Monthly Archives: September 2011

LYING OR JUST BAD?

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A Biased BBC commentator asks;

“Is Mark Mardell lying or just a very bad, ill informed journalist? 

In 2006 Mardell asked the same question about torture as he asks now.

‘I find it interesting that I can’t recall any allegation that the allies used, or discussed using torture during World War II, although there must have been occasions when it might have saved lives or even the liberty of states. If you know differently please let me know.’

 Mark Mardell 2011

It has always intrigued me that when Britain really stood in peril of foreign conquest, when the blitz was killing more people than died on 9/11 night after night, it seems torture was not used.  Perhaps they simply never captured a Nazi senior enough to be worth putting to the question. What is the tipping point ?’

You might find it difficult to believe he had not heard of ‘The Cage’ especially as it was a story run by the BBC’s print version, The Guardian, in 2005….

Here describing conditions in a post war torture camp run by the British in Germany….

‘a place where prisoners were systematically beaten and exposed to extreme cold, where some were starved to death and, allegedly, tortured with instruments that his fellow countrymen had recovered from a Gestapo prison in Hamburg. Even today, the Foreign Office is refusing to release photographs taken of some of the “living skeletons” on their release.  Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency.’

Mardell could of course just be echoing his idol Obama:

‘Is Barack Obama reading blogs, particularly the site of one of his campaign’s most committed supporters, Andrew Sullivan? At his press conference on Wednesday evening, the president defended his decision to end the use of torture on detainees, by citing an article he had recently read, in which it was noted that during World War II, Winston Churchill refused to use such tactics on the spies captured by the British. “I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees,” said Obama. “And Churchill said, ‘We don’t torture,’ when the entire British — all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.” 

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MARX WAS RIGHT!

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Plastic bust sculpture of Karl Marx
A Biased BBC reader writes;

” I’ve just seen this ridiculously left-wing piece on the BBC News web site: 

“Karl Marx may have been wrong about communism but he was right about much of capitalism”
“…more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right.”
“Marx… was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.”
“As capitalism has advanced it has returned most people to a new version of the precarious existence of Marx’s proles.”
“…just as he predicted, the bourgeois world has been destroyed”
Ah, they DO love old Karl, don’t they?

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Keeping Watch

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I’m forever guarding the BBC’s output, day and night. I watch all channels simultaneously, whilst listening to radios one two three four five six and seven, and the BBC World Service.

Only Joking. I’m bemused if anyone has that impression, and quite flattered.

From the bits I do watch, I recognise many of the biases mentioned on this blog, but I find the anti Israel bias the most painful, and somehow the most insidious, because it leads to things like the incident at the Prom.

Palestinian Solidarity Campaigners committed a profoundly self-defeating affront when they disrupted the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’s prom concert at the Royal Albert Hall.

Music lovers regard Zubin Mehta and Gil Shaham as the crème de la crème. The audience at the Albert Hall eventually got to enjoy the treat they were waiting for. First they had to sit by and watch while a bunch of nobodies who presumed they had the right to caterwaul and chant and drown out the finest musicians in the world, gave an embarrassing display of their insensitivity and ignorance.

The radio 3 audience missed out altogether. The BBC made an unfortunate decision to abandon the live transmission. However, when the fools were finally ejected, the performance went ahead triumphantly, to prolonged, tumultuous, joyous, applause.

The incident has generated thousands of comments on the internet.

There are four hundred and forty four on the BBC News website, and forty nine on the BBC Proms website, several hundred below other articles, such as Brendan O’Neill’s piece in the Telegraph.(689 and counting)

The ignorance displayed by some of the contributors is mind-boggling.

The Palestinian Sympathy Orchestra, let’s call them, is equipped with clichéd, half-understood gossip, myths and distortions. Helpfully, they nearly always set them out in full before launching off into the tirade proper. “Stolen land, illegal settlements, ethnic cleansing, diverted water supplies, bulldozed houses, white phosphorous, apartheid, UN resolutions, illegal this that and the other” they excrete, indignantly. Particularly common is: “Israelis are killing innocent Palestinians everyday.”

They *know* these things, and they use them to justify their largely predetermined hatred of Israel. Where do they get these ideas?

Comments also appear on Norman Lebrecht’s ‘Slipped Disc” webpages. Today there’s a contribution by famous tousle-haired cellist Steven Isserlis. It was submitted to the Guardian, and for some reason they chose not to publish. He begins: “The protesters who disrupted the Prom by the Israel Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta are not only guilty of cultural hooliganism, but are deeply misguided.” and ends: “To wreck their very rare and special concert over here gives a terrible impression of us all – haven’t the rioters done that already?”

You may as well read the middle as well.

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THE ‘C’ WORD…

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This latest exercise in naked partisanship by Richard Black has already been noted by B-BBC readers, but I was away yesterday and could not let it go without further comment. What it shows is that Mr Black is now such a fanatical propagandist that he is avidly snapping up any chance he can to rubbish the views of those who dare to disagree with him. The reality of the “story” – puffed up to be lead item on the warmist section of the BBC website – is that the editor of an alarmist science journal resigned after readers ganged up on him and told him that he had published a report that gave too much credence to evidence from dreaded sceptics which suggests more heat escapes from the earth into space than warmists say.

The guts of the situation – as is explained here – is that the editor appears himself to be a spineless propagandanist who has caved in, despite the powerful evidence contained in the paper. But as pounce_uk has already astutely noted, the key part of Mr Black’s predictably haughty, patronising put down of the offending research is the caption of Dr Roy Spencer, one of the joint authors:

Dr Spencer is a committed Christian as well as a professional scientist.

That, of course, to the BBC is the ultimate insult. He might as well have called him by the n* word. In the BBC lexicon, utter contempt is meant by such a description. To me, this marks a new low – the descent into a vicious, Inquisition-style vendetta against all who dare to challenge the alarmist orthodoxy. The gloves are off.

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Mark Mardell Sneers At The US Again

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As`part of the BBC’s sensational run-up to the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Mark Mardell speaks to a CIA officer about the use of torture, and whether or not it can ever be justified.

The ideas discussed in the full piece may or may not be of interest to you. I don’t know, and frankly don’t care. What I want to draw your attention to is this statement by Mardell, with which he ends the piece:

Such discussions are the meat and drink of adolescent debating societies, rather than mature democracies – where it is more normal to assume it is very wrong, while very occasionally turning a blind eye if it happens.

It has always intrigued me that when Britain really stood in peril of foreign conquest, when the blitz was killing more people than died on 9/11 night after night, it seems torture was not used.

Perhaps they simply never captured a Nazi senior enough to be worth putting to the question. What is the tipping point?

This is the BBC North America editor giving you his personal opinion that, not only is the US inferior to Britain, but we’re no better than adolescents. This is opinion, not journalsim, and sure as hell not impartiality.

Will any of you trust someone about US issues who so candidly sneers at us?

UPDATE: My thanks to all who have pointed out that Mardell is not only biased and arrogant, but ignorant of his own country’s history as well. His statement, on which his entire case for US inferiority seems to rest, is patently false. A full complaint to the BBC is on the way.

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Palmed Off

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I hope they warned Mark Regev that the focus of his interrogation had been altered at the last minute, from the original version on the Today website –



“The “million people march” is due to take place tonight in Tel Aviv, protesting against the high cost of living and shortage of housing in Israel. Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev looks at the state of Israel today”

– to this updated item, an interrogation about Israel’s refusal to apologise to Turkey for the deaths of nine activists: Israel ‘had right to board flotilla’

So John Humphrys has read the Palmer Report. Well, parts of it, he assured Mark Regev. The parts of special interest to the BBC. Not the main parts, the ones that confirm the legality of Israel’s blockade against the smuggling of arms into Gaza, but those saying Israel used excessive force when they boarded the Mavi Marmara.

The fact that the BBC brought Mark Regev on at all will have irked a particular type of listener. The type who is instantly up in arms at the sound of his voice, writing letters to the BBC about disproportionate pro Israel favouritism. They’re the ones that enable the BBC to claim impartiality ‘because we get complaints from both sides’.

The Palmer report concludes that the blockade is legal, as was the interception of the boat in international waters. The problem seems to arise with how this was enforced. The Israelis’ reaction to the violent reception they faced was criticised because in the end nine activists were shot at close range, some in the back, and some several times.

The fact that the activists were armed and uncooperative doesn’t seem to have been taken into consideration; it certainly wasn’t by John Humphrys.

I’m wondering what the difference is between being shot dead, or being shot dead several times. They must have been very dead indeed.

Would it have been acceptable to the BBC if the Israelis had waited to see just how far the activists were prepared to go before retaliating?

If they had allowed one or two Israelis to be beaten to death, say, before deciding that shooting back was fair and proportionate?

Or should the Israelis have given in, after polite requests to lay down weapons and comply with international law?

It seems that is what Mr Humphrys would have advised. He must have seen the footage of the reception that greeted the boarding party when it landed on the good ship Mavi Marmara, it was shown on Panorama after all, but given that he is aware of the violence, and who initiated it, he seems to think the Israelis shouldn’t have boarded the ship at all!

“It is hard to see how they could have initiated violence had you not boarded their ship.” he says.

I suppose he would think that Britain had no right to intercept armed shipments from Libya to the IRA in international waters, either.

Were the activists armed and resisting arrest? Yes they were. Were the Israeli soldiers being attacked and beaten with iron bars? Yes they were. Was Israel within its rights to intercept the ship in international waters? Yes it was. Was there a “Complex combative chaotic situation and close hand-to hand combat?” as Mark Regev repeated, and John Humphrys disregarded. Yes, undoubtedly.

The truth is that the BBC thinks the ship should have been allowed to break the blockade, which they still want to believe is illegal, just as they still want to believe the flotilla was carrying aid, which they still want to believe Gaza needs. They still believe that Israel is the most evil place in the world, and they still want to doubt its legitimacy, no matter what any reports or investigations come up with.

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THE VENETIAN JOB…

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A biased BBC reader notes;

“This morning I sat through 2 showings of a BBC Breakfast report at the Venice Film Festival giving us the low down on the films being released and showcased there. In both reports the BBC showed a clip of George Clooney at a press conference, supposedly there to talk about his film. Did the BBC show clips of him talking about the making of the movie? or the fact that he directed it? No. They showed a 30 second Clooney monologue on why Obama’s a great guy and has a very hard job. WHAT ON EARTH DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE FILM FESTIVAL?”

What indeed?

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OUR EVER LIVING POET

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It is perfectly legitimate to question the Shakespearean authorship. I have been an advocate of Lord Oxford, Edward de Vere, for years now, so I pleased when I saw that the BBC were going to cover the issue here as a new movie is released on the topic. Instead of a balanced view owever, we got a prolonged sneer from both David Sillito and Evan Davies. I like to deal in facts and there are many which support the De Vere claim but these were all brushed away as the luvvies just agreed with each other.

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Downward Spiral

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The so-called ‘Palmer report’ has finally been published.

Publication was held back for various reasons. The BBC says because of fears that issuing it sooner would jeopardise reconciliation between former allies Turkey and Israel – “which didn’t happen”. It seems, as well, that both Turkey and Israel had contributed to the delay by intervening with various demands and objections. The likelihood of a reconciliation seems somewhat far-fetched.

The conclusions boiled down to: a) Israel’s blockade was legal, but: b) they used excessive force on the Mavi Marmara.

The BBC’s headlines, needless to say, presented these two the other way round. They said the report stated that Israel used excessive force ‘when they boarded a ship taking “supplies” to Gaza.’

They didn’t say what the supplies were, perhaps because there weren’t any.

The next time round they modified the wording, along with, of all people, Barbara Plett’s more accurate terminology, that the flotilla was intended to ‘break the blockade’.

However the headline has currently reverted to “aid”. They’re saying the flotilla was taking aid! Everybody knows that 1) Gaza may need various kinds of help, but taking ‘aid’ isn’t one of them, and 2) the Mavi Marmara was taking a mob of activists and useful idiots on a publicity stunt devised simply to demonstrate their Israel-hating politics.

Israel takes issue with the “excessive and unreasonable” part of the report. Before saying ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they” it’s worth asking what else they could have done under the circumstances.

Turkey, of course, also takes issue. With everything else in the report.

That raises questions about the usefulness of commissioning these reports in the first place.

So, talking of Israel-hating politics, that brings us to the next headline, the disruption of the Israel Philharmonic orchestra’s performance at the Albert Hall. The triumph of the so-called pro Palestinian activists was that radio 3 had abandoned the live broadcast. Only they could believe that doing so was any help to the poor Palestinians.

The BBC initially reported that the performance was disrupted by pro Palestinian protesters shouting and booing the orchestra. So excited was the BBC scriptwriter that he/she forgot to notice that the booing came from the audience and was directed at the protesters. They’ve been featuring an interview with Deborah Fink, without mentioning the unpredictable, volatile outbursts which show her to be demonstrably unhinged. Many of us will be familiar with Deborah Fink’s other-worldly performance on a similar occasion, courtesy of Youtube.

The BBC is reflecting, creating, reflecting, creating the public’s hostility to Israel in a downward spiral, whose momentum seems unstoppable.

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