Anyone out there caught the BBC’s “Horrible Histories”? A B-BBC reader spotted this…
“I had to gulp at the opening introduction. There was a reference to the Westerners deciding to go to war with the Muslims because ‘they happened to live there’ laced with sarcasm. The rest of the narrative was blantantly anti-west. Who wrote this script, I wonder?
Am I being paranoid or have they completely missed the Muslim conquest of Syria in the 7th century, attacks of Muslim Seljuk Turks, murder of pilgrims and the consequent aggressive expansionism that led to the Byzantine Empire issuing a desperate call for help to the Pope?
It’s like describing the reason for D-Day as a war on Germany because Germans ‘happened to live’ in France.
I am shocked and above all disturbed by the inversion of teaching to the youngabout such an important time in history.”
Everything English is evil in the Horrible History books…..the trouble is that my three children read them cover-to-cover, and just love them!!
Islam always the ‘victim’ even when they are the aggressors.
It#s why CBBC’s should be taken off air, it’s just more lefty bile and propaganda for kids. WE all know the 9/11 saga and the scum at CBBC’s don’t we?
That’s right Martin and that is precisely why a proposal to replace the Asian Network with a children’s radio station should be opposed.
Yes, there is a need for a children’s radio station…but not one run by the BBC.
The horrible histories tv show is simply…well, horrible. Charles 2nd raps at one point. I really really dislike this ‘let’s dumb things down for the kids’ mentality. They only become idiots because of programs like this treating them like idiots.
As with most things education related, it’s more a problem of the ultra-PC mindset. It’s this continued obsession with forcing ideas diversity and equality (and sometimes anti-Britishness) on kids at a young age that I can’t stand. The people who do this, ironically, are the ones opposed to ‘forcing religion’ on kids and instead advocate an increasingly secular society.
Don’t suppose the BBC tell the children that the Turks originated in SW China before they migrated to what is now Turkey ? So the BBC should take the line that the Turks are living in “occupied territories” and should return to China. After all, the BBC have to be impartial, even-handed and consistent.
Islam Not CBBC (INCBBC): as part of your propaganda creed, you must not let children see this:
“No Mosque at Ground Zero”
(1 min. video clip)
#!
The Crusades originally had the goal of recapturing Jerusalem and the Holy Land from Muslim rule and were launched in response to a call from the Christian Byzantine Empire for help against the expansion of the Muslim Seljuk Turksinto Anatolia.
. In 1071, the Seljuks engaged the armies of the Byzantine Empire at Manzikert (Malazgirt), north of Lake Van. The Byzantines experienced minor casualties despite the fact that Emperor Romanus iv Diogenes was captured. With no potent Christian Byzantine force to stop them, the Seljuks took control of most of Eastern and Central Anatolia. They established their capital at Konya (Iconium) and ruled what would be known as the Sultanate of Rum. The success of the Seljuk Turks stimulated a response from Latin Europe in the form of the First Crusade . A counteroffensive launched in 1097 by the Byzantines with the aid of the Crusaders dealt the Seljuks a decisive defeat. Konya fell to the Crusaders, and after a few years of campaigning, Byzantine rule was restored in the western third of Anatolia.
The Crusades were a response to an expansionary Islam which was threatening the very survival of the Eastern Roman World which had been Christian since Constantine in the 4th Century.
The Crusades were essentially defensive in strategic terms.
Of course they were inspired by faith as an ideology ..it was a deeply religious age and Islam was similarly inspired.
RGH,
That is a pretty good summing up of what we know of that period of history and events.
History is a key subject which is why the marxist left has re written large chunks of it. It is this same left thinking that now dominates state education and it’s handmaiden the BBC. If you control the past you can shape the future.
Treat all offerings from the BBC as propaganda much like the Czechs and the Poles did their official state histories in communist times.
No child should be exposed to this type of rubbish and no parent should allow it to be viewed.
The only effective actions we can take against the current power structure are personal ones.
Even at good schools, history is taught with a sharp left wing bias these days. My kid did GCSE history (or A level, can’t recall which) and studied Elizabeth 1st. They did about 10% of the course on the Armada, the other 90% on some pseudo-feminist nonsense about why she didn’t marry, and the role of women in society in those days! You just couldn’t make up that curriculum if you tried! I hope Gove’s generation of free schools teach kids proper history, not this social history tosh.
Hanson,
If only they could get evidence that Elizabeth 1 was a lesbian.
As a Scot, I should point out that the current Queen Elizabeth is the “first”, but I don’t want to seem too chippy !
Absolutely. I will not have my children indoctrinated by the socialist teaching stasi, which is why I have countered its propaganda with non-PC literature whenever I can.
For history, I have insisted that my two teenagers read Civitas’ book “Our Island Story” as an antidote to what they had been told in school. I explained to them the reasons for this, and they were quite shocked to find out that they were being taken for mugs by their teachers. I told them to spread the word amongst their classmates and challenge the teachers whenever they detected anti-British bias.
I don’t know if this was ever effective but it doesn’t mean we have to take the rot in our schools lying down. I believe we all have a duty to be vigilant to this on behalf of our children. The left is playing a dangerous game with our country’s future.
This is the most pernicious form of BBC bias since it targets children who do not have the knowledge or self-awareness to question what they are taught. “give the child till the age of seven and I will give you the man” as the Jesuits said, a lesson not lost Marxists.
I hope the BBC will be contacted and asked to account for this. But then, from an organisation which commissioned the ultra-Marxist Mark Steel Lectures, which it showed during its Open University history zone, it is not surprising.
Reminds me of something else from a BBC favourite:
Daniel,
Quite right. The Beeboids and leftists ,generally, are child-abusers. Heaven forbid that children should learn to think for themselves and have their own opinions.
And most of the parents will be too ignorant to correct them, having already been dumbed down. The cycle continues.
Q. What’s this – LEFT. LEFT. LEFT-LEFT-LEFT ?
A. The BBC/NUJ Generals training their ground troupes – Oops I mean reporters/staff.
Sick bunch of gits.
RGH
How very dare you set out a truthful account? Don’t you know the BBC does not deal in objectivity, it deals in narratives? And it is quite clear that you have got the BBC narrative back to front.
It is monstrous of you to suggest that militant Islam went around taking over territories by force – such as Jerusalem and Antioch not many years before the First Crusade.
My goodness me, next thing you will be suggesting that when Islam was invited into a new territory they did not treat all other religions as subservient, that they built mosques where there had been basilica and churches, that there were never massacres of Christians.
You must have been reading stuff that argued that “Andalucia” was not all sweetness and light :
Next thing, you will be repeating myths about Muslims beheading hundreds and thousands of people simply because they would not convert to Islam :
http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/2008/0807fea2.asp
I know that all those Christian skulls I saw on the walls of Otranto back in 1975 are fake, plastic, just to fool the kuffar :
http://www.coolpicturegallery.net/2009/04/skull-cathedral-of-otranto-where-bones.html
Luckily the BBC has spent years now explaining to us that out notions of history should not be clouded by reality. No, no – thankfully the BBC spends oodles of our money telling us that Islam can do no wrong, is a religion of peace, that it is not a medieval ideology based on militarism and subjugation, that there is no scorn or cruelty extolled in the Koran or the haditht towards non-believers.
………………………………………
Thank goodness the BBC refuses to tell the British people such stuff. It would be awful if they got this perspective on Islam – don’t you know that Muslims are VICTIMS, always victims. Westerners are always the bad guys, always have been.
You need to get with the programme. Or rather – get with BBC programming of your mind.
John,
Do I smell the faint whiff of irony ?
Great debate though, on this website. I look forward to posters’ comments on the Ottoman “devsirme” system.
Irony ? Moi ? Heaven forfend !
Those young lads were jolly lucky to enter devsirme ! Their sisters were left with becoming concubines. And their mothers if young enough. If not, they’d be killed along with their menfolk.
And of course the young boys were never sexually violated, goodness me no.
Gosh, I did start a short debate !
The problem with Ottoman history is that to go to primary Ottoman sources one needs to be read able to read Ottoman Turkish and very few non-Turks can ( not that many Turks can these days , either) .
Any histories should be scrutinised for religious racial bias one way or the other.
What is certain is that many non-muslims rose to high office in the Empire. I could go on but…….. !
The odd thing about the devshirme system was that the actual administration of the Turkish Empire was done by these boys taken from Christian families. I think from memory that they were given a much more rounded education rather than just a religious one. They also composed the Jannisaries. This might tell us something about the comparative merits of an Islamic education vis a vis a more liberal one. The Sultans presumably realised the drawbacks of employing an “Islamic scholar” versus their own men trained to actually do something useful.
Nothing much has changed .
Weren’t they eunichs?
I don’t think so but they were slaves in the sense that their lives and property were at the disposal of the sultan
David P,
Only if they worked in the Harem.
Interesting that the “Young Turks” , Enver, Talat and Cemal appointed “Cavid” ( David ) , a “donme ” Jew from Salonica , as their Finance Minister .
Oh, isn’t Ottoman history complicated .
On a funnier note, many Arab extreme nationalists claim that Ataturk was a Jew ! You couldn’t make it up !
We must be mad to entrust the education of our children to this degraded and untrustworthy institution.
And only Westerners ever engaged in a slave trade….
And, of course this pro-Islam, anti-Christian propaganda aimed at children not only infests INBBC, but the whole of the West.
E.g. this item from New York, which was featured last evening on Glenn Beck, FOX NEWS (Sky channel 509 in UK, 10 pm):
New York state high school exam slams Christianity, praises Islam
Islam Not BBC (INBBC) and Muslim Brotherhood.
No criticism by INBBC’s Mr. Leyne of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood here; on the contrary…
“Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood launches ‘Islamic Facebook'”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11064326
Mr. Leyne exhibits his total unfamiliarity with critiques such as this:
“The Muslim Brotherhood’s Conquest of Europe”
http://www.meforum.org/687/the-muslim-brotherhoods-conquest-of-europe
And, of course, INBBC’s Obama spreads lies about the history and ideology of Islam.
While INBBC tries to dispel notions that Barak Hussein Obama is a Muslim, he certainly behaves like one. And who writes his speeches?:
“Imam Rauf Boasts that He Wrote Obama’s Muslim Speech in Cairo”
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2010/08/imam-rauf-boasts-that-he-wrote-obamas-muslim-speech-in-cairo.html
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Until Christmas I was a mature student studying history and international relations at a top 30 Midland red-brick university. And I am sad to say this is exactly how history is presented, anti-West, racist (anti-White,) anti-Christian, and pro-Left. International relations is presented as anti-American, pro-Europe (that is pro-EU,) pro-Islam, and pro-China. I was expecting some Left wing bias but it got stupid. Whether it was the Oz lecturer making the miner’s strike sound like William’s purge of the north. Or another being amazed that somebody daring say that there may be too many people on the planet as this violating a women’s right to control her fertility. Some of the stuff I was told was amazing. I questioned it once but realised I may as well conduct a debate with a potted plant. By Christmas, half-way through the course, I had had enough.
As for bias in CBBC programme I remember one being completely gob-smacked by Tony Robinson’s Maid Marion and her Merry Men which was one long republican propaganda broadcast.
You must take heart that once youngsters get out into the real world and need to compete and put themselves first most of these lefty ideas get forgotten. In fact I firmly believe most of them trot out what the lecturer wants to hear. Most don’t believe in what they are saying. If indeed they think anything of it. Unsurprisingly it is Pakistani males who do this the most. Good little Islamists in the classroom; outside they drink, take drugs, eat bacon, and sleep around (only with white girls of course.)
John,
Very interesting post. Almost all the Unis. are controlled by the left. Using history as the example, I wonder what would happen if a student submitted a perfectly written exam script based on historical facts , but totally politically incorrect. Would the student pass or fail.
Slightly OT , but whenever I hear someone say how brilliant Gordon Brown is because he has a PhD, I point out that no-one who has tried has obtained a copy and the topic of the Labour Party in Scotland would never be failed at a Scottish Uni. Of course, for all I know, it may be a work of genius.
I did a similar course, at a top 20 uni no less (god knows how bad the old polys are…) and the international relations course included Africa and the Mid East. Everyone was the fault of colonialism, everything. Yes, even the corrupt regimes that starve and kill their own people, 60 years since independence. It’s still the Brits fault. At my age, I can see through the BS – but impressionable 18 year old students? They don’t know anything else, and they lap up this western white guilt rubbish.
Hanson,
Interesting, that old white guilt crap, isn’t it?
I’ve worked and lived in a number of ex-colonies in Africa and Asia. WheneverI had dealings with the ruling elite and the corporate types in those countries, I always found a visceral dislike of the West. Nothing too overt just a general undercurrent. However, whenever I came across the normal local people – the workers, and ones not connected with the business elite – I’ve always encountered the exact opposite.
Me too – odd thing is, I know a few ordinary zimbabweans who bear no grudges towards the British, and that’s in spite of Mugabe’s propaganda. The same is often true of Arabs that I’ve met in Eygpt especially – the older generation were less politicised than the younger ones who are most susceptible to radicalism, and they speak fondly of the British.
The most striking example of this was when I was in Baghdad. The younger Iraqis were all Baath party clones and had serious anti-West leanings. Bad enough to make it a no-go area for social exchanges. Ironically. this was worse among those that had gained their qualifications in UK and elsewhere in the West. There’s gratitude for ya!
Saying that, I guess being indoctrinated for 3-4 years by leftist academics and their cohorts in the BBC would be enough to turn rabid capitalists, let alone impressionable students, into screaming socialists.
JohnW,
I have had the exactly the same experience in Asia and Africa.