The Spectator’s Notes | 6 November 2010

Quite possibly the government is right. Perhaps it is impossible to win a case against the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights that prisoners must be given the vote. Perhaps it was impossible last week to prevent an increase in the EU budget. Perhaps one can never get what one wants from the European institutions. But if so, isn’t it — I speak in the mild tone of one schooled not to ‘bang on about Europe’ — a bit of a problem?

Television reports of the service of blessing for a tourist couple in the Maldives, which was actually, unknown to the couple, a stream of insults, deliberately avoided the nub of the story. Channel 4 News, for example, referred to the incident as a ‘prank’, the word also used by those who wished to play down the obscene messages left on Andrew Sachs’s answering machine by Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. The point was that the service was supposed to be an ‘Islamic blessing’. The hotel staff, speaking in their own language, which the couple could not understand, abused them for being pork-eating ‘infidels’ and therefore ‘haraam’ (unclean). Muslims were being horrible to a couple who had naively sought Muslim goodwill for their relationship. Imagine it the other way round — Christian staff putting on a ceremony for Muslims and then mocking them. There would have been no end of talk about Islamophobia, and no use of the word ‘prank’.

A comparable evasion came in the BBC’s reporting of Barack Obama’s appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The reporter was at pains to emphasise how well the President was received by his liberal audience, how it was not a disaster and so on.