BBC betray Britain, and Iraq- part 1

. Hazhir Teimourian is a writer and journalist, and he reviewed BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson’s latest book ‘The Wars Against Saddam: Taking The Hard Road To Baghdad’ for the Literary Review this month (unfortunately offline at the moment). Teimourian’s review is headed ‘The BBC Tribe At War’. The headline caught my attention, and what he had to say held it completely.

Teimourian is of Kurdish origin, but has lived in Britain and been associated with the BBC for over thirty years. He is an accepted expert on Middle Eastern conflict. Nevertheless, he approaches Simpson’s book warily because he believes that Simpson, and the BBC World Service,

‘loses no opportunity to denigrate Britain’.

While praising the ways that in parts of the book Simpson captures events he has been a part of, he accuses him in one place of mounting ‘a tribal defence of the BBC in Baghdad’.

The title of Simpson’s latest book is, he argues,

bound to light up the heart of every Arab nationalist and Muslim zealot, implying that all of Saddam’s wars were imposed on him by the wicked West.

Teimourian also criticises the failure of Simpson’s book to hold to account the Ba’thist hierarchy- including Saddam- for its desolation of Iraq. Simpson, he says,

‘lets Saddam off almost completely’ over the deaths of children during the era of sanctions, and ‘this book will be used all over the world as the considered opinion of the BBC’s World Affairs Editor to ‘prove’ the inhumanity of his country’ (the UK) .

This is the same John Simpson who recently joined conspiracy theorist and BBC World presenter Nick Gowing in his indictment of US forces, accusing them of the ‘ultimate form of censorship’ in killing journalists in Iraq. If the World Affairs Editor of the BBC expresses his views in this way (and there is plenty more ‘rich’ material from Teimourian’s review of Simpson’s new book to be continued…), who can be surprised that the BBC coverage is as it is.