General grumble
James Delingpole Sorry, I'm in Sardinia at the moment and I couldn't find any preview tapes that really grabbed me before I went away so if you don't mind I thought I'd just have a general grumble about the state of TV.
First, Weekend Nazis (BBC1, Monday), whose undercover team made the truly cataclysmic discovery that one or two members of Second Battle Group — a British second world war re-enactment outfit which specialises in portraying German Waffen SS soldiers — may have neo-Nazi sympathies.
Well, knock me down with a feather. Perhaps next week this same crack team will manage to infiltrate the Vatican and emerge with the shock horror revelation that the Pope (and quite possibly several of his aides) are Catholic.
I mean, really. When is the liberal-left going to understand that most of us just don't give a stuff about neo-Nazis. It's not that we love or admire them — we think they're a bunch of preening prats. But this is exactly our point: in the great scheme of menaces which pose a clear and present danger to our way of life, neo-Nazis come way below everything, from Ken Livingstone and people who don't clear up their dog poo to the baggage retrieval system at Heathrow.
The only people who think otherwise are Guardianistas generally, but most especially the ones responsible for writing and commissioning for the BBC Think, for example, of Combat 18. This obscure neo-Nazi group has never achieved anything of any significance in its existence. Yet on TV it's the embodiment of all evil, forever being wheeled out in BBC spy and cop dramas as the shadowy, sinister organisation responsible for the murders, the bombings, and so on.
But how often do any of us sit trembling on the Tube anxiously scanning our fellow passengers for tattoos, short haircuts and discreet SS lapel badges, and muttering to ourselves, 'Christ. I hope I don't fall victim to another of those neo-Nazi bomb atrocities that are so terribly common these days'?
Rather less often, I suspect, than we worry about Islamist zealots. Which might lead one to expect that our TV screens would be swamped with dramas in which bearded men with knitted caps and salwar kameez plotted ever more dastardly deeds against us kufar scum. But our screens are not, are they?
Instead, the lily-livered tofu-munchers of the BBC prefer to fob us off with storylines like the one in Spooks, where the Middle Eastern hijackers turn out to be Mossad agents; or the one where, when one of the spy chiefs talks about 'Muslim terror', he makes little inverted commas signs with his fingers to show what an outrageous calumny on a universally peace-loving religion this is.
The latest series to fall victim to this conspiracy of denial is Casually. Originally, as you'll have surely read, the new series was going to open in the aftermath of a huge bomb explosion caused by Muslim extremists. But the BBC's 'editorial and ethical standards' commissars (God, aren't you so glad your licence fee is keeping these people in sandals and organic fairtrade muesli) decided that this would 'perpetuate the stereotype of young British Muslims'. So they had the perpetrators changed to animalrights extremists instead.
What depressingly few people in our spoilt, decadent society appear to realise is that terror and violence represent only one half of Islamism's two-pronged assault on the West. The second prong is the more insidious form of cultural warfare in which gullible institutions like the BBC are persuaded to surrender our cherished right to freedom of speech, and to take the (often sham) grievances of scheming minority groups more seriously than the interests of the nation as a whole. In this way will we connive in our own destruction.
The West Midlands Police fell into exactly this trap when it chose to investigate a brave, well-researched and timely Channel 4 Dispatches documentary about the antiWestern hate being fomented in Britain's mosques. Instead of pursuing any of those imams caught on camera preaching violence against the infidel, the Brummie rozzers deemed it more appropriate to try to nick the programme-makers for having dared edit these interminable rants into bite-sized snippets.
See you when I get back from Sardinia. Assuming we aren't all blown up on the way home, that is.
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