Monthly Archives: April 2011

Deliberately So

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I wish somebody else had written this because it’s about the usual, and believe me, I don’t want to be repetitive. But needs must.

Anyone who heard R4’s Saturday Live this morning will know what I mean. The studio guest was ‘comedian’ Mark Thomas who has walked the length of the separation barrier in Israel /Palestine. Saturday Live’s genial host, exceedingly left wing Reverend Richard Coles, was all ears.

Not wishing to appear one-sided, Mr. Thomas took a moment to explain that the Second Intifada was very bloody, before lapsing into a melodramatic chronicle of the Palestinian suffering caused by checkpoints and the wall. Meanwhile, Stockholm Syndrome sufferer John McCarthy chimed in with a trail for Excess Baggage, the following programme, which he hosts. McCarthy regularly devotes much of ‘Excess Baggage’ to recommending idyllic holiday destinations such as Damascus, and eulogising over Arab hospitality. Which they duly demonstrated by holding him hostage for several years.
While Mr. Thomas was underlining the unnecessary suffering caused by checkpoints and the barrier, McCarthy interjected with his twopence-worth – “Deliberately so.”

Much as Mark Thomas’s ‘comedian’s cockerney’ portended a preconceived political agenda, I still hoped this might have been tempered by his eye-opening adventure. But his eyes had remained blinkered. Barriers are bad, and must come down, he surmised. Bombs still go off, proving the wall doesn’t protect Israelis as they claim. Here I’m assuming that I’m preaching to the converted, much as the BBC consistently does from the opposite perspective. Please, if you’re not sure what I mean, you need go no further with this.

Mark Thomas is anxious to tell us that his escapade was solely motivated by a devilish, naughty-boy, ‘ooh I am awful’ spirit, and a genuine, healthy curiosity.
But, same as anyone else – you knew it all along – he was merely exploiting ‘our’ hatred of Israel to make a few bucks out of his book, Extreme Rambling. Upcoming gigs seem to be doing rather well.

Funnily enough, he’s written an article for the paper that laps up, with gusto, any morsel of anti Israel rhetoric that comes along. It features an account of a rather moralistic encounter with the late Juliano Mer-Kamis, whose Jenin based inspirational theatre project purportedly channelled would-be suicide bombers’ hatred into the performing arts. Mr. Thomas didn’t disclose that their success rate was dubious. Nor that poor Mr. Mer-Karmis was thenceforth summarily dispatched by some raving Salafist murderers.

On his journey Mark Thomas spoke to Israelis as well as Palestinians, but predictably the list he provides on his website comprises only Israeli pro Palestinian organisations such as ‘Jews for Justice for Palestinians’. There is a deep well of such bodies in Israel. Sadly, not so on the other side.

Also on the programme was an interview with ex Guantanamo Bay guard Brandon Neely who is enduring severe pangs of guilt and regret about the inhumane treatment he unthinkingly meted out to former inmates. The Rev’s introduction alluded to the WikiLeaks revelations about innocent detainees, with nary a whisper about the accompanying revelations that explained why we were involved in the war on terror in the first place.

I have a great deal of sympathy with innocent people caught up in wars. Unfortunates who are in the wrong place at the wrong time do suffer unfairly and unjustly. If inhumane treatment is a tacitly approved practice, that should stop. Should our sympathy for those who are inconvenienced, ill treated, or who suffer loss and pain obscure our sympathy for the intentional victims of Jihad who are never coming back to tell the tale? No it should not.

Ultimately such people are victims of the same terrible thing; the collateral damage that stems from a wicked ideological fanaticism that sets out to overpower and subjugate, or dispose of, unbelievers and those who don’t belong. Deliberately so.

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BBC GREEN CREED SERMON…

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Bishop Hill has unearthed this gem, a presentation to the Cambridge Science and Policy Group by Sarah Mukherjee, the BBC’s former environment correspondent, who in her time at the corporation filed hundreds of alarmist, hell-in-a-handcart reports. Admittedly the delivery was some time ago, but her lecture is a major statement of the BBC’s green creed, and an insight into the madcap and deeply biased thought processes that are involved. It therefore deserves further airing.

The main contentions across 76 minutes of unrestrained greenie bias are that, without a doubt, the science of climate change is proved; that Climategate was a load of nonsense perpetrated by the tabloid press (and the scientists involved have been fully absolved), that we are not doing enough to counter the climate threats facing us, that politicians – despite having passed the climate change act (which commits to 80% CO2 reductions by 2050) – have shamefully reneged on their commitment and – horror of horrors – they will dare to start mining coal again soon. She clearly wants us to go back to the stone age. It’s exactly the same agitprop fervour that permeates the work of Roger Harrabin, Richard Black and the whole phalanx of other BBC activists, the difference being that she has left the corporation and lets rip with a splenetic stream-of-consciousness prejudice that surpasses almost anything I have heard on this topic to date.

BBC prejudice is also writ large in that there’s no doubt of her main targets, identified by the contempt in her voice and her braying, annoying, stoccato laugh. One by one in the firing line are the Tories, the Daily Mail, and Boris Johnson (the latter, I concede, a pretty easy target on this topic).

Actually, having listened to Ms Mukherjee, what alarms me most is that this presentation is so substandard that it defies belief that she was allowed to present to such a supposedly august body. Her homily is both deeply condescending and contains not a shred of hard evidence that climate change (whatever it is) is a genuine threat. Instead, she makes vacuous assertions such as “climate change….it takes 30 years for something to happen”. Shame on Cambridge that – no doubt because of its own prejudices about climate change – it has abandoned its normal intellectual high standards.

Nonsense like that characterises all the outpourings of Black and his cohorts; but still the BBC ploughs relentlessly on.

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ROYAL WEDDING "A LEGITIMATE TARGET"

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A biased BBC reader notes;

“Yep…just checked the BBC web site and there is no mention of the Muslim radical group ‘Muslims Against Crusades’ whom the BBC gave a platform to yesterday enabling them to promote their credibility on news reports throughout the day.
No mention of the fact that they state that the Royal wedding is a legitimate terrorist target….BBC just states that the group says they have no knowledge of any serious threats….despite evidence to the contrary:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/8476705/Muslim-group-claims-royal-wedding-is-legitimate-terror-target.html
“We urge all Muslims to stay away from the royal wedding….because of the likelihood of an attack by the Mujahideen. Many people feel that they have been oppressed and have a score to settle with the Royal Family. We can see why they see them as a legitimate target.”

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THAT ROYAL WEDDING

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The BBC must really hate our constitutional Monarchy and so whilst they cover the pending Royal Wedding – you know deep down they despise our Royal family. So, when they are not sneering about the Syrian ambassador getting an invite, they are desperately trying to get former Australian PM Kevin Rudd to say something very negative about the Monarchy. Good to see he did not rise to their obvious bait and if you listen he provides quite an effective put down to the BBC interviewer.

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THOSE EVIL CONSERVATIVES – A CONTINUING SERIES

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Ah, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and Polly Toynbee is on the BBC telling us how wonderful the Labour years were and how awful those nasty vicious Conservatives are creating so much..ahem.. “child poverty” ! This struck me as a wonderfully unbalanced item but to the BBC it is all light and reason.

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Tangled Webb

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Reverend Nadim Nassar, a Syrian-born Anglican priest living in Britain, keeps in touch with contacts in Syria. He also listens to various media reports of the crisis. In an interesting interview on Today with Justin Webb he remarked on how extreme the differences are between what he’s hearing on Arabic stations, Al Jazeera etc. etc. – and the BBC. I would have liked to hear exactly what he meant, but no luck.

Justin didn’t pick that up, but he did go up in my estimation when he gave William Hague a chance to advertise the hypocrisy of the government’s floundering foreign policy. Our intervention in Libya was on humanitarian grounds. Our non-intervention in Syria is on none-of-our-business grounds. Glad he cleared that up.

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Suicide by Political Correctness

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What a fascinating turn of events. WikiLeaks has revealed that the government was so determined to uphold our reputation as a safe haven for the world’s oppressed that it repeatedly ignored warnings about radical Islamic extremists and refused to admit that harbouring them was not the simple humanitarian gesture they believed it to be.

Now that they’ve managed to turn British cities into Al Qaeda hubs, it’s a bit late in the day to say a shamefaced sorry. The labour party still diverts all recriminations over their open door immigration policy by making a reluctant apology for their small mistake concerning Poles.

At last we’re starting to hear on the BBC what we’ve known all along.

I made a flippant remark about Frank Gardner, but I really meant it.
If, as he says, he too knew all along, and (as he said on Today) Mubarak had actually gripped his hand and warned him, why didn’t he use his influence to persuade the BBC to inform educate and entertain us through one of the many programmes and documentaries that are specifically there to spread the word?

Presumably political correctness was too prevalent at the BBC, even for someone in his position, to penetrate the barrier that separates us from reality.
The real gem was the discussion at 7:31 with Frank Gardner and Kim Howells. Now ‘they’ know, the government knows, and we know they know, what is going to be done about it? If the government won’t act because they’re afraid of losing public support, the BBC must ensure the public knows, and then dealing with the problem firmly will be a massive vote-winner.

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IMPARTIALITY IS IN OUR GENES

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I found this interesting;

Helen “Impartiality” Boaden has beenawarded honorary doctorates by the University of East Anglia. Isn’t that where the CRU emails came from…isn’t that one of the BBCenvironmental journalist’s favourite source of information?  Just why did the likes of Black and Harrabin and Fielding go to such lengths todefend Prof. Phil Jones at the UEA?

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MYTHS

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A Biased BBC reader writes;

“Frank Gardener, the BBC’s security correspondent, today condemned the government for not taking Abu Hamza seriously as a threat…this from a man who works for an organisation that told us Al Qaeda doesn’t exist in its programme ‘The power of nightmares’ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/3755686.stm) …..

‘In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares. The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares.

At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists. Together they created today’s nightmare vision of an organised terror network.’
Should we be worried about the threat from organised terrorism or is it simply a phantom menace being used to stop society from falling apart?

In an age of growing disillusion with politics, the neo-conservatives turned to fear in order to pursue their vision. 

They would create a hidden network of evil run by the Soviet Union that only they could see….and then of course the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. 

It is a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media.’

 So there we have it…not only does Al Qaeda not exist but the Soviet Union didn’t either….or certainly not the highly militarised and invasion prone ‘Evil Empire’ that we knew and loved.

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