Open thread – for comments of general Biased BBC interest:


Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

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312 Responses to Open thread – for comments of general Biased BBC interest:

  1. John Reith says:

    milesinfront | 10.11.06 – 1:10 pm

    Why do you have so much trouble with the phrase ‘previously accepted’.

    The Lancet figures were never ‘accepted’. They were ‘controversial’ (opposite of ‘accepted’ ) from the off and were roundly rubbished by government sources both sides of the pond.

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  2. Umbongo says:

    In the wake of another UN report on climate change (“4 times as much CO2 as originally believed”) and another inter-governmental conference in Kenya (of all places), the BBC has another “discussion” on Today about the subject. Conspicuously absent was any view sceptical, not of climate change, but of the causes of same. There was, however, plenty of pro-Democrat anti-Bush Meacher-speak (foaming about “climate change deniers” but conveniently forgetting the 97-3 defeat in the US Senate – must have been some Democrats voting – on proposals to sign up to the Kyoto protocols) accepted without challenge by the Today interviewer: the usual unapologetic BBC bias. How long will it be before climate change sceptics find themselves in the same dock as Griffin [1]?

    [1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6137722.stm

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  3. Socialism is Necrotizing says:

    Daily now the Beeb are getting in in the press

    If the BBC is dismayed to receive another pounding from this quarter, then hard cheese. Its negligence in this matter, as in so many others, shames a national broadcasting organisation that is supposedly committed to making programmes of high quality.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/11/11/do1101.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/11/11/ixopinion.html

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  4. Alan Man says:

    “Isn’t that enough?”

    It was enough for Markus Wolf to get a six year sentence for treason after German reunification. However, this was later repealed.

    He also got two year suspended sentence for unlawful detention, coercion and bodily harm.

    Even though Wolf was Stasi’s number two, he wasn’t directly responsible for spying the citizens of GDR or shooting defectors at the Berlin wall.

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  5. dave t says:

    Alan,

    In the same way that Hitler wasn’t responsible? Just because they don’t pull the trigger doesn’t make them any less responsible for the policies or orders.

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  6. Biodegradable says:

    The Lancet figures were never ‘accepted’. They were ‘controversial’ (opposite of ‘accepted’ ) from the off and were roundly rubbished by government sources both sides of the pond.
    John Reith | 11.11.06 – 9:39 am

    Forgive me if I’m wrong JR but I seem to remember you defending the Lancet study and it’s results, and the BBC’s presentation of the issue. The BBC most certainly presented them as trustworthy and a basis for rubbishing the US and UK’s presence in Iraq.

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  7. john says:

    umbongo
    The little liberal rant from Dr Evan Harris this morning was a classic Today one. Asked by the posh Bishop’s son, Ed Staunton, if inciting hatred is something we should try and stop?
    “…um not necessarily, yeh hatred, hatred exists, for example I think we should hate Nazis ok! and I think it should be reasonable for me to say we should hate Nazis, not just Nazism, but Nazis, right!, and why should I be criminalized for saying that. I think we should also hate right-wing Christian religious bigots, you know, that you see in political spheres in the United States now if we are going to protect political movements because they are quasi religious by saying you can’t incite hatred against them then you have a real problem around actual democracy it’s a price we have to pay.”

    I wonder if Dr Harris has ever seen that wonderful Honda advert and accompanying little song…
    “Hate something, change something, hate something, change something, make something better”?
    A little song for anybody who has hated! I wonder if Dr Evan Harris would object to me whistling as I sing….“I hate Liberals, not just Liberalism, but Liberals, right!”

    Is it just me or does Jim Naughtie look more like John Reid every day?
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/

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  8. will says:

    Oh dear it seems that The Times has joined the Daily Hitzballahgraph in following the BBC line

    Hamas, which has maintained a ceasefire for almost two years, is under pressure from its supporters to sanction new suicide bombings

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-2448565,00.html

    Suicide bombings break a ceasefire, but crude, home made rockets do not?

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  9. Umbongo says:

    john

    You know, I heard that stream of bile from Dr Harris. However, as a regular listener to Today I am so used to hearing political Christianity verbally abused in a way that these same abusers would shrink from in discussing political Islam, that it just went right past me. Frightening really because it means that the BBC default position (Christianity bad/Islam good) is something we’ve become used to and is almost – until you stop and think about it or, as you have done here, have it pointed out – acceptable.

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  10. Ritter says:

    Inspector Knacker’s next ‘race hate’ case?

    Archbishop attacks public atheism
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6138486.stm

    “Dr John Sentamu told lay readers illiberal atheists were undermining Britain’s religious heritage.

    Tut tut Archbishop. If Gordy Brown gets his way, comments like that will get you a couple of years porridge….

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  11. Steve E says:

    John Reith • 9/11/2006

    “The BBC has never claimed an Iraq death-toll of 655,000. Indeed, the BBC has no view on the matter.

    What the BBC has done is to report various conflicting estimates.

    The 655,000 you cite comes from the Johns Hopkins University in the US.”

    Since we’re back on topic today, John, perhaps you’d like to respond to my point of a few days ago…

    On the night that the Lancet published their report containing the figures from the Hopkins University survey, I recall that John Simpson was in the studio and was asked about how accurate the 655,00 figure actually was. You’re correct in asserting that he indeed did say that the numbers were estimates • ranging from a lower figure (which I believe was in the 300,000 mark) to the highest estimate (somewhere close to million.)
    However, Simpson was asked what HE believed the true figure was and he was happy enough to pronounce that his best estimate was 500,000.
    Was Simpson asked in a personal capacity as to his views, or was he asked as the BBC’s World Affairs Editor?

    The level of casualties in Iraq • especially for those like myself who supported, and still support, the Bush/Blair decision to invade • have been far, far more than anticipated and a grim reminder of what terrible responsibilities we ask our politicians to take on our behalf.

    What I find most concerting about some of the BBC’s reporting is their selectivity. For instance, on the night is that they chose to lead the news with the highly-controversial Lancet report, significant progress had been made in the Iraqi Parliament towards agreeing a genuine Federal structure in the country as set out in the democratically-agreed Constitution.

    The BBC chose to ignore it. Which, for an organisation which claims to have an interest in the fate of that nation (witness their twice-used tactic of having a week-long series of news broadcasts beginning with the latest casualty figures) was quite shameful.

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  12. john says:

    Did anybody notice the astonishing BBC bias last night on Any Questions?(Radio 4) The silent respect shown to NuLabour’s Lord “Charlie” Falconer by Jonathan Dimbleby even though he twice(sic) misquoted Nick Griffin’s original Keighley speech from 19 January 2004, where he described Islam as “a wicked, vicious faith” and said Muslims were turning Britain into a “multi-racial hell hole”.
    The Lord Chancellor said twice “If you say Islam is wicked and evil (sic)” and the “hell-hole” metaphor was transformed by him into the description of a “cesspit”.
    Now, how many times have you heard Jonathan Dimbleby interrupt a panellist by correcting what it is they said with the “allegedly”, or, with what was actually said?
    Strange how Dimbleby thought it ok to allow “evil” as a substitute for “vicious” Islam twice, without correcting him, or pointing out that this was never actually said by Griffin or Collet, especially as the now notorious snippet from a speech was originally recorded in a BBC documentary? The accusations of how the BBC cherry-picked the speech in the first place, make this silent addition of Islam as “evil” really quite amazing!
    And doesn’t “evil” really throw a spanner in the works if one wants to differentiate between race hate and religious hate? Strange, but I personally think that Charlie Falconer’s “cesspit” is a better term than the original.
    Wasn’t Anne Widdicombe a breadth of fresh air!

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  13. Rick says:

    Any answers was funnier still. Every caller was aghast at BBC spying and infiltration of a private party meeting in a closed pub.

    Dimbleby has not gotten out of his habit of telling callers what they should think and today was telling a man who lived for 15 years in Muslim countries about the Koran and what it really meant.

    Dimbleby is still juvenile even as he approaches 60. Having grown up in a household with 7 servants he still has disdain for the public when they call in as if they are dirty and should be sanitised before he touches them.

    He is profoundly ignorant and it is clear that like so many he blows hot air without any real knowledge. I don’t think he has a clue but is struggling to preserve his 1960s values as reality buries them in concrete

    The BBC has never bugged a mosque, never infiltrated a terror cell, but broadcasts fiction making Jews out to be puppetmasters for Muslim terrorists in a programme they sell to the US as “MI5” and here as “Spooks”

    People like Dimbleby are despicable because of the prison they build for many ordinary people who cannot afford to move from homes now becoming ghettoes and who are bombarded with propaganda attacking them as people from a State broadcaster they are forced to pay for.

    This country is rapidly turning into the German Democratic Republic and Gordon Brown will be the Soviet-approved Party boss

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  14. Woody says:

    K Well, part of that involves demonizing as racist anyone who attempts to counter their arguments. This is what I assume you were doing with your BNP reference. So I repeat my question, who do you think are a greater threat: the BNP or islamists?

    Answer as most sensible brits will tell you is that both are as bad as each other and trying to decide which is better or worse than the other is a waste of time. Extremism is generally best left to extremists and the BNP trying to get the majority of people into the frame of mind that most of the idiot posters on this site already inhabit, should quite rightly be condemned by the government of the day. Good on Gordon Brown for standing up and saying so. Who the f*** is nick griffen or any of you lot to decide that muslims who have been in this country for over 40 years are no longer welcome ?

    Here are a few other quotes from the two current biased-bbc poster boys with the balls to stand up to islamofascism.

    “there’s not a european country the jews haven’t been thrown out of. When it happens that many times, its not just persecution. There’s no somke without fire”

    “[Aids is] a friendly disease because blacks, drug users and gays and have it”

    “Churchill was a f***** c*** who led us into a pointless war with other whites standing up for their race”

    Now I suppose even you would have to admit that those are the sentiments of a racist. Pathetic neo-fascist scumbags. If you have laws to protect against stirring up religious and racial hatred, then you have to at least attempt to prosecute people who do so. I wonder how many of you lot would object to him standing trial for publicly denying the holocaust and saying we should remove the jews, just another two views he seems to hold ?

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  15. trevor says:

    Woody

    Who the f*** is nick griffen or any of you lot to decide that muslims who have been in this country for over 40 years are no longer welcome ?

    And who the f*** are you to suggest that they were welcome 40 years ago. I don’t remember the referendum, do you.

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  16. K says:

    Woody

    Could you explain why you find people with objectionable views (BNP)equally reprehensible as people who want to murder innocent civillians (islamists)?

    As for the other posters on this site, all I can say is that I come to this site for links and information which verifiably counters the more blatant omissions and biases of the BBC. If you don’t think that makes this a valuable site, then you obviously don’t see the problem.

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  17. Woody says:

    trevor
    Ah – you must be another one of these libertarians who doesn’t believe in free movement of labour. If there was a referendum on booting out assholes, perhaps you’d better have your bag ready eh ?

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  18. K says:

    Woody, why so angry? I mean, it’s a Saturday. Surely the BBC pays good overtime.

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  19. trevor says:

    Woody.

    Don’t worry, I left long ago. I got sick of listening to “the call to prayer” and wankers like you telling me it was for the good of the country. I don’t suppose you have the faintest idea how annoying it can be to live next to a mosque, have you? Just so long as there are plenty of doctors, taxi drivers and corner shops eh? And as long as it’s not in your back yard as well, eh?

    You can shove your multicultural hellhole of a country where the sun doesn’t shine.

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  20. K says:

    No mosques? Come on. Where are you? Antarctica?

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  21. Woody says:

    trevor
    diddums. Where i live the local super intendant is a muslim. That’s right, shock horror not only is a muslim respectufl of our laws he actually upholds them. I cannae believe it. I can believe that the country would be a lot better when not full of bigots though. Whatever the colour of their skin.

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  22. trevor says:

    I Moved to La Spezia, Italy just over 10 years ago. I’m sure there are Mosques around but I don’t know where they are.

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  23. trevor says:

    Woody

    I can believe that the country would be a lot better when not full of bigots though. Whatever the colour of their skin.

    So you do want to get rid of the muslims then. I wish you’d make your mind up.

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  24. Jones says:

    BBC radio 6 Music

    I was listening to the John Holmes show this afternoon, and he decided to tell this ‘joke’

    ‘Donald Rumsfeld has just lost his new job as Father Christmas. He was sacked after calling in airstrikes on the crowd of children waiting to see him’

    Is that the kind of joke beeboids find funny?

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  25. K says:

    Woody,

    Let us know your line manager’s name. We’ll petition the Beeb to up your pay grade. Just please, lower the temp.

    Islam is not an ethnicity. To dislike an ideology is not to dislike a race. Check the stats yourself at ONS
    http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=957

    Michael Nazir Ali, Bishop of Rochester, is ethnically pakistani but according to this
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/03/26/do2604.xml
    he must be racist in your view.

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  26. K says:

    Trevor,

    It’s interesting that you live in Italy. I bet the countryside’s restful but I thought free speech was dead there, viz. Oriana Fallaci’s trial in exile for defaming Islam.

    Also, as you seem to have all of Woody’s attentions, could you ask him why he finds murderous islamists equivalent to racist BNP members. The moral equivalence thing seems to be a BBC blindspot.

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  27. boy blue says:

    Has the BBC announced a re-re-trial yet? The last time Griffin was walking out of court a free man, the BBC were screaming about a retrial even before the CPS even probably heard the verdict!

    As for the moral equivalence between the BNP and Islamic terrorism, Woody here may believe that, but the BBC before 7/7 certainly didn’t. They didn’t think the threat from Islamic terrorism existed at all, other then in the minds of those wicked neo-cons in Washington. Remember the “Power of Nightmare” documentary, which systematically tried to demonstrate there was no serious threat at all?

    Even after 7/7 one of their most senior journalists, John Simpson, described the perpetrators as just “misguided criminals”. With that attitude and the BBC’s history of denial, it hardly installs confidence that the BBC even now actually takes Islamic terrorism seriously, let alone more seriously then the supposed threat from the BNP.

    Incidentally the “Power of Nightmare” was being shown on one of the Australian networks when the 7/7 attacks actually occurred. Needless to say, it was swiftly taken off the schedule, and quietly forgotten as if it never existed. The myth of media “truth” must be maintained after all.

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  28. K says:

    Boy Blue,

    Good point. I’d forgotten Mr. Curtis and his award scooping nonsense. The MSM (BBC et al) may try to paint this site and others like it as alarmist and misguided. But these days, people check the news far more often than they used to and source reliability is all. When the MSM continually air programs like The State Within, silly episodes of Spooks, The Road to Guantamo and The Power of Nightmares, they only discredit themselves. It just doesn’t match the reality. I would never have questioned the BBC’s impartiality until a series of appallingly biased editions of Question Time in the build up to the Iraq War made me wonder if anyone else thought that the BBC was biased against America and Israel and anyone else attempting to fight Islam. And that’s how I found this site.

    Ironic to think, on Remembrance Day, that the BBC was respected and trusted by this nation at war. Tell that to folks on board the Ark Royal.

    Keep up the good work, B-BBC.

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  29. will says:

    Woody “Ah – you must be another one of these libertarians who doesn’t believe in free movement of labour.”

    Woody presumes the taxpayers of this country have bottomless pockets. His one-sided view is well countered by this comment submitted to a Daily Telegraph report on the Conservative’s immigration “policy”

    You can have open borders and virtually no state benefits (Capitalism) or closed borders and tax funded state services (National Socialism). But you can’t have open borders and tax funded health housing, education and social services (New Labour triangulation). We need an honest debate to choose.

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  30. Anonymous says:

    .
    Just typical of Labour- BNP found not guilty so Labour will keep on changing the law untill they get the verdict they want.

    “Labour heartland turning to BNP, warns Cruddas”

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/11/ubnp111.xml

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  31. terry johnson says:

    A classic of al-bbc’s usual naunced view of the geo-political world…..

    “Until now the Bush/Rice policy has been akin to telling the naughty boy in the classroom to face the corner – in the hope that everyone will ignore him until he repents and mends his ways.”

    And we pay them a TV Tax for this drivel ?

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  32. alan says:

    David Selbourne, author of ‘The Losing Battle with Islam’, says, in his current article in ‘The Spectator’:

    “But Islam’s swift progress is easily explained. For the West- but not China or India – is as politically and ideologically weak as the world of Islam is strong. The West is handicapped by many factors:
    its over-benign liberalism, the lost moral status of the Christian faith, the vacillations of judiciaries and the incoherence of their judgments,
    political and military hesitations over strategy and tactics, poor intelligence (in both senses), and the complicities of the ‘left'”.

    And, Blair, Brown, Lord Falconer and the BBC are all in there.

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  33. terry johnson says:

    Oh this is a beautiful example of liberal wailing and gnashing of teeth….

    “Pain and disbelief in Gaza”

    By Matthew Price
    BBC News, Jerusalem”

    Matthew “Cry Me A River” Price spends five hundred weepy words telling us how shocked he is at the suffering of Palestinians. He really, really understands their pain and he is sure that “most Israelis” might feel some sympathy for the death of Palestinian children. As usual Israel is portrayed as the big, bad bully and the sad, little Palestinians as helpless victims. No where in this piece does the over-emotional Price mention that these poor Palestinians happily voted for a genocidal government whose avowed aim is the destruction of all Israel. He also fails to mention the cult of hate and death that Palestinians embrace from cradle to grave.

    His mawkish one-sided attempt to elicit sympathy for those who wish to destroy us is something al-bbc would never allow to be written against Arabs, muslims or Palestinians. Would Price or any other comrade from the Corporation ever write a piece like this after a suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv cafe ? After Beslan ? After the July tube bombings ? Of course not, this is just pro-Palestinian propaganda dressed up in the hysterical , emotive language of a bleeding heart Hampstead liberal.

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  34. ghost of john trenchard says:

    “And, Blair, Brown, Lord Falconer and the BBC are all in there.
    alan | 11.11.06 – 5:54 pm ”

    hearing him on Any Questions this afternoon made me puke.

    they really are a bunch of freedom hating fascists aren’t they?

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  35. ghost of john trenchard says:

    “Dimbleby has not gotten out of his habit of telling callers what they should think and today was telling a man who lived for 15 years in Muslim countries about the Koran and what it really meant.”

    It was better than that – the man in question did NOT reveal that until a long way into the conversation – he basically set Dimblebey up , before issueing the coup de grace of “15 years living in a Muslim country”.

    if its on “listen again” i really do recommend that B-BBCers have a listen to it.

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  36. 1327 says:

    It looks like “The Power of Nightmares” has gone down the memory hole in the basement of BBC HQ. I haven’t seen it repeated on any of the digital UK TV channels that endless repeat BBC documentaries. Other series by Mr Curtis are however often repeated. Odd that isn’t it !

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  37. ghost of john trenchard says:

    “I can believe that the country would be a lot better when not full of bigots though. Whatever the colour of their skin.
    Woody | 11.11.06 – 4:16 pm |”

    good idea – lets start with closing the Wahhabi Mosques down so, and expelling terrorist loving Imams.

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  38. Cheetawatch says:

    Just what IS it about the BBC..

    “Thousands of people also gathered in London to pay tribute to soldiers killed in war at the annual ceremony known in the UK as Remembrance Day.”

    Are the BBC some kind of Far Eastern representative body, based in Malaysia? Everyone knows what Rememberence Day is – talk about dumbing down.

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  39. Allan@Aberdeen says:

    On Radio 4’s ‘God slot’ this morning, the female guest used a parable from Ancient Greece to compare Saddam Hussein to a god. WTF goes on in that place?

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  40. boy blue says:

    “I can believe that the country would be a lot better when not full of bigots though. Whatever the colour of their skin.
    Woody | 11.11.06 – 4:16 pm |”

    Unfortunately many at the BBC believe bigots only come in one colour: “hideously” white.

    Hence the BBC’s attempts to explain away such diverse events as the Kriss Donald murder, the 7/7 bombings, and the Lozells riots in Birmingham a year ago, as all being down to generic “youths, poverty and unemployment”.

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  41. ghost of john trenchard says:

    funny how the “poverty and unemployment” argument is never trotted out when explaining why certain disaffected , white, working class people vote for the BNP.

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  42. Henry says:

    BBC judge and jury decide that this is a racially-motivated arson attack. How do they know?

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/6139190.stm

    This is blatant incitement. Let the police investigate and don’t reach conclusions until all the facts are known.

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  43. jx says:

    from the link above.. the headline reads “Police reassure arson community”
    shouldn’t this be “Police reassure asian community”
    or am i being thick

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  44. ghost of john trenchard says:

    no you aren’t jx. i’ve screen captured it for posterity.

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  45. archduke says:

    i just stumbled across this excellent analysis of the recent BNP court case by “Western Resistance”

    http://www.westernresistance.com/blog/archives/003346.html

    he makes some salient points about the BBC and i quote:

    The BBC had no objections to assisting West Yorkshire police in their securing evidence to place Nick Griffin and Mark Collett on trial. Yet last year, when the BBC Newsnight team had broadcast footage of members of the Saviour Sect and Al Ghurabaa which showed blatant treason, the BBC refused to hand over all of their footage to the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

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  46. paulc says:

    The BBC has come to the conclusion that the jury in the BNP incitement trial has arrived at a perverse verdict (hence y/days pieces on R5 with Louise Christian and Musharraf Hussein(?)).
    Since a third trial would be seen to be persecution (perish the thought)
    (but the not guilty verdict does tend to leave a lot of egg on BBC faces), it leaves the BBC with only one recourse; get the law changed.

    And exactly how soft would you like your soft soap, Mr Brown?

    Sir?

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  47. Richard says:

    Woody

    “…I wonder how many of you lot would object to him standing trial for publicly denying the holocaust and saying we should remove the jews…”

    I would object to such a trial, especially for denying the holocaust. What is your right to tell someone what their opinion should be, or whether they should expres it? The opinion should be opposed, as it is wrong, but who are you to say that someone cannot express an opinion?

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  48. jx says:

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/wear/6139190.stm

    the headline

    “Police reassure arson community”
    has now been stealth edited to
    “Community reassured after arson”

    “Last Updated: Saturday, 11 November 2006, 13:53 GMT ”

    more like last updated 10 minutes ago !!
    more lies from the bbc

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  49. ghost of john trenchard says:

    here’s the original headline

    [IMG]http://i10.tinypic.com/333cqq1.jpg[/IMG]

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  50. ghost of john trenchard says:

    oops .. here it is

    http://i10.tinypic.com/333cqq1.jpg

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