The BBC has been relentlessly attacking Saudi Arabia for some time now whilst, as always, telling us what a wonderful, enlightened and moderate state Iran is…or would be if it weren’t for the Great Satan which sets out to surround poor little Iran with enemies necessitating an Iranian hardline response.
Any thought that perhaps the BBC’s take on Saudi Arabia is coloured by its security correspondent’s grudge against the Saudis?
BBC correspondent Frank Gardner reveals Saudi Arabia offered him £1million in compensation when he was left wheelchair bound after being shot by Al Qaeda covering a story there but they never paid
Frank Gardner was shot on the streets of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia in 2004
The horrifying attack left his BBC cameraman Simon Cumbers dead
Now fresh batch of documents reveal he was offered £1m in compensation
But Saudis never paid up which Gardner said he was ‘pretty miffed with’
Here’s Frank analysing the situation in the Middle East…A gulf between them: Understanding the Saudi-Iran dispute
His conclusion….
When the Arab Spring protests erupted in 2011, Iran, which had crushed its own democratic protest movement two years earlier, claimed the credit for sparking reformist movements across the Arab world.
Today, Iran once again has a relatively moderate, pragmatic president in the form of Hassan Rouhani, while Saudi Arabia has embarked on a new and aggressive foreign policy that has seen it bogged down in an unwinnable war in Yemen.
Interesting to know that the Iranians claim the ‘credit’ for the Arab Spring which led to Syria et al….not the BBC narrative which blames the Iraq war and the West.
What of that ‘moderate, pragmatic’ Iran and the nasty aggressive Saudi foreign policy?
That’ll be the Iran which supports Hamas in its effort to ‘wipe Israel off the map’, which has essentially annexed Lebanon, which fights to support the murderous Assad in Syria, which interferes in Iraq and supported anyone from the Taliban to Iraqi insurgents who wanted to fight British and US troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan…and is involved in stoking the rebellion of Shia populations inside Sunni ruled states.
Aggressive Saudi Arabia? Maybe it has just-cause in the name of self defence.
The BBC complains of the brutality of the Saudi regime as it executes ‘so many’ people…why, the BBC asks, do we maintain diplomatic relations with them? Why then do we maintian diplomatic relations with the US which also has the death penalty? Or indeed Iran which has executed far more people than the Saudis and with whom we have just opened diplomatic relations.
Nicky Campbell ambushed defence secretary Michael Fallon a while back talking (18th December) about extremism and ISIS. He asked if Fallon was totally against beheaders, abusers and torturers….you could see the trap a mile off and knew what was coming next…Campbell was not now talking about ISIS…and indeed when Fallon said he was naturally against such things Campbell leapt in and gleefully demanded what he was going to do about Saudi Arabia then? All very childish and student politics, as we expect from Campbell and co.
What is curious about all the BBC’s anti-Saudi Arabia rhetoric is that, apart from never having been similarly disposed to attack Iran for its murderous regime killing gays and young girls, hanging them and flogging them, the BBC fails to mention the Saudi money and ideology that floods into the UK, and the rest of the world.
British Muslims are heavily under the influence of the Saudi fundamentalist theology, not only that but all levels of British society and the Establishment are also being subborned by Saudi money which pours into universities, schools, business and sport…the Royal Family (PBUT) and British politicians all are at the beck and call of the Saudis and their money….the FCO is infamously ‘Arab’.…including this memorable example...’Fucking Jews’….”If I had my way, the fucking international community should be sent in and if the Israelis got in the way, they’d be blown off the fucking earth.”‘
The BBC admits frequently that the Saudi ‘brutality’ is guided by Islamic sharia law and yet they fail to link that to what is being brought into this country. If it is bad in Saudi Arabia which is a Muslim country how much more unacceptable is such culture and law in a secular western democracy? The BBC don’t like to ask in case some people of a certain ideology get upset….one of them might be their favourite extremist poster boy, Moazzam Begg, against whom the evidence of his extremism mounts rapidly…the Mail having done a large scale exposé of him over the last couple of days…ignored totally by the BBC of course….Fanatics’ campaign of hate on campus is revealed: Islamic zealots who backed Jihadi John are poisoning the minds of students.
The BBC’s Phil Mackie (who insisted the Trojan Horse plot was a hoax) reported from Birmingham’s Green Lane Mosque and told us of how moderate it was and how it was fighting against extremism…this was the mosque which was at the centre of C4’s Dispatches ‘Undercover Mosque’ exposé of Muslim extremism…it is also a mosque with close ties to Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, it’s mission in life is Dawah…the spreading of Islam. The BBC is either entirely naive or dishonest in its reporting about such things….seemingly covering up the extremist nature of many in the Muslim community in the interest of community cohesion…which is a very short sighted approach as the extremists are just biding their time to take over.
Green Lane Mosque tells us that a Salafi Muslim…
‘Is not of the sects of the Shi’ah who hate and curse the Prophet’s Companions and claim them to be apostates, claim that the Qur’an has been altered, reject the authentic Sunnah and worship the Prophet’s Family, peace be upon them.’
Now as a Mosque, a Muslim mosque you might emphasise (not so funny when you know that the BBC disregards what Muslims say and invent their own intepretation of Islam to suit the BBC’s own narrative…there’s the Muslim Islam and the BBC Islam), you might think that they knew what they were talking about when they explained what they were about. Not so. The Mosque says there is great enmity between Sunni and Shia….the BBC begs to disagree as Frank Gardner, the expert, in the Times told us today (Pay-walled)….
Islam, a handy excuse for a squabble over power.
So the conflicts between Sunni and Shia Islam has nothing to do with Islam or religion per se…it’s all about power…but power of what? It’s about which religious intepretation dominates…it’s all about religion and Islam, which version of Islam is correct….and if you get the chance to read Gardner’s piece in the Times you realise the truth of that as he admits this again and again despite his headline denying the truth of that…
In practise this has led to a sort of quais-arms race for influence, with both Iran and saudi Arabia exporting and promoting their own versions of Islam.
Why does the BBC still insist on downplaying the role of Islam in conflicts around the world…and yet at the same time admits that it plays a role just as it admits the Saudi ‘brutal’ regime is guided by Sharia law and yet refuses to make the link to the export of Saudi religious fundamentalism to the UK?
Anyone even vaguely aware of the Sunni-Shia conflict (which apparently doesn’t include the BBC) knows that much of the mutual slaughter is carried out in each other’s mosques and during each other’s religious festivals – thereby ensuring that the devout are the ones to die.
Well, at least I haven’t heard much from the BBC lately about Islam being The Religion of Peace. I guess it must finally be getting through even to the BBC that people are sick and tired of that gigantic lie.
Remember the olden days, the 60s and 70s? I just about do. There was a big debate in the media then about differences within the Communist world between Chinese Communism, then undergoing the cultural revolution and Russian Communism, viewed as more settled…more rational.
And then there were all the offshoots, and satellites such as the Yugoslav model, the Rumanian model, East Germany with its wall but “comparatively higher living standards” the democratic Communists in France and Italy, the Albanians….linked with China, then there was Vietnam and Cambodia, and “socialism in the sun” in Cuba (in later years, the 80s I think, you could take a trip to Cuba with “Progressive tours”)
The recurrent themes in the media were, will there be a war between the Russian and Chinese varieties of Communism, or were the “differences” all part of a Machiavellian plot to bemuse a gullible West?
Police fought in London with Chinese demonstrators waving little red books, MI5 reputedly watched the comings and goings of Soviet fellow travellers in Collets book shop.
The point I’m trying to make is that all varieties of Communists were generally and openly viewed by government and media as subversive and a threat to western society and life. Fellow travelling with Communism was openly discouraged in mainstream culture. There were frequent stories of bibles being smuggled into Russia, of propaganda broadcasts aimed at undermining Communism behind the iron and bamboo curtains. There was a clear resolve to militarily defend against Communist aggression.
The Eastern European, Russian and Chinese emigre communities (as they were termed ) were generally vocally and vehemently anti – Communist…..how different from today!
Why is opposition not the stance with the Shia Islamic Republic of Iran and the Wahabbi Sunni Kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Qatar over their efforts to increase their influence and infiltrate their ideology into western societies?
Islam, like Communism is openly subversive of western society and lifestyle, both should be systematically propagandised against and kept somewhat further than at arms length.
Yep…odd how we kept nuclear armed armies at constant readiness in Europe to guard against an invasion by people bringing with them the Communist ideology and yet some now welcome with open arms millions who have an equally, if not worse, ideology. At least you could work down the mines if you were a female in Russia…hurray for equality!
It’s a very interesting parallel but it overlooks the strong support that communism had in the West, despite that routine condemnation. The BBC was riddled with it, even despite the permanent presence of an MI5 officer in Broadcasting House, whose job it was to watch out for subversives! Either he missed a few or they were being kept under close watch – one thinks of the traitor Philby.
Meanwhile, in academia, the pre-war love affair of the ‘intellectual’ left with communism was flourishing and in many universities taking charge. Hill (the historian and Master at Balliol), Milliband and Hobsbawm, leading ‘intellectuals’ like Iris Murdoch, film makers and TV producers… the rats were always gnawing at the wainscotting.
Beneath these prominent communists was an army of lecturers, unionists, school teachers, journalists, lawyers and other assorted ratbags, reshaping the way our system worked, from the inside.
Finally, their ‘long march through the institutions’ (the memorable phrase coined by the German communist, Rudi Dutschke) paid off. Entire academic subjects had been subverted, neo-communist views were common in many of the ‘liberal’ professions and almost universal in the arts and once the flood of cultural Marxism arrived from the USA (where it had been seeded by German communists driven out by the Nazis) the ground was set for the current subversion of Western society.
Where Islam fits is is almost accidental. So wedded was communism to multiracialism (if you want to waste a few hours in an emetic pursuit, it’s worth reading British academics on how valiantly they ‘fought against racism’ from the early 1960s to the present day) with the result that it became almost impossible for someone to stand up and say what, for example, Enoch Powell did and survive in public life.
Multiculturalism, as it became known, was so strong a doctrine among the communists and their near neighbours that they were almost literally incapable of speaking out against anything done by a ‘person of colour’ or from a different cultural background.
Here we have the root of the cognitive dissonance between the mandatory radical feminism and pacifism of the Left and the fact that Islam is most certainly neither feminist nor pacific!
The Left is paralysed. It can’t even bring itself to condemn evil because it has made it an article of faith that the West is always wrong and ‘the other’ is morally superior. It has, in effect, swallowed a poison pill which will kill it. Unless we are very strong it will kill many of us, too.
Surely the Left is not paralysed? It is more like a vibrant bride, awaiting consummation.
I see a fundamental value linking Islam and the Left – the legitimacy of lying. Each practises deceit as a virtue, corruption as both a process and a goal, and is sunk deep in a pathological appetite for power.
For the Left, the obvious truth is routinely tortured, exiled or murdered ‘for the greater good’, to preserve the vision of Utopian Marxist perfection.
For Islam, honesty is despised and decapitated in the very worship of submission itself, the psychotic veneration of a stinking, re-animated corpse of a religion.
I see each tendency recognising the banality of the other, and falling in love with its own reflected image. Islam and the Left have become the Fred and Rosemary West of cultural abduction. If fanaticism is characterised by extreme empathy between apparent opposites, that other true marriage of souls, then that is what we have here.
Regrettably, I believe it is incurable.
GCooper thanks for your post, the last paragraph in particular is masterly and horribly true.
If Russia attacked Red China from behind, Would Greece help? 🙂
OK. I’ll get my coat.
“The emotions and expectations aroused in the Arab and Iranian masses by the preachings of militant Muslim devices are much the same as those stimulated by the propaganda of Marxists. Both open up to the masses prospects of material plenty and earthly happiness. Both are directed against the West, which is seen as the source of trouble and oppression, and against “imperialism”, which is equated with capitalism, the economic basis of Western society.” J.B. Kelly ‘Islam Through The Looking Glass”.
“If the peoples of the West do not take heed of what is happening and act to halt it, they inevitably will suffer debasement of their natural lives, standards, and institutions from the penetration by Arab and Persian oil money. It is worth recalling in this connection that Moslem jurisprudence views the world in uncompromising terms, dividing it arbitrarily into dar al-Islam (Moslem territory) and dar al-harb (hostile territory), of which Western Christendom is the principal constituent
Between these two territorial entities there can exist only a state of warfare or a condition of latent hostility. If the West continues in its present abject and infirm posture toward the Arabs and Iranians, it may well contribute a third category to the Islamic order – the dar al-abid, or land of slaves.”
J.B. Kelly (writing in 1980)
‘Islam Through The Looking Glass’
Interesting to know that the Iranians claim the ‘credit’ for the Arab Spring which led to Syria et al….not the BBC narrative which blames the Iraq war and the West.
Could I suggest neither? The Arab Spring can be said to have started on December 17, 2010, with Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia. The protests in Iran did indeed precede them in 1999 but Bouazizi’s act was in protest of the confiscation of his wares and the harassment and humiliation that he reported was inflicted on him by a municipal official and her aides. No connection with Iran or Iraq.
Street names: How Iran honours its ‘heroes’
I suppose one day the BBC might report that the Palestine Authority does the same thing with its
terroristsheroes.One thing that the BBC doesn’t mention is that Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr may have been guilty as charged. He wasn’t violent but did campaign for the overthrow of the Saudi ruling family. In Saudi Arabia that’s enough.