You can find Part One of this piece by clicking HERE.
Those of us who live in ostensibly free countries are at the moment, ‘cursed to live in interesting times’. We are living with some extreme issues that are often the result of either Islam itself, or a result of pandering to Islam by politicians and the media, and it is the media that is the subject of this section of ‘Sources for Courses’.
If you’ve grown up in a Western society where the media has been more or less honest, or at the very least is percieved to be honest, then you may not have been taught to check your sources as thoroughly as I was taught when I trained to be a Court Reporter. If you are brought up to trust some media then you are more than likely to not be inclined to drill down and sniff out agendas. To give an example. For decades the BBC has been seen as a trustworthy and impartial producer of news. The BBC had a stunning reputation for its foreign reporting and was one of those outlets that were a light in the darkness for people in occupied Europe during WWII. Also to those imprisoned in oppressive Communist regimes during the Cold War it was a lifeline to the outside world. It’s a reputation that many news organisations lust after and desire.
However not anymore. The BBC has become a byword for bent journalism. Many decades of being a huge media player and being able to buck the market because of the cash generated by TV and before that Radio Licences have created a ‘state within a state’, a sort of ‘Beebworld’ if you like. You only have to look at how it reports on things such as the counterjihad movement or the conflict between Israel and Muslim Arab terrorists or the European Union or many other issues to see that it is a media organisation with a heavily Leftist slant these days.
These criticisms do not just apply to the BBC. They can apply to other broadcasters and media outlets. Sky News, the American networks and the state and semi-state broadcasters of European nations can also be criticised for their coverage of certain issues. Because of this, we should treat media and especially news media like we would a pint of milk of uncertain vintage. We wouldn’t take a big gulp out of a questionable pint of milk without thinking, we would open the bottle and give it a good sniff first to see if it had gone off.
With so much of what some call the mainstream media acting as if it is a bottle of semi rancid milk it is no wonder that people like to transfer to alternative media. Unfortunately people are not applying the sniff test to this alternative media, when it’s something they really should be doing. I see many examples of people sharing stuff from sources that if they thought carefully about it they would have nothing to do with.
Before I go on to give details of two examples of things that people should maybe sniff a bit harder at before sharing let me say this. A growing number of people are seeing that our mainstream media is bent, and not reporting honestly on some of the stories that they should be reporting on, such as the ongoing scandal of Islamic Rape Gangs in the United Kingdom. Because of this obvious bias and bentness on the part of the likes of the BBC, people are consuming questionable alternative media because these dodgy sources ARE reporting at least some of what the mainstream media is not reporting. This means that individuals are treating some pretty iffy outlets as honest brokers and sharing stuff from them without thought and without submitting those outlets and websites to the ‘sniff test’.
To unthinkingly share stuff that comes from these places does yourself the person who shared stuff, and more importantly the causes of counterjihad, patriotism and freedom no favours at all.
Now we get onto the two examples that I present before you today. They are not the only sources that are questionable but they are some of the most obvious and high profile.
The first example is a website called ‘Veterans Today’. To the casual reader or the reader not trained as I was in checking sources as far as practicable, the front end looks reasonable. It’s well set out and looks like the site of a well funded professional media organisation. There’s a world news page, coverage of the US 2016 election campaign and similar stuff. However once you start to drill down even slightly into VT, you start to find much more disturbing stuff. It doesn’t take long before you come across tin foil hattery conspiracy theory stuff and rampant Jew-hatred disguised under the codeword ‘Khazarism’ or ‘Khazarist’. If you’ve read Fahrenheit211’s ‘About‘ page or seen THIS article on why I’m an opponent of tin foil hattery, then you can understand some of my objections to the Veterans Today website and similar outlets. Apart from VT being a site that is full of the sort of ‘Zionist plot’ guff that you could quite easily find also coming out of the mouth of some uneducated Pakistani peasant, quoting stuff from VT and similar sites is a credibility killer. If you, as I do, wish to convince the man on the Clapham Omnibus that the ideology of Islam is a threat to him and his children, then what we need to use is facts to base our arguments on. Equally importantly it’s vital use facts from places that are not going to be ripped apart by anyone with an IQ slightly above lukewarm. If you quote from distasteful, anti-Semitic, tin foil hatter type sites that often only have a passing relationship to proper journalism, then you can expect your views to be ignored or sidelined.
The second example of a highly questionable source is a site called The New Observer. Again this site has got itself a reputation for reporting stuff that the BBC and other state or semi-state broadcasters will not touch. However, like Veterans Today, you don’t have to dig down very far to find tin foil hattery nonsense about ‘Rothschilds’ or similar anti-Semitic memes along with dubious ‘racial science’ stuff. Like similar sites, The New Observer looks professional, there’s pictures of those titans of statesmanship George Washington and Thomas Jefferson on the masthead, the layout is engaging and it looks like a proper alternative news site. There’s stuff on there about the current problems Europe is having with Islamic migration and Islamic jihad and the Muslim crime wave that Germany is currently suffering from.
However you don’t have to scroll down very far to find racial science guff, and a further scroll down finds anti-Semitic canards such as ‘Jews were behind Bolshevism’. The reality, and in this case Wikipedia is much more trustworthy on this issue, as it is at least quoting its sources, is that out of 23,000 members of the Bolshevik party on the eve of the 1917 revolution, only 364 were known to be ethnic Jews. To put things in a historical perspective, which we should do at this point, we need to understand that the Tsarist period was well known for appalling discrimination against Jews (my wife’s grandmother eventually fled/was rescued from this sort of thing so I know a little of what I’m talking about). Because of this discrimination and outright violence meted out to people who only wanted to peacefully worship their own god in their own way, some and I emphasise some, Jews looked for earthly instead of spiritual salvation. In their desperation they grabbed onto something, Marxism, that looked like a lifebelt but turned out to be anything but, and ultimately the Jews of the Soviet Union paid the price. There have been periods when there has been a ‘Jewish Left’ just as their has been a Christian ‘Left’ (Remember the ‘Honest to God’ book and furore of the 1960’s or Christian Liberation Theology?) and a Hindu Left and a secular Left. You don’t have to be of any particular religious background to be a Leftist merely be in favour of collectivism, as I once was, but am no longer.
So much for the idea of ‘Jewish bolshevism’ stuff then. So if this heavily promoted part of New Observer can be shown to be guff, how much else on there is guff?
Let’s have a look at some of the ‘racial science stuff’ they’ve got on their site. Firstly here’s my position. I don’t believe that there are any inherent genetic differences between different races. Any difference in things like IQ for example are down to culture, which is often determined by both environment and by whatever is the dominant religious ideology governing a particular people.
A hypothetical culture that has no or few challenges, has a reasonably easy to get food source with a climate that is relatively predictable, is not going to produce great science or great literature. Couple that in with religious ideologies that encourage fatalism and risky personal and genetic practises such as multigenerational first cousin marriage and you have a recipe for people whose IQ is in some cases lower than those whose cultures have been tempered in the furnace of religious questioning, challenges to food production that can only be met by the application of science a respect for learning, a climate that is harsh and ever changing and moral codes that prevent risky reproductive behaviours. Necessity really is the mother of invention, if there is no necessity then it’s unlikely that you or your culture will invent stuff. This is why we see problems with a clash of civilisations and whole national and cultural cohorts where only 65% of the population can read or write. There was no need or desire for these cultures to change and therefore no need for an educated literate population.
My experience and my reading has taught me that it’s not the colour of a persons skin that is important, but the content of their headspace. Sometimes cultures create headspaces that produce people who are violent, are disrespectful of learning, are parasitical or lazy or unmotivated to discover new things. Those who say things like ‘black people are lazy and criminal’ have obviously never encountered middle class black citizens or the struggling hard working black single mother who is trying desperately to keep her son from falling for the bright lights and bling of the ghetto crime culture. A culture I might add which has been all often mistakenly lauded by mainstream media and the political Left.
So here we have two widely disseminated sources, Veterans Today and The New Observer whose political and ethical positions can quite easily be picked apart. They can be picked apart and shown to be stuffed full of Jew-hatred and also hatred for people based on the colour of their skin. I and many others out there like to consider myself as a ‘ethical counterjihadist’. I know for example that Islam is a threat to many Western countries and a threat to Western values. Islam is also, I must stress also a threat to those living as Muslims in Islamic cultures who question Islam and its ideology. However, I prefer to fight the very real threats to our existence without having to resort to the sort of racialist tin foil hat knobwittery that characterises the two sources that I’ve picked out today.
Sources do matter, they really do. The choice of a source makes the difference between whether an unconvinced reader of what you’ve quoted takes you seriously or not. I prefer to be taken seriously rather than be dismissed as a ‘loon’, therefore I check as far as possible the probity of a source. I drill down into websites to see what else the publisher is saying, I go back a week at least on people’s Twitter timelines or Facebook pages before I decide whether or not to follow this person or share what they’ve said. Even with relatively sane alternative media such as Brietbart, I don’t take things entirely on trust and check where they are quoting from, who they are quoting, whose written the Brietbart piece and what sort of people the comment section is attracting. All writers and indeed all humans have some form of bias, that cannot and indeed should not be eliminated (it would be a bland world indeed if all bias was eradicated) but it is something that we should be aware of.
If we consider ourselves as part of the counterjihad then we owe it to the wider movement to be accurate and honest in what we say. If we blindly quote questionable sources about this or that aspect of Islamic activity and it later or sooner turns out that what we’ve quoted is false, then we damage the whole idea of counterjihad. It really is a case of ‘fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me’. I’m proud of this blog I’ve created. I’ve put out approximately three quarters of a million words on here and I’ve only had to publicly apologise for about 3,000 of these words due to factual inaccuracy or mistakenly using a dodgy source. I think, although I say so myself, that this is a figure that many mainstream newspapers would like to boast about.
To conclude, my advice to those of a counterjihad persuasion on social media or others engaged in counterjihad writing or campaigning is this: Be accurate, be truthful and take the time to check the sources that you use. It may mean that you gain less followers or build your readership less quickly, but at least you will be able to sleep more easy at night knowing you’ve done your best to be truthful.
We cannot win this war against the aggressive ideology of Islam with lies. We cannot counter Islamic lies with lies of our own as that is the way of madness, widespread distrust and ultimate failure. We need to win this battle for the sake of our children and grandchildren, but we need to do it with accurate weapons which are skillfully wielded. The problem is I’m seeing too many people using the wrong weapons clumsily used and that sort of behaviour can only bring defeat for all of us.
Links and Sources
‘Sources for Courses ‘ Part One
https://www.fahrenheit211.net/2016/03/02/sources-for-courses-part-one/
The Fahrenheit211 ‘About’ page
https://www.fahrenheit211.net/about/
Why I’m opposed to conspiracy theories
The dodgy ‘Veterans Today’ website
The equally dodgy website ‘The New Observer’
Wikipedia page on the myth of ‘Jewish bolshevism’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism
The ‘Honest to God’ Wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honest_to_God
Amazon page with Honest to God on sale
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Honest-God-Classics-John-Robinson/dp/0334028515
Britannica on ‘Liberation Theology’
http://www.britannica.com/topic/liberation-theology
The Snopes website, always a good port of call to check things that are widely distributed but later turn out to be fake
One such bit of fakery that has unfortunately done the rounds of the counterjihad community is this alleged poster about how refugees are able to freely rape in Finland.
Here’s the image
and the background to this can be found via the link below
