James O’Brien Is Not That Honest Is He?

 

 

 

Gabriel Gatehouse ‏@ggatehouse Sep 11   Would you care to be more specific? What did you feel was misleading? And what was amateurish?

 

When Tory MP Daniel Kawczynski criticised the BBC’s reporting of the war in Yemen Newsnight invited him onto the programme, not it seems to actually tackle his concerns but to insult and publicly try to humiliate him.  To do this they employed the less than honourable services of James O’Brien who jumped ship from his position as a motor-mouthed shock-jock at LBC…..O’Brien has ‘car crash’ written all over him…still unsure why Newsnight were attracted to him and his talents…though of course the uber marxist Paul Mason also lurked within their hallowed portals.

When Kawczynski stated that the Newsnight film about the war in Yemen was incredibly one-sided and did not reflect the complexities of the situation and failed to deal with atrocities by the Houthi rebels O’Brien made the claim that this one-sided stance was justified because the film was actually about Britain’s involvement in the war in relation to its arms sales to Saudi Arabia who are commiting war crimes.

There is a slight problem with that, in fact many problems, all of which revolve around the fact that O’Brien’s claim is a complete lie.

If you watch the programme, entitled ‘Yemen’s forgotten war’, so even the title seems to suggest a focus on the war in general, you will hear very little about British arms sales to Saudi, though Gatehouse does try to make that connection.

 

Gatehouse tweets a question advertising the programme asking if Britain is complicit in a ‘humanitarian disaster’ which is not the same as being complicit in war crimes as O’Brien is claiming as justification for the BBC’s one-sided approach….the ‘humanitarian disaster’ has been wrought by both sides but was initiated by the Houthi.

 

• Gabriel Gatehouse ‏@ggatehouse Sep 10

  Coming up now on @BBCNewsnight: our report from Yemen. Is Britain complicit in a humanitarian catastrophe?

 

But watching the programme you are not given the broad perspective of both sides being guilty of stoking the war and causing a ‘mere’ humanitarian disaster due to general warfare….the narrative it was glued to was that Saudi Arabia was definitely committing war crimes by deliberately targeting civilians…the BBC stated this without any evidence that civilians were being so deliberately targeted.  Certainly civilians are being killed, but deliberately?  And all by the Saudis? Where’s the BBC’s proof?  They have none and yet they categorically make that claim and used it in that small clip to suggest that Britan is complicit in those ‘war crimes’.

The BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse seemed all too ready to accept everything he was told and looked as if it was in fact what he wanted to be told as he breathlessly, naively, amateurishly lapped it all up.  He was less than objective in his report and used witnesses whose own impartiality might well be suspect…many of them being either the rebels themselves or those who are sympathetic to them…for example near the end of the film we have a Shia in a bombed mosque telling us this is all the fault of Saudi Money and US weapons…these people are all criminals he tells us…no bias there then from an Iranian backed pro-Houthi man then…and very convenient for the BBC narrative which happily ignores the fact that the Houthi started this war by engineering a coup.  Gatehouse looked as if he came with an agenda and fitted the ‘evidence’ around it.

Another of the BBC’s defences of its one-sided narrative was that the Houthi are not as well armed as the Saudis which somehow makes their killing of civilians somehow more palatable for the BBC.  This is the Houthi who have tanks, artillery, anti-aircraft missiles and aircraft….so all airstrikes may not be by the Saudis and the Coalition…

The Houthis have since called for a general mobilisation of forces to fight the Hadi government. Backed by armoured forces loyal to Saleh, they took control of Taiz.

More than a dozen soldiers from both sides were killed in the fighting. That was quickly followed up by airstrikes targeting Hadi’s palace in Aden, presumably in fighter aircraft flown by Saleh loyalists.

 

The BBC film claims that damage to buildings in Sanaa is probably the result of Saudi bombing…but where’s the proof?   If anything evidence points to the Houthi being responsible for some of the damage….including to a ‘military complex’ otherwise known as a university…

In the last few days, the Houthis have been targeting buildings owned by the Sunni Islah party, including the Iman University, which has been surrounded.

O’Brien sneared when Kawczynski said that Al Jazeera’s coverage was far more impartial than the BBC’s, O’Brien claiming that it obviously wasn’t because it was a news outlet funded by one of the Gulf States involved in the war.  However if you read Al Jazeera’s reports you can understand why many now use this organisation for a broader and truer perspective on events in the Middle East than provided by the BBC.

Here is just one example as it reports on the war in Yemen… you can read voices and perspectives from both sides, the Saudi-led coalition not escaping criticism at all….

‘Declaration of war’

Speaking to Al Jazeera from Sanaa, Houthi spokesman Mohammed Al Bukhaiti called the military action a declaration of war on Yemen, adding that reports alledging that Mohamed Ali Al Houthi, President of the Revolutionary Committee or Revolutionary Council, had been injured were false. Ali Al Houthi is a cousin of Abdul-Malik Al Houthi, the group’s leader.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif demanded an immediate halt to the military operation, as Iranian state media called the airstrikes a “US-backed aggression”.

“Military action from outside of Yemen against its territorial integrity and its people will have no other result than more bloodshed and more deaths,” he told the Iranian-owned Al-Alam television channel.

“We have always warned countries from the region and the West to be careful and not enter shortsighted games and not go in the same direction as al-Qaeda and Daesh,” he said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Iran denies providing money and training to the Shia Houthi militia in Yemen as claimed by the Saudi-led coalition and some Western officials.

 

All in all the BBC does not have a case….they are claiming that Saudi Arabia is committing war crimes, and slipped in a claim that Britain is therefore implicated in this, but they present no evidence other than a water-bottling plant that had been bombed and which the Saudis say was used by the Houthi for military purposes…and just as the BBC saw no evidence of such use there’s no evidence that it wasn’t so used…just because it has one purpose doesn’t mean it cannot be used for others at the same time….there is no evidence that the Saudis knew it was purely a civilian plant and bombed it anyway.  There is no evidence that the Saudis are deliberately bombing civilians, the death of whom the BBC seems to regard as a de facto war crime regardless of intent.

O’Brien tries to justify the BBC’s one-sided reporting of the war which looked almost completely only at the Saudi-led coalition’s actions by saying this was because Britain was supplying the weapons that helped Saudi commit war cimes….but as stated above there is absolutely no evidence of such war crimes and the programme then went on to a second narrative…that the Saudi-led strikes against the Houthi were allowing Al Qaeda and ISIL to gain a greater foothold in the region…depsite it being one of AQ’s long established bases.

The BBC’s premise seems to be that we leave the Iranian backed insurgents in charge and let them take over the country and that will stop AQ and ISIL in their tracks.  Two points…one…why is it a good idea to let armed militants takeover a country, especially when backed by the dangerous Iranian regime? and second does the BBC really think that the Houthi will be able to stop AQ and ISIL?

Lastly, clearly Al Jazeera is more than a match for the BBC in the Middle East producing reports that actually do inform its audience about the complexities of events there……unlike the BBC which has long been on the side of the various ‘rebel’, many would call terrorist, groups in the region and produces reports that seem to favour their narrative as the ‘plucky underdogs’.

Just a coincidence that ‘O’Brien’ is the name of the sinister party member and Big Brother thought-police hitman in Orwell’s 1984?