was devoted mostly to the topic of Christianity in London. The presenter, Emily Maitlis, noted that 70% of Londoners (in common with ~70% of the nation at the last census) describe themselves as Christians, although the media devote more time to other much less statistically significant faiths (although by far the next biggest group in the UK are those of no faith).
Whilst this makes a welcome change, the coverage seemed somewhat over-focused on the divisions within the Anglican movement over the acceptability of homosexual clergy.
I look forward, in due course, to coverage of other faiths focusing similarly on the acceptability or otherwise of homosexuality within those faiths.
I would not hold your breath – Nick Berg and Theo Van Gogh have shown the BBC inter alia just how far to skirt such issues with the followers of the Mecca Trader.
As for homosexuality as it seeks to fuse with the Christian Church into a new amalgam we do not need to ask for which group the BBC serves as cheerleader.
As for Non-Believers being a significant group the BBC has catered for that by appointing atheist Robert Piggott as Head of BBC Religious Broadcasting
On the topic of religion at the Beeb,after Jonathan Freedlands’ outrageous article in the Guardian claiming that antisemitism amongst the Islamic world has its roots in Europe and the Nazis, The BBc are following this religious vein (it is Christmas after all!, at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4531520.stm
Hounding and oppression of Iraqi Christians is the fault of the Evil Amerikkkans and their stormtroupers.
Obviously there was no religious persecution of Christians before the Arrival of the US christian zealots.
Strange how all those Assyrians Christians fled here throughout the 60s and 70s though.
But of course they packed bags and left for Europe etc. rather like going to Portugal on Holiday.
Next its time to Blame the JOOS for the decline and persecution of palestinian Christians.
Hanan Ashwari must be mentioned since her name is enshrined in stone at the BEeb next to Barghouti and is testimony to the wonderful entente between Muslims and Christians in the pal territories!
Then we are told how those US religious zealots wildly exaggerate the fall in the Christian population of these Islamic countries.
Time to find some Christians, no ?
We are told that there are some 10 million left in the Middle east!
Someone please work this out as a percentage of the population!
But wait! six million are in Egypt living the life of Riley (which has not yet been taken over by the muslim brotherhood)
So that leaves 4 million stretched over an area the size of Europe!
OF course Muslims have longed lived in peaceful coexistence with their Christian Brethren and that is why they are so numerous.
So don’t believe what you have read in all those ridiculous history books about having to wear heavy wooden crosses round their necks and getting bashed and humiliated once a month at Jizya payment time. Or not being allowed to ride horses or Camels.
In any case it’s only the “rich” christians who are kidnapped and beheaded by the underprivileged “Militants”.So that’s alright too.
Because of the Rigours of Life under the Brutality of the Israeli “occupation” , palestinans have packed their bags and left for Europe, the US and “Elsewhere”. No point mentioning that the “elsewhere” is mostly Israel.
Now only 2% are left! Will the BBC petition for “the right of return”?
And there’s more of this crap in the article-just read it
All i can say is it makes me very sad to see Christmas exploited in such a vile manner by the BBC.
Jonathan Freedland has his own version of The Protocols – simply that it is Christians that are behind the “global conspiracy”………….being a Guardian type he cannot hold individuals accountable for their actions but must demonise some group of which he is not a member………………
It is frankly scurrilous to engage in such polemics against Christians as they are persecuted in Iraq and other Muslim states but typically Guardian
Information obtained under The Freedom of Information Act reveals that the BBC has paid bonuses totalling £15 million to more than 10,000 employees. At the same time 4,000 have been “let go”. Makes you wonder who got the push?
The bonus figure is not in the BBC annual report but was discovered in “Broadcast” magazine. This figure does not include the £546,000 (half a million) paid to the executive board or bonuses at BBC Worldwide, apparently.
……..and I thought only the evil money lenders city bankers got outrageous bonuses! at least that’s what the BBC keeps telling me.
Needless to say the BBC has called for an increase in the Licence Tax of 2.3%. The BBC line is, “Even during a period of cost cutting it is vital to reward staff who deliver HIGH QUALITY work”.
Laugh? I nearly died. It makes you wonder what the BBC considers to be HIGH QUALITY work.
On religion, it should be noted that Christian’s are themselves divided particularly since Henry 8th in the UK and Luther in Germany: still so in Ireland, between Anglican and Holy Roman Catholics.
Germany in both world wars was largely Catholic. The catholic church stigmatised Jews for centuries. The word “Ghetto” comes from the name of a Venetian iron foundry near the site of the first ghetto in Venice. Jews were made to wear yellow hats and to pay to enter and leave the compound.
The Nazis deliberately chose the name ghetto to emphasis this point.
Here the BBC shows its ignorance on religion by lumping Catholics and Christan fundamentalists, particularly the hated American ones, into a single group.
There is nothing stopping Muslims from rejecting anti-semitism but they are drawn to it like moths to a flame. Why?
An insight into Islamic thinking is given by
the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_1490.shtml
The old West Germany was roughly half-Catholic, half-Lutheran, as it included the largely Catholic Rhineland and Bavaria; the old East, being essentially Prussia, was almost exclusively of Lutheran stock.
After unification, the Catholics ended up being in the minority as a result.
Catholics in a minority in Germany today, but they did not appear to dissent with the third Reich see;
http://www.nobeliefs.com/mementoes.htm
Well there’s only one way to truly assess the quality of output.
Let people decide whther they think it’s worth subscribing too.
Anything else is just BBC bullshit.
Does anyone know whether the BBC makes a profit?It has extensive commercial operations;books,dvd sales overseas sales of of tv series etc.If it does, why can’t this money be returned to the license fee payer;as a dividend if you like?
Catholics in a minority in Germany today, but they did not appear to dissent with the third Reich see;
The conference of German bishops excommunicated all Nazis in 1930, and in the 1932 elections forbade Catholics to vote for a Nazi
mrdgriff:
“Germany in both world wars was largely Catholic.”
http://countrystudies.us/germany/94.htm
“Prior to World War II, about two-thirds of the German population was Protestant and the remainder Roman Catholic.”
Hitlers family Catholic Church (St. Michael’s), is in Leonding, in Austria where his parents are buried. His Mother Clara was a pious Catholic. I am not judging Catholics just asking what the catholic community actually did to protect their Jewish citizens during the Fascist era in Catholic Spain under Franco and Catholic Italy under Mussolini, who gave the Vatican what they wanted, namely, their own State. Also in France and especially Poland? Apart from a token excommunication, the lesson from history is that the mixing of Faith and government can have dangerous consequences for those who are not of a particular faith. The third Reich German soldier wore a belt buckle with the Nazi symbol and the words “God with us”.
Um… Mussolini and the catholic church in Italy actually refused to hand over any jews to the nazis. Read your history, mate.
Also in France and especially Poland?
http://www.holycross.edu/departments/history/vlapomar/hiatt/hero5.htm
http://home.att.net/~faithleap/Pius_XII_7of11.htm
mrdgriff – what did you do in the War ?
As for “Gott Mit Uns” why shouldn’t a German soldier wear a belt buckle provided by his Quartermaster ?
http://www.ibka.org/en/infos/shortinfo.html
It was actually the Imperial German belt insignia.
Catholics in a minority in Germany today, but they did not appear to dissent with the third Reich see;
http://www.nobeliefs.com/mementoes.htm
mrdgriff | 16.12.05 – 9:56 am | #
Complete riubbish – go read up on Clemens August Graf von Galen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clemens_August_Graf_von_Galen
http://www.catholicculture.org/docs/doc_view.cfm?recnum=2857
http://www.cryingvoice.com/Christian_martyrs/NaPers.html
http://www.holycross.edu/departments/history/vlapomar/persecut/nazi.html
Mrdgriff – do you do any research before you sound off ? Maybe learning would better better than exposing your ignorance
Hitler greets Croatia’s wartime leader Ante Pavelic
The Vatican, Croatia and the Nazi Gold
The recent apology by Pope John Paul II holds little weight with the heirs and few elderly survivors of one of the bloodiest chapters in the Roman Catholic Church, the 1941-1945 atrocities by the Croatian Nazis known as the Ustashe. In April 1941, multi-ethnic Yugoslavia fell to the Nazis who wasted no time in installing the fanatical Ante Pavlics Catholic Ustashe in power in Croatia. With the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church and the active participation of clergy, especially Franciscan monks, the Ustashe killed 750,000 Serbs, Jews, and Roma in an orgy of violence that shocked even some of the Germans and revolted their Italian allies.
Holocuast survivors in the USA are now suing to recover hundreds of millions of dollars of property looted by the Croatian Nazis, converted to gold, and held by the Vatican Bank for safekeeping.
The Vatican secretly worked with fascism, notably supporting the puppet Nazi regime in Croatia, and crucially, it helped leading war criminals escape justice at the end of the war.
With the help of the Vatican, he organised the aptly named “Rat-lines” to get Nazi war criminals to South America – for a fee of 40%. Helped by notorious pro-Nazi Catholic priest from Croatia, Father Krujoslav Dragonovic, he helped Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon” escape, with his costs borne by the US Counter Intelligence Corps
The Vatican and Francisan order are sued in the USA
In January 2000, it was announced that Thomas Easton and Jonathan Levy, lawyers in San Francisco, USA had filed a lawsuit against the Vatican and the Fransican Order for complicity in war crimes in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. The press release from the firm states:
“More than 700,000, Serbs, Jews, Roma and former Soviet Union citizens were murdered by the Nazi puppet regime of Croatia during World War II. The Croatian Nazis, known as the Ustasha, burned villages and churches, operated slave labor and concentration camps, and committed atrocities that shocked even hardened German observers. In a scenario shockingly similar to today’s Yugoslavia, genocide wascommitted to cleanse Greater Croatia of non-Roman Catholics. Hundreds of millions of dollars of gold, property, and money was looted by the Ustasha from their victims”
Dedijer writes that “the highest dignitaries in the Roman Catholic Church gave their blessing to Ante Pavelic at a time when the so-called state of Croatia was proclaimed – at a time when the Yugoslav state and it’s army still existed”. Clerics working for the Ustashe regime took part in shocking war crimes in Yugoslavia, notably participating in the genocide at Jasenovac concentration camp, where 200,000 people were systematically murdered. For example, at one point, a Franciscan monk was camp commandant of what the second largest concentration camp of the war.
Some 240,000 were “rebaptized” into the Catholic faith by fundamentalist Clerics in “the Catholic Kingdom of Croatia” as part of the policy to “kill a third, deport a third, convert a third” of Yugoslavia’s Serbs, Jews and Roma in wartime Bosnia and Croatia (The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, Vladimar Dedijer, Anriman-Verlag, Freiburg, Germany, 1988).
The Catholic Church was not only closely involved with the Ustasha movement in wartime Croatia, it helped many Nazi war criminals escape at the end of the war, including Ante Pavelic, who fled to Argentina via the Vatican and the “ratlines” of the Vatican. In mid-year 1986 the U.S. government released documents of their counter-espionage agency, the OSS. These reveal that the Vatican had organized a safe-flight route from Europe to Argentina for Pavelic and two hundred of his advisors known by name. The fascists hid frequently during their flight in cloisters and in many instances disguised themselves as Franciscan monks (Pavelic himself escaped disguised as a Catholic priest).
The RC church in Croatia (and, perhaps even more so, in Herzgovina) also has played a major role in preventing the capture of Croatians and Bosnian/Herzegovinian Croats arraigned on war crimes charges at the Hague that occured, or were alleged to occur during the 1991-95 wars too (as indeed have the Serbian Orthodox Churches of Serbia and Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina). To varying degrees this colloboration continues today.