Gerald Warner: French murders were a red flag for Guardianista bull

DID Sarkozy’s far-right rhetoric fan flames of ethnic hatred? That was the question being asked last week by self-righteous liberal-leftists who saw in the Toulouse shootings an opportunity to redefine the French presidential election campaign.

The answer was… er… no, it did not. The murderer was a French-Algerian jihadist, not a right-wing zealot. Now a feverish repositioning is being attempted by progressives with more egg on their faces than would furnish a family-sized omelette.

It is difficult to say which implication of the original thesis was more implausible – the concept of Nicolas Sarkozy as “far-right”, or the notion that his banal vapourings could conceivably inspire people to any activity beyond reaching urgently for the television remote control. Utopians, however, are nothing if not sanguine; so the leftist media establishments on both sides of the Channel played the Toulouse card with blinkered determination.

Some time ago the liberal elite unexpectedly lost its long-standing stranglehold on the immigration issue. After decades of the thought police stifling all debate on the matter, the sheer scale of the influx provoked a concern so widespread that it became impossible to impose purdah on the public any longer. Today, dismayed leftists routinely hear comments about immigration, even from politicians, that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, when the lock-down was absolute. Any kind of utterance that contradicts their politically correct world view is anathema to those who, without any sense of irony, describe themselves as “liberals”, so they are anxious to restore the status quo ante if at all possible.

Toulouse seemed to offer an opportunity of re-imposing censorship. Last Tuesday the Guardian, the Book of Mormon for all progressive Britons, set the tone in its editorial: “Nicolas Sarkozy’s lurch to the Right has included such claims as there being too many immigrants in France, and that the French were secretly ingesting halal meat.”

Note the lofty disdain for the absurd notion that there could ever be too many immigrants in France, or anywhere else.

If you are puzzled as to why the suggestion that halal meat should be labelled for the benefit of consumers ranks as neo-fascist, when animal rights and opposition to hunting and bullfighting are the normal instincts of Guardianistas, you simply do not understand the nuances of progressive ideology.

While the Guardian led the charge in print, the BBC seized the initiative in the electronic news media. The French police were baffled as to the killer’s motives, but Auntie BBC entertained no doubts at all. Muslims and Jews were being killed, ergo this was a pogrom being conducted by the extreme Right (only the Right is extreme, the Left is “hard”). A French commentator interviewed by the BBC dared to dissent from this orthodoxy. Being French, and therefore ignorant of British media protocol, he dared to contradict the harridan interviewing him, to tell her to stop interrupting him and to insist that her right-wing conspiracy thesis had no evidence to support it. Subsequent events proved him right.

The ignorant, intolerant bias of the BBC is objectionable in a way that the idiocy of the leftist broadsheets is not: nobody has to buy today’s English-language equivalents of Pravda and Izvestia, but we are compelled to pay a licence fee to subsidise the propaganda of the present-day successor to Radio Moscow, circa 1952. No organisation, apart from the gothic pesthouse at Westminster, has more significantly contributed to the moral, intellectual and cultural decline of Britain than the BBC. In 2006, the BBC held a navel-gazing seminar at which Andrew Marr disarmingly observed that the corporation “is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias”.

So, that is all right then. Not that Auntie BBC is entirely innocent of party bias, as was most tellingly illustrated by James Naughtie’s notorious slip on the Today programme on 2 March, 2005, when he asked: “If we [sic] win the election, does Gordon Brown remain Chancellor?” The corporation’s charter comes up for renewal in 2016; if it is renewed, that will be the clearest possible indication that the decline of Britain is continuing and accelerating.

It was the Left that sought to exploit the Toulouse killings for political advantage; now its apologists are sanctimoniously warning the Right not to attempt to benefit from public reaction to this latest jihadist outrage. The one encouraging change during the past decade has been that while, across Europe, the New World Order retains the commanding heights in the media, it is no longer successful in imposing its “narrative” upon the population. «