Popular BBC Host Loses Job For Racist Comments

by Global News Digest

January 28, 2004

He was known as "Mr. Slik" and, in reference to his earlier career as an MP, described as "once the golden boy of politics." British media agrees that he is a smooth operator and they attribute his endurance at the top of British talk-show ratings to his ability to "schmooze a studio audience into revealing their innermost secrets."

Now, like his political career, Robert Kilroy-Silk's long reign at the head of the most highly rated BBC daytime talk-show program has come to an end.

Following weeks of agonizing deliberations, Mr. Kilroy-Silk was forced to step down as host of daytime talk show, Kilroy! - the highly rated British Broadcasting Corporation program he has hosted for the past 17 years on BBC1 television.

Kilroy-Silk was fired for an article he wrote as a freelance newspaper columnist; not for a BBC-owned publication, but for the Weekly Sunday Express. The article first appeared in the Sunday Express just after the war in Iraq in April last year. That first appearance caused hardly a ripple, but a January 4th reprint of the same story by the same paper started an avalanche of controversy that has put a serious dent on and may yet destroy Kilroy-Silks public career.

The offending newspaper article, an anti Arab diatribe -- the kind of propaganda piece one may expect to be aimed at a safe homogeneous audience in defense of a war effort -- was titled "We Owe the Arabs Nothing." It began: "We are told by some of the more hysterical critics of the war on terror that ’it is destroying the Arab world’. So? Should we be worried about that?"

The former Labor member of the British Parliament defended the idea of toppling despotic regimes in the Middle East as a legitimate war aim. He attacked Arabs, calling them "suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors." Kilroy-Silk took great liberty in turning history on its head by denying any Arab contributions to humanity. "Apart from oil - which was discovered, is produced and is paid for by the West - what do they contribute?" he asked.

It worked for him in the immediate post-war period, but Kilroy-Silk's miscalculation was to have allowed a reprint of that article eight months later. Perhaps due to the general Islamophobia that arose in Britain and elsewhere following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, which was still there in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, those Britons who might have challenged such views when the story first appeared in April felt the atmosphere inclement to do so then. Eight months after the Iraq war, however, Britons having had time to digest a lot of what came out of that war, including arguments about the nature of the information used by the British and American governments to justify going to war against Iraq and the lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction -- a major reason for the war, had a different reaction to the story. Kilroy-Silk also miscalculated in assuming that the reaction from Britain's small communities of ethnic minorities, especially the Arabs, would not be a significant factor. But he and and the newspaper were wrong about the mood in the country.

In their effort at damage control both Kilroy-Silk and Sunday Express have claimed that the reprint was done in error. Hilary Hunter, Kilroy-Silk's secretary, has been put before the media where she took the blame for sending the wrong story to Sunday Express. The newspaper attempted to shore up that position by allowing that it erred in not checking the story before printing it a second time.

Few Britons are buying any of their excuses. Unlike the silence that greeted the first appearance of the article, British Muslim groups were quick to take action the second time around. Organizations like the Muslim Council of Britain, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, the Islamic Human Rights Commission and the Islamic Affairs Central Network began a protest campaign. They circulated information raising awareness about their objections to the Kilroy-Silk article and what they saw as a pattern of anti-Arab views by the celebrated media personality. Even Ali Muhsen Hamid, the Arab League's ambassador to Britain registered his group's objections to the article with British authorities.

The campaign worked. The Muslim Council of Britain called the Kilroy-Silk piece "gratuitous anti Arab rant" and raised objection to it with the Sunday Express, the BBC and the police. Iqbal Sacranie, general secretary of the Muslim Council described the piece as having "bigoted and ill-informed ideas." He went further and call it racist. The Kilroy-Silk piece was "ignorant, extremely derogatory and indisputably racist," Sacranie was quoted in the Guardian.

Trevor Phillips, chair of the Commission for Racial Equality in Britain called the article "indisputably stupid." The CRE brought the article to police attention seeking to determine if there were grounds to sue on the basis of "incitement to racial hatred."

In Parliament Labor MP Lynne Jones canvassed for the BBC to sack Kilroy-Silk and brought in a motion calling on the House to condemn the former MP's newspaper column.

While BBC brass mulled over his fate at the national broadcaster, Kilroy-Silk and the Sunday Express went on the defensive. In various TV appearances and newspaper articles the embattled talkshow host declared that he was not a racist. His defense is based on free speech and fear of censorship. "If I am not allowed to say there are Arab states that are evil, despotic and treat women abominably, if I am not allowed to say that, which I know to be a fact, then what can I say?" he wrote in the Express. "I clearly do not believe all Arabs are suicide bombers etc. That would be stupid. As we all know, most are educated, civilized and urbane. The article was always intended to be a criticism of certain Arab regimes - never of Arab people in general."

Ibrahim Nawar, head of the Arab press freedom watchdog and Palestinian author Mona Bauwens are two significant supporters within the Arab/Middle Eastern community who support Robert Kilroy-Silk's free speech right to voice his opinion. In Parliament, Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe is another supporter. She defended his right to voice opinion and described as "quite reasonable" his comments about the treatment of women, the severing of limbs and other practices.

The Sunday Express has maintained the position that there was nothing racist in the Kilroy-Silk column that it published. The newspaper accused the BBC of "gagging free speech" and "grossly over-reacting" and demanded it reinstate the presenter.

"Whatever else I am, I am not a racist. I have done more for race relations than the Commission for Racial Equality, empowering black people and presenting them in a positive light. I have gone out of my way to do that, sometimes I might have gone too far,' Kilroy-Silk is quoted in The Observer.

Hilary Hunter, the secretary who has worked for Kilroy-Silk for six months, agrees. "The Muslim Council is just stirring up trouble. Robert is very fair-minded; and on his show he just lets everybody have their say. He is not a racist at all - he employs a black driver," she told The Observer.

Even Trevor Phillips of the CRE does not believe Robert Kilroy-Silk is personally racist, though he describes the latter's article as "indisputably stupid." Phillips suggested that Kilroy-Silk should stop parading himself as a "24-carat martyr," acknowledge he was "wrong and offensive" in his description of Arabs and issue a proper apology. Phillips also suggested that rather than defend the indefensible, Kilroy-Silk should learn something about Muslims and Arabs and support a Muslim charity. That was at a time when there was still some hope of saving the talkshow host's job.

Robert Kilroy-Silk's more severe critics point out that this latest incident is not the first time he has been caught out under a storm of racism accusations. During the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, he is said to have written that Britons should not feel any need to accommodate Britain's "resident ayatollahs" or respect their values if they refused to "accept British values and laws." He had accused "Muslims everywhere" of behaving with "equal savagery... behead[ing] criminals, stone[ing] to death female - only female - adulteresses, throw[ing] acid in the faces of women who refuse to wear the chador, mutilat[ing] the genitals of young girls and ritually abus[ing] animals."

In 1992 he described EC Commissioner Ray MacSharry -- an Irishman -- as a "redundant second-rate politician from a country peopled by peasants, priests and pixies." He later apologized.

Few British minority groups have escaped his acid pen. He has been reported as recommending, in one of his columns, intentional racial profiling of Blacks by police because young black people "show up disproportionately as offenders in gun and street crime statistics." He is also accused of advocating similar treatment for asylum seekers and visitors from Africa, eastern Europe and Asia, whom he accuses of being largely responsible for "poisoning our green and pleasant land with Aids."

The end of a 17-year career with the BBC came for Robert Kilroy Silk on Friday January 16 in a joint statement with the national broadcaster. Kilroy ceases to be the host of the daily program that bore his name for over a decade, though the show will continue to be produced by his company. Despite this face-saving deal, according to the Guardian, most BBC executives were determined Kilroy-Silk should not return to the broadcaster.

In the end it can be said that the public's need for communal harmony and the BBC's desire to appear impartial in its own broadcasts and in the public views projected by its presenters far outweighed Robert Kilroy-Silk's right to air openly prejudiced, even harmful, opinion.