Monthly Archives: February 2011

ECO-FASCISTS

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Hold the front page. Richard Black, discussing the preposterous use of models by a group of scientists in Oxford to “prove” that higher levels of flooding in the UK in 2000 were undoubtedly caused by CO2, actually quotes a “sceptic”, who seemingly disagrees with the the analysis. Except that Bjorn Lomborg – though he once wrote a book called the “Skeptical Environmentalist” – is anything but, as a moment’s research reveals. So this is yet another example of dishonest reporting. Mr Lomborg actually firmly believes, just like Mr Black and his cronies, that greenhouse gases are causing global temperatures to rise and also that tens of billions of pounds should be spent on combatting this alleged menace. His only difference of opinion with the green creed is that people should learn to adapt to climate change, not spend their time whinging.

Meanwhile, American Thinker has unearthed some very interesting background material on the roots of the green religion that Mr Black and his BBC chums so fervently support. I reported yesterday about Mr Black’s one-sided enthusiasm for the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution’s call for mass social engineering and population control to combat climate change. Such views are a central tenet of the green movement. It’s increasingly clear that the origin of these thoughts is actually mired firmly in Nazi ideology and they were first articulated and advocated in the post war era by Gunther Schwab, a wartime member of the Nazi party. He and his fellow party members wanted massive social engineering in line with their crude and ruthless beliefs in eugenics and social Darwinism, the twin concepts that underpinned and led directly to the Nazi genocide of Jews, Roma people, Slavs, Negroes, gays, the mentally ill and infant social “imbeciles”. In my book, nothing in what today’s greens who inhabit bodies like the Royal Commission are calling for is different. It’s the callous logic of ruthless centralised control. “Fascist” is a label that in my view is bandied about too often, but here, it is clearly appropriate. Black&co are advocates of eco-fascism.

Update: those who argue that we are doomed because of rising population and that therefore social engineering is vital (and I know because I used to be one of them) seem totally impervious to the facts, as a post below illustrates. They are on a socialist, world-saving mission, but for those who want to read further with an open mind on this topic, I recommend this, or Matt Ridley’s excellent The Rational Optimist. In 1972, the Club of Rome pronounced authoritatively that there would be mass starvation in 2000; ten years on, we are feeding almost 7bn people at a better level than we did when there were 3bn and standards of living are rising almost everywhere. And yet still the anti-liberal, world-government-supporting social engineers out there want to impose more laws of the type that Hitler deployed.

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KHALID YASIN UPDATE

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“Shaykh Khalid Yasin is an American Muslim teacher, extremely popular among young European Muslims. He has embarked on a mission to de-radicalise them.”

That’s what the BBC/RedRebel film on Geert Wilders told us (see yesterday’s post).

Just Journalism points out that Yasin was one of the preachers of hate exposed in the 2007 Dispatches documentary Undercover Mosque in which film is shown of him saying the following:

“We don’t need to go to the Christians or the Jews debating with them about the filth which they believe. We Muslims have been ordered to do brainwashing because the kuffaar they are doing brain defiling. You are watching the kaffir TV and your wife is watching it right now and your children are watching it and they are being polluted and they are being penetrated and they are being infected, so that you come out of the house and your children come out of the house as Muslims and come back as kaffirs.”

“This whole delusion of the equality of women is a bunch of foolishness…There’s no such thing.”

His claim that missionaries infected Africans with the AIDS virus, which I quoted yesterday, also appears in the Dispatches film. (A pdf transcript of Undercover Mosque can be read here.)

Channel 4 showed Yasin as he really is – a divisive conspiracy-believing radical who describes the beliefs of other religions as filth and refers to non-Muslims as kaffirs. On the other hand the BBC, in its eagerness to attack Wilders, broadcasts a film describing Yasin as a popular teacher on a mission to de-radicalise young Muslims. It almost beggars belief, but quite frankly nothing surprises me about the BBC any more.

UPDATE.There’s more on the Wilders film at Gates of Vienna, including a copy of a comprehensive letter of complaint.

Here’s a transcript of a 2005 programme about Yasin that was broadcast on Australia’s Channel 9. He’s a 9/11 truther, says homosexuality is “punishable by death”, and lies about his qualifications.
And some more background on Yasin here and here.

(Thanks to all in the comments)

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GREEN SUICIDE

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This Richard Black outpouring has it all. First the agency involved, The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, is an innocent, raped, victim of government spending cuts. Those nasty Tories again. Second the said body is clearly a collection of eco-nutters preaching that we are doomed unless we stop reproducing, move around to where resources are (whatever that means), stop drinking water (and consuming generally), stop producing waste, and fervently conform to the torrent of how-to-live diktats from global and national rulers. Mr Black, as usual, purveys this fanaticism without a jot of understanding; if our Victorian forefathers had followed this sort of insane ideology, no ship would ever have left a British port, and no entrepreneur would have ever invented anything or introduced any new industrial process. All round the world, except in the green-obsessed regressive west (and for complex, non-related reasons, Africa), human beings are relishing the challenges of expansion and in general making the business of being human a happier, longer-lived and wealthier experience. The greenie philiosophy which Mr Black reports with such one-sided relish wants to introduce the economics of suicide. and negativity. Evidence of the misery wrought by his greenie chums is not hard to find – try, for example, here. The most vulnerable are actually seriously suffering because they can’t afford inflated fuel bills that have been jacked up to subsidise windfarms that are a central componenent and totem of the eco-creed. But such contradictions are lost on Mr Black (and Marcus Brigstocke!); they have their greenie worldview and they are sticking to it.

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"I rarely fly, for environmental reasons"

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Hat tip to Bupendra Bhakta in the comments for this gem.

My Life in Travel: Marcus Brigstocke, comedian

Best holiday?
I went to the Maldives the year before last… I’ve also had some of my happiest holidays in Mallorca with family and friends. It’s a very beautiful island. We stay in great place called Camp de Mar near Andratx. So it’s a toss-up between the opulent, unforgettable paradise of the Maldives and calamari by the beach, waterskiing and nightclubbing in Mallorca

What have you learnt from your travels?
I have learnt that I am incapable of packing the right amount of clothing, probably because I start 10 minutes before I’m supposed to leave; and that I truly hate airports. I rarely fly, for environmental reasons more than anything else.

Where has seduced you?
I went to China for a brief working visit and I thought that Shanghai was interesting, but Beijing totally grabbed me

Worst travel experience?
My son, sister, niece and I were sea kayaking in Mexico and got caught in a rip tide

Worst hotel?
A resort hotel in Varadero, Cuba.

Dream trip?
I have never been to India.

Favourite city?
New York. It has great restaurants and is a part of the US that you can enjoy as a liberal Brit.

Marcus Brigstocke will be performing at Altitude at Volvo Snowbombing from 4-9 April in Mayrhofen, Austria

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Kites for Peace

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In the last couple of days there has been an extraordinary mish-mash of television on the subject of Islam and Israel. All but one sanitising Islam and denigrating Israel.
For example, yesterday’s hostile portrait of Geert Wilders BBC2 seen through thick-lensed left-wing specs. The filmmaker’s agenda was showing – almost embarrassingly – so hopefully no-one will have been persuaded to change their minds on the issue from watching it. One thing that stood out was the way the filmmaker saw Israel. He assumed that just a slight association with it was enough to turn Wilders into a villain. And the bit where he approached Wilders with his furry microphone, feebly bleating something unintelligible while Wilders and entourage swept past, then “See! He wouldn’t speak to me!” I found that hilarious.
Straight away, most people will have switched on to Dispatches Channel 4 for the Islamic Schools programme. I thought they were trying to stretch a tiny bit of material too far – they kept repeating bits of it – they should have concentrated more on the Ofsted inspectors, and asked why nobody seemed to suspect anything or care. Melanie Phillips has this.
Nevertheless, these contrasting items provide a good example of the art of television, showing how it can make you think one thing one minute, and another, the next.
Which brings me to the major four-parter on Channel 4, The Promise. The director has a left wing agenda, and he tries to pretend he hasn’t. Take a look at the website, see Lindsay Hilsum’s potted history which leaves out the important bits, read some of the tweets and comments, and weep. The audience thinks they’re being educated.

Then for desert, last night’s Newsnight with Michael Morpurgo. He’s been to Gaza, and he’s got it into his head that Israelis target children. It’s so firmly embedded in his brain that even though Paxman says “the Israelis don’t go in to deliberately target children” , and he admits that “It’s not that they they’re targeted”, it still pops back in a few seconds later, when he says “You can’t achieve peace by targeting children.”
Call me cynical, but I think I know whose side he’s on. Even Paxo had a tiny go at him, reminding him of the traumas suffered by Sderot children. Louise Ellman did well, but she missed a few opportunities. Of the malnutrition he witnessed – not caused by the blockade of course – she should have pointed out the lorryloads of goods that go into Gaza every day, not to mention the international aid that pours in. Where is it all? She should have mentioned the hate that is taught to the children, not in Israel, but in Gaza.

I wondered why the donkey cart with the allegedly injured child rushed past at the exact moment they were filming. But Pallywood makes you cynical. I’d also like to know exactly what the Israelis had to say about targeting children. Of course, as Jeremy Bowen would say, they’d be partial, so we shouldn’t believe them, which makes rather a mockery out of all reporting. The BBC could just get ‘impartial’ people to speculate, and stop bothering to verify or investigate anything. That’s what they already do on the telly, some broadcasters more than others.

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BBC Geert Wilders Hit-Job

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The Geert Wilders documentary on BBC 2 last night, the latest in the recent profusion of inept one-sided films attacking those who disagree with prevailing BBC leftist orthodoxies, has justifiably attracted a lot of criticism in the comments. However, it’s gone down well in some quarters:


You can see the film via the BBC iPlayer here, or on YouTube here.

It was made by Joost van der Valk and former Newsnight journalist Mags Gavan of RedRebel Films (bit of a clue in the name there, I think). The executive producer for the BBC end of things was Lucy Hetherington, partner of Newsnight’s Michael Crick and daughter of former Guardian editor Alastair Hetherington. In the comments Pounce points out that this timeslot on BBC 2 is usually occupied by a Top Gear repeat or Escape to the Country, raising suspicions that the film was dropped into the schedule to counter last night’s Dispatches about Muslim schools on Channel 4.

There was so much wrong with “Geert Wilders: Europe’s Most Dangerous Man?” it’s difficult to know where to begin, but here are few highlights for starters.
[Read More]

The title – not exactly subtle, but I suppose it is at least in keeping with the ham-fisted approach of the film itself.

We were introduced to Shaykh Khalid Yasin, described by the narrator as “an American Muslim teacher, extremely popular among young European Muslims. He has embarked on a mission to de-radicalise them. He is also very critical of Geert Wilders.”

Here are some quotes from Yasin that the filmmakers didn’t want you to know about:

“There’s no such thing as a Muslim having a non-Muslim friend, so a non-Muslim could be your associate but they can’t be a friend. They’re not your friend because they don’t understand your religious principles and they cannot because they don’t understand your faith.”

“An AIDS virus, that is a classic disease that was created in Fort McKinley, United States. Fort McKinley, the AIDS virus,, 63,000 gallons. Missionaries from the World Health Organisation and Christian groups went into Africa and inoculated people for diphtheria, malaria, yellow fever and they put in the medicine the AIDS virus… I don’t say [that AIDS was created] by the US Government. I say there were at least five governments that acted in complicity.”

And here’s a video of Yasin talking about some unspecified policy paper relating to Muslims. Does this sound like someone who wants to de-radicalise young Muslims, as the BBC would have you believe?

Later in the Wilders documentary there is a sequence on Pim Fortuyn. The narrator tells us:

“His political ambitions came to a sudden halt on the eve of the 2002 national elections.”

Yes, getting murdered tends to do that to your political ambitions. The film does go on to say he was assassinated, but what a bizarre way to begin describing his death.

We are told, by way of introducing some of Wilders’ supporters in the States, that “America is the land of the conspiracy theory”. Oh really? How about Egypt where 43% think Israel was behind 9/11, or Saudi Arabia where a tagged migrating bird is viewed as an Israeli spy? The narrator describes America in this way because it serves to delegitimise the film’s targets.

Later, portentous music plays over footage of the Israeli flag as the voice-over intones: “Looking up ‘Geert Wilders’ and ‘Israel’ on the internet, van der Valk finds over half a million references.” Yes, and looking up Mags Gavan blows a monkey returns more than 80,000 references, but it doesn’t prove a thing. This piece of lazy innuendo is followed by wild unfounded speculation over Wilders’ funds and motives. Is he in the pay of those evil Zionists, or could he in fact be an actual Israeli spy?

At one point the narrator informs us that the Wilders film Fitna is propaganda. Talk about pots and kettles. I’ve barely touched on just how bad this documentary is (and please feel free to add further observations of your own), but one thing seems clear: if you’re a filmmaker with a leftist worldview and have friends at the BBC, our licence-funded state broadcaster is only too happy to find money and airtime for any old rubbish you produce.

UPDATE. A further thought – the film had very little to say about Wilders’ trial and the chilling effect a guilty verdict could have on the freedom to criticise Islam.

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Easy Come Easy Go

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Don’t for one minute think anyone can get an intelligent, nuanced analysis of the situation in the Middle East from the BBC, despite the endless chatter.
Islamic organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Muslim Council of Britain are treated with reverential obsequiousness by the BBC, and to evaluate the threat of Islamism taking over the Egyptian government, or having a huge influence in Egypt and therefore the entire region, you have to look, for example, at Barry Rubin here, and here. The possibility of this happening, which would almost certainly entail the ‘removal,’ or attempted ‘removal’ of Israel, has been alluded to on the BBC with a cavalier indifference that beggars belief.

Ed Stourton presided over just such a discussion on Egypt on R4 Sunday with three specialists, including journalist and writer Carol Gould, who was one of the writers who alerted me to the full extent of the media’s demonisation of Israel and the Jews.
Also on the programme were Tarek Osman and Dr. Harry Hagopian. Ed opens with a reference to Obama’s iconic speech at Cairo – ‘reaching out to the Muslim World’. “Israel is supposed to be the only democracy in the region”, Ed opines, “but Lebanon also functions as a democracy.” I Beg your pardon?
After various assurances that the Brotherhood definitely deserves to play an important role in the new democracy, but that is ‘nothing to worry about’, Carol said she had been hearing some pretty alarming things on Press TV and Al-Jazeera. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood has promised that “the first thing to go will be Israel.” “This will be the end of the USA and Israel. They’ll be out of the region.” So, not much to worry about there then.
Carol Gould managed to remind us that Lebanon’s democracy has been scuppered by Hezbollah, and that Turkey is already a goner, but Ed had already stopped listening, because “we have to end it there”.

Only time will tell whether Egypt’s was a military coup or a straightforward people’s democratic revolution. If it’s the latter, however youthful the people are, or how Westernised they look and sound, no-one from the BBC has bothered to ask whether or not they’re actually of an anti-West and virulently anti Israel disposition. As for Tunisia, they’ve been marching on the Great Synangogue of Tunis. That should set alarm bells off about all of the freedom fighting ‘youth bulges’ in North African Islamic/Arab states, and the whole world.
The BBC? Tumbleweed.

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XENOPHOBES

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Here, I thought naively, is a harmless topic on the BBC science and environment website; how Britain became an island as a result of a tsunami caused by melting ice. No mention of climate change (for once, ahtough that’s clearly the undercurrent)….but this is the BBC, and of course there’s a sting in the tail. With carefully chosen selective quotes from historian David Starkey it becomes yet another glib pro-BBC-values homily…this time about how, under the tutelage of that wicked tyrant Henry VIII, we became an island of nasty, anti-Europe xenophobes, and how our coastline – which once made us pro-immigrant pussycats – changed us into acquisitive, paranoid imperialistic robbers.

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BBC Economic Bias: Only The Left Has It Right

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While everyone is enduring yet another full day of BBC reporting negatively about the nasty cuts forced on the poorest by the Conservative-led Coalition, it’s also necessary to check out the BBC’s reporting on budget policy developments in the US.

Barack Obama unveils US budget plans for 2012

US President Barack Obama has unveiled his 2012 budget, describing the proposal as a “down payment” on future cuts to the US budget deficit.

The budget aims to cut $1.1tn (£690bn) from the US deficit over a decade.

He said the US must live within its means and called for some reductions, but said “we can’t sacrifice our future” with drastic cuts.

The White House policy sounds suspiciously like the Labour line. It’s not a coincidence, as both Labour and the White House are guided by the same economic principles. Notice how the BBC treats The Obamessiah’s position.

After the requisite criticisms from Republicans – which sound suspiciously like the Tory statements, only without the luxury of the “we inherited this mess” card – we get more of the Labour line….sorry….White House line that we “can’t sacrifice our future in the process”. Does that sound familiar? It should.

The BBC sub-editor who put this together subtly sets you up to interpret the subsequent statement from the President with this:

Although Mr Obama is empowered to propose a budget, it is up to the US Congress to enact it into law and then to distribute the funds.

Mr Obama’s budget is seen as an opening bid in a long process of negotiation with House and Senate leaders of both parties, and analysts say Republicans will press for deeper cuts.

“Analysts” say? The Republicans themselves have only been shouting it from the rooftops since Nov. 3. Why bother attributing the notion to anonymous analysts? Also notice how the BBC makes sure to include that the negotiations will be with the leaders of both parties.

Then we get some Gordon Brown language in a summary of one of the President’s points:

At a school in Baltimore on Monday morning, Mr Obama called for future investment in education, transportation infrastructure and high speed internet, “so that every American is equipped to compete with any worker anywhere in the world”.

“Spending” is softened and sexed up into “investment”. You’ve all heard that one before, and will continue to hear it next time Ed Balls is in front of a BBC microphone.

Then the BBC quotes the President’s own words about exactly the same thing.

“While it is absolutely essential to live within our means – and while we are absolutely committed to working with Democrats and Republicans to find further savings and to look at a whole range of budget issues – we can’t sacrifice our future in the process,” he said.

“We have a responsibility to invest in those areas that will have the biggest impact in our future.”

So when the BBC writes that His “budget is seen as an opening bid…”, it’s clear that this is in fact the White House’s talking point. In other words, the people who actually see it this way are the President and Katty Kay’s personal friend, the new White House Spokesman. And the BBC dutifully toes the line. He says He’s going to work with “both parties”, just like the sub-editor set framed it above. Another White House talking point turned into BBC reporting.

The resulting impression is that He’s trying His best to reach across the aisle, and any problems will be due to intransigence by nasty Republicans, who want make budget cuts for purely ideological reasons.

Notice, though, more Labour ideology in the President’s statement: “We can’t sacrifice our future”. We hear it time and time again on the BBC when hearing criticisms of the nasty Tory boodget coots.

The bias only gets worse.

Among the programmes slated for cuts under his own plans are some that Mr Obama said he considered crucial, including development grants for poor neighbourhoods.

Hitting the poorest hardest, naturally. It’s getting to be like an echo.

Mr Obama also reiterated his call for $78bn in cuts to the defence budget.

“If we’re going to walk the walk when it comes to fiscal discipline, these kinds of cuts will be necessary,” he said.

He said he aimed to wring greater efficiency from government programmes and to sell 14,000 government office buildings and properties.

So He’s now portrayed as a fiscal hawk. If He’s going to cut the precious US military machine, He must be serious, no? The only mildly opposing view we get is from another analyst who says – wait for it – that the Republicans will want more cuts. Why not get an actual Republican to say it, BBC? None willing to talk to you off the record? Couldn’t any of the legion of Beeboids in the US get a better source? No, an HSBC (greedy banker!) analyst saying we need to cut more will do nicely. Funny how they manage to dig up a month-old quote from the Treasury Secretary about making sure we “don’t hurt the recovery”. Or was it a quote from Ed Balls just mis-attributed? It’s getting very hard to tell. It’s no wonder the BBC is leaning heavily towards one side here.

The reason I’m making this a main post and not just another complaint in an Open Thread is that the bit right before that Geithner/Balls quote highlights the BBC’s bias on economics reporting both in Britain and elsewhere.

Whereas countries such as the UK have imposed spending cuts to reduce their deficits, the Obama administration has said rapid, drastic spending cuts are not the way forward.

This one sentence reveals the massive editorial bias about economics at the BBC. Countries such as the UK, eh, BBC? The Obama administration has said the exact same thing Labour keeps saying, so it must be true. In the context of the recent – including today’s – relentlessly negative BBC reporting on the Tory spending cuts, one can only draw the conclusion that “drastic” spending cuts are disastrous, hit the poorest hardest, etc.

Censored from this and basically all BBC discussions of countries imposing spending cuts is the one country which actually did it starting last year: Germany. Worst of all for the BBC, the Germans seem to have gotten it right.

The German economy, Europe’s largest, has powered the region’s expansion over the past year as companies stepped up output and hiring to meet export demand. While governments from Ireland to Spain are struggling to revive their economies and push down budget deficits, German business confidence surged to a record last month and manufacturing growth accelerated.

Germany’s outlook is looking better and better because of the austerity measures the BBC hated on at the time. They hated it so much that they actually put up a page asking for input from people engaged in anti-austerity riots in Europe. They acknowledged Germany’s success once or twice (while still reminding you that nobody likes it and the masses are rioting anyway), but it’s quickly swept under the rug and censored when discussing policies in Britain, as if the example doesn’t exist.

Business confidence in Germany is the highest in two decades, basically since before West Germany had to absorb East Germany much in the same way that Lloyds had to (yes, had to, despite Robert Peston’s attempts to make you forget about that) absorb HBOS.

This fact is suspiciously missing not only from this report, but from basically every single BBC report or discussion about budget policy. They don’t want you to think about it, because it contradicts the Narrative: Left economic policies are better.

All you hear from the BBC is how bad these cuts are, and what cruel and unnecessary damage is being done. You never hear of a case where it’s working, and certainly are never allowed to consider how the alternative plan failed in Japan and Ireland, for example. The BBC’s partisan bias on budget policy is very clear and consistent.

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