I was reading this BBC report concerning the decision by the Northern Ireland assembly not to prosecute DUP MLA Iris Robinson over comments she made about homosexuals last year. Robinson, chair of the Stormont health committee, called for homosexuals to seek psychiatric counselling.
Now, a few points; 1. I have no time for Mrs Robinson or her awful party. 2. I passionately believe in free speech. 3.This BBC item presents the issue purely in terms of the militant gay lobby screeching for Robinson to be prosecuted for hate crime versus the DUP chiming Iris is innocent. What about the views of us who are neither gay nor DUP (or even both!!) but who see that there is something inherently wrong in preventing the expression of opinion in the public sphere just because it offends one small but vocal minority. Why do WE not get a say on this? Is it because you can tell that the BBC line is very much in line with the gay lobbyists and whilst they cannot be overt about this, they seek to suggest that only the DUP are in favour of free speech?
How very strange that the BBC are not getting as wound up by the anti-gay comments of Anjem Choudary as they were by Iris Robinson’s.
Iris wanted to “cure” gays, Anjem wants to stone them to death.
Surely the BBC could not be biased towards the mouthpieces of Islamic / ethnic minorities and baised against white democratically elected Christians.
It is always a hoot watching the Beeboids bury their heads in the sand whenever one of their favoured groups insults another.
nrg,
The BBC has consistently had double standards when dealing with groups they like and ones that they don’t.
Only right wing dictators, and democracies with a conservative party in charge do bad things, Muslim, or left wing dictatorships, or countries with a left wing government are happy smiley places.
David,
You’re wrong to see this as the BBC being ‘pro-gay’.
They are happy to ignore the oppression and execution of homosexuals in countries like Iran, but happy to make a mountain out of nothing when it’s a politican they don’t like.
It’s just something to use to attack Robinson, not something they actually care about.
Ralph,
True enough.
“They are happy to ignore the oppression and execution of homosexuals in countries like Iran,”
A quick search of the bbc’s website demonstrates this is not true.
“They are happy to ignore the oppression and execution of homosexuals in countries like Iran,”
mikewineliberal- a consistent reading of the BBC’s Iran output suggests this is generally true.
A (very) quick look at the BBC’s Iran portal (http://www.bbc.co.uk/topics/iran) and a search on the BBC website has no mention of LGBT persecution, and *very* limited coverage (ie. no mention of the executions, persecution of women etc) of the other extremely unpleasant aspects of living in a theocracy such as Iran.
Also, anecdotally, I don’t remember anyone on the BBC ever discussing human rights abuses in Iran.
Sorry, mikewineliberal.
That NI MLA (and Iran, for that matter) is a good example of why (in my humble opinion) fundamentalist influences from any faith or ideology are incompatible with efficient, sensible government.
Yes, when you consider how many homosexuals work at the BBC you wonder why they never attack Islam for being anti homosexual.
Perhaps MWL might like to pint out ONE just ONE BBC programme that has attacked Islam and its attitude to homosexuality?
centre-right | 21.03.09 – 4:16 pm
That NI MLA (and Iran, for that matter) is a good example of why (in my humble opinion) fundamentalist influences from any faith or ideology are incompatible with efficient, sensible government.
Quite right. The more extreme the view the less likely the person holding it is sane.
Mike: ‘A quick search of the bbc’s website demonstrates this is not true’
I did a search for ‘homosexual’ and ‘Iran’.
http://search.bbc.co.uk/search?go=toolbar&uri=%2F&q=homosexual%20iran&tab=all&scope=all&start=1
It brings up four pages of which most is off topic.
The words ‘Cuba’ and ‘paradise’ produces six pages.
Could the twerps whose complaints led to the Police investigation now please be prosecuted for wasting Police time?
http://cctvstar.blogspot.com/2009/03/bbc-biased-never.html
The BBC are absolute cunts
cctvstar
Noticed that earlier. Bastards, but sadly unsurprising. Here’s hoping that Mr Cameron does more than freeze their budget when he gets into No.10.
btw, I’ve sent this complaint to the beeb about cctvstar’s point:
‘On your politics news front page, I do have a concern about bias. There are two headlines side-by-side. One is ‘Tax rise hard to avoid – Osborne’ and the other one is ‘Gordon Brown Rock response was right, says PM ‘
The abstracts under each are telling in their differences. The Osborne one has a condemnatory tone, whilst the other takes Brown’s claim at face value. Also on the same page, you report the news of the Conservatives’ withdrawal from EPP in terms of Hans-Goert-Pottering’s critical response. Surely it would’ve been more appropriate to report this in terms of the actual EPP withdrawal? The accusations of bias are not going to go away, are they, until such imbalances are ironed out. It is not in your interest to provide Party Political Broadcasts for Labour or indeed, any other party.’
why is the bbc getting wound up about some DUP politico when Muslims closer to home are calling for the stoning to death of gays?
well its obvious – go after the DUP and they wont bomb your home. Go after the islamist nutjobs and they’ll call for your head to be chopped off.
as reminder to the BBC – here’s what Islam does to gay folks in Iran.
enjoy the vid
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=518_1190245078
Excuse the OT, but there isn’t a general BBC so far Saturday, and the Friday night one is full. There’s a BBC online poll on British attitudes towards the EU including snarky descriptions for those answering the poll incorrectly:
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/284699.php
(One commenter at Ace’s tried on purpose to answer the most anti-British, pro-EU that he could, and still got a “I’m a dover strait–‘This group want things to stay as they are.'” Comment #96 Hutch)
Feel free to delete this as OT if you’d like, blog master, but maybe link it as a story somewhere else.
Ralph
I took part in a similar turkey shoot on B-BBC a couple of months ago. But here we go again. The links below are all stories that appear in the BBC’s search function when you enter terms such as “iran”, Homosexual”, Execution”, “islam”.
search – iran homosexual
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7259057.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7433018.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/2139221.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/6087430.stm
search – islam homsexual
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/7324985.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/gay_divide.shtml
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4915172.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1813926.stm
search -iran, execution, homosexual
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4725959.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7294908.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7799094.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/radiowales/sites/phonein/updates/20080328.shtm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7130380.stm
mikewineliberal, of those links, one 404’d, and at least 3 are not to do with Iran. The others are all nearly at least a year old, with the most recent being dinner-jacket’s Channel 4 christmas message.
Admittedly the Beeb don’t ignore the issue totally, but if it was me up there in the ivory tower, I’d be ‘raising awareness’ as much as I could about this sort of religious nutjobbery, and so damn what if they don’t like it.
It’s a random selection based on a few simple searches. But the examples of Iranian and islamic homophobia are reported so copiously, DV could use the linkage for one of his hilarious “Gays ubber alles” pieces.
mwl says the BBC DO portray the oppression and execution of homosexuals in countries like Iran. He produces a list of links which he thinks proves his point.
His 4 links for the search “Iran, homosexual” :
No 1 is about transsexuals
No 2 is nothing to do with Iran – and is tucked away on the Manchester page. I certainly did not hear that Manchester story.
No 3 is about the Gambia – tucked away on the Africa page, not a radio or TV story here by the BBC.
No 4 – the ONLY ONE about Iran, is from 2002 !
…………..
Of MWL’s list of links for the search “Iran, execution, homosexual” –
No 1 is from 2005, a Middle East page story
No 2 is 2008 and concerns an applicant for asylum in Britain. But it was put on the Europe page, not the UK page – and I did not hear anything about it on TV or radio.
No 3 does not report on the execution of homosexuals in Iran – and hardly touches on their oppression
No 4 link gives “Page Not Found – 404
No 5 is apposite, but from 2007 – and is on the Middle East page.
Checking those links confirms to me that mwl is utterly unreliable. Just like the BBC – a busted flush.
In sum – the average BBC viewer or listener does NOT get the clear view that Iran oppresses and often executes homosexuals.
And this is the Iran that the BBC itself helped push into a medieval theocracy. How much blood on the BBC’s hands ?
Did you read this?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7259057.stm
Where exactly does it seek to play down the plight of homesexuals in ? It does the opposite. And the links above show that the bbc pulls no punches in highlighting the
treatment of homesexuals in iran or other islamic countries.
Sorry if this doesn’t fit the b-bbc worldview.
JohnA | 22.03.09 – 11:51 am
tucked away on the Manchester page… a Middle East page story…. put on the Europe page
That isn’t how it works. The label a story is given (Europe, ME etc) is to do with what it is about, not where it appears. Theoretically all of these could have been on the news front page, or none of them You can’t know from the archived story.
e.g. the death of Jade Goody, leading the news currently, will be labelled Entertainment, but isn’t ‘tucked away’ on an entertainment page.
But most people’s contact with the BBC is NOT via the website. It is via TV and radio.
And as a constant radio listener I cannot recall hearing a single one of those stories.
This is a typical trick here – pointing to some abstruse website article, among hundreds of thousands of web articles, in these cases highly unlikely to be among the 20 top front page stories – as if this exonerates the BBC.
The regime in Iran is medieval and evil, especially on moral issues like homosexuality. The BBC fails to paint this picture to its TV and radio audience. How often does it crop up eg on the Today programme, on From Our Own Correspondent? – ever/never ?
I pointed to 9 of mwl’s “stories”.
He is now reduced to one out of the 9. A story I never heard on the radio or saw on TV.
mwl – a busted flush.
mikewineliberal: Can you give an example of where the BBC has ever run ANY anti Muslim programme of any sort?
If gays were being strung up in Texas you can be the BBC would be all over it.
As I have pointed out many times MWL how would you and your boyfriend get on in Saudi Arabia or Iran?
MWL- JohnA has comprehensively sieved your links and found precious little to support your contention. I looked at your chosen model BBC article and found it quite neutral over the business of regarding homosexual feeling as a malfunction either dealt with as a crime or a disorder- gays either become women or reform their behaviour. A little enquiring thought should show how radically different BBC neutrality is on this from if they talked about some British MP who thought that homosexuality was a disease or a crime. That is precisely the Iranian case, yet what do we find from the BBC- at best studied neutrality.
The BBC have no problem with opining and judging British attitudes, but cannot do so for a moment when faced with those from ‘protected’ sections of the world, according to their worldview. Balanced? Not slightly.
mikewineliberal | 22.03.09 – 12:12 pm
Sorry if this doesn’t fit the b-bbc worldview.
The story you link to is about a film that won a prize at the Berlin film festival made by an Iranian Director.
Hardly a triumph of investigative news gathering by the BBC.
A google search of the BBC website does come up with more reports on homosexuals in Iran than perhaps some here have suggested.
But there is an interesting fact to be found if you scratch beneath the surface.
Many of them are based on reports or statements issued by Human Rights Watch.
So, the BBC, which has a bureau in Tehran and employs journalists there full time, has to rely on press releases issued by an NGO that’s banned in Iran (I’m guessing).
The other main run of recent stories – about a young man threatened with deportation from Britain – was also fed to them on a plate by the Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes.
This really shows up the BBC for the agenda-led organization that it has become.
It has plenty of ‘initiative’ when it comes to chasing after Tory MPs’ nannies, but relies entirely on PR handouts when it comes to the persecution of minorities in an Islamic state.
That may well be so – i’ll see if I can rebut later. But the links you and I have both found, with a minimum of effort, show Ralph’s original point that “They are happy to ignore the oppression and execution of homosexuals in countries like Iran” to be cobblers.
BBCradio and TV mostly ignore Iran’s oppression and execution of homosexuals.
Most of mwl’s links were irrelevant or way out of date.
But like the BBC he carries on the act, the trick of endlessly repeating the lie.
25 Feb 2008 … Homosexuality is banned in Iran yet the country allows sex change …
11 Mar 2008 … An Iranian homosexual who says he will be executed if deported from the Netherlands loses his asylum claim.
13 Mar 2008 … The home secretary is to review the case of Iranian homosexual teenager Mehdi Kazemi, who has said he will be executed if forced to return .
3 Jun 2008 … He promised “stricter laws than Iran” on homosexuality and said he would “cut off the head” of any gay person. …
28 Jul 2005 … Homosexuality is illegal in almost all Muslim countries, and punishable by death in many of them.
21 May 2008 … A gay Iranian teenager who claimed he would be executed in Iran wins a …
26 Oct 2006 … visited Arshad Misbahi, the Imam at Manchester Central Mosque, to discuss concerns over the execution of homosexual Muslims in Iran. …
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iran ‘must stop youth executions’
Iran insists the youths were convicted of raping a younger boy. However gay rights organisations say the youths were executed for being homosexual. …
Sarah Jane
Pointing to old links at the BBC website which most people have never seen is a rubbish argument, those articles are lost among tens of thousands of articles a year, they are irrlevant to what the BBC tells the public by radio and TV.
And you know your arguments are specious.
The evil attitude of much of the Islamic world towards homosexuality is NOT coming across on BBC radio or TV, whcih everyone hears or sees.
Just like this morning we had a ridiculous woman saying that Mohammed was a feminist, that feminism is flourishing in the Muslim world.
Codswallop – but on the BBC it is not challenged, even ijn a discussion on feminism.
Just like the Hut T guy being asked today if he wants Islamic rule of Britain. He was allowed to avoid the question and go spinning off into facile criticisms of capitalism, but concluded by saying that Islam had a better model – the Caliphate.
Which surely means submission of Britain to Islam. Was he challenged on this by the BBC interviewer ? Was he hell. Just another thicko at the BBC, another journalist without a damn clue.
It has reached the stage where it would be better to sack half the up-to-4000 journalists at the BBC, the quality might improve. Why on earth do they need 4000 journos anyway, it is out-of-control.