April 19, 2012

The JC and the BNP

News has recently emerged that the Jewish Chronicle has been hosting a blog by the British National Party's London mayoral candidate, Carlos Cortiglia.

My thanks to Coventrian in the comments to the previous post who drew my attention to the Sam loves hummus blog.  Sam details the whole case together with screen grabs of the relevant pages which have now been disappeared by the JC and denied then undenied by its editor, Stephen Pollard.

In his post, Sam lists out three posts by Cortiglia, the last of which is headed, When things go wrong, we need common sense.  Sam describes this last one as "rather content free".  As an article, that's true but the expression "common sense" appears to be the name by which the BNP likes to describe its racist worldview, as in "it's not racism, it's just common sense."  I think it's also the name of some picnic event the BNP holds from time to time.

The articles not described by Sam as "rather content free" are restatements of hasbara which can often be found in reports and comments in the JC print edition and on line by JC journos who would never admit to having anything in common with the BNP though I am now reminded of when Board of Deputies spokeswoman, Ruth Smeed* described the BNP's website as "the most zionist on the web".

Many thanks to Tony Greenstein for spotting the error in calling Ruth Smeed "Ruth Smeeth" and for pointing out that she speaks for the Board of Deputies, not Gerald Ronson, I mean the Community Security Trust.

No comments:

Post a Comment