At the same time as the BBC is dismissing more than 500 employees, those who remain are to be forced through a compulsory online course on Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hostility.
The new Deputy Director, Rhodri Talfan Davies, informed employees last Monday via the BBC’s internal website.
Davies provided a generous timeframe of six months in which to complete this task. During the same period, many BBC employees will be worrying about their future, as further cutbacks are expected as part of a savings plan intended to reduce costs by £500 million.
Islamophobia means unfounded fear, hatred, prejudice or discrimination directed at Islam and Muslims. The term describes attitudes or actions that portray Islam as a threat, and it is often regarded as a form of racism. But Islam is not a race; it is an ideology of violence.
How unfounded is this fear really, after the orgy of violence on 7 October, countless terrorist attacks, hundreds of thousands of rape victims in the United Kingdom, and serious violent crime against Western schoolchildren?
Why is Deputy Director Davies not focusing on the highly justified fear many BBC employees have of losing their jobs?
One might perhaps regard such training as advisable if the BBC were characterised by anti-Muslim attitudes. But in more than two decades at the corporation, I cannot recall witnessing or hearing about a single instance of so-called Islamophobia, not even once.
I have, however, seen a Muslim colleague reading passages from the Qur’an at work. No one reacted to it.
This is written by Charlie Walsham in The Spectator. Walsham is the pseudonym of someone who has worked for BBC News for several years.
According to Walsham, the BBC is largely characterised by a friendly and tolerant environment – provided one avoids expressing “incorrect” attitudes (Orwell’s wrong-think). Such as being scandalously prejudiced enough to believe that a man should not be allowed into a women’s changing room merely because he puts on a wig, fishnet stockings and make-up.
So why is BBC management wasting energy and money on such bullshit at a time when hundreds of employees have already lost their jobs and more find themselves at risk?
The content of the training is decisive: Progressive groupthink and identity politics have created skewed news coverage at the BBC, just as they have at NRK. Impartiality is undermined and public trust disappears. Both NRK and the BBC have ended up as macabre parodies of genuine and reliable providers of news.
The BBC defines Islamophobia as “a strong aversion to or fear of Islam, encompassing hostility towards or prejudice against Muslims”. To demonstrate how widespread and severe the disease of Islamophobia is, the BBC’s course instructors resort to outright ridiculous examples.
A fictional character named “Sophie” confronts a Muslim colleague named “Ahmed” about a violent incident abroad and berates him by saying: “What is wrong with your people? Why do they always do these things?”
As Walsham points out: In all his years at the BBC, he has never experienced anything resembling what this example describes. The BBC has always been embarrassingly politically correct; now the broadcaster has become “woke as a joke”. Consequently, “Sophie” is a pure fantasy figure, someone one would never encounter in the real BBC.
If you believe self-evident things about Islam, then you are a heretic.
If you believe that Muslim women are oppressed, that Muslims are linked to extremism and violence, or that Muslims do not integrate, you should think again. All of these are merely clichés or stereotypes.
At the same time, one is not merely permitted, one is encouraged to describe anyone who sees the slightest problem with Muslim mass immigration as far-right or right-wing extremist. In such cases, prejudice is celebrated.
In today’s public sphere, it is wrong to make crude and offensive negative generalisations about an entire group of people, with the exception of sinners and “extremists” who are capable of thinking for themselves and do not swallow the official “truths” whole. This is how the socialist mafia infected by woke ideology believes social cohesion is built through diversity.
Diversity is fundamentally a neutral concept, neither positive nor negative. Only the simple-minded promote diversity as something unreservedly positive.
Neither the BBC nor NRK focuses on the diversity created by the fact that a large proportion of Muslim women have never had a job, have never paid tax, and many do not command the language even after several decades in the country. The serious criminality of young Muslim boys and men is ignored, or explained away by overcrowded housing and social exclusion.
Even Muslims’ dominant place on terrorism lists must, at all costs, be ignored or at least explained away.
In a speech in 2024, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum stated that approximately 75 per cent of the agency’s counter-terrorism work was directed against Islamist extremism. And of the more than 40,000 individuals reportedly on watch lists for terrorism, the majority are Islamist extremists.
“Integration”
As regards the magical word “integration”, certain areas in both the United Kingdom and Norway are almost unrecognisable compared with how they appeared half a century ago.
Arabic or Urdu are as widespread on the streets as English or Norwegian. Mosques are everywhere, and many Sharia councils operate throughout England and Wales.
In 2003, the then Minister of Local Government, Erna Solberg, led an inquiry into Sharia councils in Norway.
– There is clearly a desire for such a court, if we can find a way to establish it in Norway, Solberg said at the time.
Is this really integration?
Do people even realise how bad things have gotten in Britain?
Who Is Supposed to Adapt?
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the issue is not that integration does not mean that Muslim immigrants should adapt to our laws, rules and traditions. It is the indigenous population that is supposed to adapt to the wishes of the invading forces.
Woe betide anyone who wears a cross around their neck at work. Meanwhile, Muslims are granted prayer rooms and time off several times a day to bow before Allah with their backsides in the air. Incidentally, is anyone preventing Muslim women from wearing the hijab as part of a uniform?
Roads in London blocked by Muslims at prayer. Photo: Facebook/ Converts to Islam
Muslims Are to Be Respected and Celebrated
The BBC course concludes with an exhortation to help create “a BBC where Muslim identity is not only respected but celebrated”. Davies finds this outrageous.
Why should I “celebrate” Muslim identity? Or Jewish identity, for that matter? Or Christian identity?
It appears impossible to find anything about Islam that deserves respect and celebration; rather the opposite. To celebrate Muslim identity automatically entails celebrating the ideology of violence and anti-democratic forces, not to mention the contempt for Jews, Christians and non-believers that is a mandatory part of Islam. Yet Muslims possess a monopoly on such contempt.
A BBC spokesperson stated: “Any form of discrimination is unacceptable at the BBC.” But in his world, it is only Muslims who are subjected to discrimination, which does not correspond to the reality that we kaffirs experience every day, if we are foolish enough to find ourselves in an area where Islamism dominates.
Such areas are growing rapidly, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid these no-go zones.
If I had any say in the matter, the BBC would tell its employees – all of them, regardless of faith or skin colour – that the newsroom is a place for work, not for worship.
Good luck explaining that to the many Muslims who continually point out that Islam is not merely a religion; it is in fact their identity.