Monthly Archives: April 2017

After Trump’s strike on Assad the BBC contacted Peter Ford, a former British ambassador to Syria, and led with his views on many news bulletins today…that the gas attack was a false flag operation by Jihadis….without telling us that he is ‘a vocal critic of UK policy in Syria’ who also happily appears on RT with the Iran stooge George Galloway….how the hell did this guy get to be a British Ambassador?…why did the BBC give his views so much airtime when, as in the interview above, it is acknowledged that his views chimed with Russia’s, but otherwise remained unchallenged?…The BBC also gave the views of Tory Crispin Blunt, that it was illogical for Assad to do this, a high profile….never mind that it was almost impossible for IS to have done it….

If the operation was an IS false flag operation how did they manage to get hold of nerve agent?  Next to impossible for them to do so…and did they then bomb the hospitals and aid centres immediately after the gas attack?  They don’t have aircraft so who did that?  Good that the BBC interviewer not raise such awkward questions.

A video of Jacob Rees-Mogg giving the EU what for and telling a few home-truths that the BBC doesn’t dare voice…he mentions the rise of  extremist parties [left included] but blame sit on the EU’s lack of democracy.  Pretty damning stuff.

And here’s Simon Jenkins in the Guardian of all places giving a pretty accurate take on the BBC’s bias with a very revealing comment about Lord Hall’s views…..though have to disagree with the usual narrative that the BBC’s referendum coverage was very balanced….

The best way to tackle BBC bias is make it plain for all to see

Though the corporation had a good Brexit, it must still address the narrow monoculture that skews key decision.

After the Brexit vote last June, Robinson’s boss, Lord Hall, went round the London dinner circuit wailing that BBC balance had “lost us the election”. It had given too much credibility to leave. I disagree. The BBC may have “lost” the election, but it was not during the campaign – rather through its years of brazen pro-EU bias.

The campaign was ironically its finest hour. Amid a deluge of lies from both sides, the corporation kept a clear head. Nothing and no one was left unchallenged. [LOL]

The BBC’s former director general Mark Thompson makes a valiant attempt to chart these rock-infested waters in his book on political language, Enough Said. He had to wrestle with a BBC which is palpably left of centre, never challenging any plea for public money or any demand that “something must be done” about the world’s ills.

The doctrine of due impartiality thus allowed producers discretion in their casting.

  As [Nick Robinson] rejects all suggestion of bias, except that old cliche “the bias against understanding”, we must ask, yes, but who is to be the judge?

I like the BBC’s familiar cast of two antagonists, of “A v B”……But it is also dangerous. It can reduce debate to stupidity, to false opposites and excluded views. It vests extraordinary power in the producer to orchestrate – and distort – debate.

There is no such thing as “pure” news. Everything you read in a newspaper or hear on a radio, every question asked and answered, is the outcome of a human decision to accord it priority over another item. That even applies to humans who program computers to privilege certain stories. All information is “edited” by someone claiming a right to choose, a licence to bias.

We can accept the BBC view that any opinion must be weighed in the scales of significance before being unleashed on the public. But we must ask who is doing the weighing, what is their inherent bias.

I may love the BBC and defend its independence to the death, but it is an alarmingly narrow monoculture. Politically, it is not diverse. It staged a good Brexit debate, but by then its past bias had loaded the outcome. I am all for “due impartiality”, but to whom is impartiality paying its due?

 

Why was BBC 5 Live News telling us that Britain, France, Germany and ….Israel supported the strike on Assad?  Why no mention of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Turkey?  Is the BBC feeding into the conspiracy theories…ISIS…the ‘Israeli Secret Intelligence Service’? Is the BBC deliberately trying to stir up Muslim anti-Western radicalism?

 

Trump is to blame for Syrian gas attack and no doubt will be getting the blame for the terror attack in Sweden…didn’t he put the idea in their little heads?  Only on the BBC [and possibly RT] could it be possible to blame a man who has only been President for two months whilst the sainted Obama, president for 8 years, is applauded…and this from a BBC that for years utterly refused to mention Ed Miliband’s name when discussing the 2013 vote and his responsibiity for the betrayal of the Syrian people….

Syria chemical ‘attack’: Is Trump partly to blame?

There is an argument that the Trump administration’s “hands-off” approach to Bashar al-Assad emboldened the Syrian President to carry out atrocities like the chemical attack for which he’s being blamed.

Years of Obama grandstanding as a moral fence sitter with the BBC cheerleading that policy and only two months into Trump’s administration does the BBC suddenly find such a policy might have its faults?

The BBC has only just woken up to the fact that Ed Miliband betrayed the Syrians with his own cowardice dressed up as moral grandstanding and in effect was a major contributor to the half a million deaths in Syria, the rise of IS and the millions of refugees that flood Europe and the Middle East….naturally the BBC forgets its own role in that vote in 2013 when it refused to release the video of a chemical attack on a school until after the vote had happened knowing that if released the MPs might well be influenced to vote for some kind of military action.

The BBC is a disgrace….Obama’s role is being whitewashed out of history…his ‘quiet’ policy [ie refusal to commit and take responsibility] being applauded and Trump blamed for saying what everyone else was saying reluctantly…maybe the best solution is to leave Assad in power in order to deal with IS first….yes Obama sat back and let it all happen…but there’s a difference….

Obama’s policy on Assad evolved, shaped by Russia’s entry into the war on the side of the Syrian regime, and by his administration’s growing focus on the fight against the Islamic State group.

“Everything is done through a counter-terrorism lens,” a US official who worked closely with these issues told me in December. “Would they like Assad to go away? Yes, but only if they feel that wouldn’t undermine US interests as they define it.”

Given these realities, Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry concentrated on what he thought was achievable – de-escalating the violence and getting some sort of political process off the ground in co-ordination with the Russians.

He crystallised this quiet policy shift in December 2015, when he accepted Moscow’s demand that Assad’s fate be determined by his people.

Noting that the removal of the president was a “non-starter” as a pre-condition for talks, he said the focus was on facilitating a peace process in which “Syrians will be making decisions for the future of Syria”.

Sound familiar?

Yes, but there’s a difference.

The Obama administration, especially Kerry, continued to emphasize that Assad was responsible for the bulk of the violence in Syria, that his brutality fed the extremism that spawned the Islamic State group, and that there could be no peace if he continued in power.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been ambivalent, very publicly washing his hands of the issue.

Others have a different view….The Telegraph…

John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov: The handshake that removes any chance of Assad’s fall

Any prospect of Britain and America taking military action against Mr Assad ended, though, when Mr Cameron lost his Commons vote and Mr Obama lost his nerve.

Since then Mr Assad has enjoyed a remarkable revival in his fortunes, especially after Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to fill the void created by Western inaction and deploy his own forces to Syria in support of the regime in Damascus.

More to the point, Assad has continued to use chemical weapons against his own people. Only last week Boris Johnson, our Foreign Secretary, was railing against the Russians, calling on them to end their “indefensible” support for the Assad regime. Now he finds himself having to offer British support for the ceasefire that Mr Lavrov has brokered with Mr Kerry – an agreement that is guaranteed to keep Mr Assad in power for the foreseeable future.

From Orient-News…

The Obama administration has watched Iran devastating Syria to keep the bloody Assad regime in power without objecting to the war crimes perpetrated against Syria and its people. Even when the Assad forces used chemical weapons against Syrians, the Obama administration created the proper nasty scenario to keep the criminal safe by punishing the weapon not the user. Part of the scenario was handing over the whole Syrian affair to Putin to finish what the Assad and Iran militias could not. It even gave Russia the chance to veto any proposal or resolution to put an end to the Syrian tragedy. All was to keep Assad in power; it was said that Assad has always been under the implicit protection of the American eye. Obama should be proud of such a human rights and human protection record in the history of a country that claims to be the land of the free.

From US News…

Report: Obama Sees Assad in Power Into 2017

Documents show the administration has backed off its insistence that the Syrian leader step down immediately.

President Barack Obama has softened his position that Bashar Assad must step down as a condition for Syrian peace talks, acceding to Russian demands and ensuring that the dictator’s tenure will outlast that of his own, according to documents obtained by the Associated Press.

From Think Progress…

Syria haunts Obama and it could haunt his legacy, too

It might be a stretch to say Obama supports keeping Assad in power, but it’s hard to argue that his administration’s policies haven’t been doing exactly that.

After more than five years of war and 450,000 deaths, the Syrian civil war will surely add an asterisk to President Obama’s legacy. Obama has said the mass destruction and loss of life “haunts me constantly,” but he has also told reporters he is skeptical that any other decision would have changed the status-quo in Syria today.

Obama’s skepticism, however, is not enough for many Syrians who feel the United States has let down the Syrian people in the face of starvation sieges, chemical weapon (mostly chlorine) attacks, and repeated airstrikes on civilian targets perpetrated overwhelmingly by the Assad regime and their allies.

From Breitbart…

Hayward: Obama Loses to Bashar Assad, a ‘Tyrant’ Who ‘Massacres Innocent Children’

Obama himself has been calling the Syrian dictator a monster for years. He just doesn’t do anything about it. Having abdicated all responsibility for global leadership, deliberately weakened America abroad with his noxious “smart power” and “lead from behind” philosophy, and created a power vacuum like nothing seen since World War II, Obama has been effectively leaning against the Oval Office wall and wondering when someone else will come along to rescue the Syrian people from Assad.

Oh and best of all…the BBC’s Nick Bryant…so very off-message…

One of the reasons why the world has become so disorderly is because America is no longer so active in imposing order……Washington has lost its fear factor.

World leaders nowadays seem prepared to provoke the wrath of the White House, confident that it will never rain down on them.

It explains why the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, after unleashing chemical weapons against his people, continues to bombard them with barrel bombs.

Assad’s flouting of American warnings is especially noteworthy.

In killing so many civilians with chemical weapons, he flagrantly crossed the “red line” imposed by Obama, but escaped punishment.

The president was unwilling to carry through on an explicit threat, in what was the biggest foreign policy climbdown of his presidency and also one of the most significant in the past 50 years.

Even supporters of Barack Obama believe he made a fatal strategic mistake, because it demonstrated endless flexibility and a lack of American resolve.

Needless to say, despots around the world took note.

Another terrorist attack, motive unknown, but Sweden is determined that the values that it treasures, freedom, democracy and human rights, will not be undermined by Islam…er…I mean by ‘hate’….whatever that means…

Stockholm attack: Sweden ‘will not be undermined by hate’

Oh gosh…Pepsi has apparently hijacked the Black Lives Matter ‘iconic’ photo and exploited it to promote its fizzy drink….the BBC naturally were on the case.

First, almost certainly that photo was set up and the girl was not there under her own steam….likely someone trying deliberately to create an ‘iconic’ image.  And if anyone hijacked that image it’s BLM….done before and better….

Personally I prefer the real, authentic smack of heroism where life really is in danger…

And the Pepsi ad?

It is extremely corny but fairly typical in sentiment from any other such ad….remember this iconic Coke ad?..

No problem with Pepsi’s hijacking protest movement theme….it has just been done incredibly badly….why use a super model…the very antithesis of what such a protest would be about?  And oh so multiculti and right-on…and all those fake protest signs….crass and laughable….never mind the Muslim photographer.  LOL.  Could have been done so much better.

And this is the real face of the cop-killer BLM movement…

The best Pepsi ad?…cheap and simple….

Melania Trump issues her first official White House photo portrait and the Left goes into a frenzied attack, the BBC included with  its bizarre critique of it branding it fake and emblematic of the Trump Presidency.

Any coincidence that the day after someone in the Obama entourage slips out a ‘natural’ photo of Michelle Obama casually dressed and with her hair as nature intended to great applause from the usual suspects…BBC included…

Oddly no comments about the fact that she has spent the last 8 years living a lie then, her hair primped and preened to present an image….not as if everyone didn’t know it was a lie….here’s her graduation photo with her ‘natural’ hair…..

And it’s not like her ‘new’ look is really new…from 2011…

‘The referendum exposed two nations. We need a one-nation figure to restore order.’

 

The new Today editor coming from the Evening Standard?  A Remainder who doesn’t like Trump or immigration control[despite recognising the damage mass immigration has done…see below] No surprise there then. [Let’s hope the new editor of the Evening Standard does not become Today editor in time].  Will she as editor of the Today programme give Humphrys and Co a kick up the arse to make them less pessimistic and start being more positive and unifying?  Somehow doubt it judging her by the sum-total of what she says.

Some interesting comments from Sarah Sands in her ES column...

Let’s start with this one….and hope she takes her own advice on board..

Empathy with the public is the key political gift

I particularly admired Gill’s troubadour approach to journalism. He spoke truth to power and liked to bite the hand that fed him, which is apt for a restaurant critic.

Gill regarded himself as a sinner, which is the proper position both for a Christian and a journalist. He was a former alcoholic who never forgot that you can be in the gutter but still looking up at the stars. His compassion was not lofty but based on proper understanding — there but for the grace of God go I.

He always sided with the underdog. It is a Christmas message, of sorts.

Her loyalties and that of her friends and colleagues [in that Bubble]..

The sun has broken through. We are in a strange state of La La politics. Colleagues and friends who were devastated by the Brexit/Trump results have a new devil-may-care approach. They ask: how bad can it be?

My latest mood is one of Elizabethan adventure. I have no idea where Brexit will take us but it will be interesting to see how historians classify the age that we are in.

This sentiment is best expressed as: sod it. It is in keeping with the times that the Gibraltar issue hit us apparently from nowhere. The next years will be full of surprises.

This could be interesting….imigration is bad for jobs…..though not at all ‘unforeseen’, Blair knew what would happen to the working class and he lied, hid that truth and carried on anyway….

How do we learn to become more productive? An unforeseen consequence of immigration — Tony Blair’s Gibraltar, if you like — was the debilitating effect it has had on employment.

A throwaway workforce left us undeveloped apart from the London rocket.

And let’s not forget the BBC also lied and hid the truth not mentioning the bombshell revelations of Andrew Neather that Labour had deliberately set out to ethnically cleanse Britain…imagine if a Tory government had done something similar….headline news, blanket coverage for days, weeks, months until someone resigned.

How long can this non-PC attitude continue as she beds in at the BBC and goes native…

The policing of language is punitive.

When I read about Sunderland manager David Moyes’s remarks to BBC reporter Vicki Sparks — “You might get a slap even though you’re a woman” — I was as indignant as the rest.

Was he threatening her with violence for doing her job? Then watch the video — Moyes and the reporter are laughing (though perhaps there is a hint of anxiety in her laughter?).

He is teasing her about a question.

There is a deeper theme to the language of violence towards women because — as one Scottish woman writer put it — women always dread the sound of footsteps behind them on a dark road.

But intent and tone must be considered.

Perhaps she is already half-way there as she praises Today…

The Today programme is television for grown-ups

I have been reading with pupil’s attention Robin Lustig’s Is Anything Happening? My Life as a Newsman.

The broadcaster, who made his first career in print, is perceptive about Radio 4 and describes radio as TV for grown-ups

Radio 4 needs to be the rock of reason in the babbling ocean.

A young listener told me he had embraced the Today programme because “it was never moronic”. Television for grown-ups.

Still maybe there’s hope…well, not really…

Sarah Sands: Brexiteers and Remainers must learn to get on

When I expressed sadness to a student about Remain losing she answered darkly that now I might understand how she has felt for every election that the Tories have won. 

In his report set to be published tomorrow, Sir John Chilcot has brought back memories of mass opposition to the Iraq War. The aftershocks still shudder through our national psyche. What we need is a psychological reassessment. Living among Brexiteers, as most of us are, given the numbers, I am prepared to believe that we can reassemble our relationships, structures and economies in a new spirit of understatement. There is no absolute good or the opposite, outside the spiritual world. 

The negative version is that house prices crash and immigrants leave — because there is no growth and no jobs. 

The referendum exposed two nations. We need a one-nation figure to restore order.

Steve Bannon is moved from his temporary position on the National Security Council and. – bang – in goes the BBC. The comrades prefer to characterise this as as Bannon “losing” his seat and adds for good value…”Critics have branded Mr Bannon – who once managed populist, right-wing Breitbart News – as a white nationalist.” A bit like critics branded Obama a Kenyan, eh BBC?

Meanwhile, on the substantive issue of the unmasking of Susan Rice…….NOTHING.

The BBC is Fake News.

Here you go, a new Open Thread to highlight the BBC bias.

This will get the right-on rabble on Twitter twitting…the BBC seems to be giving the ‘Far-Right’ an almost fair hearing in an article on the ‘Alt-Right’ and a profile of Marine Le Pen…and in fact down-playing the so-oft alleged Far-Rightedness of Le Pen and those of the French ‘Alt-Right’….Read them for yourself… a pretty fair look at the various movements that are labelled of the ‘Right’ [mostly due to wanting immigration controls though their economics and social policies are usually left-leaning]…

Patriot power: How France’s alt-right seeks to sway election

It may still the usual BBC hatchet job in many respects [why no such look at the ‘Far Left’ in any other country…such as the US and here in the UK?] but it lets slip many admissions that would not normally see the light of day such as the media works to suppress Right-Wing views and debate as in the UK and that Le Pen is often supported by disillusioned Lefties…..

Spreading the message online

Shut out by traditional media, identitarians have thrived on the web over the past decade.

It also highlights the power of new media. Without the internet, Mr Le Gallou and others would have no mass audience. Their warnings against the “Great Replacement” of locals by immigrants are no-go areas for mainstream journalists.

Various parts of the online alt-right may be firing from different directions, but their target is the same: the political and media establishment.

Such resentment is not the preserve of the identitarian fringe, or of people languishing in neglected provinces.

Opposition to liberal elites and concern about the disappearance of borders are widespread, and increasingly being aired in the heart of Paris.

And from the Le Pen article…

Part of the reason for the alarm is that the FN has always had a terrible press. In France it has suited successive governments, especially on the left, to caricature the party in the worst possible light.

The article also talks of anti-White racism….

Kevin Vercin, another CRE student who supports hard-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is as hostile to multiculturalism as the conservatives within the group.

Having lived in an immigrant banlieue (suburb) he says he has often been called “dirty white”, and says the mainstream press denies the reality of “anti-white racism”.

“I have suffered from being white,” says Ugo Iannuzzi, a Sorbonne student.

“I have often cried. I used to go to school with fear in my stomach. You start to feel bad about being white, about being French and loving your origins because you get beaten up, your phone gets stolen and glasses smashed.”

Mr Iannuzzi supports the FN. But his resentment of the political and media elites mirrors that of left-wingers like Mr Vercin.

The article finsishes with this…

Identitarianism feeds on pessimism.

Surely that’s not true….it’s not pessimism but hope for a better future and the resolve to make it work that drives them.

One major quibble…no mention in the long tract about Alain Soral that he has close ties with Muslim anti-Semites…remember the ‘reverse Nazi salute’, the Quenelle?

French Anti-Semites Dieudonné and Alain Soral Announce Formation of New Political Party

And funny how times change as Soral was a valued guest on Newsnight…

Newsnight had a look at this with its now infamously coy description of the Neo-Nazi Alain Soral as merely a ‘writer and film-maker’

And then there is this from Hugh Scofield..an extraordinary profile of Marine Le Pen…extraordinary because it seems entirely even-handed and even sympathetic in many respects….it even denies she is Far-Right….despite the BBC nearly always referring to her as such…as they did yesterday on the news in fact.

Today Marine Le Pen is a nationalist. She is unabashedly opposed to immigration. But there is no hint in her of the far-right ideology that clung to members of her father’s generation.
The influence of her generation is key. “I noticed working with her that when a question came up her first reflex was a reflex of the left,” says the former adviser to Marine, who does not want to be named.

“She does not have right-wing reflexes. For me, right-wing people are people who value liberty over equality. And left-wing people are the opposite. Well, Marine always chose equality over liberty.”

But one question keeps coming back. How far-right is the National Front?

In an FN-run France, walls go up. Foreigners and foreign goods are kept out. Brussels is pushed to the margin. The franc returns, and France comes first.

According to veteran commentator Alain Duhamel, it is “a former party of the far right that has become a populist party with instincts that are xenophobic and authoritarian”.
Part of the reason for the alarm is that the FN has always had a terrible press. In France it has suited successive governments, especially on the left, to caricature the party in the worst possible light.
In France people take sides. They believe in ideas. And if the conditions are right they will fight for them. That is why it all feels more real here.

I laughed at this…Le Pen’s niece has different politics…Le Pen’s are based on those of the ideological deconstruction that came out of the 1968 era…in other words she has the same values as so many at the BBC…..

Marion Marechal Le Pen, one of the FN’s two MPs, was born in 1990. One of her closest friends is Madeleine de Jessey, spokeswoman for the pro-Catholic family-values and anti-abortion movement Sens Commun.

Though they love each other deeply – Marine was a second mother, says Marion – their politics are very different.

According to Marion: “I am from the generation of the anti-May 1968. My generation is reacting against all the ideological deconstruction that happened after the student rebellion. We want principles, values, mentors – everything in fact that negates May ’68.

“For Marine the cultural victory of May ’68 dominated her childhood and adolescence. But today things are switching over.”

Schofield finishes with this comment….that a Le Pen victory would lead to violence in the streets…left-wing violence…ala Trump’s opposition..

A Marine Le Pen presidency could well spark violence on a scale far greater than the protests she currently attracts.

Twitter foaming at the mouth yet?