{"id":309,"date":"2007-04-15T09:26:12","date_gmt":"2007-04-15T08:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2007\/04\/15\/inshallah_on_the_bbc_a_cultural_cringe"},"modified":"2007-04-15T09:26:12","modified_gmt":"2007-04-15T08:26:12","slug":"inshallah_on_the_bbc_a_cultural_cringe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2007\/04\/15\/inshallah_on_the_bbc_a_cultural_cringe","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Inshallah&#8221; on the BBC: a cultural cringe?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title = \"Melanie Phillips&#8217;s Diary &raquo; The Beeb&#8217;s cultural cringe\" href=\"http:\/\/www.melaniephillips.com\/diary\/?p=1490\">Melanie Phillips&#8217;s Diary &raquo; The Beeb&#8217;s cultural cringe<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Melanie Phillips reproduces emails one Brian Gilbert sent to her (not sure who he is; there is a film director by that name, but it may well not be him) in which he complained to the BBC about the use of &#8220;insha Allah&#8221; by the BBC reporter Hugh Sykes, who was reporting from Baghdad.  He insists that al-Jazeera reporters do not use phrases like &#8220;\u2018For Jesus Christ\u2019s sake\u2019 or \u2018Deo volente\u2019 or \u2018Shalom\u2019&#8221;, that &#8220;poor old sentimental, lugubrious Hugh Sykes has, in the old unfortunate phrase, \u2018gone native\u2019&#8221;, and that &#8220;many of those hoping to kill British and American soldiers, as well as innocent Iraqis, will be using the same expression regularly, and with religious intent&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Does he not realise that many of these same innocent Iraqis use the phrase all the time, as does pretty much every Muslim any time he&#8217;s talking about something that he expects to happen in the future?  The likelihood, given that Sykes was addressing a British audience, was that this was not a &#8220;cultural cringe&#8221; to the Iraqis at all, but rather the unthinking use of a phrase he heard Iraqis use all the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Melanie Phillips&#8217;s Diary &raquo; The Beeb&#8217;s cultural cringe Melanie Phillips reproduces emails one Brian Gilbert sent to her (not sure who he is; there is a film director by that name, but it may&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-melanie_phillips"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-4Z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}