OBAMA "LIKE DUBYA", SAYS BBC GREENIE


Polar bears have long been the sacred cause of warmists, especially those at the BBC. This story from last year shows the ridiculous political lengths that they will go to to claim that despite abundant evidence to the contrary (most populations are actually rising), the species is at risk of extinction because of nasty emissions. Now BBC reporter Rajesh Mirchandani – who has secured a cushy beat with the BBC that allows him to pontificate freely about melting arctic ice, including this gem of a scare story – has filed this bellyaching piece bemoaning that the US government has shown a glimmer of sense for once and pulled back from declaring the bears as “endangered”. Such news perhaps could be seen as a sign for celebrations, especially for the biodiversity obsessives at the corporation; nice, cuddly polar bears aren’t going to leave us anytime soon. But no. Instead, it is used as a peg for Mr Mirchandani to give an airing to one of the most astonishing attacks on President Obama that I have seen in any BBC copy. He writes:

The Centre for Biological Diversity – one of the groups trying to get the polar bear listed as “endangered” – said the ruling showed that the administration of US President Barack Obama was continuing to defend Bush-era “anti-science decisions”.

Ouch! Not his words, admittedly, but he’s created the platform for them, and there’s no balancing copy. It shows in its rigid one-sidedness that greenies like Mr Mirchandani will savagely bare their ursine teeth and sink them into any target they want – no matter how venerated – if their inflexible religious view that the science must be obeyed is crossed. Come back McCarthy – all is forgiven.

NHS IS PERFECT

Criticism of the NHS does not go down well at the BBC. I suppose both are anachronistic cabals and the BBC gets defensive when people suggest that the NHS is a dinosaur. So listen to this interview with the head of NHS Direct. Note the instant attack on the Daily Mail and then the smug satisfaction and faux apology from Nick Chapman, all lapped up by Humphyrs.

VICTIMHOOD CONVEYED!

Nothing excites the BBC more than conveying victimhood status upon those it most favours. And so it is that this morning, the Today team determined that Saint Vince Cable is “a victim” of those evil snoops at the Daily Telegraph. Indeed that Cable halo that has slipped since May is now restored as he is turned into a media martyr. Throughout the programme, the BBC were keen to provide Lib-Dems with an opportunity to bash the Tories, Ed Miliband will be pleased that his broadcasting arm is so active opposing the Coalition! Of course Cameron deserves all he gets thanks to his gutless approach in dealing with the monster in Broadcasting House. There can be no reform of the BBC, no amelioration of its worst excesses. It must be axed.

BLIZZARD CONDITIONS


The BBC has been eerily silent about the causes of the latest cold snap. There’s nothing that I can find that suggests that its main weather information supplier the revered Met Office might be wrong; and the Quarmby report, saying that there is no evidence of clustering of cold weather, has been covered virtually without comment. Yet elsewhere, the internet is abuzz with stories that the Met Office is seriously at fault. I wonder why?

And I am intrigued by this item. Paul Hudson, the BBC weather reporter who has dared before to challenge AGW orthodoxy spells out that this December is in line to become the third coldest such month since the Central England Temperature (CET) record was started in 1659. He concludes:

This is the third winter running when we have had very cold and snowy conditions hitting the UK. It comes at a time of continued, unusually weak, solar activity. In my blog ‘could the sun cast a shadow on global temperatures’ I wrote about how Australian scientist David Archibald was convinced that prolonged weak solar activity could mean much colder winters in future. He wrote his paper in February 2009. Perhaps we all need to get used to colder winters across the UK in the next few years.

Stand by for a veritable flurry of denial statements from the warmists at the BBC. But thank God someone in the corporation (from Yorkshire, I note)seems to have a glimmering of common sense. In one report, at least.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the BBC, the blizzard of AGW nonsense continues.

CABLE – THE FALL OUT

Well, the BBC agenda on Saint Vince has been spelt out by that intrepid example of independent thought, Nick Robinson. Talking on Today this morning, (8.10am) he explained that the Daily Telegraph has more likely done more damage than good to “political transparency” since our totally honest MP’s will now be even more careful what they say to anyone outside their immediate circles. So Cable’s only crime was to speak his mind and the DT stands in the dock as the enemy of freedom. You have to admire the delusionalism that reigns within the State Broadcaster.

HIBERIANISATION

Just a curious little item.Lead story on BBC Northern Ireland is that…gasp..Dublin Airport is now open, having been closed by snow yesterday. Dublin Airport is not in Northern Ireland and yet those wonderful folks at BBC NI determine this to be the single most important news story affecting our lives this morning. Gotta love it.

Topsy Turvy Tale

A reader has asked me to draw your attention to something that the BBC is unlikely to explain.

A Qassam rocket has landed perilously close to a nursery school in a Kibbutz in the Hof Ashkelon area north of Gaza Strip, injuring a girl and an adult.

Squabbles amongst the leadership of the BBC’s favourite terrorist organisation have led to a new wave of provocative acts against Israel. I refer to escalating missile, mortar and raiding attacks, and what DEBKAfile calls “murderous kidnapping operations inside Israel”.
That, of course, was the widely reported incident in which an American woman was murdered and her companion was injured. Incidentally, on a previous thread, I commented:
“On BBC News 24, the anchor woman was interviewing the Jerusalem correspondent. (I think it was Jon Donnison) She kept on asking if he would agree that the woman’s injuries were surprisingly trivial under the circumstances. I have no idea what she was getting at. Surely she wasn’t implying that the victim was exaggerating, or hiding something?
A most peculiar line of questioning I thought.”
Having read the report on DEBKAfile, which describes the incident as a botched attempted at a kidnapping, I think I see what she was getting at after all. Of a policy eerily reminiscent of the way our own police play down certain sensitive issues, I quote: “Israeli police officers spoke vaguely about exploring different paths of inquiry and cast implicit aspersions on her testimony.”
Casting implicit aspersions. That’s what the BBC did too, but why? Does Jon Donnison know more than he’s letting on, or what? Where’s Julian Assange when you need him.

According to DEBKAfile, Israelis are acutely aware of, and constrained by, the international outcry – “disproportionate force!” This now affects their response to provocation. At one end of the scale Israeli police play down the severity of incidents. At the other, it was these concerns that led to a policy of deliberately sending their precious soldiers into a war zone on foot rather than striking from the air, something that Col. Kemp pointed out repeatedly after Operation Cast Lead.

From DEBKAfile, another example:

“Monday, Dec. 20, saw not only a 10-mortar barrage from the Gaza Strip, but three Palestinians armed with long knives trying to assault an Israeli soldier at Givat Zeev. They fled when he cocked his sidearm.
The soldier took care not to shoot and injure any of his assailants – and so bring Israeli anti-terrorist authorities a valuable asset for interrogation – because he was afraid of sharing the fate faced by some of his comrades – trial by the military prosecutor and the media for responding with “disproportionate force.”

However, take a look at how the BBC reports this escalation of “tensions”. In an article by Jon Donnison headed Israeli air strike on Gaza as tensions rise” he concentrates on Israel’s retaliation, and plays down the incidents that provoked it. For example:

“The rockets fired by Palestinian militant groups into Israel rarely cause injury or damage, but they do cause widespread fear.”

The rockets certainly cause widespread fear, but they do cause injury and damage, and I’m sure the militant groups would be delighted if they caused more. They rarely do only because the Israelis have taken the trouble to protect people. The kindergarten is a bomb shelter.

“They are not fired by Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza, but by smaller militant groups. Nevertheless Israel says Hamas is responsible because it controls the territory.”

“Israel says?” I think most people would say that Hamas does bear responsibility, unless they were trying to defend Hamas. And why “nevertheless?” Is Jon Donnison saying that he doesn’t think Hamas is responsible? By Jove, I think he is!

“The Israeli military says the air strikes were in retaliation for the firing of 13 rockets and mortars at Israel this week.
Israel Radio says the rocket fired by Gaza militants on Tuesday landed near a nursery school. No serious injuries were reported.”

No serious injuries, so that’s okay then.

The article concludes with the return, after a short absence from every single Israel-related BBC web article, of the death toll from Operation Cast Lead, and another statistical comparison of “Palestinian” and Israeli deaths and injuries, courtesy of the UN.

I do realise that the intricacies of power struggles within the Hamas hierarchy are of little interest to the BBC audience, but surely turning the incident upside down in your impartial report is going a bit too far.

SAINT JULIAN OF ASSANGE DAY

Well, it’s pretty easy to work out what the BBC finds so attractive about Wikileaker Julian Assange. His viscerally anti-American agenda was always going to resonate with the BBC so he was afforded two interview spots on Today this morning as John Humphyrs travelled to his mansion to pay seasonal homage to him. There was SO much wrong with this simpering interview not least the way in which the BBC insists that Wikileaks is a “whistle-blowing” website when it is not. It is much closer to a criminal conspiracy that accepts hacked and stolen information but so long as the US is the victim, who cares, right? Assange is able to suggest that he cannot justice in Sweden hence his attempt to avoid being sent there to face the serious allegations concerning sexual assault and the entire interview was set up as a soapbox for the peculiar ego-tripper Assange.
  

THAT CABLE GUY

“Today” featured an item (7.50am) concerning Vince “My heart beats to the left” Cable. His arrogance and self-conceit have been wonderfully exposed by a couple of undercover Daily Telegraph journalists and so this poses a problem for the BBC. You see Saint Vince used to be a good  guy through the prism of the Beeb before he went and spoiled it all by joining the wicked Conservative coalition. But BBC hopes have been raised as Cable talks of using the “nuclear option” and resigning which would, apparently, be the cue to bring the Coalition down. Naturally he is “embarrassed” that he has been caught out but the BBC are keen to portray him as a noble hero fighting for what is decent amongst the “maoists” in the Conservative Party. I expect Cable will continue to get the hero treatment just so long as he represents a threat to the lawfully elected government of the UK.