ARE PARTS of the establishment catching up? I began to hope so on Saturday morning, my mood lifted by the sun flooding into my kitchen as I scanned some ‘Johnny come lately’ headlines in the supposedly right-wing media. ‘How the left’s love-in with Islam will change Britain‘, wrote the Telegraph. But they’d got the tense wrong. It has changed Britain. The crisis is very much here and now.
As it is with the BBC. How preposterous that we are having another Charter renewal round. Its anti-Trump, anti-Israel and anti-war bias is beyond blatant. Heading that subversive force last week was none other than the over-promoted, self-indulgent, Israel-hating International Editor, the windbag Jeremy Bowen.
Last week the Corp, via its bias flagship, the Today programme, allowed him full vent. Seemingly oblivious to the American president’s $5billion lawsuit (a meticulously argued accusation over the Corporation’s intentional deception in Panorama’s now-infamous edit of Trump’s speech on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021), in a lengthy harangue Bowen called Trump a liar over the Iran school bombing. I can see another couple of million dollars added by Trump’s lawyers. As in Robin Aitken’s Telegraph article, linked to above, Jeremy Bowen has form on shooting from the hip – and getting it wrong.
That was not the only BBC News and current affairs programming that made me feel ill last week. Watching their reports on Israel’s attacks on Lebanon midweek made me wonder how many viewers would have been aware that it was Hezbollah’s massive attack on north Israel that precipitated them? Or that there was no reportage on the BBC until Israel responded? Or that by March 6/7 Hezbollah had carried out a total of 192 attack waves against Israeli territory, some 500 launches of rockets, missiles and drones? Or that the perspective of the Israelis under bombardment as expressed here is rarely if ever considered? Bias by omission is just as pernicious as by commission.
So is the scheduling. A story at the end is the least important in news terms. Tagged on to the end of one of the BBC broadcasts was a throwaway report on the female Iranian footballers who’d sought asylum in Australia. The commentary was cursory. Brief shots of the team being frogmarched aboard a plane to Tehran by their Iranian minders with crying bystanders saying ‘run’, ‘run now’, were not explained. There was none of the tragic detail of this Fox News report. But it all fits. The plight of the Iranians living under this regime, of those who have sought asylum abroad and are desperate for change, was forgotten.
Instead there was one news headline after another willing Trump’s defeat and Iran’s victory. Hardly any better than the social media keyboard warriors like the well-heeled tweeter who wrote: ‘I am a Westerner and I want the West to lose the war decisively and quickly.’
As I write, even Classic FM is at it, bringing on a supposed academic expert to gleefully tell us that Iran will prevail. Whose side are they on? Have they stopped to think? This is hardly a freedom protest. It is the reverse, as Daniel Jupp pointed out in his excellent TCW article at the beginning of last week. They are right there with the Guardian, our PM and his Attorney General – Iran’s Western allies – the establishment Trump derangement syndrome view.
Was anyone writing anything positive about Trump’s attacks on Iran, I disingenuously asked Google. Surely public opinion must concede that a non-nuclear Iran is better all round than an Iran with nuclear capability? But the answer was ‘no’.
You have to know where to search to find articles like this. Or like this, ‘Operation Epic Fury – victory within Trump’s grasp’, which states that Iran’s air force lies in ruins, its navy rests at the bottom of the sea, missile launches have plummeted by 90 per cent, their Supreme Leader is dead, that Revolutionary Guards are deserting en masse, recording themselves as they abandon their posts, declaring ‘The regime is done!’ Or even for the Washington Post article that argues that ‘President Trump is on the verge of achieving what no American president before him could.’
So I was with Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of State for War, when he berated the press on Thursday for all the negative headlines. He knows they are a gift to Iran. How he must wish for the days of the Falklands conflict when the news media were still patriotic! When the Sun accused the BBC and the Guardian of being ‘traitors in our midst’ for their more neutral reporting.
If only we could call them neutral today.
Of course truth is the first casualty of war, as Gustavo Jalife explained in TCW last week. It is inevitably beset by propaganda (on both or all sides). But there’s an additional problem today. The post-democratic progressive left technocracy (forget the left’s military industrial complex bogey) determines the algorithms that decides what we see in the media, as discussed by Dr Shane Fudge. This is the new hidden tyranny. And perhaps it is the answer to the critically important question Gustavo Jalife puts in these pages tomorrow: Why do societies with a long tradition of upholding freedom of expression and pluralism find themselves aligned – openly or tacitly – with autocracies that reject those very principles?
That refers not just to the egoists on X but to all the Greens, the Labour Cabinet, the Lib Dems and, sadly a significant smattering of so-called Conservatives and Reformers, who apparently can’t wait to see Trump cut down by the Ayatollahs. Given the choice, I wonder where any of them would choose to live? Iran or the US? Michel Houellebecq’s prescient novel Submission perfectly exposes the ease of secular liberal moral collapse in face of such a choice.
I don’t expect my views will be too popular with some readers. But please read Gustavo’s article tomorrow. And if you missed Tony Rucinski ‘Lost boys’ article and Sally Beck’s on the confusion of young mums in a society that has turned its back on motherhood, don’t. They both feature fundamental aspects of the West’s moral and social collapse. A society, if I am to be brutal, that turned men metaphorically from soldiers into childminders in just 40 years.
Fighting this culture war is our prime mission – a war at home which is just as important as the political war abroad if the West is not to commit suicide.
