PROPAGANDA FROM THE FRONT LINE….

"Girl of 8 used as 'suicide' bomber". That’s the headline which screamed out at me from the front page of London’s Metro freesheet on the Tube yesterday morning. I felt sick to my stomach, unable to digest this latest barbarity allegedly perpetrated by fellow members of my faith. Here is how the Metro reported the story in its first three paragraphs:

“Militants strapped explosives to a young girl and used her to blow up an army checkpoint in Iraq yesterday.

“They detonated the device by remote control as the child, thought to be as young as eight, walked towards a group of soldiers.

“The girl and an army captain were killed in the blast which also injured up to seven other soldiers."

Simple and straightforward, right? Wrong. Five short paragraphs later, in the same article, a revelation:

“The Americans called it a 'suicide' attack and put the number of injured at seven. Later, they gave the age of the girl as between 16 and 18.”

So, let me get this straight. The Metro claims in its banner headline and at the start of its front-page lead story that a girl 8 has been used by those nasty evil terrorists in Iraq to kill and maim Iraqi soldiers. The article says she is ‘thought to be as young as eight’. Thought to? Thought to by whom? Because later in the same article, American officials give the age of the girl as being between 16 and 18. Can British journalism get any lazier, shoddier or more bizarre? I mean, if you’re going to lie about a ‘fact’ in your story (the age of a suicide bomber), it would probably be best not to reveal that your lying by undermining your own central ‘fact’ later in the same piece. Then agan, the article’s author was probably hoping that commuters making their way to work on a busy morning probably wouldn’t read beyond the headline and the opening paragraphs.

But it wasn’t just the Metro that went with the headline-grabbing claim of an ‘8-year-old suicide bomber’. So too did the Telegraph, the Mirror, the Daily Mail and the rest. The Telegraph tried to have it both ways:

“It was reported that the girl was as young as eight. Neither the US or the Iraqi army could confirm this.”

If neither the US nor Iraqi troops could confirm an age of 8, then who “reported” that the “girl was as young as eight”. It’s a sly journalistic trick: confidently state something that you know to be potentially untrue, and then, in the very next breath, caveat it in order to cover your ass.

Of course, it’s not the first time, in the fog of Iraq’s bloody war, that false information has been peddled by journalists and/or occupying coalition forces. In its coverage of the alleged ‘8-year-old suicide bomber’, the Daily Mail reported this morning that,

“In February, Iraqi insurgents used two women with Downs Syndrome as human bombs in a blast that killed 99 people in Baghdad.”

Other reports made similar references to the infamous ‘Downs Syndrome bombers’, despite the fact that this story has been thoroughly debunked and disproved by, among others, the Independent’s award-winning Iraq correspondent Patrick Cockburn:

"More often, the lies have been small, designed to make a propaganda point for a day even if they are exposed as untrue a few weeks later. One example of this to shows in detail how propaganda distorts day-to-day reporting in Iraq, but, if the propagandist knows his job, is very difficult to disprove.

"On 1 February this year, two suicide bombers, said to be female, blew themselves up in two pet markets in predominantly Shia areas of Baghdad, al Ghazil and al-Jadida, and killed 99 people. Iraqi government officials immediately said the bombers had the chromosonal disorder Down's syndrome, which they could tell this from looking at the severed heads of the bombers. Sadly, horrific bombings in Iraq are so common that they no longer generate much media interest abroad. It was the Down's syndrome angle which made the story front-page news. It showed al-Qa'ida in Iraq was even more inhumanly evil than one had supposed (if that were possible) and it meant, so Iraqi officials said, that al-Qa'ida was running out of volunteers.

"The Times splashed on it under the headline, "Down's syndrome bombers kill 91". The story stated firmly that "explosives strapped to two women with Down's syndrome were detonated by remote control in crowded pet markets". Other papers, including The Independent, felt the story had a highly suspicious smell to it. How much could really be told about the mental condition of a woman from a human head shattered by a powerful bomb? Reliable eyewitnesses in suicide bombings are difficult to find because anybody standing close to the bomber is likely to be dead or in hospital.

"The US military later supported the Iraqi claim that the bombers had Down's syndrome. On 10 February, they arrested Dr Sahi Aboub, the acting director of the al Rashad mental hospital in east Baghdad, alleging that he had provided mental patients for use by al-Qa'ida. The Iraqi Interior Ministry started rounding up beggars and mentally disturbed people on the grounds that they might be potential bombers.

"But on 21 February, an American military spokes-man said there was no evidence the bombers had Down's. Adel Mohsin, a senior official at the Health Ministry in Baghdad, poured scorn on the idea that Dr Aboub could have done business with the Sunni fanatics of al-Qa'ida because he was a Shia and had only been in the job a few weeks."

Tragically, despite the Americans now admitting that there is no evidence that the bombers had Down’s syndrome, despite Iraqi officials acknowledging a link between Dr Aboub and Al Qaida to be improbable and unlikely, the doctor remains in prison, as do dozens of mentally disturbed beggars.

This is the power – and the disastrous and depressing consequences – of the propaganda that we are being fed by ‘reporters’ (stenographers?) from the front line of the conflict in Iraq. Next time I pick up the Metro and see a similar story to this morning’s rubbish, about ‘child suicide-bombers’ and ‘8-year-old killers’, I’ll remind myself that all it tells me is how screwed Iraq and its people are, how little progress is being made there and how little are media tells us. To quote, once more, the peerless Patrick Cockburn,

“…it is all too clear that al-Qa'ida is not running out of suicide bombers. But it is pieces of propaganda such as this small example, often swallowed hole by the media and a thousand times repeated, which cumulatively mask the terrible reality of Iraq.”

WHO CARES ABOUT THE PALESTINIANS?

The bloodshed in the so-called 'Holy Land' continues, with the typical Middle East 'cycle of violence' spiralling further and further out of control. Earlier today, after hundreds of Palestinian deaths at the hands of the occupying Israeli machine, the predictable 'terrorist' response arrived - in Jerusalem, an Arab gunman infiltrated a Jewish seminary school in Jerusalem and shot dead eight people, wounding at least nine others.

The attack has dominated news headlines - of course, the deaths of Israeli civilians (like the deaths of American and British civilians) always trumps over the deaths of dark-skinned Arab Muslims. So, here is a small reminder of the suffering on the 'other', often ignored, side of the Mid East ledger of pain and suffering, from Monday's Guardian front page:

"First came an explosion in the street outside. Then the sound of a single rifle bullet slicing through the sky in a sharp crack and into the apartment directly above the home of Raed Abu Saif, the same apartment into which his young daughter Safa had just gone. It was Saturday afternoon, about 4pm.

Abu Saif hurried upstairs and found, lying on the floor of the front room, Safa, aged 12.

There was a hole in her chest where the bullet had entered and a hole in her back where it had exited. It took her three hours to die.

Outside in the district of Zimmo Square, at the eastern edge of Jabalia in the Gaza Strip, there was by now a heavy Israeli military presence, with tanks and troops and the sound of fighting raging. It was too dangerous for ambulances to reach the apartment and too dangerous for Abu Saif to head out on foot with his daughter.

Instead, he fetched bandages, closed the wounds as best he could and held her in his arms as she bled.

"She said she was in pain, that she couldn't breathe," he said. "A few minutes before she died she told me to stop squeezing the wound,
she couldn't breathe. I was just touching her hair. Then I saw her eyes roll up. I felt her heart. It was not beating."

Read the full, heart-breaking piece from Rory McCarthy here.

And check out Donald Macintyre's excellent and deeply sensitive coverage in the Independent here.

And if your heart can bear the overwhelming sorrow and grief, read here about the latest report from Amnesty International on how the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip has actually now reached its lowest point in forty years, i.e. since Israel first occupied the Palestinian territories in 1967.

God save the Palestinians - after all, no one else will.

RADICAL OPINIONS AFTER A WEEK AWAY…

After a regrettable and difficult week away from world affairs and away from this blog of mine, I am now officially back and back with a vengeance. (Incidentally, my thanks to the blogger Legal Alien who, in the meantime, left an insightful and passionate comment in response to my earlier posting on Barack Obama).

So, what has been going on in this dark, dank and dismal world we all so passively and effortlessly inhabit over the past few days? Here are the radical opinions – on the major geopolitical events to have rocked the globe over the past week – that the mainstream media have been denying you, but which this particular blog was set up to provide and purvey:

1) Prince Harry’s war in Afghanistan

Thanks to Matt Drudge, we discovered that the third in line to the British throne, Harry Windsor, second son of Diana, has been fighting in Afghanistan against the Taliban over the past two months. Some say he is a war hero, while our Prime Minister says we owe him a debt of gratitude – but why? Is a spoiled, ex-Etonian, rich, royal brat who volunteers to fly half way around the world in order to help sustain the invasion and occupation of a poor, defenceless country, populated by brown-skinned Muslim inhabitants (none of whom, by the way, had anything whatsoever to do with the 9-11 attacks!), and to continue fighting a pointless and seemingly endless counter-insurgency war against history’s most stubborn and determined insurgents, really deserving of hero status and deserving of our gratitude?

The media have shown us the usual grainy, black-and-white cockpit videos of ‘coalition’ bombs – ordered and directed by Prince Harry – destroying their ‘terrorist’ targets? But what about the collateral damage? How much innocent Afghan blood does our young prince have on his royal hands? The fact is that US-led and NATO-led ‘coalition’ forces in Afghanistan, including ‘our boys’ from Britain (and including Harry!), have actually killed more civilians there than Taliban insurgents or Al Qaeda terrorists – and continue to do so. Yet our media remain silent on this key point and prefer instead to uncritically idolize Harry and his warmongering ilk.

2) Ongoing violence in Iraq

Despite claims from hawks in the United States that the ‘surge’ in the number of American troops occupying Iraq has led to a verifiable and indisputable decline in the number of civilian casualties in Baghdad and the country’s various other hot spots, the number of Iraqis killed actually rose (!) by 33 percent from January to February, according to official figures released on Saturday. The combined figures obtained by AFP from the interior, defence and health ministries showed that the total number of Iraqis killed in February was 721, including 636 civilians, compared with 541 dead in January. How many of our newspapers chose to report this horrific yet significant statistic on their front pages? Or with banner headlines on the inside pages? Typically, and depressingly, none at all. Zero.

3) Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians

The cat is now out of the bag: Israel’s deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai admitted on Friday what those of us on the anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian left have long believed, i.e. that the Jewish state is bent upon destroying the Palestinian people and is engaged in a genocidal occupation. Vilnai told Israeli army radio,

“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

“Shoah” is of course the Hebrew word normally reserved by Israelis for referring only to the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews during World War II.

Of course, Israel is not gassing the Palestinians en masse, nor is it massacring the residents of Gaza (or the West Bank) on Nazi-like levels. Yet, according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the definition of genocide includes acts,

“….committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Is there any better or more apt description for an occupying state which chooses to respond to the deaths of two or three of its citizens in rocket attacks over the space of a few months by killing over a hundred of its enemies in the space of a few days, including a six-month-old baby and four boys playing football? Is this a proportionate act of self-defence or a genocidal act of aggression? I have no doubt that it is the latter.

So, the question is: who can reverse – or at least stem – these negative, depressing and bloody geopolitical trends? Will it perhaps be the next President of the United States of America? Tomorrow, I’ll be blogging on the US presidential elections and the Texas and Ohio primaries which conventional wisdom suggests Senator Hillary Clinton must win in order to stay in the race….

Your comments are welcome (in fact, requested! demanded!) on any and all of the above issues. And, please, please, keep checking back to this blog for the latest radical opinions on the latest world events.

BEING PRO-WAR MEANS NEVER HAVING TO SAY ‘SORRY’

Paul Wolfowitz, the former World Bank president, US Deputy Defense Secretary and Iraq war architect, has been appointed to head a high-level advisory panel to the State Department on arms control and disarmament.

Is this some sort of bad joke?

I have blogged before on how out of touch with reality the Bush administration is but to task the man who helped launch a fraudulent war against Iraq to disarm it of non-existent weapons of mass destruction with the job of giving ‘high-level’ advice on how to now disarm the rest of the world’s weapons of mass destruction is a new and improved form of madness and illogic. (To quote arms-control specialist Joseph Cirincione: “The advice given by Paul Wolfowitz over the past six years ranks among the worst provided by any defense official in history. I have no idea why anyone would want more.”

It also reminds us of how the chief architects and supporters of the Iraq war, on both sides of the Atlantic, have basically carried on with their lives and their careers, continuing to prosper and polemicize while refusing to offer even the mildest or gentlest of apologies.

Wolfowitz left the Pentagon in 2005 under the cloud of Iraq, yet managed to land the prestigious post of World Bank President. He then left the World Bank in 2007 under another cloud (this time related to his authorisation of a large compensation package for his girlfriend) and yet now he is invited to offer official advice on defence policy to the very same US administration he left behind in ignominy.

Has he since apologized for all the grandiose (and inaccurate) claims he made in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? Not in the slightest. Yet he is the man who argued, before the war, “Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction, and he cannot be trusted. The risk is simply too great that he will use them or provide them to a terror network.” He is the man who testified, before the war, “We're dealing with a country [Iraq] that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” He is the man who said, before the war “Some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark.” He is the man who predicted, before the war, that it was “reasonably certain that they [the Iraqis] will greet us as liberators.” Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Then there is Wolfowitz’s close pal and neoconservative ally, William Kristol, the editor of the Murdoch-owned, Bush-supporting Weekly Standard. Kristol penned this prophesy (!) on the eve of the war, in 2003:

“…the war itself will clarify who was right and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about Saddam's regime. It will produce whatever effects it will produce on neighboring countries and on the broader war on terror. We would note now that even the threat of war against Saddam seems to be encouraging stirrings toward political reform in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a measure of cooperation in the war against al Qaeda from other governments in the region. It turns out it really is better to be respected and feared than to be thought to share, with exquisite sensitivity, other people's pain. History and reality are about to weigh in, and we are inclined simply to let them render their verdicts.”

Is it even possible to be more wrong? Every word is fraudulent, inaccurate and diametrically opposed to the truth.

Was Kristol sacked from his post as editor of the Weekly Standard, in the wake of Iraq? Of course not. Has Fox News sacked him as one of their leading on-air political pundits? Nope. On the contrary, the supposedly liberal and left-of-centre New York Times recently hired him as a new ‘star’ columnist. So much for accountability. So much for an apology.

On this side of the Atlantic, all of the overpaid, overrated columnists and correspondents in the press who hyped the threat from Iraq and pushed us towards war in 2003 are still in their jobs, still pontificating on the Middle East and on issues of war and peace. None – bar the Independent’s Johann Hari and the Observer’s David Rose – has offered an apology for their role in propelling us into an illegal, bloody and disastrous invasion and occupation.

And then there’s our former Prime Minister. Like Bush in 2004, Blair too was maddeningly re-elected in 2005 despite the carnage in Iraq and the failure to find any weapons of mass destruction. He left office without being defeated in an election or deposed by his party, and now blissfully and arrogantly wanders the killing fields he helped create in the Middle East as an alleged 'peace envoy'. Oh, and don’t forget: while Iraq burns and its children grow increasingly malnourished, Mr Blair gives $500,000 speeches and accepts $1 million-a-year consultancies from international banks.

As I said, being pro-war means never having to say ‘sorry’. It means never having to worry about your job, your career, or your self-respect. There is no accountability. There are no consequences. And these people, basically, have no shame.

DEATH OF ‘OUR’ DICTATOR

I had planned to blog today on the death of the former Indonesian president, General Suharto, one of the twentieth century’s most brutal and bloodthirsty dictators.

He also happened to be a close friend of the West, supported and sustained by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, as he presided over the violent deaths of up to a million Indonesians, the invasion, occupation and rape of East Timor, and the embezzlement of up to $30 billion of government funds.

But in an article in today’s Guardian, aptly entitled 'Our Model Dictator', the veteran war correspondent (and East Timor specialist) John Pilger sums up the bloodthirsty nature of the late tyrant’s reign, and his ‘special’ relationship with the West, far better than I could:

“To understand the significance of Suharto is to look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer - "our" is used here advisedly. "One of our very best and most valuable friends," Thatcher called him. For three decades the south-east Asian department of the Foreign Office worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto's gestapo, known as Kopassus, who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler & Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica "riot control" vehicles.”

Go read the full piece here.

Incidentally, note how ‘soft’ much of the coverage of Suharto’s death has been – compared to, say, the death of another brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, a little over a year ago. Can you imagine Saddam’s rule simply being described, rather casually, as “tough”? That’s how an Associated Press article described Suharto’s tyranny in this morning’s Washington Post. I guess, as they say:

"He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard!"

NUCLEAR HYPOCRISY – AND IMMORALITY!

The Guardian reported this week on a “radical manifesto for a new NATO” authored by the former armed forces chiefs from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Netherlands, in which these wizened and greying generals insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" for the Atlantic Alliance since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world".

There has been instant criticism of the report, and its "first use fallacy", with experts in this field pointing out the obvious practical flaws in the generals’ thesis. For example, Professor Robert Hinde, chair of the British Pugwashe Group, draws attention to the inherent contradictions in the strategic recommendations contained in the report:

“The five retired military commanders suggest that a Nato policy involving readiness to make pre-emptive strikes is necessary to counter political fanatics and international terrorism, because of the mass migrations that could be triggered by climate change, and because of the weakening of nation states and the UN. But a nuclear strike is unlikely to deter a political fanatic and would be ineffective against terrorists. No one could possibly think of deterring refugees with a nuclear weapon, and such a policy could only weaken the UN further. We must choose between a world ruled by threat, or one ruled by law and mutual understanding. Most of us would prefer the latter. The first step towards it must be to take all nuclear weapons off alert and a commitment to no first use.”

Dr Ian Davis, from the British American Security Information Council, reminds readers why the heavyweight credentials of the authors (each is a former chief of the armed forces in his respective country of origin) should not necessarily overwhelm or distract us:

“Their view that "nuclear weapons - and with them the option of first use - are indispensable, since there is simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world" is certainly not shared by four veteran US cold warriors - former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former secretary of defence William Perry, and former Senate armed services committee chairman Sam Nunn - who are leading the call for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. All three Democratic presidential candidates have endorsed this vision as well as the progressive steps needed to realise it.”

(To his list I would also add former US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, of Vietnam-era infamy.)

Yet I have yet to hear or read, in all the comment and analysis and opinion in the mainstream media about these nuclear proposals, anyone point out how undeniably counter-productive and hypocritical the chief recommendation of this new report is. After all, the generals write:

“The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."

What? You mean to tell me that five experienced, educated, intelligent, sane soldiers are suggesting that the only way to ‘prevent’ the use of a weapon of mass destruction is the ‘first use’ of another weapon of mass destruction (i.e. a nuclear weapon)? How on earth can anyone justify such a statement, such a proposal? On grounds of morality or logic? To prevent using WMDs, we should use WMDs (!) It’s like saying: “To prevent a murder taking place, we must first murder someone.” It is a ridiculous and offensive view, and an insult to logic and common sense.

Yet it is a view that goes to the heart of our foreign and defence policies here in the West. ‘We’, the enlightened, advanced, mature democracies of the West are allowed to kill, maim, loot, plunder, invade and occupy all in the name of preventing others (at some indeterminate point in the near or perhaps distant future) from killing, maiming, looting, plundering, invading and occupying. Thus actions by nations are not defined as moral or immoral, right or wrong, in and of themselves – they are judged on the basis of who is doing them. Thus, the use of WMDs is BAD but then becomes GOOD if we are the ones stockpiling, deploying and (ultimately) using those WMDs, be they nukes (in Hiroshima/Nagasaki or even chemical weapons (in Vietnam and, more recently, Fallujah).

So, ‘our’ nukes, our WMDs, good. ‘Their’ nukes, their WMDs, bad. And our nukes should be used to stop them from using their nukes. Brilliant. Great. What a way to run the world….

SIDEBAR: Guess who one of the co-writers of this war-mongering, nuke-endorsing NATO report is? The rather obnoxious and spotty neocon pundit Douglas Murray, whose nasty and belligerent views I wrote about in a recent post and whose qualifications to write on international defence policy and nuclear deterrence theory are rather unclear (and perhaps non-existent).

935 LIES ABOUT IRAQ

Despite being picked up on by the New York Times and USA Today, this study from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity in Washington D.C. has so far been ignored by the mainstream media on this side of the Atlantic. Its findings are, however, shocking.

As the Associated Press report points out:

“The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both.

“…Bush led with 259 false statements, 231 about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 28 about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the study found. That was second only to Powell's 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq and al-Qaida.”

There is now an ‘Iraq/WMD fatigue’ in the British press, encouraged by supporters of the war who want us all to forget about the lies, half-truths, distortions and exaggerations that they peddled in the run-up to the March 2003 invasion. Its now time to ‘move on’, they claim.

Of course, moving on is a means of saving their reputations and their massively inflated salaries. Remember David Aaronovitch of the Times? He proudly proclaimed in the immediate aftermath of the illegal invasion,

"If nothing is eventually found, I - as a supporter of the war - will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere. They probably are."

Remember those words, David? Have you had a chance to look back on the 935 lies you believed and then gullibly passed on to your readers?

EXPOSING THE RIGHT-WING 'THINKTANKS'

In their book, 'Banana Republicans', US authors (and public relations experts) Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber outline, among other things, the systematic and successful way in which right-wing, corporate-funded thinktanks - claiming to be neutral and nonpartisan - have hijacked the US political, media and intellectual agendas in recent years.

It is a book crying out for a UK equivalent - given the growing proliferation of similar 'nonpartisan' (but glaringly and undeniably right-wing and conservative) thinktanks on this side of the pond.

The Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Policy Exchange, Civitas, Reform and the Adam Smith Institute publish right-wing screeds and propaganda, in the guise of 'academic' papers and pamphlets, on a weekly basis. A gullible 24-hour news media here in the United Kingdom invites their spokespersons to offer regular comment on the issues of the day, without revealing their right-wing, free-market, anti-immigration links to their viewers.

None of these thinktanks offer any specialist expertise on a subject - say, the Middle East - in as rigorous, neutral and peer-reviewed manner as a university department or professional academic might. Yet they are easier to get hold of and far more media-savvy than your average professor or lecturer and so they are taken seriously and given acres of media coverage, despite the fraudulent and politicized nature of much of their 'research'. One only has to watch the BBC's flagship programme Newsnight tear apart Policy Exchange's widely-reported and widely-acclaimed report on extremism within Britains mosques (my own posting on the subject is here).

Yet the supposedly liberal and left-wing BBC Newsnight last week chose to carry a typically sensationalist, over-the-top and over-hyped report from reporter Richard Watson - on alleged government funding of 'radical' Muslim organisations - which relied on an investigation by the Centre for Social Cohesion. It left viewers with no proper information as to what this rather Orwellian-sounding institution stands for, or who its staff are.

The Centre for Social Cohesion was founded last year by the right-wing thinktank Civitas. Its website claims it is trying to "help bring Britain's ethnic and religious communities closer together while strengthening British traditions of openness, tolerance and democracy."

However, the political views and agendas of its staff and advisory council suggest it will have the exact opposite effect - fanning, instead, political intolerance, racial and religious hatred and right-wing authoritarianism.

Its director is the twenty-something Douglas Murray, self-proclaimed British neocon and author of "Neoconservatism: Why We Need It. Murray appears frequently on programmes like the BBC's Question Time to mock and ridicule British Muslim organizations - all of which, he seems to believe, are filled with closet Islamists and jihadists. In an article in the Sunday Times, he described himself as a writer "most critical of Islam's current manifestation in the West".

And one only has to take a look at the members of the Centre's Advisory Council to realise how toxic and deep-seated its blatantly anti-Islam, anti-immigration agenda is. There's the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr George Carey who has defended both the Pope's comments linking Islam and violence and Samuel Huntington's controversial 'Clash of Civilisations' thesis. There's the editor of Prospect magazine, David Goodhart, who was effectively described as a racist by the then head of the Commision for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, after arguing for the left to get to grips with immigration by abandoning multiculturalism. There's the Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, whose recent claims about there being so-called 'no-go areas' in Britain for non-Muslims, and whose history of inflammatory remarks via vis Islam, I have already blogged about here. And then there's Dr Denis MacEoin, the now infamous author of the "fabricated" Policy Exchange report on British mosque bookshops, and a man who says,

"I do not hold a brief for Islam. On the contrary, I have very negative feelings about it…"

Judging from its director and its advisory council, it is no wonder then that the Centre for Social Cohesion is replete with so much anti-Muslim, anti-Islam material - reports, debates, pamphlets, articles - as well as attacks on multiculturalism and immigration.

Does the BBC's flagship news-and-current-affairs programme really want to rely on such a partisan and polemical thinktank for its key stories on British Islam and the terror threat? And if so, shouldn't reporter Richard Watson have explained to his viewers where the CSC bods are coming from, before interviewing them so uncritically? Whatever happened to Reithian impartiality?

As the Guardian's Seumas Milne wisely comments,

"The constant regurgitation by the media of Muslim-baiting "research" by hard right think tanks…not only misleads the public about one of the most sensitive issues of our time - it is also clearly driven by a neoconservative political agenda, which seeks to convince people that jihadist terror attacks in Britain and elsewhere are driven not by outrage at western violence in the Muslim world but by opposition to western freedom."

BBC EXPOSES “FABRICATED” MOSQUE REPORT

In October, the right-wing thinktank Policy Exchange published a report into the selling of “extremist literature” – including books allegedly glorifying terorism and hatred of Jews – on the premises of Britain’s leading mosques. The thinktank, which pretends to be “committed to an evidence-based approach to policy development," described its controversial report in grandiose terms as "the most comprehensive academic survey of its kind ever produced in the UK ... based on a year-long investigation by several teams of specialist researchers."

Predictably, given the Islam-obsessed, jihad-focused media environment we all now inhabit, the report dominated the headlines upon its release. “Lessons in hate found at leading mosque”, declared the front page of the Times. “Hate literature easily found at UK mosques,” proclaimed the front page of the Telegraph.

This week, however, the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, accused Policy Exchange of "fabricating" its survey of mosque bookshops after an in-depth investigation of the evidence by its correspondent Richard Watson. Newsnight's editor, Peter Barron, takes up the story on his blog:

"Policy Exchange had given us the receipts to corroborate their claim that a quarter of the 100 mosques their researchers had visited were selling hate literature.

"On the planned day of broadcast our reporter Richard Watson came to me and said he had a problem. He had put the claim and shown a receipt to one of the mosques mentioned in the report - The Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre in London. They had immediately denied selling the book and said the receipt was not theirs.

"We decided to look at the rest of the receipts and quickly identified five of the 25 which looked suspicious. They appeared to have been created on a home computer, rather than printed professionally as you would expect. The printed names and addresses of some of the mosques contained simple errors and two of the receipts purportedly from different mosques appeared to have been written by the same hand. I spoke to Policy Exchange to try to clear up these discrepancies but in the end I decided not to run the report."

The actual Newsnight report which aired this week on Wednesday night – and which can be seen via Barron's blog – includes expert testimony from a forensic scientist disputing the authenticity of the receipts provided by Policy Exchange. (It is also worth watching the heated exchange afterwards between the Beeb’s rottweiler, Jeremy Paxman, and the red-faced Policy Exchange research director, Dean Godson).

The Newsnight investigation is a rare tribute to the power of public-service current-affairs broadcasting at its best and, dare I say it, the BBC at its very best. I was cheering in front of the television screen. (Let us hope and pray that Newsnight’s budget remains unaffected by BBC budget cuts).

One final point: aside from the Muslim Council of Britain’s Sir Iqbal Sacranie, few have been willing to question Policy Exchange’s undeniably Islamophobic motivations. Its director, former Times journalist Anthony Browne, has claimed in the past that “Islam really does want to conquer the world”. And not a single newspaper or broadcaster, in its coverage of the original Policy Exchange report in October, mentioned this rather pertinent quote from the ‘academic’ chosen by Policy Exchange to write their report, Dr Denis MacEoin:

“I do not hold a brief for Islam. On the contrary, I have very negative feelings about it…”

So, fraudulent evidence and Islamophobic authors. Is it any wonder why British Muslims are so disillusioned, and so disillusioned with the media in particular?

THE CENTRAL MYTH OF ‘JOURNALISM’

We journalists like to arrogantly pretend that ours is an exclusive profession, with a special set of skills and a unique commitment to truthseeking and muckraking. In a recent interview, however, Rolling Stone magazine's roving political reporter Matt Taibbi bluntly and graphically skewers this central myth that underpins so much of the media-generated universe:

“If you have no real knowledge or skill set and you’re lazy and full of shit but you want to make a decent wage, then journalism’s not a bad career option. The great thing about it is that you don’t need to know anything. I mean this whole notion of journalism school—I can’t believe people actually go to journalism school. You can learn the entire thing in like three days.”

Three days? Some people seem to have ‘learned’ it in less.

Taibbi has (hilarious) form on this subject. In 2004, he also happened to write this devastatingly true statement:

“I've been around journalists my entire life, since I was a little kid, and I haven't met more than five in three-plus decades who wouldn't literally shit from shame before daring to say that their job had anything to do with truth or informing the public. Everyone in the commercial media…knows what his real job is: feeding the monkey. We are professional space-fillers, frivolously tossing content-pebbles in an ever-widening canyon of demand, cranking out one silly pack-mule after another for toothpaste and sneaker ads to ride on straight into the brains of the stupefied public.”