Those Cute and Cuddly Taliban Guys

Just this morning El Inglés coined the phrase “deranged altruism” to describe the suicidal impulse to do good things, even towards evil people, with destructive consequences and with no discernible benefit to oneself or one’s countrymen. Since deranged altruists are by and large atheists, their actions don’t even accrue any benefits to their immortal souls.

There’s nothing like the BBC when it comes to yoking together derangement and altruism, and the latest madness from the Beeb, as reported by today’s Daily Mail, is a classic:

TV Reporters Are Not Showing the Taliban’s Humanity, Says BBC Presenter

A BBC presenter has attacked coverage of Afghanistan’s ongoing war, claiming TV reporters are not covering the ‘humanity of the Taliban’.

Lyse Doucet, a presenter and correspondent on BBC World News, was speaking at a discussion of TV reporting of the war in the country.

Doucet, who has been at the BBC since 1983, also spoke out against the nature of the reports on Prince Harry’s deployment in Afghanistan.

The veteran correspondent and presenter, who played a key role in the BBC’s coverage of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, told the Edinburgh International Television Conference: ‘What’s lacking in the coverage of the Afghans is the sense of the humanity of the Afghans.

I have to disagree with Ms. Doucet. I think the news coverage of the Taliban has more than adequately exposed their humanity; it’s just not the sort of humanity that the BBC prefers to contemplate. If one subscribes to Rousseau’s view of human nature, the evil and darkness of the soul can be ascribed entirely to the pernicious effects of civilization, and man in his natural state is as sweet and guileless as a little child.

So the Taliban, obviously more primitive than the average BBC reporter, must therefore have a more wholesome spirit than any of the Brits. Therefore we have not been revealing their true human nature, and we must do a better job of it!

The article continues:
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‘In the Prince Harry coverage for example, there were all these people out there but you never really saw them.

‘You knew that the bombs were dropping in that direction and the guns pointing in that direction but you never got a sense of how Afghans are as a people.’

Asked what was missing in British coverage, she added: ‘It may sound odd but the humanity of the Taliban, because the Taliban are a wide, very diverse group of people.

Aha! They’re a diverse, Multicultural bunch of terrorists!

The BBC obviously needs to apply some affirmative action to its coverage of Afghanistan, so that the people who appear on the screen “look like the Taliban”, and not like those nasty unwashed creeps who put their women in burkhas, kill aid workers with their AK-47s, and keep goats and nancy boys with them in their mud-walled compounds. Those aren’t the real Taliban. The real Taliban are… well, they’re just like BBC reporters, only with turbans and lice.

‘Some of them would like to talk to the British Government. Some of them don’t want to be fighting British troops. Some of them would. This is the ideological Taliban.

‘We never have the ability or sometimes the desire to present this in a different way, so that people would be interested… it’s a regret.’

She told the conference: ‘In a country which is as complex, and as difficult and dangerous as Afghanistan you can’t really cover it properly and get the full picture unless you are there day in day out. Unless you are living there and feeling and eating the heat and the dust.’

I don’t know this particular reporter. Can any of our British readers tell me how much time Ms. Doucet has spent in the heat and the dust of Afghanistan? And I don’t mean a suite in the Kabul Hilton, either; I mean the real Afghanistan.

By the way, I don’t know if it makes any difference to her attitude, but Lyse Doucet is from Canada.


Hat tip: VH.