A Staff Reporter
Remember that peculiar article in the Guardian after it fired Dilpazier Aslam? It was two weeks ago now, but I want to mumble a few belated words.
Rightwing bloggers from the US, where the Guardian has a large online following, were behind the targeting last week of a trainee Guardian journalist who wrote a comment piece which they did not care for about the London bombings. The story is a demonstration of the way the ‘blogosphere’ can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed.
That’s peculiar stuff. There were leftwing bloggers not from the US who criticized Aslam. And why call it ‘targeting’? (To make it sound illegitimate, that’s why.) And ‘did not care for’ is a silly way to characterize the issue. And what is this ‘obsessively personalised attacks’ business? It was disagreement and criticism; it was neither obsessive, nor any more personalised than any other disagreement with and criticism of a particular commenter is, and it was not an attack. So what’s up with all the rhetoric?
These ravings were posted alongside more legitimate questions as to whether a newspaper should employ a reporter who belongs to a controversial political group linked to the promotion of anti-semitic views. Aslam’s comment piece…did not mention that the author was a member of the radical but non-violent Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, proscribed in Germany and Holland as anti-semitic.
There it is again – that word ‘radical’. Along with ‘controversial,’ which is an anodyne way of describing Hizb ut-Tahrir. That’s one reason I want to mumble a few words. I think the Guardian has that problem I mentioned the other day, about getting all confused when the word ‘radical’ turns up. Yeah, Hizb ut-Tahrir is radical, but not in the way Greens or socialists are radical. It looks to me as if the Guardian kind of thought they were. You know – angry, militant, activist, radical, sassy, boat-rocking – it’s all kind of the same thing. Well – no.
Scott Burgess, a blogger from New Orleans who recently moved to London, spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian…
Spends his time indoors?? Oh, come on…
Indoors-staying Burgess quotes from Private Eye’s take on the Guardian’s silly-looking hissy fit.
Nothing in the brief Guardian career of Dilpazier Aslam – even the “exclusive interview” he conducted back in March with Shabina Begum, the girl whose legal fight to wear the jilbab was backed by Hizb-ut-Tahir, the same radical group of which he himself was a member – became him like the leaving of it. When the paper belatedly decided on 22 July that his ‘continuing membership of the organisation was incompatible with his continued employment by the company’, it was not without a last shriek of defiance on its website. A lengthy rant claimed that ‘right-wing bloggers in the US were behind the targeting’ of Mr Aslam, pointing out that ‘the ‘blogosphere’ can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed’, before mounting one of its own, on ‘Scott Burgess, a blogger who spends his time indoors posting repeated attacks on the Guardian’. And who was the author of this piece which sneered at bloggers for their anonymity and the speed at which they rushed to judgement on the net? ‘A staff reporter’.
The thing that Scott Burgess reports that I didn’t know, however, is that the ‘staff reporter’ byline is unusual – very unusual. I wondered about it – I certainly noticed it, because as soon as I started reading that truly ridiculous article, I wanted to know what buffoon had perpetrated it, and was a bit staggered to be unable to – but I didn’t realize how unusual it was.
In fact, a search of the Guardian archives indicates that, within the last 3 years, a total of only three stories have been published completely without attribution. Two of these involved memorial services for individuals associated with the newspaper, and one was filed from Zimbabwe by a reporter with very good reasons for anonymity.
Not the Guardian’s finest hour.
Of course, back when the Guardian was the Manchester Guardian it was a Radical newspaper, in the sense of generally promoting the viewpoint of the Radical wing of the Liberal party. Maybe the word “radical” still makes them all warm and fuzzy inside …
Some more points about that Guardian article by the “staff reporter”. In Guardian-speak “right-wing” immediately signals to readers that the views of the individual concerned are at the least questionable, and probably disreputable. It plays the role of a “boo” word, in the sense meant by Orwell when he wrote about platform speakers at Labour Party conferences using “cheer” and “boo” words to trigger an appropriate response (and approbation for the speaker) from the audience.
Note that the “staff reporter” uses the cover of “a fellow blogger” (Dsquared) to provide misleading pieces of information which he/she doesn’t correct. One is that the damning quote from the Aslam article is “taken out of context”. This is false, as can be seen from the article itself at http://www.khilafah.com/home/category.php?DocumentID=1437&TagID=2
The second is that the article was written when Aslam was a teenager, when in fact he was actually 23 (and the article was signed off as Dilpazier Aslam, Middle East Correspondent).
Dsquared is quoted: “How many people posting on this blog [Daily Ablution] would like their teenage scribblings used as an assessment of their politics as an adult”. Given that the “staff reporter” was well aware that Aslam was comfortably beyond teenage when he wrote the article, the quoting of this sentence (which could easily have been omitted while still citing Dsquared’s defence of the Guardian) is dishonest.
A third erroneous statement in the Guardian article is the claim that Scott Burgess was “seeking to settle scores” – “Mr Aslam… beat him to the traineeship on the Guardian”. This is a reference to Burgess’s entertaining spoof application for a traineeship posted on his blog a little while back. Either the “staff reporter” is again being dishonest, or, more likely, he/she hasn’t done the minimal amount of investigation to ascertain the true nature of the “application”, either from the Guardian records or Burgess’s blog. (Though I suppose it is always possible that he/she saw the application and didn’t recognize it was a spoof!)
Dsquared is also quoted absolving the Guardian (“I don’t think the Guardian can be blamed for not rumbling him”). As it happens, this is contradicted in another article, published the same day, in which it is acknowledged that “Subsequent to joining the Guardian, Aslam made no secret of his membership of this political party [Hizb ut-Tahir], drawing it to the attention of several colleagues and some senior editors.
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1534494,00.html
I emailed a letter to the Guardian at the time briefly citing three erroneous items in their article. Needless to say, it wasn’t published.
Note that the article starts off by quoting the (inevitable, I’m afraid) over-the-top accusations against Aslam from the wider “blogosphere”, which immediately puts Burgess’s carefully argued and documented case in bad company, tarnishing him by association. Again, the journalist mentions the recent article by Aslam that set the affair going, but fails to reveal to Guardian readers the more important fact that (as Ophelia mentions) earlier this year he wrote up a triumphal interview with Shabina Begum without disclosing that he was a member of Hizb-ut-Tahir, the organization behind Begum’s campaign, which started when she was only thirteen years old:
“’I could scream with happiness. I’ve given hope and strength to Muslim women’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1429072,00.html
Not to mention his article on Muslim schools:
‘Islam is the secret of our success’
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1397256,00.html
All in all I’d say the article was more than “peculiar”, it was a pretty disgraceful piece of work, written under the cover of anonymity.
I’ve recently been pondering how rock music has a massive debt towards Romanticism – especially in the persona of the Byronic hero.
Later, I begian to realise that the whole of popular culture was – in turn – still ‘Romantic’ in this sense (you can find all sorts of parallells – too many to go into here).
Post the London bombings (this where this ramble approaches relevence to your peice) I’ve begun to believe that the whole post-60s liberal consensus is itself still stuck within this Romantic worldview where ‘outsiders’, ‘rebels’, ‘revolutionaries’ – that sort of thing are given a cache, a gloss, along with those leading ‘authentic’ lives (ie in the third-world) are seen as somehow more ‘human’ than the first-world and so on.
So, the people who have grown up within this atmosphere – middle-class university graduates usually – tend to see the world through this Romantic lens, and a good many of them end up working for instituations like the Guardian, the BBC, the universities themselves and other such… er ‘lefty-liberal-friendly institutions’ as it were, where such views are seen as almost the norm, certainly unquestionable.
Of course, the irony is that it is in istself as conservative and insular aas the world-views (right-wing, of course)they think they despise. And, of course, it is a wolrd view of binary oposites where those that do not fully-subscibe to the party line (like Scott Burgess) are ‘the enemy’.
Yeah, radical–>warm and fuzzy. I think that’s just it.
Agreed, Allen. I was using whatever the opposite of hyperbole is. Really I think the piece is pretty outrageous.
V. interesting about Romanticism. Nick Cohen mentioned the Romantic connection on that Radio 4 discussion yesterday, though in a different context (Romantic reaction). But the two converge, which is the point.
While browsing for something else, I came across Dsquared’s posting on the Daily Ablution that shows that even his “out of context” claim was twisted by the Guardian “staff reporter”. Dsquared alleged that Burgess’s quotes on the meaning of *Khalifah* (Caliphate) had been taken out of context, but of the quotation cited by the Guardian he wrote:
“The second excerpt above is nearest the knuckle and does look like an endorsement of violence…” Dsquared then goes on to say that it has to be seen within its context, the subject matter of the article. In other words, he is saying the opposite to what the “staff reporter” says he is saying!
http://dailyablution.blogs.com/the_daily_ablution/2005/07/sassy_suicide_b.html#comments
Seen Nick Cohen’s piece in the Observer ? It doesn’t get put more clearly…
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1544111,00.html
“Staff reporter” gets it wrong again. Boy – that staff reporter is a piece of work.
Yes indeed, saw Nick’s piece and posted link to it in News. Meant to comment on it (meaning, really, post excerpts from it) but ran out of time.
DRAT! Sorry, Chris, I accidentally deleted your comment. Meant to delete the duplicate on the other thread, and hit this one by mistake. Was able to see beginning by using back key – ‘WRT romantics there’s an essay by Micha’ – but the rest of it is Gone Forever. Unless you remember it and retype it.
The comment was an essay of sublime brilliance, and now it’s gone. Not really – it was just a jumped-up reference:
Moorcock, Michael ‘Starship Stormtroopers’ in _The Opium General’ (Pan? 1980ish).
Precis: WRT the politics of science fiction and fantasy, slags off the charismatic rebel figure. Features the fab line ‘Heroes betray us; by having them, we betray ourselves’.
And it’s online here:
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:cLpTcqawa7sJ:recollectionbooks.com/siml/library/Moorcock.htm+%22starship+stormtroopers%22&hl=en&start=2
I love this bit:
“What can this stuff [Tolkein, Heinlein] have in common with radicals of any persuasion? The simple answer is, perhaps, Romance. The dividing line between rightist Romance (Nazi insignia and myth etc.) and leftist Romance (insurgent cavalry etc.) is not always easy to determine. A stirring image is a stirring image and can be employed to raise all sorts of atavistic or infantile emotions in us. Escapist or ‘genre’ fiction appeals to these emotions. It does us no harm to escape from time to time but it can be dangerous to confuse simplified fiction with reality and that, of course, is what propaganda does.
The bandit hero — the underdog rebel — so frequently becomes the political tyrant; and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our infantile selves — what is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their ‘charm’. Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby. These are too often the revolutionary figures on whom we pin our hopes, to whom we sometimes commit our lives and whom we sometimes try to be; because we fail to distinguish fact from fiction. “
Exercise – how often has GG been decribed as ‘charming’?
Ah – good stuff.
You know…Jane Austen was fascinated by all that. The ‘charm’ of the Romantic thug. The co-existence of real charm (real in the sense of being based on some estimable qualities) and real selfishness and brutality. And how fatally easily people are suckered by it.
GG as a kind of Wickham or Henry Crawford.