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PBS’s Christiane Amanpour Sees Red Over ‘Pink Ladies’ in UK Fighting for Safety vs. Migrants
On Friday’s Amanpour & Co. on PBS, simulcast on CNN International, alleged feminist and host Christiane Amanpour condemned a UK women’s group fighting for the rights of women to be safe in their own country from migrants who come from Islamic cultures where women are often not treated with respect.
She claimed the “cheerful branding” of the Pink Ladies concealed a “much harsher message.”
Amanpour skipped the problems of migrant rape in Europe, most notoriously the “grooming gang” scandal -- the underage sex trafficking scandals involving men of Pakistani origin in the United Kingdom. Mentioning that is "harsh"?
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: From the United States to France to the U.K., there's no denying this is a time of rising tensions over the issue of immigration. And here in England, one anti-migrant group seems to be building a base. It's called the Pink Ladies. But behind the cheerful branding is a much harsher message. Correspondent Jomana Karadsheh went to one of their rallies….
JOMANA KARADSHEH: Meet the Pink Ladies, a new face of Britain's growing anti-immigration movement. We went to one of their Pink protests just outside London to try and understand what this is all about.
ORLA MINIHANE, ORGANIZER, THE PINK LADIES: We've got our own scumbags, our own predators and our own sex pests. We do not need to bring in more every day. Men from cultures that do not think like we do. Who treat women like third class citizens. And who think it's acceptable to marry eight- and nine-year-old girls.
When there are no reasonable arguments to offer, the press can always try guilt by association with the “far right” to intimidate opponents into silence.
KARADSHEH: This is not racism, they say. And they're not the far-right. But a lot of what we heard sounded an awful lot like the far-right's narrative.
Does that label automatically disqualify their argument? Karadsheh seems to hope so. She also apparently had a quota to abuse the “far-right” epithet, employing it five times in the sub-four-minute segment, plus one “right-wing.” In contrast, the words "Muslim" or "Islamic" were absent. Their opponents were unlabeled "advocacy groups."
KARADSHEH: Advocacy groups say exploiting the issue of violence against women and genuine safety concerns is a common far-right tactic. The Pink Ladies say they're grassroots. Women concerned about mass migration and what it means for their safety and the future of their country. Putting out catchy tunes like this one that market their agenda. This so far small group emerged a few months ago. At a time of rising tensions over migration, with the far-right seizing on that.
KARADSHEH: A lot of people looking at what's happening in the U.K. from the outside. They might say that a lot of the things that you are saying are the talking points of the far-right.
MINIHANE: What is far-right? Far-right is extremists. Far-left is extremism. How am I extremist? I'm just a mom who's worked her whole life. Who's bringing up three children. Who lives in suburbia. I don't want my daughter to be sexually assaulted by men that have come over to this country that we've got no background checks on. If that makes me a far-right, then there's something very concerning with the rhetoric, right?
KARADSHEH (voice-over): That's Orla Minihane. She's a local candidate for the right-wing populist party Reform U.K. Amid this show of pink solidarity....
After letting the Pink Ladies have their say -- to a point -- Karadsheh unleashed one of the most pathetic media “gotchas” in recent memory, a level of flyspecking scrutiny that journalists would never apply to even the most audacious left-wing claims but which she called "twisted facts that go unchecked."
KARADSHEH: The government doesn't publish detailed figures on crimes committed by asylum seekers, but there have been some high-profile cases that have put women and girls on edge. On top of that, there are the twisted facts that go unchecked.
MINIHANE: These five women have died. Have been murdered at the hands of an illegal migrant catastrophe that this government is letting happen --
KARADSHEH: Except two of the suspects in these five horrific murder cases are British nationals. But for Laura and others what they heard here was enough for them to make up their minds.
Those two "British nationals" were left unidentified, so their actual immigration background and status remains unknown. In any case, what a perverse terrain on which to defend the innocence of migrants.
According to her CNN bio, Karadsheh grew up in Amman, Jordan and studied at the Lebanese American University in Beirut.