Baddiel’s Holocaust denial doco has questionable timing and a dodgy presenter
Baddiel: how can we accept pronunciations on racism from the man who subjected black footballer Jason Lee to racist mockery as a “pineapple head” back in the 1990s?
Holocaust denial was one of the accusations against me when the Labour Party accused This Writer of anti-Semitism.
And I have clashed with David Baddiel on Twitter. He came across as a man with an agenda who was not interested in reasoned arguments.
So it is hard to adequately describe my disappointment when I heard that he had made a documentary on Holocaust denial for the BBC.
I have long since been exonerated of the Holocaust denial charge – by press regulator IPSO – and am currently engaged in a court battle with Labour over its use of false information to expel me from membership.
But Labour is currently embroiled in a leadership election and the vexed issue of alleged anti-Semitism in the party has again reared its ugly head.
In this context, don’t you find the timing of a documentary on the subject questionable?
And as for the presenter – well, my brother Beastrabban raises a very interesting point about his own past, which is arguably racist itself:
Baddiel used to appear in blackface wearing a pineapple and dreadlocks in order to mock the appearance of the Black footballer, Jason Lee, who was then playing for Nottingham Forest. He was taking the mick out of Lee’s hairstyle, which was a mixture of the corn rows and dreads. But this led to ‘pineapple head’ being used as a racist insult against Blacks with a similar hairstyle.
Maybe Baddiel would say it isn’t his fault that others picked up his characterisation and used it in a racist way – but the mere use of blackface is taken to be racist these days; and would racists have picked up on his character if they didn’t see racism in it already?
Note that the programme where this appeared
The Beast also points out that Baddiel’s arguments about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party aren’t very strong. Consider this attack on Jeremy Corbyn:
He also wrote a piece in the Guardian claiming that Corbyn was a terrible anti-Semite because he pronounced Jeffrey Epstein’s name ‘Epshtein’. This was supposed to be an attempt to make the deceased magnate and paedophile less English or, rather, American, by stressing his non-English-speaking origins.
It’s a rubbish argument. Unless you’re aware that Epstein, or others with the same name, are Jewish and pronounce it differently, the name looks German. And Corbyn gave it the German pronunciation. There’s nothing inherently racist in that. Consider the number of gentile Brits with foreign names, like the Eurosceptic politico Mark Francois. Presumably his surname is given the French pronunciation, but this is not taken to mean that Francois is less British.
So the documentary – Confronting Holocaust Denial with David Baddiel, February 17, 9pm, BBC2 – has questionable timing, a questionable presenter with a questionable past, and may expose its audience to questionable ideas.
Any questions?
Source: Comedian David Baddiel Presents Show Attacking Holocaust Denial | Beastrabban\’s Weblog
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In the recent book Don’t Look Back in Anger, Baddiel is interviewed about his regular Jason Lee impressions on Fantasy Football League and says that they weren’t ridiculing him because he was black, they were ridiculing him because he was a crap footballer. But this didn’t wash for me back in the 90s and it still doesn’t today. The impression made specific insult to Lee’s ethnicity and cultural heritage. Baddiel strikes me as someone who wants to straddle two camos: the Liberal intelligentsia and the hooligans on the terraces. I may be wrong, and am happy to proven so, but I seem to recall he often referred to himself as ‘p*ki looking’ at the time too.
The fact that the BBC sought to employ him for this documentary after his last appearance on the channel to wrongly claim that YouGov stats prove that Corbyn supporters believe there’s a secret Jewish cabal running the world, tells us all we need to know about the corporation these days.
Also Corbyn’s Epstein comment: to me the ‘sh’ sound was nothing more than him tripping over his words during a heated debate. As for ‘stine’ rather than ‘stein’, here in Liverpool we still pronounce the Beatles manager and the theatre that has taken his name as Epstine. Is the whole city of Liverpool anti-semitic? Given that we overwhelmingly voted Labour at the last GE I imagine Baddiel would say that we must be.
According to Baddiel it must be antisemitic to say ‘Frankenstein’ rather than ‘Frankensteen.’
It would be laughable if it weren’t also so sad.
Baddiel is to Frank Skinner (And Rob Newman for that matter) what Andrew Ridgeley was to George Michael.
Imagine him watching this – he’d have convusions!! But then again, the film was made by and starred talented jews.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxxSIX3fmmo
So, we can now be called, accused of AS because we don’t say words like the listener expected to hear?