This week's Spectator magazine hosts an article by the right-wing agitator Rod Liddle calling for more Islamophobia within the Tory party.
This extraordinary call for even more anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks comes against a backdrop of Theresa May deliberately stonewalling Muslim people's demands for an inquiry into the shocking scale and frequency of Islamophobic abuse within the Tory ranks.
There's no denying that the Tory party is riddled with anti-Muslim bigots, from the rank and file all the way up to the top of the party.
One of the most bizarre things about Rod Liddle's Spectator article is that it starts off with one of his trademark transphobic rants, which is still going on as the article hits the paywall fadeout!
But if you do get beyond the paywall you find that Liddle is re-using the simplistic extreme-right trick of conflating criticism of the Islamic religion with bigotry and hatred towards Muslim people.
He tries to imply that the loony liberal left are somehow censoring people from criticising Islam by accusing those who criticise the religion of being Islamophobes.
It's an utterly misleading argument, but unfortunately right-wing idiots buy into it.
It only takes the briefest glimpse at reality to see that the majority of people criticising the vile homophobic, misogynistic, democracy-crushing, head-chopping, terrorism-promoting, tyrannical Saudi war criminals are lefties.
Meanwhile Theresa May and the Tories continually suck up to the vile Islamist Saudi tyrants in order to hawk them even more British weapons, and right-wingers like Liddle and his chums at the Spectator turn a blind eye to this absolute depravity.
In fact, the very same Boris Johnson who the extreme-right hate mob are lauding for sticking the boot into Muslim women this week is the very person who outlined the Tory government's position that Britain will continue selling weapons to the Saudi tyrants to commit their war crimes with because if we don't cash in on their war crimes, someone else might!
Then if you look at the countries that are banning arms sales to Saudi Arabia and openly criticising them for their grotesque human rights record, it's the kind of socially liberal governments that Liddle and the Spectaror mob regularly spit their hate at (Canada, Norway &Germany).
If you look at the UK politicians who do the most to oppose arms sales to Saudi Arabia while they're committing war crimes in Yemen, it's lefties like Emily Thornbury, Caroline Lucas, and Jeremy Corbyn (all hate figures for Rod and his mates in the Spectator mob).
If you look at people who are actually leading the fight against grotesque practises like female genital mutilation, forced under-age marriage, and rampant misogyny, again it's usually leftie liberals and western Muslim women doing the heavy lifting, while hard-right idiots like Liddle carp from the sidelines and use these issues as ammunition to call for even more bigotry and hatred towards Muslim people in general.
Let's get it absolutely straight. It's absolutely possible to utterly condemn vile Islamist regimes like Saudi Arabia, and to oppose barbaric practises that are still commonplace in the Muslim world (like FGM and forced marriage) without spitting bigoted Islamophobic vitriol at all Muslims in general.
In fact there's nothing Islamophobic about criticising the Islamic religion at all (especially if you're doing it from an atheist/agnostic stance that includes criticism of other religions too).
But if you're using cheap and nasty appeals to "our Judeo-Christian history" to deliberately conflate criticism of Islam with spewing bigotry and hatred at Muslim people (as Liddle does in his article), you're blatantly being an utterly disingenuous shit.
We all know that had a left-leaning magazine or blog posted an article that openly called for "more anti-Jewish bigotry in the Labour ranks" and created a ridiculously deceptive argument that the freedom to criticise Israel somehow justifies this call for more anti-Semitic abuse, there would have been an absolute tidal wave of condemnation, but somehow Liddle continually gets away with this kind of extreme-right trolling.
What's even more telling is that the BBC's heavyweight political presenter Andrew Neil is the chair of Spectator magazine which published this disgracefully deceptive article calling for more anti-Muslim bigotry in politics.
So next time you see Andrew Neil, or any other BBC journalist, spewing faux outrage about the Labour anti-Semitism row, just remember that Neil is perfectly happy to turn a blind eye to outright calls for more anti-Muslim bigotry in the Tory ranks, and that the BBC are quite happy to have Neil continue to be the heavyweight front man for their supposedly impartial political coverage.
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The myopia of the political right never ceases to amaze. On the weekend after Theresa May's deal capitulation on the first phase of Brexit negotiations the Spectator published a piece warning that the Tory government must wake up to the dangers of fake news before it's too late.
Of course I have no quarrel with the central premise of the article that fake news is a huge problem. Nobody is denying that Twitter and other social media platforms are awash with automated bots pushing vast tides of deliberate political disinformation into the news feeds and inboxes of millions of people.
The problem of course is that fake news isn't just limited to Russian bots, white supremacists, extreme-right activists, and the like.
As much as the mainstream media and the political establishment would love to convince you that they're the only true sources of reliable information in an ocean of disinformation, they're often guilty of disseminating fake news to the kind of vast audiences that the owners of Russian Twitter bot farms could only dream of.
Mainstream news sites from across the political spectrum have been caught promoting distortions, exaggerations, misleading narratives, and outright lies. Surely we can all think of plenty of examples of newspapers and broadcasters producing shockingly misleading content for ourselves?
In fact it's been proven that mainstream media hacks have massively amplified the popularity and reach of Russian Twitter bots and other fake news purveyors by lazily embedding their Tweets into their articles instead of engaging in actual journalism.
But aside from the mainstream press doing stuff like brazenly misrepresenting statistics to whip up hate against British Muslims, repeatedly inventing fake terrorist incidents, embedding Russian bot tweets in their articles, and concocting stories out of outright lies they've lazily churnalised off the Guido Fawkes blog, there's a subtler but more sinister form of fakery going on.
Take the British Medical Journal research paper linking 120,000 excess deaths with Tory austerity dogma that the BBC decided not to mention at all. The astounding decision to hide the existence of this damning report from the public revealed that the BBC is more of a PR department for the political establishment than an impartial broadcaster.
Then there's the fact that the BBC continually gives credence to fringe lunatics with their fake balance agenda so that qualified climate scientists are given the same platform and airtime as clueless blowhard climate change denialists like Nigel Lawson.
But the BBC obsession with creating fake balance (even between experts and extremists when it comes to subjects like climate change) suddenly evaporates completely when it comes to economics. At the 2017 General Election the British public were split almost exactly 50-50 between supporting pro- and anti- austerity parties. You wouldn't know that watching BBC political output though, which insists on heavily stacking almost all of its debates and politics shows with pro-austerity politicians and political commentators, as if the idea of economic impartiality is an absurd concept, rather than something that should absolutely be expected from a taxpayer funded public service broadcaster.
Mainstream newspapers and broadcasters are demonstrably guilty of creating and disseminating fake news, and of deliberately manipulating public perceptions. But there's also the problem of politicians creating fake news themselves too.
We've all seen how the "£350 million a week for the NHS" and "only a madman would try to drag the UK out of the Single Market and Customs Union" Brexiteer lies have crumbled away to reveal a hard Tory Brexit and a vast 50 billion divorce bill.
We all saw how Donald Trump won the US election promising universal health care to the American people before immediately launching attack after attack on America's very limited socialised health care provisions in order to deny coverage to literally millions of people.
And anyone who uses Twitter will be aware of the Tory party accounts @CCHQ and @Conservatives which both spew a near constant stream of pro-Tory fake news.
On the day before the Spectator article pleading with the Tories to take fake news seriously the @Conservatives account published an extraordinarily misleading Tweet claiming that there is such a thing as British law (there isn't because Scots Law and English Law are two distinct legal systems) and using a picture of a gavel to illustrate it (gavels have never ever been used in Scots or English courts).
On the very same day Tory MPs conducted an absolute barrage of Twitter propaganda trying to recast Theresa May as some kind of master-negotiator for having finally crawled over the first Brexit hurdle a lamentable eight months after triggering Article 50 with no plan for what she wanted to achieve as an actual objective.
And let's not forget that just days before Theresa May's Brexit deal capitulation her Brexit minister David Davis claimed that the Tory government has actually done no Brexit impact assessments whatever, meaning the 58 Brexit impact assessments he'd spent the summer bragging about to parliament, the press, and the public were in fact fake news.
Imagine the myopia of appealing to the Tory party to do something to combat fake news when the writer knows perfectly well that Theresa May's cabinet is stuffed to the gunnels with lying Brexiteers; that the Tory party operates a pair of the most shockingly misleading official British political accounts on Twitter; that BBC political coverage is little more than taxpayer funded PR for the Tory party these days; and that Tory politicians are currently engaged in yet another Orwellian propaganda campaign, this time to convince the British public that the Brexit deal capitulation is a wonderful thing and Theresa May is some kind of exceptional master-negotiator!
It really is like asking the fox to do a better job of guarding the chicken coop.
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I have to admit that I was momentarily fooled by the Guardian's Fake News about Jeremy Corbyn supposedly deciding to whip Labour MPs into supporting the Article 50 bill that hasn't even been written yet.
The title of the Guardian article when shared on social media reads "Corbyn to impose three line whip on Labour MPs to trigger Article 50".
When I first saw the headline I thought "what the bloody hell is Corbyn doing? What an utterly stupid position to take!" because it would obviously be complete lunacy for the leader of the opposition to declare that they're going to force their MPs to vote in favour of a government bill before anyone even knows what's actually going to be in the government bill. Such a move would be an open invitation for the government to fill the Article 50 bill full of all kinds of unacceptable nonsense.
After the initial feelings of anger and disappointment generated by the headline began to dissipate, a bit of investigation soon revealed that the article didn't actually contain a single quote of Jeremy Corbyn, or any of his team saying that they're going to whip Labour MPs into supporting the Article 50 bill.
About halfway through the article it actually admitted that the real Labour Party position is that "no formal decision on whipping had been made and the party would seek to amend the bill if it did not meet its priorities for negotiations", which is completely at odds with the article headline that claims that Corbyn will order Labour MPs to vote in favour of it.
The big problem here is that vastly more people will have seen the article headline in their social media news feed than will have actually clicked on the article, read at least half of it, and then clocked that the headline was clearly contradicted by the actual contents of the article.
John Shafthauer at The Canary explained the problem very clearly when he pointed out that The Guardian has taken this reality:
Labour MAY tell MPs to vote a certain way DEPENDENT on what’s in the bill.
And turned it into this:
Labour WILL tell MPs to vote a certain way REGARDLESS of what’s in the bill.
There's no escaping the fact that the Guardian has invented a Fake News headline about Jeremy Corbyn and spread it all over social media.
I was far from the only person to be duped by the Guardian. I'm a huge fan of the Green Party co-leader Caroline Lucas, but she fell for this Fake News headline and shared it on her Twitter feed.
It wasn't just the liberal-left who got duped by the Guardian's Fake News headline either. The Spectator (a right-wing news comic owned by the tax-dodging Barclay brothers) worked themselves up into a synthetic rage over Corbyn's supposed hypocrisy. How dare he be a serial backbench rebel and then impose a three line whip on his own MPs?
Probably the worst thing of all about this Guardian Fake News headline is that it came in the same week as Theresa May announced that the long-awaited Tory "negotiating strategy" we've waited six months for is a ludicrous threat against our 27 former European allies that represents a massive lose-lose situation for the vast majority of British people and British businesses.
Either the EU gives in to the Tory demands for a massively uneven playing field where banks and major corporations get preferential access to the Single Market while ordinary British people, independent traders, small and medium businesses and the like suffer the economic damage of getting locked out, or the Tories get rebuffed by the EU and then set about following through on their threat to turn the UK into a bargain basement corporate tax haven.
When the focus of criticism should have been on Theresa May and the Tories, the supposedly left-liberal press were far too busy fabricating Fake News headlines to damage Jeremy Corbyn's leadership to bother attempting to counter the absolute tide of euphoric uncritical guff in the right-wing gutter press about Theresa May's woeful threat-based posturing.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
