Funny how Germany and France’s fall from economic grace is caused by their export market to southern Europe collapsing….whilst the British economy stagnating is all the fault of Osborne’s Plan A and nothing to do with European economic meltdown on our doorstep at all (or Gordon Brown).
BBC not happy that Government is using CPI rather than RPI as inflation measure to calculate public sector pensions, amongst other things. Jonty Bloom had an item on Today this morning about this with the not so subtle meme that basically this change will drive us all into poverty. Talk about inflating hype! I suppose expecting the BBC to look at it from another perspective, namely cutting the bloated Public Sector and its totally unaffordable benefits is to be unrealistic?
The BBC is always rigorous in its work when it comes to certain subjects….Israel, George Bush, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and undermining the Tory Party…it is also well known for attacking ‘America’ itself, its values and customs, its legal system and health care, its gung ho attitude to life.
Here is an ex-pat American, who has now fled back to America (presumably because he knew one day Justin Webb would be back here) who has noticed the BBC’s curious attitude:
So, to sum up, for the year 2005 the BBC covered the executions of 5 specific individuals (and clemency grant of 1) with 21 articles, and touched on the death penalty in the US more generally in an additional 7 pieces. This, in a year in which 60 convicted criminals were executed throughout all of the US. Even if we ignore the BBC’s Tookie Williams campaign and count all of its 11 articles on him as one, the BBC still averagied more than an article a month about the US death penalty.
The BBC also repeatedly reminded its readers that the US ranked 4th behind leader China in total number of executions for the year 2004, a fact which presents us with an interesting comparison.
A definitive figure on the number of executions in China for the year 2005 could not be found, but Amnesty International estimates that the figure was “at least 3,400”. How many articles do you suppose can be found on the BBC website specifically about executions in China? TAE did a google search on the BBC’s site for “china execution [month] 2005”. The relevant results were:
January – none
February – none
March – none
April – none
May – none
June – none
July – none
August – none
September
UN envoy cautions China on human rights (with a specific mention of executions).
China top court gets power to review death sentences.
October
– none
November – none
December – none
So, 3,400 executions in China merits only 2 stories on the death penalty in general, and zero stories on any specific execution, while 60 executions in the US merits 7 stories in general and 21 stories about specific executions. Or, put another way, executions in the US, which total only 1.76% the number of executions in China, get 1,400% of the amount of coverage given to executions in China. And the 1,000th execution in the US since 1976 is, for the BBC, a “landmark” and “milestone” requiring 3 stories, while the 1,000th (and 2,000th, and 3,000th) execution in China since January 1 last year passes by entirely unremarked upon.
Just what is it about US executions that so attracts the attention of the BBC?
Many of the BBC profess a liking for the Chinese way of doing things…Andrew Marr, Richard Black, and John Humphrys who told us the Chinese invasion of Tibet brought great progress to the country as the new Chinese built rail road encroached ever more upon the Tibetans bringing with it a swarm of Chinese settlers…no problem with these settlers….unlike the Jewish ones elsewhere!
The Sunday Times reveals the traumas that the Chinese have brought to Tibet.
‘Hide, Wait, Run’
‘The girls hugged the ground as the soldiers scanned the forests and mountain foothills, their torchlights bobbing in the distance. The girls, aged 12 and 10, were running for their lives and their story is far from unique….with thousands of other child refugees from Tibet they trek to India in search of a new life away from the persecution they receive in ‘China’ (ie Tibet).’
Marr did an interview with the Dalai Lama who has been in exile for 50 years but failed to ask why he was in exile or ask what is happening in Tibet….or why Tibetans are burning themselves to death…Marr said they must be ‘desperate’ but no clue as to why.
The BBC’s lack of interest in events in Tibet is all the more surprising considering its concentration on Israeli affairs which is remarkable, as is the BBC’s implicit condemnation of Israeli actions, remarkable because whilst several thousand people have been killed in the conflict their numbers pale into insignificance beside those of the Congo where over 5 million have died due to conflcit in 10 years, or the 1 million killed in Tibet since the Chinese invasion, or the 40,000 who have been killed in the Turkish/PKK conflict over 10 years in which hundreds of Kurdish villages have been wiped out.
Only recently the Turks launched a two week offensive against the PKK ‘terrorists’ as the BBC like to call them…..but we heard hardly a peep (compared to what it puts out in Israeli coverage) out of the BBC despite over 100 people being killed. Where is the constant stream of reports coming out of Turkey from Jeremy Bowen claiming these attacks are ‘disproportionate, murderous and probably war crimes’ as he has with Israeli assaults on ‘terrorists’…where is Orla Guerin claiming ‘this is Turkish terrorism, this is the Kurd’s 9/11’?
The BBC can’t claim that they have no access to Turkey as they do with other hard to reach, or hard to work freely in, countries. Turkish tanks gets a free pass, but the Jewish ones do not.
Awww, it’s so lovely! Yes, Harry and Emilia are the most popular baby names in England and Wales in 2011, the BBC tells us. Wonder what happened to THIS name?
Hi all, for your edification. Off you go….
The BBC, the police, academia, local and national government all conspire to hide the truth about Islam in our midst…..They tell us that Al Qaeda doesn’t exist, bombers are just criminals perverting a peaceful Islam, Muslim rape gangs targeting non-Muslims don’t exist, ‘extremists’ don’t represent the vast majority of Muslims….all untrue.
The real, inconvenient, Truth is much more complicated…and all the more frightening.
Read this from Der Spiegel and contemplate the future and not just for Turkey…or indeed Europe should Turkey be allowed to become a member but also for individual countries with large populations of activist Muslims:
By Maximilian Popp
Millions of Muslims around the world idolize Turkish preacher Fethullah Gülen, who likes to present himself as the Gandhi of Islam. His Gülen movement runs schools in 140 countries and promotes interfaith dialogue. But former members describe it as a sect, and some believe the secretive organization is conspiring to expand its power in Turkey.
Germans have devoted a lot of attention to Islam in recent years. There are conferences on Islam and research projects on integration. But the German public knows almost nothing about Gülen and his movement, even though it has more influence on Muslims in Germany than almost any other group. “It is the most important and most dangerous Islamist movement in Germany,” says Ursula Spuler-Stegemann, an Islamic scholar in the western German university city of Marburg. “They are everywhere.”
The Gülen movement has two sides: One that faces the world and another that hides from it.
In one of his sermons, he called upon his students to establish a new Muslim age. He advised his supporters to undermine the Turkish state and act conspiratorially until the time was ripe to assume power. “You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe, they (the followers) must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere. (…) You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power (…) Until that time, any step taken would be too early — like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch. It would be like killing the chick inside.”
Gülen’s influence in Turkey was enhanced when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s conservative Islamic party, the AKP, won the Turkish parliamentary election in 2002. Observers believe that the two camps entered into a strategic partnership at first, with Gülen providing the AKP with votes while Erdogan protected the cemaat.
Many civil servants act at the behest of the “Gülen brothers,” says a former senior member. “They were our students. We trained and supported them. When these grateful children assume office, they continue to serve Gülen.” In 2006, former police chief Adil Serdar Sacan estimated that the Fethullahcis held more than 80 percent of senior positions in the Turkish police force. “The assertion that the TNP (Turkish National Police) is controlled by Gulenists is impossible to confirm but we have found no one who disputes it,” wrote James Jeffrey, the then US ambassador in Ankara, in a 2009 cable.
All of this sounds harmless, tolerant and peaceful. But Ilhan Cihaner experienced in Turkey what can happen to critics. “Anyone who messes with Gülen is destroyed,” says the former chief prosecutor. He has been a hero among secular Turks since he investigated the Gülen community in 2007. Cihaner says that he had received information about illegal financial transactions within the cemaat. But then, in response to pressure from the government, he was taken off the case. He was arrested in 2010.
Cihaner was accused of being a member of the ultranationalist Ergenekon organization, a group of conspirators who had allegedly planned to overthrow the government. Even Cihaner’s political rivals believe that the charges against him were absurd. The former prosecutor had acquired a reputation for his staunch campaigns against mafia-like networks. And now he was being accused of working with Ergenekon and planning to plant weapons in dormitories where Gülen supporters lived so as to discredit the movement. The prosecution based its case on statements by anonymous witnesses. Cihaner was eventually released because of insufficient evidence against him. He is now a member of the opposition in the Turkish parliament.
Istanbul-based journalist Ahmet Sik suffered a similar fate. He was arrested in March 2011, shortly before his book about the Gülen movement, “Imamin Ordusu,” (“The Imam’s Army”), was to be published. Security forces searched the offices of his publishing house, and the manuscript, in which Sik describes how the Gülen movement has allegedly infiltrated the police and the judiciary in Turkey, was confiscated. The investigative reporter was charged with being a member of Ergenekon. Ironically, it was Sik who, together with a colleague, had exposed the secret coup plans of an Ergenekon admiral in the weekly magazine Nokta in 2007 and who had repeatedly targeted the Ergenekon network. Sik was released a few months ago, following international protests.
In September 2010, Hanefi Avci, a former Turkish police chief and former Gülen sympathizer, was arrested and accused of having participated in the Ergenekon conspiracy. He had just published a book in which he accused Gülen members in the police of illegally wiretapping their enemies’ telephone conversations and manipulating trials.’
You will never see such a report on the BBC…it is too close to home and too likely to raise some very awkward questions about ‘multi-culturalism’.
“You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers … until the conditions are ripe.”
Remember, this is in essence what Mehdi Hasan says…Muslims must get into positions of power, especially in the Media, so that Muslim influence can increase and hence the power that Muslims can wield will also increase.
Yet again we have the ‘Establishment’ carrying out a policy that has highly controversial consequences, possibly dangerous ones for Democracies, and all criticism is suppressed and silenced. Not only that but Islam is actively promoted by the BBC and all without any balancing critiques.
When the end game starts to play out many of the people who implement these policies will ‘adapt’ and bow down before the new regime and take the silver pieces on offer. They know that just as in Communist society the privileged still live a life of privilege unencumbered by the normal rules and laws of society…look at Muslim royalty and high flying businessmen…..drinking, gambling, womanising…..and yet the morality police back home are hunting down women for driving cars or going out unescorted by a male relative.
Those at the top now figure that come what may they will still be in charge and enjoying the good life never mind what happens to the ‘small people’ and whatever new regime takes power.
The BBC is supposed to hold such people to account…and yet it has become those people itself.
In his now infamous speech, John Humphrys argued that: “If we were not prepared to take on a very, very powerful government indeed there would be no point in the BBC existing — that is ultimately what the BBC is for.’
Shame he doesn’t live up to his own ideals by taking on very, very powerful vested interests.
Yet more relentless socialist, green propaganda from the BBC:
3. The End of the Affair
‘When the first motorways opened they did so to national celebration. But after the first 1,000 miles had been built, their impact on both town and country was becoming apparent and people started to protest.
Middle England rose up and disrupted public inquiries to voice their frustration at motorway building, but it continued and over time the frustration gave way to concerns about saving the planet. In the early 90s that meant young people willing to risk everything to stop the motorways being built. The programme shows how we began to question the promises made by the motorway and along the way found our voice of protest.’
Was that really the case? Wasn’t it in fact just Swampy and his mates tying themselves to trees who ‘risked everything’ to stop roads being built…& ‘everything’ being his roll up fags and social security card.
Of course the BBC are right…no one ever uses the motorways now.
Do you get the feeling that whoever wrote that was also one of the ‘protestors’ before getting a proper job at the BBC to pay the rent?
I wonder when they will be doing such a programme about something more current…such as windfarms and the massive protests across the country from all sectors of society against them?
Forty or more years on from the heady revolutionary days of the 60’s Joan Bakewell is still breaking down boundaries and hierarchical structures in her search for a socialist nirvana….and all from her plebeian, lowly social position…as a Baroness in the House of Lords!
Of course she is fighting the Establishment from the inside! Just like John Prescott and Peter Mandelson.
Bakewell was the ‘thinking man’s totty’ in the 60’s and was suspected by the BBC hierarchy of wanting to overthrow the government.
She doesn’t seem to have changed much as here on ‘Saturday Live’ she lays out her socialist ideology for us to examine.
She disdains the collaboration of State, Church, Schools and Family that all upheld the same values….the young don’t want to feel compelled to follow those rules because they have seen Society is flawed.
She says that the power of corporations was never as great as it is today ….really? I very much doubt that is true….Corporations or traders have always played a role in shaping society….all through history….the Hudson Bay Company or the East India Company are two obvious examples…never mind the ‘nightmare’ of the ‘military-industrial complex’ growing out of the 60’s that the Left are so alarmed about….or indeed the vastly wealthy corporate Church that essentially ran the country for centuries.
Bakewell claims that the 60’s were a ‘world of possibilities’ that has never happened before or likely to happen again…really? Maybe she hasn’t followed British history…or any history….has she never heard of the buccaneering Youth that sailed off around the world in search of adventure and fortune and made an Empire in their wake?
Such simplistic statements of course are made to back up her other assertions which are equally flawed……
She goes on to proclaim that you must ‘make your own rules…make your own values’.
That sounds terrific…we all want to live our lives as we want…but we all have neighbours and we all live in a ‘Society’ which requires rules so that we ‘rub along’.
The SAS’s founder, David Stirling, was a man who broke the rules when needed, but he recognised an essential truth…..that self discipline is by far the harder virtue than following rules set in stone by others. He said this about recruits to the SAS in WWII…..
‘In a sense they weren’t really controllable. They were harnessable and all had a sense of individuality. The object was to give them a sense of purpose and once they were harnessed to that proposition, they policed themselves, so to speak. And that goal had to be a very exacting one…That bag of vagabonds had to grasp what they had to do in order to get there, which included discipline. Although most of them were escaping from conventional regimental discipline, they didn’t fully appreciate that they were running into a much more exacting type of discipline.’
That is ‘Self Discipline’.
The SAS are highly professional, focussed and self disciplined…..they are few in number, highly trained and specially selected….they can maintain the mental attitude needed to exercise self discipline for long periods…..Regular troops in standard units are not so disciplined and need to be kept under control by rigorous enforcement of rules…..should we experiment with Bakewellian anarchist ideas I can only imagine how quickly the call would go up for a police force to be re-established, and for some ‘law and order’.
Some listeners (20 MINS 40 SECS) took exception to Bakewell’s comments and said it was ‘the mentality of the rioter’.
True enough.
But she back pedalled only slightly…saying of course there must be rules…you must work out your own morality….it is a heavy burden…but there is something intrinsic in human nature that lets you know some behaviours are better than others…so work out for yourself a decent way of living…it’s quite a burden to have to do that and very much easier to live by the 10 Commandments.
I think she very definitely lives a very, very cloistered life, a cosy bubble of Upper Middle Class privilege that rarely gets to see the real side of life…or if it does it categorises it as some sort of anomaly that most people don’t really suffer from.
That is the trouble with Socialists…they have no idea of Human Nature…or don’t care….they just wish to impose their utopia upon everyone….nor do I think they have any real grasp of the true nature of Communism or ‘Social Democracy’.
Raising the Red Flag in your Student garret and singing the Internationale in the student bar is all very well but putting it into practise has consequences…very real consequences…..
Having no doubt read all those Leninist tomes surely they must have understood some of it:
‘Under Socialism all Democracy withers away’. Lenin
Socialism aims to destroy the ‘State’ as we know it….society’s servant as it should be…and make it our master…
‘The abolition of the State means the abolition of democracy’.
‘The word Social-Democracy passes muster for a Party whose economic programme is not just socialist in general but directly Communist, and where the ultimate political aim is to overcome the whole State and therefore democracy as well’. Engels.
The Communists claimed that Democracy is organised around the systematic use of violence and that Socialism, developing into full blown Communism, would end Democracy and the use of violence to enforce rules….and why would people conform to a certain acceptable pattern of behaviour in a Communist society?
Because…..the need for subjection of one section of the population by another ‘will vanish since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without force and without subordination.‘
The last two weeks have been a pleasure…Janet Daley in the telegraph explains her delight at the transformation of London’s ‘personality’……
‘What I had not anticipated was that the spectacularly effective campaign of advance warnings and threats to London’s travelling public would cause so much of its working population to abandon the capital. Thus the evacuation of traditionally depressive, harassed, exhausted Londoners made way for the arrival of a lot of rather sweet, smiley people who turned the city into a very jolly and, momentarily, carefree place.’
I can’t help thinking that the same sort of transformation has gone on at 5Live where the dedication to force feeding us Socialist dogma and re-educating the non-believers has been put to one side for a couple of weeks and we were left with what the BBC is best at…providing us with pure information unadulterated by politics, and entertainment from the sporting arena.
I came back down to earth with a bump this morning as 5Live announced Cameron’s new sport project and wheeled on Ed Miliband (who probably has never kicked a football in his life….though he is quite happy to turn up to football games in a Rolls Royce when he should have been at an NHS hospital). Not having heard him for 2 weeks meant his re-appearance in the public sphere was a bit of a shock……disheartening, dismal and depressing are three words that instantly sprang to mind as Miliband droned on.
5Live probably did us all a favour…anybody hearing him would surely be viscerally opposed to voting for him.
So it is back to the political dogfighting and undermining of Britain by the BBC now we’ve got all that horrible flagwaving, elitist, patriotic nastiness out of the way.
Taking a wide view of the BBC you could conceive of it as the mindless vandal in the midst of our community smashing up things of value and daubing its mindless slogans across our streets and airwaves in artless graffiti….much like the vandalism to the post box painted gold to celebrate an Olympic ‘Triumph’ ……
‘When the golden post box commemorating Jessica Ennis’s Olympic triumph was vandalised within 24 hours of its dedication in her home city of Sheffield, the civic authorities painted out the graffiti immediately. That was how New York’s police defeated their epidemic of graffiti: by scrubbing it off as soon as it appeared. It was one of the ways that they took their city back. Sheffield, inspired by the Olympic spirit, decided not to let the hooligans win. Is it too much to expect that the rest of the country might do the same?’
…And like that council that immediately sprang into action to erase the graffiti that defaces our nation and community, sites like Biased BBC do the same…aiming to tackle the BBC’s vandalism to our culture and society by its gerrymandering of the political debate in favour of Labour and the Left, its pro European stance, its pro-mass immigration position and it’s anti-Israel but pro-Islam standpoint.
This site in its own little way, and many others, tries to counter that BBC graffiti that so disfigures our political life and poisons the democracy that protects and lifts us out of darkness.
BBC economics editor (and former advisor to Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers) Stephanie Flanders offers an insight into the BBC’s narrative for the rest of the election campaign:
Ryan is risky VP choice for Romney. Republicans now so extreme, his main appeal 4 swing voters was record as a moderate. Ryan anything but.
— Stephanie Flanders (@BBCStephanie) August 11, 2012
