Monthly Archives: October 2015

Here you go, a brand new Open Thread to see us all off into the wide blue yonder.

Middle of the week and time for a new House of Lords approved Open Thread!

BBC exultant over the decision by The House of Lords to undermine the Chancellor’s plan to cut tax credits. Robert Peston twisting the figures, Laura Kuenssberg claiming this is a “humiliation” for Osborne and hailing this as “a triumph” for Corbyn. The BBC has been leading the attack on the perfectly reasonable plan by the Chancellor and sees this as a victory for itself. I was on BBC5LIVE on Saturday Night and Stephen Nolan would not listen to any reason on this subject. The BBC basks in satisfaction tonight, but it stands exposed in its true BIASED colours had it the wit to see it.

New week dawns and time for a new open thread to detail the bias!

Tony Blair has admitted he is guilty, his illegal and disastrous Iraq War adventure has detroyed Iraq and led to the creation of the Islamic State (‘so-called’  BBC™)

Or that is what the BBC has always wanted us to believe and yesterday they spun a bit of Blair spin to their reflect their own narrative…

Tony Blair concedes link between Islamic State and Iraq War

Most significant, though, in terms of new revelations is the former prime minister’s admission that getting rid of Saddam Hussein may have had some bearing on the rise of so-called Islamic State.

Only that’s not really true, there is very little ‘significance’ to what he said on ISIS…what Blair alluded was that the democratically elected Iraq government’s sectarian behaviour, it is Shia and it neglected the Sunnis, allowed ISIS to get a foothold in Sunni areas of Iraq and that it was more to do with the Arab Spring and Assad than the Iraq War that created ISIS….ISIS, under a different name was long in existence, created in Afghanistan as part of Al Qaeda.

And curious that the BBC refuses to mention the Labour leader who  is the real culprit in this huge failure of geo-politics….Ed Miliband, whose betrayal of the Syrian people in his refusal to honour his word to vote for military action against Assad letting Assad stay in place and allowing him to then go on to release Islamists from his prisons who went on to reform their terrorist group that is now known as Islamic State…a group that Assad, Turkey and many Gulf states have backed one way or another.

So who is to blame for the creation of the Islamic State?  Not Blair, but Miliband and the countries with vested interests in the prospering of ISIS…..and let’s not forget that the BBC refused to broadcast film of an Assad attack on a school with chemical weapons just before the Common’s vote on military action….a very political choice by the ‘impartial’ BBC?

All the more ironic when today Justin Webb ( Today 07:52 ish) suggested that military action by the Russians could be forcing the peace process in Syria….something that could have happened years ago if Miliband hadn’t been such a coward and the BBC hadn’t hid the evidence of Assad’s atrocities.

Just been listening to Labour supporting Jim Naughtie repeatedly saying Labour should be voting ‘no’ in the House of Lords on the question of tax credits.

He had the LibDem leader Tim Farron and Labour’s Owen Smith on to chat at 08:10.

Curiously, in light of both parties decision to break with constitutional precedent to not vote down financial legislation voted for in the Commons, Naughtie didn’t ask the right, important, questions, over eager as he seemed to be for them to vote down the government.

Tim Farron just a few months ago in July said that the House of Lords was rotten to the core, corrupt and undemocratic and ‘above the law’….

Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron has urged other party leaders to throw their weight behind a constitutional convention after the resignation of Lord Sewel sparked fresh calls for reform of the House of Lords.

Mr Farron welcomed Lord Sewel’s decision to quit but said his downfall had wider implications for an undemocratic system which was “rotten to the core” and allowed peers to feel they were above the law.

Corbyn himself has expressed a similar attitude demanding either reform or abolishment…

No case for unelected patronage in politics – time to end undemocratic House of Lords but not replace with party lists and 15 year terms.

So both Labour’s leader and the LibDem’s think the House of Lords is undemocratic, unrepresentative and corrupt…and yet they both want to use it to destroy the elected government’s legislation that was democratically passed in the Commons.

Why no comment from Naughtie on this rather obvious, relevant and important point?

William Shawcross is right: Islamists are skilled at lawfare

The Telegraph reported…

Muslim men having ’20 children each’ because of polygamy, peer claims

Muslim men in some communities are having up to 20 children each because of polygomy and the rise of “religiously sanctioned gender discrimination” under Sharia Law, peers have warned.

Baroness Cox, a cross-bench peer, highlighted a series of “shocking” examples of the impact of Sharia law on Muslim women in Britain as she called for them to be given greater protection under equality legislation.

“The rights of Muslim women and the rule of law in our land must be upheld.” she said.

She added: “My Muslim friends tell me that in some communities with high polygamy and divorce rates, men may have up to 20 children each.

Clearly, youngsters growing up in dysfunctional families may be vulnerable to extremism and demography may affect democracy.”

Note that rather important last bit about how democracy could be under threat from the rise of Islam in the UK….even the BBC let slip that the rising number of Muslims in Europe could radically alter politics…and it won’t just be on Israeli/Jewish issues either…..

Germany’s traditionally pro-Israeli stance has been shifting, particularly since the 2014 Gaza campaign.

A growth in Germany’s Muslim population, not least through the acceptance of hundreds of thousands of refugees, may also have an effect, long term.

Then there is this from the same report in the Telegraph…

Lord Green of Deddington, chairman of MigrationWatch, said Britain was entirely different to Muslim countries, adding: “Those who come must accept that.”

The independent crossbench peer said: “We must be prepared to insist that there can be only one law.

“We must get away from what I call the Rotherham complex where the authorities were so afraid of offending a minority community that they turned a blind eye to the appalling abuse of young mainly British girls.”

Which brings us to this rather surprising statement from the BBC’s Roger Scruton concerning ‘Islamophobia’…..

At the time of the attacks on the twin towers, many expressed their shock at the gratuitous murder of 3,000 innocent people, blaming doctrinal Islam for the perversion of the criminals responsible. Immediately a new word entered the public discourse – Islamophobia.

The religious fanaticism of those who had flown into the twin towers and the so-called Islamophobia of their critics were both represented as crimes, hardly distinguishable in their destructiveness. The main purpose of future policy, it was implied, must be to ensure that neither crime is committed again. Pressure mounted to forbid Islamophobia by law – and in its way that is what the Racial and Religious Hatred Act has tried to do.

This takes us back to what John Stuart Mill had in mind. It is not falsehood that causes the greatest offence, but truth. You can endure insults and abuse when you know them to be false. But if the remarks that offend you are true, their truth becomes a dagger in the soul – you cry “lies!” at the top of your voice, and know that you must silence the one who utters them.

That is what has happened in the case of Islamophobia. Muslims in our society are often victims of prejudice, abuse and assault, and this is a distressing situation that the law strives to remedy. But when people invent a phobia to explain all criticism of Islam it is not that kind of abuse that they have in mind. They wish to hide the truth, to shout “lies!” in the face of criticism and to silence any attempt at discussion. In my view, however, it is time to bring the truth into the open, including the truth about the Holy Book itself.

So Muslims invented ‘Islamophobia’ to silence their critics.  You heard it here first!

I await the ‘truth about the Holy Book [Koran] itself.’….will the BBC suddenly have to admit that Islam is not a ‘religion of peace’ after all as it urges its followers to fight the unbelievers until Islam reigns supreme never mind happily killing apostates and homosexuals and chopping various bits off of their own citizens? Mishal Husain thought Christianity was deeply backward and unpleasant…God knows what she thinks of Islam then.

‘Media’ matters because it underpins how societies respond to the problems they face. This makes media not only relevant to the most urgent problems of poverty and marginalisation – it makes it critical to solutions designed to address them.

Drama, discussion programmes, public service announcements – can be most effectively used to deliver information and stimulate discussion.

The BBC has been caught once again shilling for the EU and getting handsomely paid for it….The BBC’s Media Action arm is supposedly an independent charity but it, of course, is ‘BBC’ through and through, the staff and values all pushing the same narrative that Big Auntie pushes.

The Telegraph reports that the ‘BBC’ has been paid £9 million to spread the word by training journalists in relevant countries so that they can then become part of the EU friendly propaganda machine.  Let’s hope they have more balls than their BBC counterparts who submit to the orthodoxy so readily.

EU bias row as Brussels pays BBC charity £9m

The BBC is at the centre of a new row over bias in its coverage of Europe after it emerged that the broadcaster’s charitable arm has received more than £9 million directly from Brussels.

The charity, BBC Media Action, was paid the money to deliver key parts of the EU’s political strategy in countries on the fringes of Europe.

Senior Tories warned that taking so much money from the EU will undermine the BBC’s reputation for independence when the broadcaster will be reporting on the EU referendum campaign.

Not the first time of course that the BBC has taken the EU shilling, and it didn’t need to be press-ganged to do so…..

BBC: EU grants – the £20 million sting

There was a brief frisson of excitement last week, with the Spectator blog telling us that the BBC had received about £3 million of EU funds between April 2011 and November 2013, most of which has been spent on unspecified “research and development” projects, with the remaining £1 million spent on programming.

This was the fruits of an FOI request, but had the magazine consulted the EU’s transparency website, it might have come up with an altogether more weighty sum – £20,152,022 (€24,435,906) to be precise. That is the sum dispersed to the BBC from EU funds between 2007-2012 inclusive.

And it turned out that the alarmist ‘independent’ BBC film, ‘The Great European Disaster Movie’ (which didn’t tell the real tale of the disasters the EU has imposed upon us) was also funded in part by the EU.  Go figure.

We’ve looked at the BBC’s ‘Media Action’ before…it used to be called The World Service Trust and is in essence nothing more than a propaganda weapon, soft power that supposedly spreads democracy but in fact seems to be intent on encouraging dissent and protest on subjects close to the BBC’s heart such as the environment and climate change.

Here is a taste of how important they think the media is in changing population’s minds and behaviour and subsequently how they can influence and pressurise governments and other organisations to submit to their demands….

BBC World Service Trust(where the BBC does not think you are looking…so they print the truth):

• ‘Media’ matters because it underpins how societies respond to the problems they face. This makes media not only relevant to the most urgent problems of poverty and marginalisation – it makes it critical to solutions designed to address them.
• It matters too because it is a critical part of strategies to [alter and control behaviour.]
• The media, and increasingly new technologies, is increasingly how humans communicate with each other.
• How well we communicate with each other has a good deal to do with how successful we’re likely to be in confronting the massive problems we face (and the masses.)

Making informed choices

• Media enables people to access information on issues that shape their lives, without which they cannot make choices.
• Media enables people to hold their governments to account and provides a critical check on government corruption
• Media and communication enables people and communities to understand, debate and reach decisions on the issues that confront them

Media and communication can be immense and powerful instruments for change and empowerment in society

• Media can be an important part of the solution to development challenges. But they can also be a part of the problem
• Media can be used as instruments of oppression, manipulation and hate
• Truth can be distorted as well as illuminated, malpractice hidden as well as revealed.
• The character of a country’s media tends to determine the character of a country’s democracy and society. It underpins how people learn, understand and shape change.

Engaging at high levels to gain influence:

Our initiatives and corresponding audience research seek to engage at four different ‘levels’:

The sector level with policy and decision-makers

The organisation level with state, commercial and not-for-profit entities

The practitioner level with professionals and opinion leaders; and

The individual level with various target audiences

Drama can be a powerful mechanism for development. It can build an emotional connection with target audiences over a period of time, while modelling situations or behaviours….drama, discussion programmes, public service announcements – can be most effectively used to deliver information and stimulate discussion.

Viewers or listeners become attached to characters and share in their experiences, sometimes discussing them with people around them, reflecting on their situations and actions and how they might respond if it were them.
Reinforcing the message
In building a campaign we generally use a range of formats, because they cross-promote one another and reinforce messages. Additional materials – such as posters and comics – may also be used to echo the messages and stories conveyed by other media outputs.

Tim Stanley in the Telegraph reports that Hilary Clinton lied about the causes of the attack on the American embassy in Benghazi….

Hillary Clinton’s big Benghazi lie

Clinton won her encounter at the Benghazi hearings, but one important deception was exposed. The administration tried to mislead the American people about the attackers’ motives

On September 11 2012, Islamists overran a compound in Benghazi, Libya and killed ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Conservatives believe the administration mishandled it. Maybe, maybe not. But in one very crucial way, we have solid proof that they lied.

This is what has been forgotten: administration officials tried to claim that the attack was a spontaneous, angry reaction to a revolting anti-Islamic video made by a US resident. The implication was that the assault was unforeseeable and that bigotry was guilty of stirring it up.

Again and again and again, the administration insisted this was an attack in response to a video. And yet we now know that on September 12, Hillary Clinton rang the then Egyptian prime minister, Hisham Kandil, to tell him: “The attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack — not a protest.”

To anyone who was alive, conscious and watching the TV in those days following the murder of Chris Stevens it was quite obvious where the administration stood. It tried to sell the story that the attack was motivated by religious anger. And we finally have proof that they were selling us a lie.

The BBC for some reason, perhaps they are covering up for Obama’s failure, seem to have missed that important point.

The BBC remarkably tells us that…

Despite the committee sitting in four consecutive hours-long sessions on Thursday, the hearing yielded little new information.

Well, nothing except the administration lied about one of the most important facts in this event….its cause, and the fact that it was not a ‘spontaneous and unforeseeable’ event but one that might have been foreseen and prevented by an adminsitration that was on the ball.

Oh wait…the BBC does dare to venture down this tricky path which might lead to the sainted Obama being shown up as incompetent…

Why were we originally told US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans died because of a YouTube video that agitated a large crowd of people?

It’s a good question, and one that was asked by numerous congressional investigations. There were demonstrations against the video in the region at the time, one of which targeted the US embassy in Cairo, and that’s what the administration said also happened in Benghazi.

But many Republicans believed the White House was trying to deflect attention from what they saw as its policy failures in the battle against terrorism. The House Intelligence Committee agreed that the talking points were flawed. But it said intelligence analysts, not political appointees, made the wrong call, and there was no deliberate attempt at a cover up.

Oh, OK….nothing to see here , move along kids….it’s just the Republicans being partisan….there was no deliberate cover up…..em…except Tim Stanley shows that there was….by the politicians….and not sure how the BBC can report the politicians made no failure as it admits that Clinton admits…

 …..that security requests made by the Benghazi consulate were not met.

And that…

…emails show Clinton’s staff had other political priorities than responding to the ambassador’s pleas.[For more security]

Curious that the BBC makes absolutely no mention of the questioning of Clinton about her admission to her family and to the Egyptian president that the attack had nothing to do with an internet video but was in fact a terrorist attack.

Of course a cynic might say that the BBC’s own preferred narrative is that an ‘anti-Islamic video’ caused so much anger and distress in the Muslim world that this is the natural result, blowback, and by default this also covers Obama’s ass for the failure of his administration to protect the embassy.

A cynic might say, or indeed anyone who has the slightest experience of how the BBC thinks and operates.