The age of disinformation

On a recent Sunday evening the great beneficiary of the licence fee, the BBC, presented us with "Fiona's story" a disturbing portrayal of the disintegration of a family following the arrest of the father, who had allegedly downloaded indecent images of children from the internet. The father in question having been played by the talented Jeremy Northam, whom many of us will have watched dying a noble and principled death, on the previous Friday night playing Thomas Moore in BBC2's sumptuous historical drama "The Tudors".

In Fiona's Story Northam's role was far less principled and devoid of any vestige of nobility and, given the heavy handed feminist nature of the plot, his guilt was presumed and inevitable. However, even more inevitable was his whiteness.

Indeed as if to highlight the point, the story opened with his wife, the Fiona of the title,(played by a ghostly pale Gina McKee) singing hymns in a Church choir, thus establishing the Christian and Anglo Saxon roots of the family, so essential for any dramatised exploration of the contentious subject of paedophilia.

As they no doubt considered fitting to the subject, the BBC had obviously set aside their usual quota casting rules, and the cast was overwhelmingly white, the single non-white actor playing a social worker (surprise that one huh?) and as such placing her firmly on the side of right. Apart from that single role, and unlike almost any other BBC TV Drama set anywhere after 1960, no other ethnic minority actors could be soiled by association with such an undesirable subject matter.

It was, of course predictable that the BBC, so proud to be controversial and provocative when it comes portraying an effeminate and overweight Jesus in a nappy in Jerry Springer the Opera would chose to locate a drama on the subject of paedophilia in an overwhelmingly white setting. Upsetting white Christians wins a broadcaster brownie points with their friends at Common Purpose, upsetting non-whites, especially, at the moment, Muslims, is a very different issue.

To ask whether the BBC would have the courage to address the growing problem of Asian men grooming under age white girls, or the excessive brutality which passes for discipline in African and West Indian families, misses the point. Courage is not the issue, the BBC would not consider associating child abuse with the non-white community, because it would not suit their agenda to do so.

On the rare occasions that crime or vice is portrayed within the non-white community it is minor and forgivable or they are forced into it be an oppressive (white) society. The depiction of the unforgivable is reserved, Apartheid like, for whites only.

The exception, so far is in relation to Islamic terrorism, although TV dramas featuring a terrorist theme invariably seek to explain, and usually justify, acts of terrorism in terms of Western foreign policy and go to great lengths to expose Westerners as being no less reprehensible than those actually committing the acts, they have not yet found a means of denying that the vast majority of Islamic terrorists are Islamic. To deal with this dilemma, the thought controllers usually resort to the "tiny minority" lie, in which they seek to pretend that Islamic terrorists are an aberration, who's acts are in direct conflict to the teachings of the Quran and the wider Muslim community.

The night following Fiona's Story, Channel 4's Dispatches documentary "Undercover Mosque - the Return", used the "tiny Minority" lie, but added bells and whistles. After disclosing that extreme Saudi Arabian Wahhabism was being preached to women upstairs in supposedly moderate British mosques, the reporter assured us that such teachings would be shocking to the followers of what she described as mainstream "tolerant and inclusive Islam".

Some might call such a description as disingenuous, others might prefer a more blunt expression. Few would go so far as to claim that most Muslims are fanatical Jihadis who actively applaud terrorist atrocities, however, there are many ways to describe the Muslim faith, but "tolerant" is not one of them, and it is certainly not "inclusive". Yet such arrant nonsense is repeated as fact in supposedly serious documentaries.


When one might be forgiven for believing the disinformation could get no worse, the Metropolitan Police released an advert highlighting the dangers of carrying knives following the spate of teen aged stabbings recently seen on London streets. Of course, who do we see slipping a knife down the back of his pants, but a white boy?, who walks out of his flat whilst a girl screams at him "What have you done?" followed by a crowd, carrying a coffin, who look accusingly at him.

By implication, the white actor is the face of knife crime, however, the role might as well have been played by a middle aged Albanian woman for all the relevance it would have to the reality of knife crime, and, in particular knife related killings, in which white boys feature in around 10% of the crimes, primarily as victims. Knife crime in London is an overwhelmingly non white problem, and yet the Metropolitan police have spent thousands of pounds of tax payer's money creating a totally misleading and blatantly dishonest version of the truth. Do they really care more about preserving their fantasy than they do about saving young lives?

Surely even the most ardent supporters of a multi-racial society must see that we are being fed propaganda, lies and disinformation a scale which is positively Orwellian, or can it be that the brainwashing has worked, and they actually believe it is the truth?