Monthly Archives: May 2011

TWISTED VALUES

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A bit of a revolution is going on in Canada. The Conservatives won a thumping election majority on May 3, and new premier Stephen Harper has wasted no time in cutting taxes, asserting national sovereignty and boosting defence spending. His resolve puts the Cameron government to shame and shows how far we are from having a truly conservative administration. Top of Mr Harper’s agenda, too, was scrapping climate change legislation. Hallelujah! Unlike in the UK, there will be no suicidal carbon tax, and he’s also binned plans to phase out old-fashioned light bulbs – which may seem minor, but the imposition in the UK of mercury-filled monstrosity bulbs symbolises to me all that is insane and fascist about greenie zealotry.

The BBC, of course, has scarcely metioned this major outbreak of common sense – a tectonic shift, I would argue, in that it’s the first government to comprehensively disagree with climate change lunacy – saying instead only that Mr Harper has “avoided” climate change legislation. In BBC speak, that means he’s a right wing, shifty, denialist who is taking his country to hell in a hand cart.

Meanwhile, in sharp contrast, BBC climate change zealotry is in full sympathetic flow this morning in the reporting of Australia’s continued descent into climate change lunacy. Premier Julia Gillard has blatantly broken election pledges not to introduce carbon taxes, and now, crows the BBC, has induced – in true Pravda style – the Climate Change Commission to file a report that warns that sea levels will rise by one metre by the end of the century. Oh yes? These people are such shameless propagandists that they are beaneath contempt. Nothing ever dents or blunts greenie arrogance…as this report shows.

But as usual, the BBC reports the nonsense with only a nodding mention of scepticism, and of course, it’s emphasised that “Australians are one of the highest per capita carbon emitters in the world”. In the BBC’s creed, governments are always right if they support climate change lunacy; those that don’t are simply right-wing nutters.

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Complicity in Israel-Bashing Jamboree

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Does the Media Aid Israel? Does Amnesty Aid Humanity? Does the BBC Aid Amnesty?
To comply with its charter the BBC needs to convince the world that its coverage of the Middle East is impartial, but you need only glance at certain BBC employees to spot a commonality that belies any such claim. Former BBC Middle East correspondent Alan Hart is a conspiracy nut whose anti-Israel fanaticism crosses the line between rationality and hyper mania. He flimsily camouflages this by producing a faux BBC chat show called ‘Hart of the Matter,’ with a rogues gallery of career anti Zionists as guests. He parted company with the BBC a while ago, but there’s also Tim Llewellyn who worked for the BBC for ten years and knows all about propaganda. At the 2004 book launch of ‘Bad news From Israel’, Mr Llewellyn exposed the tricks used by the cunning Israelis to dupe the BBC into promoting the case for Israel.

“The Israelis appear in studios wearing suits. They’ve learned all sorts of tricks. They are wizards at communication; [….]He added that the tone of complaints against those giving the Palestinian viewpoint was “vituperative, pestering and controlling.”

‘Bad News From Israel’ is a rich source of material from which BBC spokespersons tediously produce morsels to attest to the BBC’s impartiality. (the antidote is Stephanie Gutmann’s The Other War)
Author Greg Philo and his colleague Llewellyn use the technique, much cherished by Arabs, of attributing your own most malevolent inner thoughts, suspicions and shortcomings to your enemy.
To employ one anti-Israel polemicist as Middle East correspondent seems careless; two appears more than mere coincidence. Yet more still …… looks positively purposeful.

When the Arab uprisings began to make the headlines, one of the experts on the BBC’s speed dial was kindly grandfather Kamal Helbawy, spokesman for the Islamist group Jeremy Bowen calls moderate, the Muslim Brotherhood. Moderate in comparison to something in his own head no doubt. Meanwhile, Bowen, himself a man with attitude, has temporarily forsaken his Palestinian pals to support Gaddafi, and Jon Donnison is following in Alan “I’m telling your story” Johnston’s well trodden footsteps, like a kidnap waiting to happen. So Is Wyre Davies. Yasmin Alabhai Brown is on the BBC so often that she acts as if she owns the place. She and Mehdi Hasan are incessantly called upon to review the newspapers. Why?
Abdel Bari Atwan’s eyes bulge constantly from our screens. Thought for the Day regular Oliver McTernan runs Forward Thinking.

“Have a look through Harry’s Place archives and you’ll understand very quickly that this is merely a euphemism for “we support Hamas”.

I could go on, but I won’t.
Tim Llewellyn is consumed by his hatred of Israel. He’s beside himself, a man possessed. He and Mr Philo are continually beavering away alongside other Israel-haters, spreading the word. Amnesty International has unequivocally aligned itself with the Islamists. In the UK the BBC, the rest of the MSM, and probably the global social media network have convinced the majority of the idiocracy that taking an anti Israel stance is cool.
Occasionally the BBC administers Douglas Murray and Melanie Phillips to take the bitter taste away, but that’s just a drop in the bucket of balance. Next time a human rights report from Amnesty headlines a BBC news bulletin, remember the BBC’s charter.
Because of the BBC, Zionism is a pejorative, and the very word Israel has come to embody evil. Heedless that they’re recreating 1930s Germany, the BBC carries on regardless.

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How The Establishment Closes Ranks Around the BBC

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This is a cross post from Autonomous Mind

“Regular readers may recall a couple of posts back in January where we told the story of an Autonomous Mind reader who complained to the BBC about an edition of Hardtalk.

This is the one in December 2010 where President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives was allowed to state, without challenge, that due to human induced climate change sea levels around the Maldives are rising. The lack of journalistic rigour and blind acceptance of such a controversial viewpoint as fact led to the complaint being made and the BBC’s two fingered resp0nse in January which included the immortal words:

We’re committed to honest, unbiased reporting and are determined to remain free from influence by outside parties.

Following the response, our reader then filed a Freedom of Information request to the BBC asking for details of:

  • how many complaints/ accusations of bias the BBC received from the public about the BBC’s coverage of climate change
  • how many of the complaints received about climate change were upheld by the BBC, i.e. were accepted
  • brief details / a list of all the complaints upheld, i.e. the details of the upheld complaint and the BBC’s response (excluding details of the person complaining)

In publishing the story in a follow up post we shared the unsurprising news that the response from the BBC to our reader’s request was a refusal to provide the information sought. Once again the BBC was hiding behind its establishment-given provision to withhold any information the BBC considers to be held for the ‘purposes of journalism, art or literature’.

Read the rest:

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All The same Mistakes

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The only thing that was new in Andrew Marr’s interview appeared to be Obama’s acknowledgment that ‘conditions on the ground have changed’ in the Middle East. People are attributing this to Netanyahu’s response to the ‘1967 lines’ section of Obama’s speech. On BBC news 24 with Zeinab Badawi they infuriatingly cut Netanyahu’s reply. It was essential to listen to Netanyahu’s speech in full to critique his reaction, but as the BBC would rather misunderstand it, why bother?

The West’s desire for a new dawning of an Arab age of enlightenment has triumphed over reality. Effigies draped in the Israeli flag, strange fruit hanging in Tahrir Square, are ignored while the West’s wishful thinking is projected onto the so-called Arab Spring. Echoes of the deluded optimism that led America to project all its desires onto Obama’s vacuous promises of Hope and Change and swept Him to power, startled, on a tidal wave of expectation with only a platitudinous manifesto to sustain him. Obama was bound to disappoint.

As we pull out of Iraq it is generally admitted that we failed to plan for the ‘peace.’ The overthrow of Saddam was the beginning, not the end. Yet we repeat this error having learned nothing.

Obama’s obtuse self-serving interpretation of the Arab revolutions, his deliberately naive pretence that they herald ‘democracy,’ his willful ability to ignore the rise of Islamism and refusal to acknowledge that the single unifying feature of the Arab street is hatred of Israel and Jews, were the discordant notes in Obama’s ambiguous backward-looking speech.
In the Marr interview Obama refers to ‘ rockets fired by Hizbollah’ but completely fails to mention the ideology behind them. Similarly his two ridiculously biased ill-informed guests sagely warned that unless Israel makes more concessions to its deadly enemies there will be dire consequences for the whole world.
On Barry Rubin’s Pyjamas Media summary, commenter ‘Terry’ describes Obama as:
“an adolescent, a sophomore radical imbued with all the Leftist BS slogans, he is immature & his intellectual development stopped long ago, he is intellectually shallow & not particularly well-educated or well-read. He has no understanding of history or economics beyond all the incoherent leftist slogans & the crap he heard from his leftist & Islamist friends & acquaintances, the Rev. Wright comes to mind.”
The BBC is hostile to Israel, openly disrespectful to PM Netanyahu, superficial, lazy, pandering to Islam; in fact the BBC itself fits the above description of Obama perfectly. How else could they get away with promoting Obama’s outrageous plan to wind the clock back 44 years and recreate the conditions that gave Israel’s enemies the confidence to attempt an intended war of annihilation? They make no secret of the fact that this is still their aim. They don’t have to. Even if they shouted it from the rooftops, the world would project their own cuckoo-land interpretation onto the religion of peace, and the BBC is up there aiding and abetting.

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RECONCILIATION BETWEEN HOLOCAUST DENIERS AND GENOCIDAL JIHADISTS

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Anyone catch William Hague on the politics show? It was interesting to see him dodge BBC questions on whether the Fatah/Hamas “reconciliation” was a step forward. It’s sad to see Hague spew forth the banalities of the Israel-hating F.O. but not unexpected. Whilst the blogosphere was alive with Netanyahu’s very public dressing down of Obama’s “1967” nonsense, the BBC remains married to it.

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MISSING CO2

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The reason why Tata steel is cutting 1,500 jobs from its UK operations could not be clearer. According to this report, Karl-Ulrich Köhler, head of European operations for Tata, said:

“EU carbon legislation threatens to impose huge additional costs on the steel industry. Besides, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about the level of further unilateral carbon cost rises the UK Government is planning. These measures risk undermining our competitiveness and we must make ourselves stronger in preparation for them.”

In other words, lunatic EU greenie policies combined with dead-man-walking Chris Huhne’s newly-adopted turning of the screw (scroll down to the David Rose comment piece) – proudly putting the UK in the world lead as adopter-in-chief of suicidal eco-economic policies – are forcing lifeblood manufacturing industries out of the UK.

Surprise, surprise, the BBC’s reports on the job losses here and here barely mention this. When a union chief or Labour MP slams government policy for being Thatcherite or “Tory cuts”, the subs at the BBC routinely salivate and make it headline news. But because in this case Labour MP Nick Dakin dares to attack the BBC’s revered carbon taxes, it’s not emphasised or played up at all.

The headline I would have written for the story would have been “Carbon taxes lead to major job losses, says steel boss”. Never in a month of Sundays on the BBC.

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WELL THERE’S A SURPRISE!

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Regular readers of this blog will know that David Preiser, DB and myself (in the comments) have had our purely metaphorical cross hairs trained on Katie Connolly – the lead reporter at BBC Online’s Washington bureau – for quite some time now.

She was headhunted from Newsweek in the Spring of 2010 to head a new team that (we discovered) also included an enthusiastic Obama 2008 campaigner called Matt Danzico (remember ‘Llamas Heart Obama’?). We noticed that the new online unit began pumping out a lot of heavily-biased reports, generally favouring Democrat positions and undermining Republican ones. Katie Connolly was responsible for quite a few of those articles.

The unit seems to have gone oddly quiet in recent weeks and it now transpires that Katie Connolly has a new job. According to her updated strap line on Twitter she is now a Senior Project Director at the Benenson Strategy Group. They are usually described as Democratic Party pollsters but also help devise campaign strategies for a large number of Democrat politicians and trades unions, playing a major role in the 2008 Obama Campaign and even helping Gordon Brown during the 2010 UK general election. (That went well, didn’t it?) .

So a BBC reporter we’ve long suspected of being biased towards the Democrats leaves to join a firm of Democrat Party strategists.

Who’d have thunk it?

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Everybody Draw Mohammed Day – 1st Anniversary

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What with all the noise about the US President selling Israel down the river due to a combination of naiveté, wrong-headedness, and a soupçon of anti-Israel sentiment, but apparently still not doing enough to please Hamas and Kim Ghattas, I missed out remembering that May 20 is the 1st anniversary of Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. Yes, I realize it’s officially over in the UK as I write this, but when I started there was still five minutes to go US EST. So there. The BBC is going to censor all of it because they bow to unjust demands of Islam on these things. Mark Thompson himself said that Islam gets special treatment.

I’m recognizing the day not out of any malice towards Islam itself, as I personally bear none (I’m aware that I’m in the minority here, but this blog is actually a pretty big tent). I do this in defense of individual religious freedom, something that is as relevant in the US as it is in Britain, even though my country doesn’t have an official state religion (If anyone tells me that Christianity is the official religion of the US, they’ll need to tell me which version before I start laughing).

The reason I say this is about individual religious freedom and not malice towards Islam is because I take the position that non-Muslims are not required to obey the rules of Mohammed. Why do I bother? Because of the continued pressure to avoid saying anything that offends Muslims. Except the real concern isn’t as obvious as having the freedom to burn a Koran (which is an act of malice towards the religion), but rather the freedom to do things that Muslims wouldn’t do without being told to stop because it’s offensive to their sensibilities. The vast majority of media outlets in the UK and US censored even the most innocent cartoons out of appeasement and fear. Freedom of speech was thus taken away from non-Muslims, who instead were forced to obey the law of a religion not their own.

I’m talking about things like preventing non-Muslims from having a plastic pig included with their childrens’ farm toy set, because pork is verboten in Islam. More food companies are shifting their products into halal compliance, in the US and in the UK, in spite of many non-Muslims’ objections to that particular method of butchering. It’s being forced on non-Muslim children by the school system as well. No option for both choices: only the Mohammedan option on offer, period. Then there’s telling non-Muslims they can’t eat in front of Muslims during Ramadan. Nobody’s going to ban eating a sandwich in any public sector workplace during Passover in order to avoid offending Jews who don’t eat leavened bread during that time, so there is a clear unjust double standard which cannot withstand the scrutiny of the laws of freemen. Nobody should be forced to obey the rules of a religion not their own, or even their own if they don’t want to.

Yes, the above examples are mostly a couple years old or more, but where’s the evidence that this no longer happens anywhere, all cases are solved and will never happen again?

I fully support offering halal or kosher or Klingon dietary options in an area where that’s what the majority wants, if it’s a commercial decision. If KFC or Domino’s want to have halal-only food in Mohammedan neighborhoods because that’s where the money is, it’s perfectly fine by me. But nobody should be forced by the government to obey the rules of another religion.

It’s in the spirit of continued religious freedom that I mark this first anniversary of Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. Muslims are forbidden from making graven images of people, most especially Mohammed, but non-Muslims can do whatever the hell they like in a free country. That is not an attack on Islam, but a defense of freedom against any form of fascism or oppression.

My contribution is below. Everyone is encouraged to add their own contribution or links to others. It’s not an attack on Islam, but rather a statement of individual freedom. Mohammedans are as free to make fun of me as celebrated artists are for such brave acts as dipping a crucifix in urine or producing a play featuring Jesus as a homosexual. I don’t care. Freedom, baby. Censorship is against the best interests of a free society.

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