed. If anything, it was the title of the film and its original packaging that led to difficulties, rather than the content. The idea of the film may, of course, be offensive to some but that is not a good enough reason to cut or reject it. We would only cut or reject a film for adults if the content was illegal or harmful. "SS Experiment Camp" is neither illegal or harmful, just tasteless."

And they can't be causing that much of a problem. It took nearly three years for anyone to notice 'SS experiment - love camp' had been re-released. The others were released between four and six years ago. Still, it's never too late to panic.

Me? I'm off to watch Knightmare and drink Quatro.

More bullying? Surely some mistake?

I had started to type up a quick response yesterday to the further bullying of Aisha Amzi by the Mail in their article 'Veil girl's father may have met 7/7 bomber'. In it, I would have said much the same as I did in 'Just when you thought there was no lower to sink' about how the links are only alleged and very tenuous indeed, and pointed out the need for the Mail to deny the very thing it implies with the article because it really does have nothing. There would have been a reference to someone dancing naked on a table with a flower sticking out of their bum as well, so you've lost out there.

I thought the article sounded a bit fishy, though. To go, in the space of a couple of days, from a gingerly asserted possibility halfway through the article (which was primarily about another bomber) that Shehzad Tanweer might have possibly perhaps maybe visited the Markazi mosque to an assertion that it has been widely reported that he attended the seminary seemed a bit of a leap for me. Especially as the seminary is primarily for 12-16 year-olds (although most stay on and it's not unknown for pupils to return). So I thought I'd check a little bit into this claim:

His attendance at the seminary has never been confirmed, but it has been reported many times since the July 7 attacks and has never been denied.

thinking I might find that it had only been reported many times on hate sites, or by the sort of professional Islamophobe like Melanie Phillips or Daniel Pipes that I could scoff at, but not much else. I was also prepared to be proved wrong, and find out that it was all over the place that Tanweer had attended the seminary but I'd just missed it. I wasn't expecting to find little but tumbleweeds.

All I could find after hours of searches for possible combinations of relevant words was one reference from the Times, which appeared one day before the one in the Mail, in an article called, 'How bombers' town is turning into an enclave for Muslims'. The article has one offhand statement that Tanweer attended the seminary, without any reference to a source, or mentions of the claim being widely reported.

What I did find though, were a whole load of references to Tanweer attending a seminary in Pakistan called the Markaz-e-Dawa seminary. Now, I can't help thinking - Markazi and Markaz-e sound pretty similar. Is it possible that there has been some mistake here? Has the Times reporter confused the two seminaries and included the statement without checking, and the Mail based their article on what they read without checking? This sort of thing is not unheard of.

Back in 2003, the Telegraph reported that a school in Tower Hamlets had banned hot-cross buns from its Easter menu, and suggested that they'd been replaced with naan bread. The article even included a picture of some schoolkids tucking into some good, old fashioned hot-cross buns. The trouble was, once the story was investigated further, it turned out to be completely false. The council involved stated that they'd never actually served hot-cross buns at Easter, so the idea that they'd been banned was totally specious. Who knows where they got the naan bread idea from. The picture had been achieved by the photographer nipping up the road to buy some from a bakery.

By the time this was discovered, the story had been covered by other papers and columnists, reported as true. These papers, as well as the Telegraph, had to issue apologies retracting the story, but it had already taken its place in the great 'PC gone mad' mythology, along with the idea that nobody's allowed to ask for black coffee and that manholes have to be called 'person-holes'.

You can still read the story on the Telegraph website, and there's no mention on the page that it has been retracted, no mention that it wasn't true, and no link to the apology, which you can only see on the site if you know where to look, or open one of the search results for 'hot cross buns' that doesn't actually mention hot cross buns until you click the link.

The Daily Mail still reported this story as true earlier this year - even though it was proven false and retracted three years ago.

And let's not forget that only a few days ago, the Mail included a column by Melanie Phillips that repeated a completely incorrect story from the Sun. You can read more about the Sun story at Ministry of Truth, Pickled Politics, Clive Davis and Obsolete.

So, this sort of thing does happen. Something gets misreported somewhere, the shonky report gets picked up and reported in other places and it becomes accepted wisdom that it's true. Except it's not. It'd be pretty bad if this story became part of the accepted history, especially as it seems to have become a stick to bash Aisha Amzi with.

I have emailed the home news editor at the Times and the news editor at the Mail to ask for references and point out I think there might have been a mistake, but I'm not holding my breath. I kind of hope they do get back to me and prove there hasn't been a mistake - because it won't exactly speak very well for the country's press or the current anti-Muslim climate if there has. If anyone stumbles across this (and one or two people have stumbled across the blog, so there) and does have some other references, I'd like to ask that they stick them in the comments so I can have a look at them.

If I'm wrong, I'll stick a correction at the bottom of this post, so nobody's in any doubt I've made a mistake.

Seriously, any colour - just pick one. Not that one.

The last posting on this issue, probably. It's a bit difficult of a difficult one to crowbar gags in for a start. (And I might end up getting the hang of putting everything in one post and not spreading stuff over three posts one day. Don't hold your breath though).

Next for the weekend papers is an actual interview of Shabina Begum with Jasper Gerard in the Times, in which we actually get to hear what the girl in question actually has to say for herself. Gasp!

It's still not very good though. It's a bit long, includes quite a lot of stuff and it would take too long to dismantle everything in it, so I'll stick to the main bits that struck me.

Gerard opens his piece with the 'poor victim' version of Shabina Begum. She's being used, apparently - but by 'her white guards' rather than 'the “regressive” forces of Islam'. This is a really important distinction, so here's the full quote.

"As the mineral water flows I begin to wonder if it is less the “regressive” forces of Islam leading Shabina astray than the progressive forces of legal aid. Actually, her brother, 23, comes across as her meekest minder and certainly the most charming. It is her white guards who are the real frights."

This quote reveals quite a lot about the underlying assumptions that have been made in the commentary about this case. The first and most obvious point is that it simply cannot be Begum's own decision to wear the jilbab. She must be a victim of manipulation. Next, because there were no shadowy evil bad guys around, and because her brother is clearly not behaving as the hothead he's been portrayed as, Gerard has to choose someone else to be the manipulators. In this case, it's the only other people around - her 'white guards'. This formation slots in quite nicely with the right's idea that there is a liberal elite who field do-gooders to interfere on behalf of ethnic minorities, bothering the actual minorities in the process.

But the most important thing to note here is the opposition created by '"regressive" forces of Islam' and 'white guards'. We're told all over the place, by the right and the decent left that to attack Islam is not racism, because Islam is not a race. If that's true, why are the non-Muslims in this situation described by their race? Why assume that the 'white guards'are not regressive Muslims in the first place? Is it impossible for them to be because they're white? If not, why contrast the two groups in this way?

Later in the article (past the bit where I could have done the 'any colour you like' schtick again):

"Curiously, the jilbab is worn mainly by Arab Muslims. Muslims of Asian origin — like this family from Bangladesh — tend to wear the shalwar kameez which satisfies Koranic demands of modest dress. So what is this dispute really about?"

Curiously, Catholics tend to come from the Latin countries and Ireland. English people tend to be Protestants, so why are there English people claiming to be Catholic? What's their dispute really about?

Then, we finally get to the bit where we hear what Begum actually has to say. Interestingly, she talks about her brother. We've already seen that he doesn't act in the way he's been depicted as acting previously. Now we find this:

"People say my brother forced me, but my sister is not orthodox: how come she has not been ‘forced’?"

She has a point. She could say she hadn't been coerced, and we could doubt that. Indeed, if she had been coerced, she'd hardly admit it. But her non-orthodox sister is evidence that she's telling the truth. It's funny that this non-orthodox sister doesn't get a mention anywhere else. Couldn't be because she makes the idea that Begum's been coerced look unlikey, could it? Surely not!

The other great point about her brother is that he 'denies being part of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the extremist group'. So it's possible he's not even part of the group he's been accused of being a part of, and the group isn't responsible for forcing Begum to do anything. Note also that the way this is worded makes him look like he's lying. If you read a headline that said 'Celebrity X Denies Accusations of Paedophilia', what would you think about Celebrity X?

What about if you read that a person was a 'silky debater'? Would you think they were entirely honest and straightforward, or would you suspect something a little too clever and slippery? This leads to the next bit I love, which comes when Gerard tries to catch out Begum by asking whether Rastafarians should be able to smoke skunk at school. Begum shoots down this crap slippery slope fallacy agrument by pointing out that smoking drugs is illegal, and Gerard's response is this (written down in the article, mind - not out loud) "Hmm: a silky debater." So when Begum herself shoots down a really crap, fallacious argument, she's described as a 'silky debater', rather than just 'right'. Gerard goes on to make the point he was going to make anyway, even though it's just been exposed as being a bit shit. Nowhere has Begum argued that 'anything goes' for religion. This is an argument he's put in her mouth. She's even given a reason why some alleged religious behaviour should be disallowed.

"Tony Blair realised a Shabina victory would mean the end of uniforms." No it wouldn't. Turbans didn't. The shalwar-kameez didn't. I already mentioned the slippery-slope fallacy, didn't I? Here it is again if you missed it. "If Muslims are granted exemptions then the Vicky Pollards could argue for nose studs:" and they'd be told to fuck off. And Muslims already are granted exceptions. Did he forget his argument that Begum was allowed to express her religion because the shalwar-kameez were allowed? "At what point could a school say “enough”?" at the point where what's being asked for isn't a genuine form of religious expression. And in those cases where it is - where there's a sensible reason why what's being asked for would cause problems in themselves at that point in time - not at some indefinable point in the future when someone asks for something else.

Then we have arguments we've seen before - lunch counters and jobs up the road and so on. We should pressure girls to wear what they might not want so they're not pressured to wear what they might not want. That kind of funky stuff.

That's the first page. The second involves dumb questions like 'do you have non-Muslim friends?' Er, yes. 'How does she feel about arranged marriages?' What is this, an episode of Eastenders from 1986? Here again, we see the facade of non-racism slipping. Lots of religions have arranged marriages, why is it important here, if not to draw some sort of parallel between a common practice in Asian (and other) cultures and 'extremism'?

The closing paragraphs reveal quite a lot. Firstly:

"One realises the gulf in understanding when her brother quietly, patiently, lists all the compromises that he suggested to the school. One, it transpires, was that Shabina be taught in solitary confinement."

Why only disclose that one option out of a list? It couldn't possibly be because it was the most extreme, could it?

"So here is the authentic voice of the extremist: prepared for his bright, giggly sister who loves medicine and handbags to be shut away from life, just so she remains theologically pure."

No. She wears the jilbab to be 'theologically pure'. She'd be shutting herself away to get an education that would be denied to her otherwise.

The last paragraph is possibly the most revealing. It goes:

"There you have the dilemma for British Asian youth: the veil of Islam versus the exposure of BBC1. Some radical young Muslims may consider the West the devil in disguise — but at heart even they, it seems, accept that it has the better clothes."

Remember - attacking Islam is not racism because Islam is not a race. Why then is this the dilemma for British Asian youth rather than British Muslim youth?

Gerard doesn't argue that the choice is between "regressive" Muslim or non-Muslim, or even "regressive" Muslim or "non-regressive" Muslim - it's "regressive" Muslim or white. He argues that whether or not to wear Islamic dress is a dilemma for British Asians, not British Muslims. In doing this, he unwittingly reveals the true face of his argument.