British row: Kilroy and the Arabs

Sky.com ^ | 10th January, 2004 | Sky

[FreeReporting]

KILROY: BEEB HAS GIVEN IN Television presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk says the BBC has "given way" to a lobby demanding his resignation.

The Corporation has suspended his talk show while there is an investigation into anti-Arab comments in a newspaper report.

Mr Kilroy-Silk said he had hoped the Corporation would have "kept the programme going and dealt with the criticisms".

The 61-year-old caused a furore last week in his Sunday Express column by describing Arabs as "suicide bombers, limb-amputators, women repressors".

Speaking on Tonight with Trevor McDonald, on ITV1 tonight, Mr Kilroy-Silk admitted he was in a "difficult position".

However, he insisted his views did not encroach on his "impartiality" as a talk show host and that he "would have preferred" the BBC to have reacted differently.

The presenter again apologised for any offence his column had caused and insisted he had not intended his remarks to smear all Arabs but was referring to corrupt Arab regimes.

"I did not intend, and if that is the way it was read, that I was smearing all Arabs, then clearly I apologise for that because I didn't intend that, I did not believe that and I do not believe that now, and I know that is silly and wrong and stupid," he tells the programme.

Mr Kilroy-Silk again denied he was racist and claimed that on his programme he had "done more to improve race relations in this country than any other single institution".

[FreeReporting]

There is a strong support for Kilroy from what Sky News calls Middle Britain.

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[Cronos]

"I did not intend, and if that is the way it was read, that I was smearing all Arabs, then clearly I apologise for that because I didn't intend that, I did not believe that and I do not believe that now, and I know that is silly and wrong and stupid,"

I take it he meant Arab regimes. And he is right. If he means all arabs, he is wrong. There are millions of Christian Arabs (though most have fled and are living in WEstern countries) who have our values and to whom any generalisation would be an insult.

[FreeReporting]

The BBC is so sensitive to certain issues and so blind to others.

I agree with Cronos that ALL Arabs don't behave like this, but Arab States have laws that prevent women from receiving educations, or even from driving; that make losing limbs a penalty for minor crimes like theft and as for suicide bombers, who could argue?

[Cronos]

Yes, he has said that in his original article he stated "Arab REGIMES", but in the reprint that was made into "Arabs". That is incorrect, but Silk does seem to be innocent.

[FreeReporting]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/01/13/do1302.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/01/13/ixopinion.html

We are falling under the imam's spell
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 13/01/2004)


Let me see if I understand the BBC Rules of Engagement correctly: if you're Robert Kilroy-Silk and you make some robust statements about the Arab penchant for suicide bombing, amputations, repression of women and a generally celebratory attitude to September 11 – none of which is factually in dispute – the BBC will yank you off the air and the Commission for Racial Equality will file a complaint to the police which could result in your serving seven years in gaol. Message: this behaviour is unacceptable in multicultural Britain.



But, if you're Tom Paulin and you incite murder, in a part of the world where folks need little incitement to murder, as part of a non-factual emotive rant about how "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead" because "they are Nazis" and "I feel nothing but hatred for them", the BBC will keep you on the air, kibitzing (as the Zionists would say) with the crème de la crème of London's cultural arbiters each week. Message: this behaviour is completely acceptable.

So, while the BBC is "investigating" Kilroy, its only statement on Mr Paulin was an oblique but curiously worded allusion to the non-controversy on the Corporation website: "His polemical, knockabout style has ruffled feathers in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive." "The Jewish question"? "Notoriously sensitive"? Is this really how they talk at the BBC?

Mr Paulin's style is only metaphorically knockabout. But, a few days after his remarks were published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, some doughty Palestinian "activists" rose to his challenge and knocked about some settlers more literally, murdering among others five-year-old Danielle Shefi. In a touch of symbolism the critic in Mr Paulin might have found a wee bit obvious, they left her Mickey Mouse sheets soaked in blood.

Evidently Kilroy's "polemical, knockabout style" is far more problematic. For what it's worth, I accept the BBC's right to axe his show. I haven't seen it in a decade and I thought they should have axed it then. I myself got fired by the BBC a while back and, although I had a couple of rough years sleeping in a rotting boxcar at the back of the freight yards, I crawled my way back to semi-insolvency. There's no doubt in my mind that, when the CRE, the BBC, the Metropolitan Police and the Muslim Council of Britain are through making an example of him, he'll still be able to find gainful employment, if not in TV then certainly in casual construction work or seasonal fruit-picking.

But it's not really about Kilroy or Paulin or Jews, or the Saudis beheading men for (alleged) homosexuality, or the inability of the "moderate" Jordanian parliament to ban honour killing, or the fact that (as Jonathan Kay of Canada's National Post memorably put it) if Robert Mugabe walked into an Arab League summit he'd be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room. It's not about any of that: it's about the future of your "multicultural" society.

One reason why the Arab world is in the state it's in is because one cannot raise certain subjects without it impacting severely on one's wellbeing. And if you can't discuss issues, they don't exist. According to Ibrahim Nawar of Arab Press Freedom Watch, in the last two years seven Saudi editors have been fired for criticising government policies. To fire a British talk-show host for criticising Saudi policies is surely over-reaching even for the notoriously super-sensitive Muslim lobby.

But apparently not. "What Robert could do," suggested the CRE's Trevor Phillips helpfully, "is issue a proper apology, not for the fact that people were offended, but for saying this stuff in the first place. Secondly he could learn something about Muslims and Arabs – they gave us maths and medicine – and thirdly he could use some of his vast earnings to support a Muslim charity. Then I would say he has been properly contrite."

Extravagant public contrition. Re-education camp. "Voluntary" surrender of assets. It's not unknown for officials at government agencies to lean on troublemaking citizens in this way, but not usually in functioning democracies.

When Catholic groups complain about things like Terrence McNally's Broadway play Corpus Christi (in which a gay Jesus enjoys anal sex with Judas), the arts crowd says a healthy society has to have "artists" with the "courage" to "explore" "transgressive" "ideas", etc. But, when Cincinnati Muslims complained about the local theatre's new play about a Palestinian suicide bomber, the production was immediately cancelled: the courageous transgressive arts guys folded like a Bedouin tent. The play was almost laughably pro-Palestinian, but that wasn't the point: the Muslim community leaders didn't care whether the play was pro- or anti-Islam: for them, Islam was beyond discussion. End of subject. And so it was.

Fifteen years ago, when the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was declared and both his defenders and detractors managed to miss what the business was really about, the Times's Clifford Longley nailed it very well. Surveying the threats from British Muslim groups, he wrote that certain Muslim beliefs "are not compatible with a plural society: Islam does not know how to exist as a minority culture. For it is not just a set of private individual principles and beliefs. Islam is a social creed above all, a radically different way of organising society as a whole."

Since then, societal organisation-wise, things seem to be going Islam's way swimmingly - literally in the case of the French municipal pool which bowed to Muslim requests to institute single-sex bathing, but also in more important ways. Thus, I see the French interior minister flew to Egypt to seek the blessing for his new religious legislation of the big-time imam at the al-Azhar theological institute. Rather odd, don't you think? After all, Egypt isn't in the French interior. But, if Egypt doesn't fall within the interior minister's jurisdiction, France apparently falls within the imam's.

And so, when free speech, artistic expression, feminism and other totems of western pluralism clash directly with the Islamic lobby, Islam more often than not wins – and all the noisy types who run around crying "Censorship!" if a Texas radio station refuses to play the Bush-bashing Dixie Chicks suddenly fall silent. I don't know about you, but this "multicultural Britain" business is beginning to feel like an interim phase.

[Cronos]

Good point. I saw a Brit documentary which stated that white conservative Americans are converting to Islam in large numbers. It stated that islam was the fastest growing religion in the USA. They also made a point to show white girls who liked to wear hijabs and scarves. However, this same channel loves to point out that Xtianity (they call it Xmas not CHRISTmas) was responsible for SOOOOO many evils.

[holdmuhbeer]

Kilroy was here.