Get The Frum Out

David Frum on Question Time tonight, less than three months after Richard Perle. What, exactly, do these people know about Britain? If Perle's performance was anything to go by, absolutely nothing.

The neocon inner circle are the only Americans for whom the BBC would do this, and Americans are the only foreigners at all, except perhaps for Israelis, who could expect such free holiday provision from the British license-payer. However, homegrown campus Leftists from the 1970s who have become mainstays of neoconservatism's London branch are always welcome on Question Time, as are homegrown old bag men of Pretoria and Santiago who have done the same thing.

Of course the BBC is biased. But not in the way that is usually asserted. The same is true of the Foreign Office. The appalling Matthew Gould, paid to be Britain's man in Tel Aviv but obviously being paid a lot more to function as Tel Aviv's man in the British Embassy, is finally being subjected to some sort of scrutiny, as part of the ongoing fallout from the exposure of Liam Fox's treason. Bang on cue, all hell has broken loose about "anti-Semitism".

Recalling the blood libel that all opposition to the Iraq War was anti-Semitic. That was said routinely at the time, and for a long time thereafter. They all did it. Every one of them. Harry's Place only stopped when I lately started making a fuss about it. It still crops up from time to time, there and elsewhere. The people loudest in berating Raed Salah for his own blood libel, and now attacking Paul Flynn over Matthew Gould, put it into print or onto the airwaves every single day for months, and regularly for years. They have never expressed one word of remorse, either for that or for their catastrophic war itself.

Paul Flynn is a fairly lapsed Catholic, but he would still make mincemeat of Frum on Question Time. The solidly pro-life and anti-drugs George Galloway would be sublime. But there is no chance of that. I wouldn't be surprised if Frum were "balanced" by Nick Cohen, or John Rentoul, or David Aaronovitch, or Oliver Kamm, or someone from Harry's Place, which today reprints in full and without criticism an article from a loss-making Murdoch newspaper demanding that Press TV be closed down to the benefit of Sky and Fox, and the easier to shriek us into war against Iran. There seems to have been no comeback. Breaching the paywall at The Times may be done with impunity by Harry's Place. Anyone would think that that site were funded by Rupert Murdoch. Among other people, of course...