Let me see if I understand the BBC Rules of Engagement correctly: if you’re Robert Kilroy-Silk and you make some robust statements about the Arab penchant for suicide bombing, amputations, repression of women and a generally celebratory attitude to September 11 – none of which is factually in dispute – the BBC will yank you off the air and the Commission for Racial Equality will file a complaint to the police which could result in your serving seven years in gaol. Message: this behaviour is unacceptable in multicultural Britain.
But, if you’re Tom Paulin and you incite murder, in a part of the world where folks need little incitement to murder, as part of a non-factual emotive rant about how “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers on the West Bank “should be shot dead” because “they are Nazis” and “I feel nothing but hatred for them”, the BBC will keep you on the air, kibitzing (as the Zionists would say) with the crème de la crème of London’s cultural arbiters each week. Message: this behaviour is completely acceptable.
I think he’s got it about right. But wait, there’s more — and it’s not quite so amusing:
So, while the BBC is “investigating” Kilroy, its only statement on Mr Paulin was an oblique but curiously worded allusion to the non-controversy on the Corporation website: “His polemical, knockabout style has ruffled feathers in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive.” “The Jewish question”? “Notoriously sensitive”? Is this really how they talk at the BBC?
Mr Paulin’s style is only metaphorically knockabout. But, a few days after his remarks were published in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, some doughty Palestinian “activists” rose to his challenge and knocked about some settlers more literally, murdering among others five-year-old Danielle Shefi. In a touch of symbolism the critic in Mr Paulin might have found a wee bit obvious, they left her Mickey Mouse sheets soaked in blood.
Read the whole thing.