Monthly Archives: April 2017

The BBC has been reporting all day that a recording of a phone call has implicated the Bank of England in the Libor rigging scandal…..this is what was said on the phone in 2008…

“The bottom line is you’re going to absolutely hate this … but we’ve had some very serious pressure from the UK government and the Bank of England about pushing our Libors lower.”

How is it that the BBC misses out that bit about the Labour ‘UK government’ when asking who was rigging the rate…Gordon Brown of course having been Chancellor before taking over as PM?

On Panorama tonight.

Here you go, a new week and a new Open Thread. If the BBC bias is annoying you THIS is where you detail it.

The BBC reports that an heroic Muslim girl has stepped in to save another being viciously assaulted by EDL thugs…

A viral photo of a woman smiling at an English Defence League (EDL) protester in Birmingham was snapped after she stepped in to defend a “fellow Brummie”, she has told the BBC.

The image of Saffiyah Khan has been shared thousands of times since it was taken at Saturday’s demonstration.   Ms Khan, from Birmingham, said she felt moved to intervene when she saw another woman surrounded by about 25 men.

“I don’t like seeing people getting ganged up on in my town,” she said

She said she had initially been happy “to stay out of the way”, but “stepped forward” when another woman shouted “Islamophobe” at members of the EDL who had gathered in Centenary Square. “A group of 25 quite big-looking EDL lads, they surrounded her,” she said.

“She was 360 surrounded… I stepped forward and identified myself as someone who supported her and contradicted them.”

After that, Ms Khan said, protestors gathered around her instead, which led to the scene captured by a Press Association photographer.

Trouble is none of that is true…the real story is that she and her mates were counter protesting and disrupting a minutes silence for victims of Muslim terror attacks….and the police had to drag her away and kick her out of the area…..

Video of the girl in the pic being dragged out by the police. pic.twitter.com/SDbYgTtKVE

— Al Hank (@alhank78) April 9, 2017

And still smiling after the event… pic.twitter.com/vpW9IcuKWq

— Matthew Cooper (@MatthewCooperPA) April 9, 2017

The BBC likes to drum up a vision of a nastier, more racist Britain due to Brexit but is not so keen to suggest that maybe Europe is a nastier more racist, homophobic, sexist place after so much Muslim immigration.  Is it not a discussion worth having when so much of that immigration is occurring…surely the consequences should be considered and the citizens of Europe warned as the BBC warns of the rise of the Far Right?

The reality of the Muslim immigrant flow is not the Swedish one as illustrated in the previous post where homosexuality etc are celebrated and encouraged, the reality is more one where Gays had better watch their backs so to speak…however the BBC is being rather coy about that reality as it reports on an attack in Holland upon two Gay men [H/T Craig at Is the BBC biased]…

Dutch protests against attack on gay couple holding hands

No mention that the attackers were Moroccan…no mention in this BBC report either..

Jasper Vernes-Sewratan, 35, and Ronnie Sewratan-Vernes, 31, say they were attacked by a group of men in the early hours of Sunday morning in Arnhem, in the country’s east.

Their story was widely publicised and they appeared on Dutch talk show Pauw earlier this week, where they described being set upon after holding hands.

Even the Lefty New York Times has edited out the truth as it reports what the victim said…or some of what he said….

Then suddenly six to eight youths set upon them, he said, and “before I knew it, I was on the ground fighting with three men on top of me.”

What’s missing?…..

‘And then suddenly there was a group of six to eight Moroccan youths. Before I knew it I was on the ground fighting with three men on top of me.’

Curiously no one is mentioning that Geert Wilders has been campaigning against Moroccan immigration and been convicted of a hate crime as he did so.

What’s also curious, or not, is that the BBC should be so quiet about the identity of the attackers and why they may be homophobic….perhaps it’s something they have been radicalised about on anti-social media but definitely not in the Mosques.

The BBC ranted and raved about the attack on an Asylum seeker recently and instantly labelled it a hate crime, despite some of the attackers being black and the motive completely unknown  at the moment despite suggestions that it was an argument about cigarettes…the claim that the attackers asked whether the youth was an asylum seeker is completely unsubstantiated and probably came from his two friends…so hard to believe.  Will this attack on gays in Holland, one of many (allegedly a rise in attacks from 400 in 2009 to 1,600 in 2015…#DuetoBrexit?), merit a similar wave of BBC angst driven reporting?

Note that a Dutch near equivalent of the BBC, RNW, reports..

Moroccans agree with Wilders about violent Moroccan-Dutch youths

Many Moroccans agree with Geert Wilders, the leader of the populist Freedom Party, who recently stated that the violence being committed by Moroccan-Dutch youths in the Netherlands is a “Moroccan problem”. The assertion is based on reactions from people who read an RNW article about a linesman who died after being beaten up by a group of Moroccan-Dutch teenagers.

The article was reprinted by Hespress, a popular Moroccan website, and sparked dozens of reactions from Moroccans living in Morocco and abroad. 50 of the 60 people who reacted agreed with Geert Wilders’ remarks.

“The truth has to be told”, wrote ‘a commentator from the Netherlands’. “Moroccan youths here in the Netherlands are causing numerous problems. They carry out hold-ups, rob old people and attack bus drivers and gays. These incidents are occurring on a daily basis. In my opinion, the Dutch have a lot of patience with these criminals.”

According to another reader, “I have been living in the Netherlands for the past 22 years, and I have never had any problems with Dutch people. From what I have seen, whenever there are problems of vandalism or theft in public transport, Moroccans are involved. Anyone who wants to succeed in the Netherlands can. The opportunities are there. You just have to want to seize them.” 

Be aware that the following post contains graphic illustrations of a sexual nature….

Came across this after following link on previous post……Swedish safe sex guidance for immigrants, all very inclusive…….welcome to Sweden….

Sexual health is an important part of most people’s lives and you need to know what healthcare services are available, and how you can protect yourself and others from hiv and sexually transmitted diseases (also called std:s). This brochure is a guide for you who are newly arrived in Sweden and identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or queer (lgbtq)

Read more about protecting yourself from sexually transmitted diseases, living with HIV, taking care of your sexual health and your rights in Sweden.

Welcome.

I think this deserves a higher profile…thanks to Mice Height…..

And there are still some out there that say "white privilege" doesn't exist. pic.twitter.com/I0RDuKPmEd

— Black Pigeon Speaks (@navyhato) April 2, 2017

‘G’ in the comments notes that the BBC corrected an article that stated ‘Thousands of EU laws on everything from workers’ rights to the environment are to be scrapped or replaced with UK equivalents in a new plan.’  and replaced it with this ‘Thousands of EU laws on everything from workers’ rights to the environment are to be transferred into UK law as the country gears up for Brexit. ‘

‘Brexit‘…or the ‘Scrapheap Challenge’ as the BBC prefers to call it.

How the BBC presents the negotiations is important….the BBC and Remainders are pushing the narrative that negotiations and any trade deals will be extraordinarily complex and will take years, perhaps over a decade, to complete.  It is all part of their anti-Brexit campaign…keep up a negative barrage of comments about how difficult and complex Brexit will be and how the supposed advantages of it will in fact be almost impossible to negotiate….they are still fighting the referendum whatever Nick Robinson spins about it all being over.  He, and the BBC, should actually listen to the Public…as Lord Ashcroft points out…they want to get on with it….

For an event that was supposed to change everything, Brexit has made strikingly little difference to domestic politics. The single biggest reason, according to my latest research, is that most people, however they voted in the referendum, think a democratic decision has been made and needs to be implemented: even among remain voters there is very little appetite for trying to block or delay our departure.

The fact that we are already in the EU and comply fully with all their rules and regulations already would, to an impartial observer, seem to indicate that any deal must be relatively simple and quick to cobble together…but again the BBC seems to want to paint a different picture…that opening line, ‘Thousands of EU laws on everything from workers’ rights to the environment are to be scrapped or replaced with UK equivalents in a new plan.’  was clearly totally wrong as a paragraph later on the BBC itself proves as it quotes David Davis…’It also meant workers’ rights, environmental protection and consumer rights currently enshrined in EU laws would continue when Britain left, he added.’

Interesting of course that the BBC cherrypicks workers rights and the environmental laws to claim they are being ‘scrapped’…..a Remainders’ alarmist theme.

What is remarkable is how many versions of this report there are, it is constantly updated [News sniffer] and many of the updates seem to be designed to put a negative spin on Brexit and a positive spin on the EU’s own stance..and indeed that claim that laws are to be emotively ‘scrapped’ itself was a later addition, the first version being ‘The government will set out how it plans to remove EU law from the statute book later by publishing details of its Great Repeal Bill.’

This was also added…‘Asked if the PM’s comments amounted to “blackmail”, he replied: “I try to be a gentleman, so towards a lady I don’t even use or think about the word ‘blackmail’.”

As was this ‘The prime minister’s words sparked an angry reaction from some EU officials who said security was too important to be used as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations. ‘

This ‘She called for a “deep and special partnership that takes in both economic and security co-operation”, and also warned the failure to reach a deal could weaken the joint fight against crime and terrorism.’ was changed to this more alarmist ‘blackmail’ version ‘ In her letter on Wednesday triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, Mrs May suggested cooperation with the EU on the fight against crime and terror was at risk if Britain did not agree an overall Brexit deal within the two year time limit.’

A bit of positive news about the EU…it won’t ‘punish’ us, they’re lovely really...’He said the “fear” that the EU would punish Britain for leaving, in order to deter other countries from going down the same route, “has reduced” although it had not disappeared altogether.’

Oh and the Public are ‘apprehensive’ about the deal …‘Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson admitted to public “apprehension” over the outcome of a deal, but said Mrs May was “wise” to wait until now to set out her negotiating position.’

And so on…many, many changes as the article is extensively rewritten over the space of a day but don’t forget…‘Get news from the BBC in your inbox, each weekday morning’...and remember to keep checking every hour as the story is rewritten to suit as the agenda changes and they think of new and interesting ways to slip in a few Brexit slanders.

The BBCers and Teachers….brothers in arms….reading this description of how educational ‘progressive trolls’ patroll the internet you’d easily recognise it as a description of the BBC itself…it may not be able to back up an argument but it has the moral highground…and so it is right anyway….and all their opponents are Fascists….

The Rise Of The Progressive Trolls

When I started blogging, it was at the height of the control of policy and institutions in education by educational progressives, and I used to get a lot of personal attacks. It was seen as close to blasphemy to dissent, or even to express opinions like saying INSET is often a bit boring, that you can hear in almost every staffroom. There was very little professionalism or restraint from those who just wanted me to shut up.

As time went on, more classroom teachers joined Twitter, my following grew, and I saw less of that kind of intimidation aimed at myself, although I saw plenty of it aimed at newer voices, like Quirky Teacher. They’d be witch hunts every so often, when the great mass of progressives saw a target, but less in the way of actual abuse, and what there was tended to happen only when somebody lost their temper having already lost the argument. I mainly experienced a lot of tut-tutting from those convinced they had the moral high ground, and that even if they could not show my opinions were wrong, they were at least convinced my tone was not what it should be, and that their own motives, behaviour and compassion were beyond question. Every so often a troll, by which I mean somebody who hurls insults and threats on social media, would pop up and be blocked but it was the exception.

Over the last few months things have changed. Having spent years trying to claim the moral high ground in the debate, a new faction seems to have emerged. The progressive trolls. They have appeared to tell us that traditionalists are evil, selfish fascists up to no good (although they sometimes claim not to be terribly progressive themselves). They congratulate each other on being blocked, and subtweet personal attacks and conspiracy theories about those who have blocked them. They put a lot of time into telling anyone who listen that traditionalists are extremely right-wing.

‘The left would be wise to try to incorporate the findings
of behaviour geneticists into their political philosophy rather than
continue to deny them. Why? Because they’re almost certainly right.’

The BBC was right all along, we are heading back to the Thirties…who’d have believed it…the BBC, in its hatred of Brexit and Leave voters, is broadcasting a programme that says genetics, biology, makes the ‘lower classes’ stupid [and thus they know not what they vote for]…natural selection…perhaps we should be practising Eugenics…Toby Young should know better than to peddle this tripe for the very nasty BBC…

The populist movements that swept Britain and America last year in which angry, often working class, voters rejected the political hegemony of highly-educated, liberal elites were uncannily like the one imagined in The Rise of the Meritocracy – a dystopian satire written almost sixty years ago that imagined a modern society much like our own that collapses after an anti-Establishment revolt in 2034.

Michael Young’s son Toby, a journalist for the Spectator, asks if his father’s dark prophesy is correct and whether the Brexit and Trump votes signal the death knell for the popular political vision of a modern meritocracy.

A new open thread for those whose lack of an opposing digit doesn’t restrict their ability to type…..

‘It will be vital to challenge apologists for terrorism.’    

Prevent Programme

 

Andrew Neil asks…

Perhaps he should have listened to the likes of Tommy Robinson instead of showtrialing him at the behest of the Islamist Mehdi Hasan……they don’t need a reason other than you’re not Muslim…..

Islam the religion, in Ms. Hirsi Ali’s view, is a Trojan horse that conceals Islamism the political movement. Since dawa is, ostensibly, a religious missionary activity, its proponents “enjoy a much greater protection by the law in free societies than Marxists or fascists did in the past.”

Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the West has made a colossal mistake by its obsession with “terror” in the years since 9/11. “In focusing only on acts of violence,” she says, “we’ve ignored the Islamist ideology underlying those acts. By not fighting a war of ideas against political Islam—or ‘Islamism’—and against those who spread that ideology in our midst, we’ve committed a blunder.”

A whole new ballgame…and it’s here, according to Tommmy Robinson in a very unPC video as he ‘exposes and opposes’ Islam and criticises the MSM and the Establishment for turning a blindeye to the real threat as he sees it, not terrorism but cultural Islam…he says there are two types of people…those affected by Islam and those who will be affected by Islam.  I’m guessing he won’t be given the same freedom to express his views on the BBC as they give the Muslim fundamentalists from the likes of Cage, MPACUK and the MCB.

At least one MSM publication is not turning  a blindeye….The Wall Street Journal...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Islam’s Most Eloquent Apostate

The West’s obsession with ‘terror’ has been a mistake, she argues. Dawa, the ideology behind it, is a broader threat.

The woman sitting opposite me, dressed in a charcoal pantsuit and a duck-egg-blue turtleneck, can’t go anywhere, at any time of day, without a bodyguard. She is soft-spoken and irrepressibly sane, but also—in the eyes of those who would rather cut her throat than listen to what she says—the most dangerous foe of Islamist extremism in the Western world. We are in a secure room at a sprawling university, but the queasiness in my chest takes a while to go away. I’m talking to a woman with multiple fatwas on her head, someone who has a greater chance of meeting a violent end than anyone I’ve met (Salman Rushdie included). And yet she’s wholly poised, spectacles pushed back to rest atop her head like a crown, dignified and smiling under siege.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia in 1969, is Islam’s most eloquent apostate. She has just published a slim book that seeks to add a new four-letter word—dawa—to the West’s vocabulary. It describes the ceaseless, world-wide ideological campaign waged by Islamists as a complement to jihad. It is, she says, the greatest threat facing the West and “could well bring about the end of the European Union as we know it.” America is far from immune, and her book, “The Challenge of Dawa,” is an explicit attempt to persuade the Trump administration to adopt “a comprehensive anti-dawa strategy before it is too late.”

Ms. Hirsi Ali—now a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where I also work—is urging the West to look at Islam with new eyes. She says it must be viewed “not just as a religion, but also as a political ideology.” To regard Islam merely as a faith, “as we would Christianity or Buddhism, is to run the risk of ignoring dawa, the activities carried out by Islamists to keep Muslims energized by a campaign to impose Shariah law on all societies—including countries of the West.”

Dawa, Ms. Hirsi Ali explains, is “conducted right under our noses in Europe, and in America. It aims to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and also to push existing Muslims in a more extreme direction.” The ultimate goal is “to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with Shariah.” It is a “never-ending process,” she says, and then checks herself: “It ends when an Islamic utopia is achieved. Shariah everywhere!”

Ms. Hirsi Ali contends that the West has made a colossal mistake by its obsession with “terror” in the years since 9/11. “In focusing only on acts of violence,” she says, “we’ve ignored the Islamist ideology underlying those acts. By not fighting a war of ideas against political Islam—or ‘Islamism’—and against those who spread that ideology in our midst, we’ve committed a blunder.”

The way it will go…

From this…

To this…

To this….and note how the man stays the same……it’s the woman, Janet Jackson, who is changed by Islam the most….

Divorce seems to be the only answer.