Please could someone tell Jim Muir. He doesn’t seem to have a clue. He’s unapologetic about it though.
Look, we’ve had the tears for Arafat episode. How many times does the BBC need to hear that they are notto take sides?
Where to start, where Muir gives us the film-set intro or where he describes the origins of Hamas’ success as being among ‘men of undoubted and bearded piety’?
Right there, I’m angry. Does Muir not know what happened to men who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) grow beard in Afghanistan, another land of men of ‘undoubted and bearded piety’?
According to the BBC’s beloved, Amnesty, ‘Men whose beard or hair length was found not to conform with Taleban regulations were beaten, often with metal cables.’
That’s the piety of radical Islam. It’s only a bad novelist who would pretend otherwise.
But hang on a moment, is Muir implying that the movement was essentially launched through Israeli injustice in the 90’s (a vague backdrop never clearly explained)? He doesn’t bother to mention that the ‘spiritual’ leader Yassin registered it in 1978! Romance, combined with anti-factualism.
Also, against this heroic backdrop, what does it mean to talk about the ‘relatively benign’ Muslim Brotherhood. Relative to what?
And what does it mean, in what time frame, to say ‘as the situation worsened’? There is no reference point for this vaguely described trend. He surely can’t he mean as Bill Clinton bent over backwards to give the Palestinians what they wanted (excepting the destruction of Israel) through the Oslo process?
And, for Muir’s information, sending homicide bombers to kill civilians doesmake them a terrorist organisation, and not just to the eye.
The numerical argument to justify the Palestinians endorsement of this (which, btw, Muir does not acknowledge) is scandalous. Does Muir not realise that there is a crucial difference at work in the calculations- there is no definition of a Palestinian soldier from which to identify civilian deaths? Even Palestinian women and children have been suicide bombers (and I’d be interested to know, by the way, whether the bombers themselves get counted as Palestinian casualties). One theory I hold to is that the Israelis are just far more competent soldiers, so fewer get killed. Furthermore, when Palestinian suicide bombers attack, they go for cafes, buses, the kind of place only civilians are: Israeli military casualties indicate failure due to interception (at least regarding the dominant means of murdering, suicide bombing). The opposite is the case for Israelis offensives against Palestinians, where civilian casualties are a major propaganda defeat. Muir is so uninformative it is quite literally unreal.
There was no justification for a vote for the murderers. That is the only defence the Palestinians have: that of lack of choice. Which makes a mockery of Muir’s last sentence, ‘And many Arab regimes, on which Yasser Arafat modelled his Palestinian set-up, must also be shuddering at the thought of what might happen if real democracy is let loose on them.’
I could go on. A dozen or so brazen lies demand hundreds of points of refutation; that’s the nature of a real lie. But hopefully people in the comments will continue the work. Fisks away! (there’s so much more to say! And thank you, too, because I’m not sure I’d have found this Muir fabrication without comments- especially DFH, whose excellent blog also makes its point).
Re: RSS feed.
I have to admit to a certain stubborn technophobia, which is quite silly in a blogger. Once I have an idea how something is done I have no problem, but until then I’m at a loss. I tend to rely on other members to take the initiative in things like this; I agree it would be helpful. No-one yet has, though I know some who are much more savvy than I technicaly speaking. I think I will send an email about it to some people who might act on this suggestion. Or someone could lay out the instructions here in the comments boxes and I’ll do my best with them.
Cheers.
Meanwhile one of the Jocks in my regiment was killed today and all some people seem to worry about is that he is the 99th to die etc. Actually he is the 76th; the others died in road accidents, suicides etc but that doesn’t stop some people trying to make a bad situation worse…more soldiers have died in road traffic accidents in NI and Germany than in action so why aren’t these statistics added to the overall figures for NI for example? Answer: it does not fit the bill for the ‘correct facts’ in their version of the story…
The former US President, Bill Clinton, twice elected on minority voting, spoke of “anti-muslim prejudice”. It should be noted that the word ‘prejudice’ means judgement prior to the facts against which a person or creed should be judged. I’m judging islam (and the behaviour of its adherents) after a whole suite of violent and distasteful events and patterns. The ‘prejudice’ is, in fact, a verdict: islam is a barbaric doctrine which is completely incompatible with real human rights.
But, if one says that out loud, the BBC will attempt to jail him who dares to say so.
sorry to hear that dave t – my sympathies to yourself and the other members of your brave regiment.
Veering back onto topic (sort of), I wonder if the BBC’s grandes fromages are having the odd restless night thinking about how they will shape their Middle East coverage following Hamas’s victory?
When Hamas, the new PA government, sends its next plumber into Israel, we will be in new territory because a terrorist attack could reasonably be seen as an act of war.
Can the BBC justifiably continue to call Hamas a ‘militant Islamic group’ given that it is now the governing party of the ‘Territories’ (i.e. Hamas IS ‘Palestine’)?
Emanuele Ottolenghi describes the situation better than I ever could.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/ottolenghi200601261002.asp
archduke: Thank you
Jim Muis extolling the virtues of the fluffy-bunnies of Hamas again:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4655716.stm
I am impressed with his optimism and I hope he is proved correct. That said, it is hard to see how the Hamas Covenant sits with the “flexible openness” that Muir refers to.
Oh well. Muir is the expert, after all. I naively thought that Hamas wanted to wipe Israel off the map because they hate Jews and believe that the land that Israel occupies belongs to them and their co-religionists.
no probs dave t – just letting you know that we’re getting sick to death of this anti-war crap from the bbc.
when was the last time you saw a bbc report about the british army rebuilding and opening a school in basra? think about it. never? thought so.
why isnt there at least a kind of once-a-week-roundup about what the british army is doing out there, interviewing the troops out there, asking what they are doing to help the iraqis – stuff like that, human interest stuff?
bugger all.
sickens me that brave British soldiers are putting their lives on the line for democracy, and theres bugger all from the bbc about it – instead they pander to the Hamas fascists. sickens me to the core, it really does.
Same here, Dave… my deepest sympathies! Here’s to the brave people who defend our freedom.
archduke,
where would libertarianism fit? extreme right? but that would lump it in with the BNP.
No, the BNP, SNP, and WNP are all very similar, left-wing parties, with added anti-English racism in the latter two cases.
Archduke, please do excuse me, for I had (quite obviously) not noticed your 6:56 message.
What are political parties anyway ? What gives them any legitimacy ? We know the history of Labour and Conservative but not who is really behind them; and the LibDems are really a hybrid of two third parties fused into a messy compromise which noone quite remembers…………….and the BNP is probably a creation of MI5 to attract misfits so noone like Mosley can emerge as a credible force as in 1931.
Political parties are just corporations which go ‘vote-harvesting’ so they can get access to cash-flow and feather their own nests through the spoils system and distribution of contracts.
Rick,
It’s why The Enron Chancellors (Gordo’s) plan to fund political parties via extortion is so wrong.
rick -> reminds me of the old story that half of the British Communist Party was MI5 , the other half KGB, with a sprinkling of CIA keeping an eye on both of them.
if MI5 can get agents into Sinn Fein and have them there undetected for decades, its not beyond reason that your thesis has credibility.
Dave T, Having just left my condolences on ARRSE, I fear that the press are already planning a reprise for when the total of combat fatalities reaches 100.
Headline “Soldiers killed in war” isn’t very useful.
How does the risks compare to say training or even the building industry?
yet more sucking-up-to-genocidal-fascists crap from Jim Muir
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4655716.stm
hamas is a “radical guerrilla movement”
BBC still havent changed this misleading headline:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4663742.stm
which you can see on here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/default.stm
why not “EU and US in agreement”?
> hamas is a “radical guerrilla movement”
More like a radical orangutang movement. i.e. soon to be extinct.
A radical gorilla bowel movement.
Full of sh*t.
I wonder if Muir really does see Hamas as romantic beret-clad figures, outmanned and outgunned but nevertheless bravely resisting the powerful enemy army.
Or whether he simply does what he feels has to be done to keep his BBC job and his head on his neck.
Whatever the case, the disassociation from reality is extraordinary.
“Also, against this heroic backdrop, what does it mean to talk about the ‘relatively benign’ Muslim Brotherhood. Relative to what? ”
relative, perhaps, to Israel’s state terror against Palestinians – still more dead Palestinians each yr than Israelis, many of them children…
Derek, you got lost and wandered onto the wrong site. This is a site for people who have their critical faculties intact and haven’t been brainwashed by Palestinian propaganda.
poor old Derek. must be hard for him to constantly ignore and filter out the fascist rantings of the Islamists. terribly hard work that.
Terribly hard work, ignoring and filtering out the Islamists’ fascists rantings, you say? I know of a site which makes it easy.
Derek should watch Pallywood.
As should everyone else who hasn’t seen it.
B-BBC should have a permanent link to it.
elative, perhaps, to Israel’s state terror against Palestinians – still more dead Palestinians each yr than Israelis, many of them children…
derek lane | Homepage | 31.01.06 – 5:49 pm |
This is flawed logic but rampant sentimentalism. Gaza has a birthrate of 27 per 1000 like Kosovo and is the main cause of poverty.
If the birth rate were lower parents could control their offspring better; they would have jobs, and would not need to blow themselves up or throw stones at soldiers.
In the absence of Malthusian Checks because of Welfare Payments from Japan, USA, and EU this situation will get worse.
Did you Derek also speak of “State Terror” when the Sudeten Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia ?
pallywood is available here:
http://www.seconddraft.org/movies.php
Archduke, thank you very much for providing a link to Pallywood — watching that video, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
well, if you ever wondered about the curious Palestinian “car swarm” tradition – there’s your answer.