CARRYING A TORCH FOR BIAS

Further to DB’s post and looking back through his tweets, there’s another campaign that Stuart Hughes seems single-handedly to have got started and then used the BBC News website to publicise.

https://twitter.com/?tw_e=screenname&tw_i=193078816724365312&tw_p=tweetembed#!/stuartdhughes

The story begins back in March:

19/3/12 Delighted to finally be able to announce that I’ll be taking part in the Olympic #torchrelay on Jul 24th

The following day though he gets some unwelcome news…

20/3/12 Ah, the spirit of the Games. I’ve just been told I can buy my Olympic torch – for just £200. Can I claim it on expenses?…

Later that same day on Twitter….

20/3/12 Pls get in touch if you’re part of the #torchrelay & unhappy with the £200 cost for the torch – I’m interested in doing a story on it.

20/3/12 Thanks to all #torchbearer s who sent me quotes on cost of buying torch. I’ve just filed this story… (cont) http://tl.gd/ghdlun

20/3/12 @jackieleonard01 I’m going to sell photos with the torch outside TVC for a fiver a pop.

20/3/12 My story on Olympic #torchbearer s being charged £200 to keep their souvenir from then #torchrelay http://ow.ly/9MCFR

22/3/12 @damiendavis My colleagues at BBC London are following this up with other councils after my story & seeing if others will follow suit.

From this Twitter trail, it looks as if Stuart Hughes was told he was going to be an Olympic torch-bearer and was delighted. The following day he was told he would be charged if he wanted to keep the torch and was far from delighted. So he immediately decides he’ll use the BBC News website to run a story getting other people to protest about it and starts tweeting for help. He gets some replies and publishes a story (with a second BBC journalist) on the BBC website. Then his pals at BBC London start digging after to see if the story goes beyond one council. Or that’s what it looks like.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17444857

I would describe the BBC Online piece as loaded against the particular company SH is unhappy with. His article also fails to disclose that he, the joint-author of the article, has a personal interest in the story.

The first guy expressing outrage in the report, “Thomas Read”, must be the “Thomas” a certain Emma Gilliam tweets SH about. From her Twitter feed it looks as if she picks up on SH’s request, knows somebody in her class who’s also going to be an Olympics torch-bearer and tells him about the £200 charge, thus making him “outraged!”:

@stuartdhughes i’ve got a student who’s doing the torch relay. where’s the info about the £200?
@stuartdhughes student just seen the email about it all. he’s outraged!
https://twitter.com/#!/EmmaGilliam

SH replies:
@emmagilliam Ask him to email me.
@emmagilliam Thomas has emailed me. Thanks.

(Emma Gilliam, incidentally, is BBC through and through:
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/contactsandpeople/profiles/gilliam-emma.html)

This seems to be revealing about how certain news stories make their way onto the BBC New website and some might argue that this is just a reporter finding an interesting story and reporting it – except that Stuart Hughes surely isn’t a disinterested reporter here. He wrote that story, didn’t he, because he is personally involved in it, was “outraged” that he was going to be charged to keep his Olympic torch, fished on Twitter for other people to back him up by saying they were outraged too & then published an article on the BBC News website about the row he seems personally to have stirred up?

Is this what an impartial BBC reporter should be doing?

Propaganda Works

Although the BBC’s current attitude towards Israel is predominantly hostile, certain Jews are always treated sympathetically. Those persecuted and murdered by Hitler.

“Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel is one of the most sombre points in the calendar. This year has seen the opening of an exhibition dedicated to the young men who ran a football league in the ghetto of Theresienstadt in the Czech republic, who left a remarkable musical legacy. ” So says the Today webpage, introducing Kevin Connolly’s item (yesterday) about the type of Jews he and the BBC have no problem with.

It was a moving and memorable piece, but sadly, such undoubtedly well-intentioned features also provide material for the anachronistic but oft-cited complainants who, according to the BBC, contend that the BBC is overly pro-Israel. This conveniently masks the genuine bias and generates our old friend “we-must-have-got-it-about-right”.  It will have been filed away away in the recesses of their consciousness, together with  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s Shoah-themed Thought For The Day, to justify another tedious complaint about catching sight of Mark Regev on television, or to inspire a hateful post on the internet beneath the YouTube clip of the Nazi propaganda film contrived to bamboozle the public into believing that Hitler was kind to the Jews.

Kevin Connolly spoke to Israeli born Oded Breda who has worked at Beit-Terezin since 2009: “That cynical propaganda film still troubles him to this day. Holocaust deniers who find it on the internet want to use it to suggest that the Jews of Europe were not mistreated. Were not slaughtered” said Connolly, and Mr. Breda added:

“The propaganda film is still working. If you look at YouTube, if you look at remarks that people are putting, people are saying ‘look at the Jews in the war. There was nothing. Look how they play. The propaganda film was working very well.” 

The BBC should be made aware that propaganda is a powerful weapon, and reminded that many people are still unhappy with the BBC’s misleading coverage of the “Jenin massacre”, the lingering fallacy surrounding the Al Durah incident, the uncritical publicity gifted to Ken O’Keefe and Sarah Colbourne after the Mavi Marmara debacle and the ongoing misinformation over the unnecessary death and sanctification of Rachel Corrie; not to mention the BBC’s biased reporting of Operation Cast Lead, and for that matter all wars and skirmishes involving Israel, invariably provoked by the neighbouring states, but habitually blamed on Israel. Not forgetting the misrepresentation of Gaza, the air time given to Islamists and unmarked, unnoted supporters of Islamists and terrorists. In fact the incessant vilification of Israel fits in nicely with the conventional present-day perception of righteousness, no doubt just as it did regarding Jews in pre-war Germany. If the Guardian reflects the thinking behind the BBC’s worldview, and the BBC was not hobbled by its charter, Kevin Connolly’s piece might have replicated the Guardian’s insensitive conduct. In reply to the suggestion that it was inappropriate to publish a piece written by Raed Salah on Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day day, Guardian Comment Editor Becky Gardiner said: “No offence intended”.

 

SANDBAGGED BY THE BBC

“Genesis 12:10 And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine was grievous in the land.”  Biased BBC contributor Alan notes how  the BBC rewrites history to produce a new narrative of Egypt and twists the facts so that a Muslim scholar can claim the credit and not the ‘White Europeans or Americans’ ….they then rewrite it all again 10 years later to surreptitiously feed us yet more climate change propaganda attempting to terrify and trick us into submissive acceptance of the new climate orthodoxy.

Here’s a little riddle.

In 2001 the BBC produced a programme, ‘Ancient Apocalypse ‘, about the end of the Egyptian ‘Old Kingdom.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1458327.stm
In 2011 the BBC published a report on the same by the archaeologist who presented the 2001 film Professor Fekri Hassan http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/apocalypse_egypt_01.shtml
In 2012 the BBC produce another film….’Ancient Apocalypse\’ this time again with Fekri Hassan…only older.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0074m5l/Ancient_Apocalypse_Death_on_the_Nile/
The riddle is ….has the BBC been deceived and is the BBC using the programme for propaganda about climate change?

‘Ancient Apocalypse’ describes the end of the Egyptian Old Kingdom….and tells us of new archaeological discoveries of unimaginable horror from a time when government power crumbles, an advanced civilisation falls apart and Egypt is plunged into a Dark Age…the causes of which have mystified Egyptologists until now. That answer is drought….or as the BBC call it ‘catastrophic climate change’.

You begin to get an idea where this is going.

The BBC’s frontman is Professor Fekri Hassan whom the BBC claim has for 30 years looked for his own explanation for the collapse of the Old Kingdom. He has “always challenged orthodoxy…..The conventional wisdom is that the Kingdom fell after the death of the Pharoah leading to major political conflict for the succession’

The BBC tells us that the first evidence of something far more devastating than political unrest came in 1971 when Hassan himself found an inscription in a little known tomb that described famine and anarchy:

‘All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger, to such a degree that everyone had come to eating his children. . . .The entire country had become like a starved (?) grasshopper, with people going to the north and to the south (in search of grain) .’

However in 1971 scientist Barbara Bell published this:
http://www.gizapyramids.org/pdf%20library/bell_aja_75_1971.pdf
The Dark Ages in Ancient History
1. The First Dark Age in Egypt!

In this publication she referenced numerous texts as evidence for her own theories about the Old Kingdom, one text which she described here….

‘Turning now to the written evidence itself, we may first consider ANKHTIFI, who is
known from the inscriptions in his tomb at Mo\’alla, some 20 miles south of Luxor. This tomb has beenthoroug hly studied by Vandier (1950) who is the source for the quotations3 which follow.’

Note the date of the source…1950….not 1971….and not from Hassan.

What was the quote from the inscription?

‘All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger, to such a degree that everyone had come to eating his children. . . .The entire country had become like a starved (?) grasshopper, with people going to the north and to the south (in search of grain) .’

This is the exact quote that the BBC gives us and claims was found by Hassan.

Clearly it was not.

Clearly the ‘orthodoxy’ is not so certain at all….there is a vast amount of evidence and scientific reports detailing how Egypt suffered from climate driven disasters…the Bible itself indicates that this happened….and although obviously not scientific are almost certainly based on true events however altered in the telling over the years.

Here Bell peppers her text with references to other sources from years past:
‘The cause I postulate as “historical reality” is drought-widespread, severe, and prolonged lasting for several decades and occurring more or less simultaneously over the entire eastern Mediterranean and adjacent lands. This is not to deny the significance of contemporary political and social factors; it is, however, to assert that a climatic economic deterioration of sufficient magnitude can set in motion forces beyond the strength of any society to withstand. Such an hypothesis has indeed already been advanced by Rhys Carpenter (1966) for the Second Dark Age, c. 1200-900 B.C.; Even a moderate drought can bring famine to the marginally productive lands on the edges of the deserts and can thereby motivate tribal migrations and invasions of the better-watered river valleys, a phenomenon discussed by numerous scholars (e.g. Brooks 1949). ‘

She also reveals the widespread climate change in the late 19th century and early 20th century leading to drought and dustbowls across the world.

Long before even the discovery of the Ankhtifi inscription was this….
In 1890, Charles Wilbour discovered a stela on the island of Sahal that described a seven-year drought and famine that occurred during the reign of Pharaoh Djoser, said to have reigned during the classical Third Dynasty (the Old Kingdom)….. it tells a story of anarchy and mutual robbery.
http://conservapedia.com/Famine_in_Egypt

 So Hassan neither discovered the inscription nor was he the first to discover or suggest that climate could effect agriculture and therefore produce famine which then created political instability.

Genesis 47:13 And there was no bread in all the land; for the famine was very sore, so that the land of Egypt and all the land of Canaan fainted by reason of the famine.

What does this suggest?

Firstly that perhaps the BBC has been conned…..perhaps ‘willingly’ so……into producing a programme in which one man, Fekri Hassan, is the’hero’….or ‘local hero’…..nothing like giving the credit to a non-white person to bolster an Empire guilt ridden BBCer’s self worth.

The failure to mention Bell or her predecessors can only have come as the result of a deliberate decision. There is plenty of readily available evidence to reveal their part in the theory of drought driven famine and subsequent disaster in Egypt.

Secondly why has the BBC recycled this 10 year old programme and gone to the trouble of updating it?

The only answer can be that the magic words ‘catastrophic climate change’ caught their eyes and they knew they could use this to keep on pushing their own climate change narrative, keeping it in the public eye and keeping associating it with disasters, collapse of even advanced civilisations and associated ‘unimaginable horrors’.

Naturally they forget to tell us what sort of cars the Egyptians were driving in 2200BC and strangely failed to mention that the drought and famine only ended when the wind turbines were mounted on large pyramid shaped constructions to catch the desert winds to produce the newly discovered electricity.

A SOCIALIST WIN IS A BBC WIN..

I love the BBC’ s lack of pretence that it desperately wants to see Francois Hollande become the next French President. Here’s a cute little item from the BBC’s Hugh Schofield headed. “Nicolas Sarkozy: Why is the French president so disliked?” With his plans to increase the upper tax threshold to 75%, abandon any attempt at austerity and pursue hard core Socialist plans on business, it’s easy to see why the BBC love Francois.

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN?

I see that thousands of BBC staff are to be balloted for strikes over pay, with unions warning of disruption to coverage of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations if action goes ahead.

Members of unions representing journalists, technicians and other employees will vote in the coming weeks, with the result due on May 21. The unions would have to give seven days’ notice of any action, but they would have time to call strikes over the June weekend of events.

I say let them all go on strike, their perfect right. Then sack them all. Our right as the people who fund them.

Question Time LiveBlog 19th April 2012

Tonight Question Time comes from Leeds.

On the panel tonight Conservative party co-chairman and beacon of promoted-beyond-their-ability tokenism Sayeeda Warsi, shadow home secretary and screechy self-righteous harpy Yvette Balls (Cooper), the Respect MP and professional cat impersonator George Galloway, president of the Liberal Democrats and odious backstabbing leadership-wannabe Tim Farron; and the Times columnist David Aaronovitch

Your Moderators line-up consists of David Vance, David Mosque, TheEye and John Ward.

It’s a 10:30pm kick off and afterwards we will suffer the maddess that is This Week. Don’t forget to look for Blue Nun Bingo updates on David Mosque’s website dedicated to the game here.

See you here later!

Covering Up The Cover-Up

(UPDATE: See below) The BBC has posted a news brief about the recent seizure of more than 250,000 rounds of assault weapon ammo being smuggled from the US into Mexico. Not a single mention of the massive story of Operation Fast & Furious, the scandal involving the ATF and the US Justice Dept. deliberately allowing weapons to be sold to arms dealers working with Mexican drug cartels in order to create a body count with which they could inspire more interest in stricter gun control laws.

As this blog has shown, the BBC has barely touched on this scandal at all, and has in fact censored most news about it. Here they’re doing it again. The scandal is highly relevant to this story of ammo smuggling, because the ammo is for the kinds of weapons sold to cartel gun-runners on orders from the US Government.

The BBC even has the gall to mention that the Mexican President is calling for stricter US gun laws, but deliberately censors information about how this has come to pass. They even bring up the body count meme, which is exactly what the gun control advocates in the Government wanted. Yet they censor the actual story behind it all.

The Beeboids behind this know exactly what they’ve done here, and why. This was a deliberate editorial decision to censor news for ideological purposes.

UPDATE: Now the truck driver’s boss says it was a legal shipment to Phoenix, and the driver took a wrong turn. Apparently an ammo sales company in Phoenix claims they ordered the stuff and it’s their shipment. Presumably the ATF is no longer telling them to sell it to gunrunners, so it’s legal stuff going to legal buyers. We’ll see.

If this turns out to be true, we can fully expect the BBC story to “evolve”, right? They don’t go running off to report sensational stories without waiting to see if the facts are correct, right?

IRONY: ECO-NUTTERS DISRUPT BBC BRISTOL OUTPUT

An arson attack on a communications mast which disrupted BBC Radio Bristol’s service last week has been claimed by the Earth Liberation Front:

We take responsibility for the attack on the communications mast on Dundry hill on 11th April, that took out five communication services and took off air BBC Radio Bristol and Jack FM for more than 16 hours, as well as disrupting Avon and Somerset Police radio communications it seems (although they are refusing to comment on this).

They did it by burning tyres, which doesn’t sound very eco-friendly.

Isn’t BBC Bristol the place where they make all those environmental films pushing the climate alarmist agenda?