Britain and America

Driving faith underground

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a commentator on religion for National Public Radio.

There are proven methods to weaken the influence of faith in public life. One is to use the power of the state to restrict religious activity or marginalize its values. Another is to simply ignore the civic contribution of religion, to act as if it doesn’t exist. In other words, maintain either a posture of attack or one of indifference. Both approaches were on display this past week in the BBC’s coverage of two national issues: prison overcrowding and gay rights.

Last week Home Secretary John Reid was raked over the coals for allegedly telling judges to give criminals lighter sentences in order to ease overcrowding. The prison population in England and Wales stands at nearly 78,000—an 85 percent spike since 1993. That includes a 26 percent jump in the number of children and young people incarcerated. As one expert told BBC Two’s Newsnight: "We’re standing on the brink of a prisons’ crisis."

That may well be the case, especially if we consider the likely outcome of swarms of young people caught in a prison maze of drugs and violence. What struck me is that hardly anyone in government—or in the BBC’s editorial shop—seems to have a clue about how to step back from the ledge. Most prisoners, after all, will eventually be released back into the community. But Britain, like the United States, will watch most of them return to prison unless government seriously engages with community and faith-based groups that work effectively with inmates and ex-offenders.

In the news coverage I heard, there was almost no discussion about the problem of repeat offenders, or the profound challenges faced by ex-inmates returning to life on the outside: Most are estranged from their families, can’t hold down a steady job, lack basic literacy skills, and will struggle with drugs or alcohol. What do we expect will happen once they’re back on the streets?

Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative Party leader, has been a trailblazer in promoting the redemptive work of community and faith-based groups. His Centre for Social Justice is one of the most important sources of sound policy and best practices. It would be a useful thing if more politicians from all the parties, along with editors from the BBC, spent time with religious organizations such as Prison Fellowship, the largest faith-based prison ministry in the world. I’ve traveled into maximum security prisons with the group’s founder, Charles Colson, and seen their transformative work up close. It beats the Nanny State hands down.

"We will only tackle the deepest manifestations of poverty and alienation," writes Iain Duncan Smith, "when we rebuild the people-sized institutions of free society." Religious organizations are crucial players in this project of rebuilding. A trip or two into prison with these "people-sized institutions" could help cure the spiritual tone-deafness that seems to afflict politicians and media types alike.

Nasty and Small

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a commentator on religion for National Public Radio.

For several turbulent days last week, the BBC helped to fix the nation’s distressed gaze on an “international incident” between the governments of India and Great Britain. The British prime minister condemned an alleged home-grown atrocity against an Indian national in the most somber tones. Indian Minister for External Affairs Anand Sharma called it “unacceptable in any civilized society.” Angry mobs gathered in cities across India to burn figures in effigy. Chancellor Gordon Brown, traveling in the country, punctuated his schedule with a press conference. And Anglican Archbishop John Sentamu pleaded with Britons to cast out one of the “modern demons of our time.”

The incident, of course, was the racist row orchestrated by two house residents on the Channel 4 reality show Celebrity Big Brother. That such a petty, fribbling exchange could animate public discourse for days on end says something about the success of militant multiculturalism.

Millions of Britons stood on tip toe, it seemed, waiting to see if television star Jade Goody would be booted out of the house for talking trash to Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty. Every conceivable BBC outlet - its news, entertainment and business departments across its media empire - provided hour-by-hour updates as the drama unfolded. A bewildering array of the nation’s political figures, from Tony Blair to Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, were forced to condemn the rot of racial discrimination. “I think this is racism being presented as entertainment,” Jowell said, “and I think it’s disgusting.”

There was the usual slimy, serpentine denial by corporate executives. “It is unquestionably a good thing that the programme has raised these issues and provoked such a debate,” puffed the Channel 4 chief executive Andy Duncan. “These attitudes, however distasteful, do persist. We need to confront that truth.”

Lots of truths need confronting all right, beginning with this one: Britain’s experiment in multiculturalism is creating a paranoid culture - a society that reacts with Inquisitorial fear and loathing to anything that might offend racial and ethnic minorities.

Multiculturalism has helped to produce, in the words of Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, a “collapse of national self-confidence.”  Signs of that collapse, if it can be called that, were surely on display in the Big Brother brouhaha: At times it all seemed like a morbid exercise in national self-flagellation. Archbishop Sentamu warned gravely about the “demon” of racism - but like so many others he says next to nothing about the malevolent threat of Islamist preachers and their violent challenge to democratic life. That kind of outrage would require a certain conviction about the political and religious ideals of British society. “Multiculturalism is said to promote equal treatment for all cultures,” Phillips writes in Londonistan: How Britain is Creating a Terror State Within. “But this is not true. There is one culture that it does not treat equally at all, and that is the indigenous British culture.”

Here’s another truth about the whole affair that’s worth mentioning. A media organization that panders to a multicultural ideology has abandoned its civic calling - to strengthen, not weaken, the moral foundations of the nation’s democratic culture. Think about all of the issues, domestic and foreign, that were forced off the national radar screen for most of last week: the country’s rising rates of violent crime, the debate over immigration and national security, Iran’s progress toward developing a nuclear weapon, the genocidal violence of radical Islam in Darfur. When the BBC devotes more resources to inflame a voyeuristic food fight than to help ordinary citizens grasp the existential threats to democratic life - militant Islam, for starters - it is losing its way (I’d be the first to admit that most of the American broadcast media already has lost is way).

There were a few bright spots in the Big Brother storm. Conservative Party leader David Cameron, who sounded like one of the few adults in the conversation, simply told the BBC interviewer that people should turn off their television sets. At least 40,000 people fired off complaints to Channel 4, while 82 percent of the audience voted Goody off the show. The chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, a program sponsor, announced that his company was yanking its support. A UK chain pulled Goody’s perfume line from its shelves.

Even Jade Goody, whose insecurity and self-obsession seem boundless, appeared to suffer a pang of conscience. She weepily confessed that her outbursts were indeed racist and called her behavior “nasty and small.”

Yes, nasty and small. She had lots of company.

The BBC's failure to tell the whole truth about the recent executions in Iraq

This weekly series, by Joseph Loconte, is devoted to critiquing—from the perspective of an American journalist living in London—the reporting and commentary by the BBC on political and cultural issues important to Britons and Americans.  Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and a commentator on religion for National Public Radio. His most recent book is The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm.

Let’s start with the BBC’s weekend coverage of the execution of Saddam Hussein’s tag-team merchants of death, Barzan al-Takriti and Awad Hamad al-Bandar. The report notes in passing that Tikriti led Saddam’s secret police, the Mukhabarat, and that Bandar was a top judge in the Ba’thist regime. Here’s the opening paragraph announcing the event to the BBC’s millions of readers and listeners worldwide: “Two of Saddam Hussein’s key aides have been hanged in Baghdad, two weeks after the chaotic execution of the former Iraqi president.” Now note the sentence immediately following: “Officials stressed this time there had been ‘no violations,’ but Saddam Hussein’s half-brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, was decapitated as he hung.”

You get the point. The brief report, like the bulk of the BBC’s news coverage of this event, focused on the manner of these latest executions—apparently what its editors and reporters found most offensive. Yet, in their blinkered moral vision, they mostly ignored the macabre wickedness that both men meted out upon the Iraqi people.

We learned virtually nothing of the fearsome and deadly reach of Takriti’s Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service—a vast cadre of jack-booted thugs, any one of whom would make Orwell’s Big Brother look like a doting nanny. If the BBC had a more honest sense of its civic responsibilities, it would have reminded us of some of the Mukhabarat’s many methods for enforcing Saddam’s reign of terror. You can read about these activities in an excellent September 2002 report by scholar Ibrahim al-Marashi in The Middle East Review of International Affairs. They included: 1) monitoring (i.e., spying on, infiltrating) all grass-roots organizations 2) suppressing (i.e., arresting and/or assassinating) leaders of Shi’a, Kurdish and other opposition groups 3) maintaining a massive network of informants 4) targeting for arrest or assassination any individual considered threatening to the regime 5) conducting sabotage, subversion and terrorist operations abroad and 6) murdering opposition elements outside Iraq. This was the same Mukhabarat that tried to assassinate President George H.W. Bush during a visit to Kuwait in 1993.