The BBC is just relentless:

A Point of View: Taking England back to the Dark Ages

I am not sure that it’s just a coincidence that Switzerland is one of the more reactionary and anti-immigrant nations in Europe.

My view is that we need fewer borders, not more. That’s why the European Union makes sense to me. I worry that if we were to go back to historical precedent for the basis of our political units, we would end up fighting medieval battles, not with bows and arrows, but with immigration rules and tax regimes. In the 21st Century, surely it’s time to celebrate what unites us, not what divides us. If we are ever to overcome the problem of climate change, we think globally and act globally. I do love the idea of bringing back the heptarchy, both because I think smaller countries work better, but also because I love traditions. But, proud as I am to be an East Anglian, I think I am first and foremost a human being.

Geddit?  ‘Taking England back to the Dark Ages’ by closing the borders, leaving Europe and creating little nation states.

Hang on...isn’t that what we have been warned would be the result of mass immigration when the immgrants refuse to integrate?

A good trick by the BBC using a ‘point of view’ to smuggle in blatantly prejudiced and biased rhetoric to promote its favoured subjects.

As has been pointed out to me, the BBC is leading its WORLD NEWS this evening as I write this at 22.31pm with Labour’s demand that Theresa May MUST apologise re the Gove spat. Now I am sure this may change and the link will be out of date but here is the screenshot that indicates a certain…shall we say…. BIAS?

The vast immigration this country has suffered recently has been certainly undemocratic in the way it was foisted upon us….if it was undemocratic there must be a good case to make that it is also illegal with politicians implementing their pet policies without a mandate to do so….not just undemocratic by default but by design, the politicians deliberately keeping the public out of the debate and hiding what they intended to do, openly lying to them about the consequences….remember when Labour told us that only 13,000 immigrants were going to come here?

Many immigrant communities have grown up around the country, becoming more isolated and ghettoised year on year as more and more immigrants flock to the same areas to be with their ‘countrymen’ making integration ever more difficult and unlikely.

The Telegraph in 2011 looked at the damage the BBC’s censorship has done to Britain:

How the BBC’s silence on immigration damaged the country

Mark Thompson’s confession that the BBC shied away from subjects like immigration shows how an insidious culture of the unsayable took hold under Labour, says Jenny McCartney.

The topic of immigration today is no longer primarily bound up with racism, but with resources and economics: the views of the children and grandchildren of the Windrush generation are just as varied on the subject as anyone else’s. All of this should have led to a vigorous discussion, on the BBC and elsewhere, which would have helped considerably to detoxify the debate.

Yet for far too long, the corporation simply bottled it, preferring to leave any mention of the i-word to the BNP. As a result, the notion of the “unsayable” was perpetuated, an official omertà that let government policy proceed unchallenged – in a chaotic style that even Labour now admits was a mistake – while popular concern mounted.

As the BBC has now realised, difficult topics do not evaporate because one ignores them: the unsayable has a way of becoming the unavoidable.

That was said in 2011.

Now in 2014 it seems people have come to recognise that certain thngs are unavoidable:

We can’t avoid the threat of Islamism

The truth about how the Home Office views Islamic extremism – by Theresa May’s former speech-writer

Alasdair Palmer in the Telegraph looks at the consequences of immigration starting with terrosim and how governemtn treats that threat, moving on to the effects on society as a whole.

The advocates of the narrow concentration on terrorists insisted that “we can only beat back the crocodiles who come close to the boat”. Those who disagreed felt that, in the long term, the only way to deal with the crocodiles was to drain the swamp – and that meant, they said, targeting extremist ideology.

The argument between Mr Gove and Mrs May – which resurrected talk about “beating back the crocodiles” and “draining the swamp” – is a continuation of that long-standing debate.

Here Palmer looks at the disastrous effects that mass, uncontrolled immigration and failed integration brings…….

The debate on how best to ensure that religious extremism does not generate terrorism takes place in the context of another one: how to integrate immigrants into British society, and to ensure that they adopt values that are not actively hostile to the central ideals of our society – secular democracy, freedom of conscience, tolerance and the equality of everyone before the law.

The number of immigrants coming to this country increased enormously when Tony Blair relaxed the rules restricting entry. Many of the new immigrants were from Pakistan and Bangladesh. They went to the communities in Britain that had been settled and shaped by people who came from the same area, sometimes even the same village, as they did.

It is perfectly reasonable that immigrants, arriving in a strange land whose values and even language they do not fully understand, should prefer to be with people who are similar to them and who share their own language and values. But the effect of that preference is to create “diaspora” communities that do not integrate or adapt to the values of the new society.

Sir Paul Collier, a professor of development economics at Oxford University, has produced a model that shows that it inevitably becomes a self-reinforcing process: each diaspora community gets ever more entrenched in reproducing the values of the society from which the migrants to it come, which in turn attracts more migrants from that society to it, which then ensures that it is less integrated with the host society – and more attractive to the immigrants from the traditional society in Pakistan, India or wherever.

Professor Collier thinks that unless the state takes very definite steps to stop this process happening, it will continue more or less indefinitely, with the result that migrant communities become ever more alienated and remote from the society to which they are supposed to adapt.

That leads directly to the nightmare scenario: a Britain made up of mutually antagonistic “monocultures” that do not trust each other, do not work together and do not share the values of secular democracy, freedom of conscience and the equality of both sexes before the law.

State policy in Britain over the last two decades has fostered the formation of unintegrated diaspora communities: multiculturalism, which was for many years the dominant approach, encouraged communities to hold on to their own values – with the inevitable result that they have become more entrenched.

White racism is not the biggest obstacle to integration: the highest levels of segregation anywhere in Britain are those recorded between Indians and Pakistanis in towns in the north of England. The segregation between

African-Caribbeans and Asians is markedly higher than the degree of segregation between whites and African-Caribbeans. And it seems to be getting worse, not better. Immigrant communities are getting more isolated, less integrated and more locked into their own traditional values.

What can be done to reverse this depressing trend?

The Home Office nurtures the hope that integration is going to happen naturally without any active intervention from the Government. The children of migrants, or their children’s children, will come to realise that our way of life – based around freedom of choice and material prosperity – is better than the poverty, bigotry and intolerance that characterise religious extremism. But officials at the Home Office insist that immigrants can only come to that conclusion by themselves.

At Michael Gove’s Department for Education, there is a more pessimistic conviction, that if we do not intervene to stop religious extremism, it will flourish and create communities that reproduce values utterly inimical to British ideas of toleration and individual freedom. Mr Gove’s supporters note that radically conservative Muslims already see themselves as locked in a battle with secular culture, one they have to win if their own religion is not to wither away.

It is of critical significance to all our futures: what kind of society the next generation will inherit depends on who is right – and who wins the battle in Cabinet and in Parliament.

Despite such a debate being critical to all our futures it is something the BBC has long sought to suppress and even now it continues to promote immigration and attack those who oppose it…see their reaction to UKIP in the run up to the election. The BBC has a similar approach to Islam…it will certainly discuss issues surrounding some aspects of Islam but still seeks to censor the debate in the interests of ‘community cohesion’…..the paradox being such censorship only serves to increase the likelihood of conflict and allows the extremists to operate unchecked in society.  As you can see from the BBC’s reaction to the Trojan Horse affair where it has attempted to downplay its significance, excuse the extremist’s actions and instead uses the opportunity to turn it into a story about politics in Westminster the BBC still wants to control the debate and the narrative.

What damage will history reveal is now being done to Britain and its society by the BBC’s censorship and promotion of multi-culturalism and mass immigration?

Biased BBC reader Alex notes…

“Take a look at this pointless but all-too-typical pro-EU, left-wing drivel from the BBC that seeks to undermine English identity: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27731725 Now, repeat after me folks: England, unlike Scotland, never has been a unified country, but rather a mix of divided counties. Therefore, multiculturalism and the devolution of English counties is a good thing.”

I have been contacted by Saif Rahman with regard to this article he has written about BBC favourite Mehdi Hasan. I commend it to you…

“He is the UK’s political director of the Huffington Post, appears regularly on BBC’s Question Time, has 122,000 followers on Twitter and a monthly Al-Jazeera TV slot (a channel that boasts broadcasting to 40-60 million people daily in the Arab world).

And anyone who knows me will be aware that I’ve always been keen to expose poor role models within the Muslim community.  Recently we delivered the coup de grace to Muhammad Ansar, the media’s favourite Muslim “public commentator” resulting in the viral #MoCV hashtag, after he had been falsifying claims of being a lawyer, lecturer, community leader, an imam etc. Although he’s not quite in the same league, I would argue Mehdi is more harmful & pernicious.  Unlike MoAnsar’s scrappiness which led to his ultimate demise, Mehdi is wary about the spats he chooses to engage in and his slicker performance lends him a free pass from our generally forgiving public.  It’s about reading between the lines.

I tried to find a journalist to unravel Mehdi and despite offering to help in this endeavour, not a single journalist was willing to take it on.  Journalists are a tighter knit community than I first expected. Few are willing to poop on their own doorstep and even fewer are willing to take on an influential media man with a large following. I came to the conclusion Mehdi was untouchable. Or almost, until i decided to write it myself.”

Do read the rest from Saif, great stuff and I think it is a sound insight into the mindset of one of the BBC’s ‘go-to” guys.  I have debated Medhi on the BBC and found him OK if a touch strident but on Twitter he is plain nasty, full of himself and arrogant beyond words. I find much truth in what Saif says. Do read the full article on the Link.

The BBC has given a platform to Labour’s Tristram Hunt and Yvette Cooper all week to trash Gove and his education policies…yesterday Hunt was on the BBC’s ‘prestigious’ Today programme and Cooper was on ‘Pienaar’s Politics’ this morning spinning the same message…..Gove has been derelict in his duty allowing Islamism to thrive in schools, he failed to take action when warned of the threat, and that his school’s policy actually makes things worse by preventing any action being taken to deal with such threats when they arise.

So why didn’t Gove and the Department of Education take action, or any serious measures, to stem the Islamist infiltration when warned in 2010?

You might have thought the  massively resourced news organisation that is the BBC would have asked Gove that question, or even asked themselves that, I have yet to hear them do so, but it appears the BBC isn’t actually interested in the answer.

The Sunday Times is and seems to have come up with something that should alter the narrative somewhat.

In 2007 Tahir Alam, Mr ‘Trojan Horse’ himself, published with the MCB, an Islamist’s charter that was distributed to education authorities and schools across the country with the intent that they would implement policies that favoured Muslim pupils.

In 2008, just as Birmingham council were being warned of Islamist infitration of its schools, the Labour Government employed that very selfsame Islamist Tahir Alam as an advisor to their ‘Prevent’ anti-radicalisation programme who went on to ‘develop the right channels to visit Whitehall on a regualr basis…fashioning himself as a kind of spokesman on all things education that concerned Muslim communities…he was always in and out of the Home Office.’

A poacher staying a poacher.

The Times goes on ‘More than a year ago sources in the education department told the Sunday Times that the Home Office was encouraging Gove’s department to approve applications for free schools and academies run by Muslims to make it easier to monitor radicalisation or extremism….but Gove did not want his free school programme “hijacked” and wanted May to take a tougher line on terrorism in general.’

So let’s think about that…the Department of Education’s schools policy was ‘hijacked’ by the Home Office, from 2008, and schools allowed to be deliberately ‘radicalised’ so that the security services could monitor certain people more easily….a programme shaped in part by the very Islamist at the centre of the recent furore, Tahir Alam,  put in place by a Labour government which began this policy of handing over schools to Islamist extremists….a man who was also an Oftsed inspector.

So shouldn’t Tristram Hunt et al also be asked some very difficult questions about Labour’s role in encouraging extemists to take over schools?

At least we have an idea why the DofE stood back, no thanks to the BBC…it was obeying orders from the Home Office…the same Home Office that ‘won’ the argument, once again, with Gove over the definition of ‘extremism’ and how to tackle it…proving that Gove was correct in saying it was the Home Office’s responsibility and that they had failed to deal effectively with extemism.

In other words Gove is really off the hook if this is all true….his only sin being the public complaints made by him about the Home Office in the Times this week…for which he has apologised.

The BBC is giving Yvette Cooper headline billing on its frontpage right now after her Pienaar interview as she demands May also apologises…as she should quite rightly…however the story is obviously somewhat different to that spun by Labour…they should also be under the spotlight from the BBC….so far they are not….and all we hear are the critics of Gove…the leftwing NUT’s Christine Blower being the sole commenter, other than Labour’s duo, about Gove this morning on the news bulletin that I heard..naturally damning him and his policies.

Perhaps the BBC’s frontpage tomorrow will be Gove demanding Hunt and Cooper apologise for years of appeasing Islamist extremists.  Somehow you doubt it.

An update to this post after reading the Sunday Times magazine where the wonderfully diverse Baroness Warsi reveals ‘A Life in the Day’.

For what other reason than the stated one above might a government tread carefully with all things Islamic, barring the obvious threats of angry, alienated, disaffected youth?

Warsi, a minister from 2010, tells us that her first challenge was to make sure that Islamophobia, like anti-Semitism, was put on the government agenda.  She says ‘I believe I have done that.’

Must be difficult for a government on the one hand to deal with er, what shall we call it…em…’cultural conservatism’, and on the other be promoting…er…what to call it…let’s say ‘cultural conservatism’…especially when you have a ‘culturally conservative’ minister in office…never mind Mr Trojan Horse guiding the security service’s strategy.

There are various inquiries being carried out investigating claims of Islamist’s infiltrating schools seeking to run them along Islamic lines.

Once these investigations have been concluded and the dust has settled there needs to be one other investigation.  An investigation into the BBC’s role in this affair.

I use the term ‘The BBC’ here because it is clear that what is happening is not one or two journalists imposing their own interpretation on events,  there is an obvious direction from above….when so many BBC journalists refuse to report something as important and damning as the MCB’s 2007 ‘Advice to Schools’ it can only be because an editorial message has gone out not to, conversely when all journalists start using the same phrase, such as ‘cultural conservatism’, you can be similarly assured that there is another editorial guideline passed down from on high setting the correct narrative.

The BBC hasn’t just stood back and reported events impartially, it has actively sought to mislead its audience about those events, it has downplayed not only the events themselves and the activities of the Islamists, but the importance of them in regard to society as a whole, not only that but the BBC has set out to damage Ofsted and especially Michael Gove…damaging them it hopes to also to damage the credibility of the investigations by Ofsted and the government into ‘extremism’ and Birmingham schools.  Worse, the BBC has actively promoted the takeover of schools by Islamists saying ‘…once you accept that certain schools are Islamic schools, you can then think about constructing a governing body with proper representation and management processes to prevent the problems in Birmingham.’

The BBC suggests this is a good way to both promote cohesion but also control the ‘extremists’….perhaps somewhat naive of the Journalists deep inside the BBC bubble.  Such journalists should take their own advice and heed the ‘warning from history‘ they are so keen on usually….German politicians and industrialists thought they could control Hitler…they couldn’t.

The BBC is muddying the water….on the one hand they report that there is no evidence of a Muslim plot but then report there is evidence and Gove ignored it…. trying to downplay the significance of the plot and yet use the dangers of the plot to attack Gove.

One major and obvious ‘mistake’ in the BBC’s coverage is omission of the central question that set Gove and May at loggerheads…how to define ‘extremism’?  May wanted a narrow definition, Gove a broader one encompassing not just violence or threats of or incitement to violence but what might also bring Islam itself into question.  Is extremism solely violence or does it also include the various social and judicial imperatives inherent in Islam for example in regard to the status of women especially in regard to rape or their harsh and restrictive demands on women in the name of ‘modesty’, or else FGM, or the treatment of apostates, gays and other religions or non-Muslims?  Cameron takes a line more akin to Gove’s in his 2011 Munich speech…Europe needs to wake up to what is happening in our own countries.…the “doctrine of state multiculturalism” has failed.

Pupils as young as six were taught to treat Western women as ‘white prostitutes’ by a school at the centre of the ‘Trojan Horse’ Islamist plot.

The BBC has recognised that there is the danger of Gove’s definition taking hold despite May apparently winning the argument….it’s hard to hold back the tide of reality when it is blatantly obvious what is going on.  The BBC’s answer?  As mentioned below they have adopted a phraseology that they hope will deflect criticism of Islam and place the blame for events at the schools on ‘conservative cultural practices’ as they often do with many stories that would otherwise highlight uncomfortable truths about Islamic justice and attitudes.

The BBC will report what many people tell of very serious issues in Birmingham schools and of a plot to Islamise schools, for instance, ‘Khalid Mahmood, MP for Perry Barr, believes there are reasons to be concerned. “All the information I’m getting… is there has been a serious bid to take over most of the schools in the east and south of the city,” he said.’

The problem comes when we get the BBC’s own interpretation….all that ‘evidence’ is suddenly forgotten, the BBC claiming:   ‘The focus is not on a “conspiracy”. The “Trojan Horse” letter is now widely assumed to be a forgery, and appears to have been written to alarm people.’

The BBC is rather casual when it comes to those facts, or reporting relevant facts that might change perceptions.  Here they report this, ‘A chair of governors at one of the schools involved described the reaction to this letter as a “witch hunt”. ‘   But who was that ‘chair of governors’?  Tahir Alam, the man at the very centre of the conspiracy claims, which immediately puts into question his claim of a ‘witch hunt’.

Why did the BBC hide that fact?

The BBC is very keen not to tell you some things about Tahir Alam that might set the alarm bells ringing…for instance the Times revealed that he had been a member of an Islamist extremist group, he also wrote a document laying out the Muslim Council of Britain‘s demands to schools as to how they should adapt their schools in order to suit Muslim pupils.

Whilst the BBC has never reported the existence of that important and revealing document it has reported that Alam was in fact an Ofsted inspector.  Why would the BBC report that fact but not the others?  The suspicion must be that they are attempting to undermine Ofsted by saying the man at the centre of its investigations was in fact employed by them and therefore must be a credible and respectable person.

The BBC is hiding Alam’s islamist tendencies whilst publishing something that they might believe would help his case.

What of that ‘conspiracy’, or in the BBC’s opinion, ‘Non-conspiracy’?

The BBC claims that there is no plot but merely a small, insignificant group of people,

‘The Ofsted results also support the notion that this is really about a clique of governors.

The leaders of four of the schools expected to go into special measures are good friends, who speak a lot via WhatsApp, the mobile messaging app.

The idea that there is no wider conspiracy has support: people working in counter-extremism in Birmingham also do not think there is an acute broader problem in the city.’

‘The problem is really about a small clique of governors’?  Well yes…and no.  That surely is the central thrust of the claims anyway…that a group of governors has been inserted into schools so that they can ensure that they are run along Islamic lines.  But it doesn’t rely solely on governors, it requires the help of teachers, parents and pupils….in other words there must be a conspiracy if such events are in fact happening.

Tahir Alam is in fact a classic ‘Trojan Horse’ himself…..having infiltrated Ofsted as an inspector, he runs a Trust which controls numerous schools as well as being a governor of Park View School.

The BBC not only seeks to mislead audiences by omitting facts such as Alam’s Islamist tendencies, or by downplaying other facts such as whether it is a deliberate conspiracy or whether the Trojan Horse letter is real or not, or by adding other facts into the mix to muddle things up such as Alam being an Ofsted inspector but it also manipulates the language used so that certain concepts are pushed to the fore and others are pushed to the back and out of people’s minds.

You may have noticed that the BBC is now frequently using phrases such as ‘cultural conservatism’ rather than islamic extremism, ‘For Ofsted, the issue in these schools is that they are socially conservative.’

This form of words is intended to move audiences away from the idea that the problem stems from Islam itself, the problem is social or cultural….ignoring the fact that such societies or cultures are defined and governed by Islam in every way.  Everything the BBC does is with the intention of downplaying the influence of the Islamic beliefs that drive these plots.  The BBC believes that if the public realises what is actually happening they will no longer be supportive of a growing, separate, Islamic culture and society within their own and that this will lead to conflict.  The BBC’s alternative is to keep a lid on things, sit back and do nothing and allow the Islamists to take control, as evidenced by the BBC’s promotion of Islamising schools for a quiet life.

More evidence of the BBC’s dangerous and highly political game can be witnessed by listening to Evan Davis on the Today programme (08:33:40) ostensibly examining the events surrounding the schools, Oftsed, Gove and May.

Who does he invite on to comment?  Labour’s Tristram Hunt and Islamist Salma Yaqoob.

Hunt was allowed free rein to attack Gove and to claim that it was outrageous that he hadn’t investigated claims of Islamists trying to take over schools made in 2010, and that Ofsted was clearly not working properly.

Davis didn’t challenge any of this and in fact encouraged the narrative about Oftsed being unfit for purpose after having given Park View School an outstanding classification in 2012 but now possibly going to be placing the school in special measures.

Firstly this is what a teacher from Park View said of that 2012 inspection:  “They were very analytical, razor-sharp; these people really knew their stuff.”

So Ofsted ‘knew their stuff’.  The teacher was there, he saw the inspection being done, he liked what he saw.  I might suggest he knew more than an opportunist politician with perfect hindsight and a biased journalist.

But what of Hunt’s claim that Gove or Ofsted did nothing in 2010 when warned of the Islamist threat?

Davis might well have leapt in there, but didn’t, and demanded why Labour had done nothing in 2008 when Birmingham Council was warned of a similar plot:  “Many demands were made that were simply impossible to meet and it began to appear like there was some sort of organised attempt to undermine the management of the school.”

Davis could also have asked why Labour, in power for 13 years, did nothing about the approaching disaster that Headmaster Tim Boyes said has been bubbling away for 20 years:

“Back in 2010, I had a whole series of colleagues, other head teachers, who were reporting concerns about governance and things that weren’t going well in their schools.

“Over 20 years… tensions and politics have exploded and as a result head teachers have had nervous breakdowns, they’ve lost their jobs, schools have been really torn apart,” he said.

Sounds quite serious but Evan Davis decided such questions were irrelevant and didn’t bother to derail the Labour politician’s anti-Gove narrative….maybe because the BBC recognises that ‘Mr Gove and Mrs May are two of the “biggest beasts” in the Conservative Party’ and to damage them would have many beneficial results for the BBC’s own narratives in regard to Labour and Islam.

What about that Ofsted inspection in 2012 and the subsequent downgrading in 2014?  Davis suggested that this indicated that Ofsted may have serious problems…but does it?

So was that 2012 classification of ‘outstanding’ wrong…or is the new one wrong?

There are some points that might be relevant in deciding how Ofsted came to its conclusions in 2012 and subsequently came to change them two years later.

• Firstly the inspection was done with two days notice given to the school prior to the inspection, time enough to tidy things up and get the story right.

• Secondly the inspection may not have been an aggressive, hard hitting one…the teacher who praised Oftsed above said this, ‘Outside the lesson, the history teacher, Lee Donaghy, praises the approach taken by the Ofsted team that visited the school in January. This is a view many other heads and teachers dispute – but Donaghy warmly describes the inspectors as “collaborative”. “It was more ‘done with’, rather than ‘done to’,” Donaghy says.’    So the inspectors were ‘collaborative’, doing the inspection in close cooperation with the staff…..a recipe for a bit of a fudge?

• Thirdly there is political correctness, the thinking that multi-culturalism is to be positively encouraged and that Islam especially should be welcomed if it helps with integration and cohesion.  In other words the fact that schools were introducing Islamic practices would not have raised alarm bells, quite the opposite in fact….the actual, damaging,  effects of such an Islamic culture being adopted and enforced by the schools in relation to the wider society may have been ignored, Islamic values being seen as beneficial and Muslim pupils under its yoke not alienated by being forced into a ‘Western’ style education.

• Fourthly we are now told by the BBC that there is ‘no evidence’ of a conspiracy…..so even now despite all the ‘evidence’ and numerous credible claims the BBC can sit there and say there is nothing to see….if so…why should Ofsted not taken a similar stance in 2012…or indeed in 2007 when they last fully inspected the school and proclaimed the school to be ‘good’  ….or the Department of Education in 2010?

Tristram Hunt demands to know how a school classed as oustanding in 2012 can two years later be downgraded so far…and yet he has no questions about a school classed as good in 2007 and then in 2010 in an interim inspection still classed as only good which can be reclassified as ‘oustanding’ two years later in 2012.

This report from the Mail may give a clue as to how Ofsted classifications can jump so readily between grades based on, well, very little of substance:

Payhembury Primary in Devon was criticised by Ofsted for being insufficiently ‘multicultural’.

So the 68-pupil Church of England school is asking parents to pay for their children to make a two-day trip to a school with a wide mix of ethnic backgrounds.

The visit – described by one parent as patronising and bizarre – has been sold to parents as a way of boosting Payhembury’s Ofsted grade from good to the top rating of outstanding.

So that was the BBC’s platform for Labour’s tub thumping rhetoric but what about Salma Yaqoob?  Yaqoob is an Islamist herself, ‘radicalised’ by 9/11,  and so it must raise a few eyebrows that the BBC should bring her, an Islamist, on to reassure us that there is no Islamist plot to take over our schools and that it is in fact a government conspiracy with right wing media that creates a hysterical anti-Muslim witch hunt…her standard reply when Islam is criticised in any way whatsoever.

Davis allowed her to rant on only interrupting to feed her a question that she could then answer with another rant.  Not a lot of journalism going on as she went completely unchallenged.

Davis remarkaby came up with that old phrase we’ve been hearing a lot on the BBC recently…’cultural conservatism’…trying to suggest that this wasn’t a bad thing really but often confused with that bad old ‘extremism’…‘people often mix them all up together’ don’t you know old chap.

Davis referred to a Daily Mail article which he said talked of such ‘cultural conservatism’…however read the article and if that is cultural conservatism it boggles the mind as to what you would have to do to be considered ‘extreme’ in Davis’ eyes.

Yaqoob said, ‘she had yet to see “a shred of evidence” that pupils were being radicalised.  “The kids of Birmingham are already damned as being extremist,”‘

She kept referring to the ‘kids’ but they aren’t the issue…the issue was with the governors and teachers.  Making ‘kids’ the ‘victims’ of this ‘witch hunt’ as the basis for her defence of the schools was a rhetorical trick purely designed to distract attention and create a particular negative emotional reaction against Ofsted and those who make claims of a conspiracy.

Yaqoob claims that she ‘Doesn’t want to see extremism in the schools‘…and yet she is a hardened Islamist herself:

Salma Yaqoob Picks Today to Support Jihadists

Salma Yaqoob, one of the best known activitsts in the moribund RESPECT Party, cut her political teeth campaigning for the British jihadists who were imprisoned by the Yemeni authorities for their terrorist activities. 

She also wrote a playful article in Inayat Bunglawala’s “Trends” magazine, in which she imagined Britain as an Islamic Republic.  The piece ended with a terrified Salman Rushdie fleeing the country.

You’ll also remember that at Ken Livingstone’s “Clash of Civilisations” debate, Salma Yaqoob called the 7/7 terrorist murders “reprisal attacks“.

‘Harry’s Place’ claimed in 2008 that, ‘Salma Yaqoob’s entire political career has been devoted to stirring up sectarian hatred.‘

and added, ‘Salma Yaqoob is invited to write op-eds for the Guardian. She is a favourite of the BBC, and is repeatedly invited on programmes like Question Time, where she is presented as a serious politician and a spokewoman for Britain’s muslims. In reality, she is a marginal politician, for a tiny party, whose interventions in local and national politics have been poisonous.  Let us hope that we hear a lot less of Salma Yaqoob in the future.’

Well, obviously not so far.

Yaqoob laid into Gove claiming that this was in fact a government conspiracy against Muslims and that the spectre of an Islamic ‘Trojan Horse’ had been haunting Gove’s imagination for a long time as evidenced by a chapter titled ‘Trojan Horse’ in a book he’d written.

However on that basis let’s have a look at something Yaqoob has written and use it to judge her intentions and motivations…a tract in an Islamic magazine run by MCB man Inayat Bunglawala happily imagining an Islamic state of Britain:

Guess it is pretty clear exactly where her loyalties lie and her intentions.

The question might be asked exactly where the BBC’s loyalties lie and what are their intentions as they promote Islamist takeovers of schools, hide evidence that this is happening and attempt to do political damage to elected politicians?

You may want to read Charles Moore’s piece in the Telegraph:

While we turn a blind eye to Islamists, our children suffer

 We have now become accustomed, unfortunately, to the painful discovery that children were abused in the state system – in some schools, hospitals, children’s homes. When these things are exposed, we all agree how disgraceful it was that the authorities turned a blind eye. The danger from Islamist extremism is comparable. It too is an abuse of children, and yet we still dare not face it.

And Damian Thompson:

Radical Islam in secular schools: now the shocking truth emerges

“Students’ understanding of the arts, different cultures and other beliefs are limited.” That’s one of the complaints about Birmingham schools made by Ofsted in their leaked report. It sounds like a relatively mild criticism.

Not so. What the Trojan Horse scandal has revealed is that leaders of the Muslim community in Birmingham have been creating a Wahhabi-inspired counterculture in secular, not faith, schools.

I expect plenty of controversy in the days to come, as the Ofsted report is published and its implications sink in. The BBC will try to dampen it down. We mustn’t let that happen.

I’m on Fubarr Radio with Jon Gaunt this morning discussing this story;

The BBC will send more staff for its coverage of Glastonbury Festival than it is dispatching to the World Cup in Brazil. Corporation music chief Bob Shennan said 300 staff were being lined up for the weekend, outstripping the 272 who are to head to Brazil to work on its football programming in the coming weeks. The BBC said it was trying to keep numbers down wherever possible, but each member of staff had a “clear and accountable role” to bring hours of coverage from the Somerset festival.

From my perspective, the BBC is demonstrating a reckless disregard to obtaining value for money for the license payer but I suppose £3billion a year pays for lots of Glastonbury type indulgences? The 272 going to Rio seems excessive to me and it would be interesting to compare the resources the BBC throws at this compared to other global broadcasters.

As the weekend approaches, here is a new Open Thread to see us all off into the blue yonder. Is the BBC showing bias? Detail it HERE…go on, right now.

BBC seem to have enjoyed the Conservative win in the 44th safest Conservative seat in the UK. I caught a very hostile and patronising interview around 6.50am on the Today programme where the meme being flogged was that the UKIP bubble had burst! Honestly, the BBC is as biased against UKIP as rags like The Huffington Post. Little analysis of the WOEFUL Labour performance, of course, just a chuckle at the LibDems. UKIP cut the Conservative majority in half and yet, to the BBC, this is a tragic failure???