Tone Deaf

 

 

 

Evan Davis interviewed Nigel Farage and it went pretty much as you might expect, Davis not focussing on policy but instead intent on painting Farage as some sort of racist rabble rouser who uses unnecessarily inflammatory language.

The BBC website’s follow up was equally determined to paint a similar picture and uses a snearing tone to undermine and discredit Farage as incompetent or ‘angry’.  The headline of their report itself is an indicator of what the BBC wants you to think…..they have decided what is important in the interview and highlighted it…but it was their question that set up the premise about Farage’s ‘tone’ and it was they who decided this was an issue, it is the BBC, Evan Davis, who insinuates that Farage’s ‘tone’ is somehow unacceptable….and that Farage used it cynically, not really meaning what he said about immigration, in order merely to ‘get noticed’….

Farage ‘used tone to get noticed’

The problem with that is what do they mean by ‘tone’?  Judging by the way the interview went ‘tone’ is not tone of voice, it is not the way you say something, not the language you use, but in this case it is the content of what Farage says….that immigration must be controlled and that multiculturalism has led to various segregated communities that are unhealthy for society…..apparently that is the ‘tone’ that is unacceptable.

Davis only really began the interview (and this is where Newsnight decided to start their edit of the interview from) when he started to ask about UKIP’s polling numbers and linked it to ‘image’ saying that UKIP was polling less than support for its policies might suggest because…..‘there might be a whiff of meanness and divisiveness about the Party’.

Farage tried to answer but was constantly interrupted by Davis who then declared that he think’s this has something to do with your tone, the way you talk about immigration.

So that’s the usual Evan Davis Stalinist-like show trial technique in operation….label someone a racist, demand they prove themselves innocent, interrupt so they can’t explain themselves and then tell them they are racist ….and then declare ‘let’s move on’ before the victim has a chance to object.

So Davis has already set up Farage as somewhat sinister and possibly racist and then tries to ‘prove’ his own labelling of Farage by using the ‘proof’ of his own interpretation of how Farage talks about immigration…naturally Davis, an ardent pro-immigration extremist himself, thinks anyone who talks about controlling immigration is wrong.

But never mind that Davis not only labels Farage with a strawman argument and then goes on to ‘prove’ it with his own thoughts, is he right that UKIP is polling low because it looks ‘mean and divisive’ due to Farage’s ‘tone’?

One reason is that UKIP has been under sustained attack from nearly every news outlet with their own vested interests intent on discrediting and underming UKIP…but even that isn’t the major cause for the low poll ratings.

The real reason UKIP polls low is that people recognise the bigger picture…vote UKIP and you may well end up with Miliband….vote Tory you will at least get a vote on Europe, under Labour you definitely won’t….so one major issue for UKIP supporters has been hijacked by Cameron…..and they also know that UKIP will not, certainly in this election, become a party that can win a majority and fulfill its promise to take us out of Europe and cut immigration….so they vote tactically, and certainly many Tory voters who might vote UKIP will remain Tory although many disgruntled Labour voters may well decide UKIP is less disagreeable than voting Tory.

Davis’ interpretation is wrong and coloured entirely by his own issues with immigration and Europe, not to mention HIV and its associations with Gays in relation to Farage’s comments on HIV positive immigrants and the NHS.

The BBC website tells us….

[Farage] does plenty of interviews and he’s got two televised debates under his belt, but this was probably the toughest exchange so far.

During a half hour of intense scrutiny Nigel Farage was at times tetchy, even angry. “I’m not having this,” he said, when he accused his interrogator of misquoting him. “I don’t hate anything” he said when he thought words were being put in his mouth. “I couldn’t care less,” he said – twice – when pushed on one sensitive issue. He was combative and he stood his ground.

But the interview did emphasise one thing – numbers are not his strong point.  On UKIP’s plan for big tax cuts and deficit reduction he was nonchalant in saying “dynamic growth” in the economy – more revenue from less tax – was the secret to it working.

Farage’s ‘toughest exchange yet’?  Hardly think so….LBC’s James O’Brien’s kangaroo court was by far the ‘toughest’ if only for the continual stream of made up accusations and half-truths O’Brien attempted to lynch Farage with…and yet Farage kept his cool and showed O’Brien to be less than credible as an interviewer and distinctly dishonest.  Evan Davis was less dramatic but had the same intent as O’Brien, to smear Farage with whatever trumped up charge came to hand.

At one point Davis played a clip from an interview Farage did on Fox News about the rise of radical Islam in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo and claimed this was an example of an unacceptable tone.  It was in fact Farage merely saying what many, many other people, from politicians, to journalists, to academics,  have said.

Davis seems to be saying that any criticism of Islam is unacceptable and shouldn’t be voiced lest we ‘upset’ Muslims, making them feel ‘under siege’.…leading to radicalisation.  The BBC seems to have no problem with a communtiy that says ‘If you criticise us we will turn nasty’….but does have a problem with anyone who suggest FGM, or polygamy, extreme intolerance, or indeed extremism based upon religion, is wrong.

Farage and Davis get sidetracked as to whether Farage in the clip is talking about Islam in the UK, he actually was in that BBC clip, but the interview as a whole was about radical Islam generally and was based upon events in Paris and so Farage, having done so many interviews, may be excused for not remembering the exact details of the clip…especially as it was edited to be very short and without context.

Cuious that Davis thinks this is ‘mean and divisive’……..

 

Davis dismisses the claim that the Archbishop of Canterbury said we should accept Sharia law in the UK by saying ‘He was misunderstood’.

No, no he wasn’t.  He quite clearly ssaid that we should accept a parallel system of law based upon Sharia…because….if we don’t it will upset Muslims and there will be a ‘breakdown in cohesion’...what could he possibly mean by that?

 “as a matter of fact certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law” ……. “the application of sharia in certain circumstances – if we want to achieve this cohesion and take seriously peoples’ religion – seems unavoidable?”

 

Here is the BBC’s very own report on the matter….

Sharia law in UK is ‘unavoidable’

Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4’s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

Dr Williams said an approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts – I think that’s a bit of a danger”.

“There’s a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law.”

 

So we must accept that Muslims do not want to be ruled by British law and must have their own legal system…and whatever else they want to keep them happy and quiet.

Farage was right, Davis wrong on that important point.

Things then got surreal with Davis suggesting the recent children’s film about Paddington Bear showed the wonders of immigration and multi-culturalism….‘a proclamation of the virtues of multiculturalism which I know you hate…’

Farage then objected to the word ‘hate’ as it was perjorative and seemingly designed to be a ‘ramping up of the rhetoric’ about him by Davis.

I wonder where Davis got the ‘Paddington’ angle from…..maybe the left-leaning Economist:

UKIP, pursued by a bear

MANY Britons were raised on tales of Paddington, the second-best-known bear in fiction after Winnie-the-Pooh. A kind of ursine Jacques Tati, the well-meaning Paddington caused chaos wherever he went through a mixture of clumsiness and cultural misunderstanding; the best moments usually involved his clashes with pompous British officialdom.

A new film version, directed and written by Paul King, focuses on a quality for which the British once prided themselves—a welcoming attitude towards refugees. An archetypal British explorer called Montgomery Clyde (who travels with grand piano and grandfather clock) meets Paddington’s aunt and uncle, introduces them to the joys of marmalade, and tells them of the warm welcome they can expect in London. When an earthquake destroys their home in “darkest Peru”, Paddington is duly sent to London to seek shelter.

[Laughed at this bit..]

If this interpretation had been served up by the BBC, the publicly subsidised national broadcaster, the howls of protest from the Daily Mail and Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigrant UK Independence Party, would have been deafening.

It was a reminder that UKIP polls relatively poorly in multicultural London and that its national ratings are still in the mid-teens, well below the Front National in France.

Not everyone in Britain is a “little Englander”; a lot of people, if they met Mr Farage, would be tempted to follow Paddington’s example and give him “a particularly hard stare”.

Well not this particular commenter…..

‘Why, instead of making Paddington into a bear in this new film, they could have just stuffed a coat with straw so the evil characters were directly attacking a strawman!

How about this for a film – Paddington arrives in the UK and instead of openly assimilating with society, invites in more of his bear-friends and sets up a parallel society in the neighborhood. Instead of following his adopted country’s rules and laws, the bears insist that their radical religious rules are sufficient for controlling issues within their separate community. The bears prey on young and vulnerable girls within the city subjecting them to gang rape and torture while native civil servants nervously sit by wondering just how this got so out of control. What a fun children’s movie when the complex, sensitive issue of immigration is brought more in line with reality!’

Ouch!  Very mean and divisive!

Davis then pulled another of the anti-UKIP lobby’s favourites out of the hat asking Farage if it was ‘patriotic to support Mo Farrah?’   Why not ask if it would be patriotic to support the 7/7 bombers or Lutfur Rahman?  Ridiculous, as Evan Davis might say.

Davis accuses Farage of ‘ramping up the rhetoric’ but in fact he merely states the truth that many have stated before…so why pick on Nigel Farage and suggest he is somehow a dangerous and divisive influence polluting people’s minds?  Here’s the Independent on the dangers of segregation, Muslim in particular…

Segregation between different classes and ethnicities in Britain is worsening due to increasing numbers of faith schools and the opening of free schools, a leading campaigner on social equality has warned.

Matthew Taylor, the respected chair of the Social Integration Commission, called on governors to issue regular reports on how their pupils are mixing to prevent serious divisions in society – saying that Muslim schools were of particular concern as their intakes tend to be less diverse.

Social segregation is already costing the British economy £6bn a year, recent research from the Commission has found. The study showed Britons increasingly seek the company only of those most like themselves, with profound consequences.

The resulting drop in social mobility and increased isolation between groups means that problems are emerging in areas from employment to health, costing the UK the equivalent of 0.5 per cent of GDP.

 

Here’s the BBC itself on such dangers…quoting Trevor Phillips…telling us that the dangers of segregation should come as no surprise (They obviously do to Evan Davis)….

The head of the Commission for racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, is warning of increased segregation…..

But it should come as no surprise – it has been on the government’s books since the riots of 2001 in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham.

The most damning report into the disturbances, by Ted Cantle, a former council chief and expert in local communities, warned of communities living “parallel lives” and recommended wide-ranging changes to policy.

The words chosen by Mr Phillips for his speech are more strident – but they amount to the same thing: People share space in Britain’s towns and cities but do not know who each other are.

The CRE chairman has already attacked what many increasingly regard as the heart of the problem, multiculturalism, a concept that few people agree on.

In his speech, Mr Phillips argues that the nation is becoming more divided by race and religion, with young people being brought up in enclaves.

He warns that Britain is “sleep-walking” its way towards segregation on a scale already seen in the USA. The evidence is there to be seen, says Mr Phillips, it’s just going unspoken.

So remind me of the virtues of multiculturalism and mass immigration Evan!

Then we had another even more bizarre attempt to show Farage as ‘mean and divisive’ by misquoting him on his comments on breastfeeding suggesting he had a problem with women doing that….Farage said he had absolutley no problem and the quote was about a very particular circumstance…and he couldn’t care less if women wanted to breastfeed in public….and he repeated that.

The BBC’s analysis on the website tells us…..’ “I couldn’t care less,” he said – twice – when pushed on one sensitive issue’.  That makes out that Farage is being aggressively dismissive of a ‘sensitive issue’ when really he is saying the opposite and is in fact supportive of that ‘sensitive issue’.  The BBC twisting his words to make him look crass and callous…..why hide the fact it was on ‘breastfeeding’ instead of calling it a ‘sensitive issue’….were the BBC trying to get you to think he was talking about something else…such as race?

Davis then got on to some policy asking how Farage’s policy to reduce tax would encourage growth in the economy and lead to more tax revenue in the end.

The BBC web report tells us…’But the interview did emphasise one thing – numbers are not his strong point.’

Well, no not really.  Farage used an economic thinktank to run through the figures and verify his policy…and it is a well established principle…the present government is convinced…from HRMC:

‘The modelling suggests that the tax reductions will increase investment by between 2.5
per cent and 4.5 per cent in the long term (equivalent to £3.6 billion – £6.2 billion in
today’s prices) and GDP by between 0.6 per cent and 0.8 per cent (equivalent to £9.6
billion – £12.2 billion). Lower Corporation Tax will also increase the demand for labour
which in turn raises wages and increases consumption. Given the share going to
labour this equates to between £405 and £515 per household.’

 

The US based Tax Foundation also supports the theory…

‘In any case, the lesson from the studies conducted is that long-term economic growth is to a significant degree a function of tax policy. Our current economic doldrums are the result of many factors, but having the highest corporate rate in the industrialized world does not help. Nor does the prospect of higher taxes on shareholders and workers. If we intend to spur investment, we should lower taxes on the earnings of capital. If we intend to increase employment, we should lower taxes on workers and the businesses that hire them.’

 

 So perhaps numbers are Farage’s strong point after all despite the BBC’s attempt to undermine him.

 

All in all Davis’ interview and the follow up ‘analysis’ on the web were pretty dire and intent only on showing Farage as a racist, someone who doesn’t really care about things and as an incompetent winging it on his charm.  Davis was highly selective in what he chose to emphasise and the bulk of the interview wasn’t at all about Farage’s policies, or even about his actual immigration policies, but about the ‘tone’ of his comments on immigration…..or rather the fact that the things he said were critical of immigration policy….apparently being critical of immigration policy and talk of controlling and reducing immigration to sustainable levels somehow means you are unacceptably ‘ramping up the rhetoric’ and are a danger to a cohesive society in which immigrants want to feel the love.

Personally I thought Farage kept his cool and held his ground well under sustained and often bizarre attack.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another One Of ‘Those’BBC Audiences

 

From the Telegraph:

BBC accused of left-wing ambush on David Cameron over hostile Radio 1 interview

The BBC has been accused of launching a left-wing ambush on David Cameron after a deeply hostile Radio 1 interview in which the presenter bet the Prime Minister £1,000 he could not win a majority.

Appearing on Radio 1’s Live Lounge, Mr Cameron was repeatedly interrupted by audience members and presenter Chris Smith, leading to widespread accusations of bias.

The Telegraph understands the Conservatives are considering lodging a formal complaint over the interview.

 

NicK Griffin Wins BBC Lifetime Achievement Award.

 

Yusuf / Cat Stevens with presenter David Gray

 

H/T Guido…

 

 

 

The BBC has given a lifetime ahievement award to a man who expressed the desire to execute Salman Rushdie.….. endorsed by Sharia law…but only in an Islamic State Yusuf Islam assured us….though I’m sure the BBC thinks it has nothing to do with Islam.

This year’s Lifetime Achievement awards will be given to legendary musician Yusuf / Cat Stevens and Grammy Award-winning artist Loudon Wainwright III.

 

From Nick Cohen:

But here is what Islam said to Geoffrey Robertson QC in 1989. (Video here.)

Robertson: You don’t think that this man deserves to die?
Y. Islam: Who, Salman Rushdie?
Robertson: Yes.
Y. Islam: Yes, yes.
Robertson: And do you have a duty to be his executioner?
Y. Islam: Uh, no, not necessarily, unless we were in an Islamic state and I was ordered by a judge or by the authority to carry out such an act – perhaps, yes.
[Some minutes later, Robertson on the subject of a protest where an effigy of the author is to be burned]
Robertson: Would you be part of that protest, Yusuf Islam, would you go to a demonstration where you knew that an effigy was going to be burned?
Y. Islam: I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing.

Just had this from my marvellous Observer colleague Andrew Anthony: “He told me in 1997, eight years after saying on TV that Rushdie should be lynched, that he was in favour of stoning women to death for adultery. He also reconfirmed his position on Rushdie. He set up the Islamia school in Brent, which is currently undergoing council-backed expansion. Its mission statement three years ago explicitly stated that its aim was to bring about the submission of the individual, the community and the world at large to Islam. For this aim it now receives state funding. Its an incubator of the most bonkers religious extremism and segregation, and is particularly strong on the public erasure of women. Why do people go to such lengths to ignore these aspects of Yusuf Islam’s character and philosophy?

If the BBC’s continuing endorsement of a Muslim fundamentalist with views that are evidently quite extreme, in  British society, is quite scary this (H/T Sue at Is the BBC biased?) should create a great deal more concern as it looks as if the BBC’s much vaunted independence has been compromised by Muslim activists seeking to change how the BBC reports Muslim issues:

Aaqil Ahmed, the BBC head of religion and ethics, said: “Religious literacy is far too important just to be left in the hands of people who are not subject specialists. I think you need both.”

Replying to criticism that BBC cuts and the pressures of the 24-hour news cycle had stripped out specialists, he said: “There are a lot of conversations with BBC News. There is a different leadership in BBC News, understanding exactly the world is different.”

He said editors, including director of news and current affairs James Harding, had attended a recent meeting with Muslim academics covering “the rise of religiosity in young Muslim children, the Trojan horse schools, which are not one-offs, they are a glimpse of the future.

“We have to find out the right way of telling that particular story. That notion has landed.”

‘A glimpse of the future’?  What did Ahmed mean by that exactly?  Is he saying that Muslims are becoming more devout, fanatical, in their religious observation and will be demanding British Society adapts to them…or else?

I think he is saying precisely that….but he is also looking to have the BBC report such issues, such as the Trojan Horse scandal, in a Muslim friendly manner rather than present them as the threat to a democratic, secular, tolerant and peaceful society under one law that is the British way.

All of which is a bit laughable as the BBC already does its utmost to pretend there are no such issues with the Religion of Peace and happily sweeps them under the carpet more often than not…or if forced to report them looks to downplay any issues and deny a connection to Islam…the Trojan Horse scandal being a case in point, the BBC claiming it was all a hoax, that there were no issues, that it was a result of islamophobia and racism…the BBC that refused to publish information that indicated that the lead Muslim advocacy group, the MCB, was at the heart of the scandal.  Why would the BBC do that?

Even John Birt noticed the BBC’s failure to address the issues….

BBC’s current affairs programmes ‘failing to address radical Islam and other tough topics’

The BBC is failing to address the “awesomely difficult questions” facing Britain, including the economy and the threat of radical Islam, according to the corporation’s former chief.

John Birt, director-general of the BBC from 1992-2000, said its current affairs analysis was falling short.

“What it’s not sufficiently doing is addressing the very big, awesomely difficult questions our country and our world are facing at the moment,” he said.

 

 

 

There is a war going on, a war of words and ideologies.  Activist Muslims have launched a media assault on our society with the intent to intimidate the Media into censoring themselves on Islamic issues, forcing them to whitewash any crimes or behaviour that can be associated with Islamic teachings in order to silence criticism of Islam and deceive non-Muslims about the serious concerns that the rise of a fundamentalist religiosity, one that is highly intolerant of other religions and which incites high levels of violence in many adherents, in the West raise.

It looks like the BBC has been groomed and recruited.

I think we should know who were these ‘Muslim academics’ that lobbied the BBC and what exactly was said and agreed.  How can it be that private interest groups can shape how the BBC reports the news in their favour?

How soon Rochdale is forgotten.

 

 

 

 

Wiki lies

 

This morning the BBC filled the airwaves with tall tales about Tory Grant Shapps and Wikipedia edits.

The BBC told us that the administrator who had made the claims about Shapps had said that he ‘couldn’t be sure who had edited the account’….so the question is did the BBC know the identity of that administrator and if so why did they not report it?  Was the story about Shapps just too good to put a stop to?

The Telegraph reports that the administrator at Wikipedia was in fact a LibDem activist…

Wikipedia administrator who accused Grant Shapps of editing pages of Tory rivals is Liberal Democrat activist

The Wikipedia administrator who accused the Tory co-chairman, Grant Shapps, of creating a fake identity on the online encyclopedia to boost his reputation is a leading activist in the Liberal Democrats, the Telegraph can reveal.

Richard Symonds admitted today that he had been “chastised” by other administrators at Wikipedia for not checking with more people before banning a user who he claims is Mr Shapps, or someone working for him.

Mr Symonds also admitted that he had briefed The Guardian newspaper, which broke the alleged story yesterday.

 

No mention of the identity of this administrator in the Guardian story, nor of his inability to actually provide any evidence that linked Shapps to the edits….so where did the BBC get their quote from about his lack of evidence? Did they contact him personally?

After spending the day slinging mud at Shapps, and he was also interrogated on Newsnight last night so important is this story,  the BBC hasn’t bothered to update the story with the rather significant fact that it looks like a bit of LibDem skulduggery at work.

Funny how much time the BBC spends on a story when it seems to suit their bias, as with the ‘Jihadi Bride’s father, and then can suddenly lose all interest when the truth comes out and contradicts their quality journalism…and never a sign of an apology or a rowback from them….they’ve already managed to imprint people’s minds with the BBC version and they know that may well stick however much ‘truth’ comes out later. All very Goebbels-like.

I’m sure Nick Clegg will be rewritng his jokes now…

Asked about the claims, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg said he was “prepared to believe” that Mr Shapps had not altered his Wikipedia entry but joked: “It just could have been someone else – Michael Green, for instance.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shapps Sticks And Stones

Good start to day on R4…BBC journo’s all asking what should the ‘new governement’, the ‘next government’ and the ‘new Prime Minister’ do to resolve current issues…all rather suggestive that Cameron and Tories are going to be out. Why not just say ‘What do you want the government to do?’

We also hear that rural life is in meltdown with communities rapidly collapsing with all services such as shops, pubs, post offices and bus services being closed.  Might have been relevant to suggest that the country isn’t a museum with pretty little shops and so on being there to make the place look idyllic….perhaps if people used those shops, pubs and post offices they wouldn’t close…..and have to say plenty of such rural services available where I live.

Then they got onto Rural Payments to farmers….slipped in was the comment that farmers desperately ‘need the EU subsidies’.

Hmmm…EU subsidies?  Do they mean the money the EU sends us back from the billions we send them but not before the EU bureaucrats rake off huge salaries with lavish expenses that they pay themselves before generously handing some of it back to us…with the demand that we thank the EUists profusely for their largesse?

 

The BBC’s biggest story of the day seems to be the Guardian smear that Grant Shapps may have altered his Wikipedia entry….shock and horror!

The BBC’s Norman ‘utterly terrifying’ Smith was delighted with this tale saying ‘This story brought a big smile to my face’.….telling us that Shapps thought it was a Labour Party smear which Smith dismissed with a joke denying it could possibly be a Labour smear operation…..they’re too computer illiterate and lack a sense of humour….leaving it up in the air as to who did alter the entry…suggesting Shapps perhaps?  Even if true…so what?

The Guardian’s evidence?…

The site’s administrators, selected Wikipedia volunteers who patrol the site, told the Guardian that they “believe that the account Contribsx is a sockpuppet of Grant Shapps’ previous accounts on Wikipedia … and based on the evidence the account is either run by Shapps directly or being run by someone else – an assistant or a PR agency – but under his clear direction.”

Oh hang on….anyone can edit it and the administrators can in fact almost be anyone….who is the admin who claims Shapps is guilty and what’s the evidence?…the Guardian fails to enlighten us….the BBC is admitting that that particular admin. ‘can’t be sure of who edited the account‘…..so a non-story about a non-story based on the word of one man who admits he is speculating. Big news!

R4 ignores the Mail story about Unite controlling half of Labour’s candidates…but then again why would we expect the BBC to cover that when they ignored the story when it arose before and even Labour sites attacked Unite and Miliband?  That’ll be the Unite Union that wants to impose Ralph Miliband’s Marxist utopia upon us.  Might be important…especially as Unite Leader, Len McCluskey, says Democracy is over-rated and he wants to use ‘direct action’ to force his views upon society.  Something that might be of interest to anyone thinking of voting for Unite funded Miliband.

Just heard that America is guilty of creating ISIS…never mind it existed in Afghan under a different name long before the BBC’s Peter Taylor claims it was created and the idea to create an Islamic State was always the dream.  The BBC happily ignores the reality that ‘ISIS’ was smashed by the US in Iraq and resurrected by Assad who released them from prisons and attacked their rivals whilst protecting them for his own purposes….not a mention of that key Syrian angle in this write up by Taylor.

The BBC is relentless in trying to blame the West or the US for what is happening in the Middle East…never mind that it was the Arab Spring that set off events in Syria and created the circumstances that allowed ISIS to rise again.

Even Jeremy Bowen admits that the self-immolation of the Tunisian fruit seller was the spark that began the uprisings across the Middle East…Syria would not be self-destructing if that hadn’t happened and ISIS wouldn’t have had the opportunity to rise again…nothing to do with Iraq.

 

 

 

 

 

Infidelity

 

It’s an odd thing isn’t it?  Muslims flock to the infidel and despised West to take advantage of the benefits provided by that infidel and despised Western society, including the ability to practise their religion more freely than when back in their ‘Islamic’ homelands, and yet the West is not allowed to go to Muslim lands to depose secular dictators hated by those same Muslims and to bring religious and political freedom to the oppressed people of those lands as well as to oust regimes like the Taliban…. the sort of Jihadi ‘Muslims’ that ‘real’ Muslims, sat comfortably in their Western homes, tell us aren’t real Muslims…and yet the West is somehow guilty of a crime against Muslims… which drives those ‘Real Muslims’ to be radicalised and to join up with those ‘Non-Islamic’ Jihadi Muslims to fight the Infidel and despised Western oppressor.

Go figure.

The BBC believes it unquestionably.

What brought that little rant on?  This from Craig at Is the BBC biased (yes it is) in which he tells of a complaint he made to the BBC about their lack of coverage of the fact that the father of a ‘Jihadi runaway’ was himself an extremist when they had previously given an enormous amount of airtime to him and his ilk to complain that it was all the Police’s fault or MI5’s fault that his daughter had gone off to join ISIS.

The BBC’s response was to say this…

BBC News is aware of the video material said to show Mr Hussen at a rally in 2012 and we have looked into the matter ourselves.

We didn’t consider it merited a report on its own, but it was included in a TV piece due to run on the evening of Friday, March 27th. Unfortunately, because of other news priorities, including the court verdict in the Amanda Knox/Meredith Kercher case, it didn’t make it to air.

 

I’m sorry, what was that?  ‘We didn’t consider it merited a report on its own’!

Are they kidding? Having flooded the news with sob stories about his daughter and her friends the BBC couldn’t find time for what is an important part of that story, the missing piece of the jigsaw that answers the question that the BBC constantly asks…Just what drives our young British Muslism to become radicalised?

Turns out its the way they’ve been brought up.  Suddenly though the BBC has lost interest in the answer.

Strange that.

The BBC does reassure us that….

However, it is something that we do intend to return to in the future.

Craig is doubtful…

When the BBC Complaints guy writes, “However, it is something that we do intend to return to in the future”, I afraid I don’t have any confidence in that pledge whatsoever. They clearly have absolutely no plans to update this story. The censorship will continue.

However I have every faith that the BBC will indeed return to the subject….the father will of course be the victim of Western oppression in his homeland that forced him, ironically, to flee to the West where he again suffered discrimination, disenfranchisement, alienation and Islamophobia, not to mention the trauma of watching his homeland being freed from the savage grip of a secular tyrant on the BBC each night…no wonder he became radicalised and turned to extreme measures when the much vaunted Western Democracy failed him.

 

 

 

 

Trust Busters

 

LibDem Peer, Lord Palumbo, thinks that politicians are making promises that they can’t possibly fulfill and it’s bad for democracy…but who’s to blame?

Wild election promises, funded with Monopoly money – is it any wonder nobody trusts politicians?

I don’t entirely blame politicians for behaving in this way. Our short-term cyclical political process seems designed to generate this auction of electoral bribery and reality avoidance. Honesty doesn’t win seats, promises do. The problem comes later, when politicians have to live up to their commitments while keeping the country’s economy afloat.

This is, however, one of the reasons we hit the financial crisis in 2008 and why deficit reduction has been so difficult during the last parliament. The needs of our democracy run against those of sound economic management. The skills needed by a media-savvy politician are the opposite to those needed to run a large and complex organisation. The by-product? As Viv Nicholson might have said: debt, debt, debt.

I take the somewhat controversial view that democracy would be enhanced if there was a little less electioneering and a little more truth telling. More experts, fewer communicators.

[Democracy] only works if voters make an informed choice, balancing individual needs and national interest, and if politicians are able to operate in an environment by which difficult choices and honesty are not prohibitively costly to their existence.

The choice for voters at this election is a critical one. The wrong decisions afterwards could bankrupt this country or leave us even more vulnerable to global economic turmoil.

We will pay a very heavy price if short-term political needs are placed before the national interest. And democracy will be undermined in the process.

Of course he is right as I’m certain we all recognise, politicians often refuse to admit there are difficult decisions, difficult choices, to be made, they refuse to admit mistakes and make rash promises, say for example to keep funding the NHS regardless of cost, because to suggest anything else is ‘death by Media’ and, they believe, electoral suicide.

Palumbo blames the politicians and only touches on the real culprits, the Media, which drives the agenda and makes politicians afraid to say anything that may later be held against them.

How often have we heard on the BBC that politics is failing, that voters have lost their trust in politicians (such as it was) and that democracy is on the rocks?

If that were so how much blame could be apportioned to the likes of the BBC which rather than merely seeking the truth to inform voters and their judgements also seeks to cast its own moral judgement upon the politicians and their policies or seems just out to trash any policy regardless of merit?

Here is a classic example of BBC mendaciousness…it can’t have been an honest mistake…how could a professional journalist make such a mistake?  H/T George R:

“HOW THE BBC STITCHED UP CAMERON WITH A FAKE QUOTE ABOUT FOX-HUNTING”

Why is it that politicians refuse to contemplate reducing any funding to the NHS when it clearly has got out of hand?  If the BBC were responsible it would allow the case to be made for such reductions but instead of that reasoned debate it goes into attack mode and as with welfare reforms sets out to paint any such change as an appallling, callous and wicked attack on the poorest and most vulnerable in society even if the policy might in fact be beneficial for them.  The rants about food banks are another example…often cited as proof that poverty stalks the UK when the reality is that most of the recipients are those who are having to wait for their benefits to be paid for one reason or another…in other words not ‘poverty’ but a bureacracy that has failed. Britain is not starving.

There is a distinct lack of honest debate that would allow politicians to freely admit money is short and savings have to be made. How often do you hear the BBC criticise ‘austerity’ without reference to the causes…that being the worst recession in 100 years?  It’s as if it was instead a cruel and heartless experiment that the Tories imposed, not out of necessity, but because they wanted to….that of course being a narrative that Labour likes to run with…the Tory (coalition) austerity measures are purely a nasty small government, everybody fend for themselves, Right wing ideology and nothing to do with fixing the economy….a narrative that the BBC’s failure to highlight Labour’s blame for the recession allows to gain credence and keeps up the notion of the ‘Nasty Tories’.

If Democracy is failing its because the Media is failing…and one of the biggest players, and the biggest culprit, is the BBC.

 

 

Headline Billing For Labour

 

Having watched the BBC website over the last 3 or so weeks I think I can agree with this from Guido…

BBC Website ‘Balance’ is a Joke

Everytime you look there is a Labour policy announcement being headlined or if the Tories make an announcement the headline can often be ‘Labour criticises Tory policy’ rather than a positive one for the Tories.

It isn’t just the website, the Radio news bulletins pull the same trick or that is my impression…it may just be that Labour make far more announcements and are better at getting them into the news cycle….you be the judge…here’s some more of Guido’s look at BBC bias…….

 

It reads like a Labour press release, with each election story given the best possible pro-Labour slant to it. Where are Cameron’s, Osborne’s or Major’s attacks on Miliband on the same subject? Why is Labour’s nursing policy presented without question? Where is any other party on the front page?

Click through to the BBC’s Election 2015 hub, and it’s even less balanced:

Not a single Tory or LibDem featured story.

 

 

Mary Poppins She Ain’t…But She Could Well Be Right

 

http://www.redmolotov.com/images/designs/nye-bevan-vermin-tshirt_design.jpg

 

Fascinating watching the Left turn themselves in knots in reaction to comments by Katie Hopkins about the migrant surge that is resulting in so much tragedy….as the Spectator says it’s the greatest game in town for the Lefties..

Hating Katie has become the speediest shortcut to the moral highground in this slacktivist age, when people prefer to make a virtual advert of their moral correctness than to do anything so tough as try to change the world outside their bedroom door. And if you aren’t hating Katie, if you aren’t partaking in this orgy of competitive benevolence, what is wrong with you?

It is an irony that, as said before, the real extremists, those who spout the irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric about immigration, aren’t the likes of Hopkins but those on the Left itself which demands open borders and mass immigration knowing full well the shattering consequences but willing to look away and ignore them as they seek to implement their grand project whilst at the same time grandstanding, mouthing ‘concerned’ platitudes about the ‘tragedy’ of the migrants dying in their hundreds, a faux compassion, a mockery of the humane principles they pretend to espouse so loudly.  To compound their crime, and to hide it, they work to silence their critics and those who propose controlled immigration that would benefit countries taking in the migrants and not least the migrants themselves…not only trying to silence their critics but to blame them for the deaths that are in fact the outcome of the ‘good men and women’ of the Left whose ideology overrides their professed humanity.

What did Nietzsche say?…

‘Good men are thus the most harmful type of men because they prevail at the expense of truth and at the expense of the future.’

‘Morality as a hiding place, a shield, a weapon…like a beast near death, crawl away and hide behind it.’

 

Those good men and women of the Left no doubt adhere to the principles of that famous socialist Adolf Hitler who didn’t believe in letting the facts get in the way of a good story either…..

‘What is important is not what the creator

of an idea of genius may mean, but what this idea

becomes in the mouth of whomever transmits it.’

                                                                                      Adolf Hitler

 

 

So let’s look at what those on the Left who retransmit the ideas of Katie Hopkins can turn them into……..

 

axelrod

 

Let’s start with the Huffington Post which lays bare the raw anger that Katie Hopkins remarks apparently generated….

Katie Hopkins Wrote This In The Sun About Migrants And Now Everyone Is Really Angry

“NO, I don’t care. Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad.

I still don’t care.

Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit “Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984”, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb. They are survivors.

It’s time to get Australian. Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats.”

 

Here is John Wight, Guardian and Huffington Post writer, with a taste of his position on immigration…

Migration is as old as humanity itself, and attempting to impede the natural right of people to escape poverty, war, and social convulsion is both futile and cruel.

In other words…make no attempt to prevent immigration.

Here is his reaction on Twitter to Katie Hopkins…

The description of migrants as ‘cockroaches’ is the language of a genocidal maniac. Step forward the rancid piece of shit Katie Hopkins.

The language of a genocidal maniac?  What describing the immigrants as ‘cockroaches? Well on first glance it’s unpleasant language but hardly ‘genocidal’ and in the context she is actually praising the migrants for their ability to survive…’Cockroach’ is in fact a term of praise….Muhammed Ali ‘floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee’…so making references to insects as a favourable comparison isn’t unknown..and in fact was much celebrated.

In fact ITV had a programme called ‘cockroaches’, a comedy about the survivors in a post-apocalyptic world..

Hang on what’s this?  Oh it’s an old article by John Wight in which he tells us that the ‘Tories are not just vermin, but lower than vermin’...the language of a genocidal maniac?….

Nye Bevan Once Described the Tories as ‘Lower Than Vermin’ – He was Right

“No attempt at ethical or social seduction can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.”

So said Nye Bevan in 1948……If he were alive today to see the current Tory-led coalition government in power, there is little doubt that the harsh words he had for them back then would not change by as much as one syllable.

Welcome to Tory Britain in the 21st century.

The Guardian itself didn’t seem too concerned about Bevan’s comment…nor of his casual racism towards the English…

Bevan’s “vermin” remark – one of the most famous jibes in politics – was adroitly turned against the Attlee government by Tory speakers, who pretended it insulted their voters rather than policy makers. However, Bevan merely retorted that men of Celtic fire were needed to bring about great reforms like the new NHS. That was why, he explained, Welshmen were put in charge instead of “the bovine and phlegmatic Anglo-Saxons.”

 

Here is the inestimable John Wight again this time railing against those ‘racists’ who want to control immigration properly…and compares Thatcherism to cancer…

Ever since Labour capitulated to Thatcherite nostrums and took its place alongside the Tories at the altar of the market and the rich, general elections in this country have presented the electorate with a choice between the political equivalent of a heart attack or cancer.

Labour’s immigration mug symbolises the extent to which the right is dominating the battle of ideas. It will be a collector’s item for racists up and down the country.

Finally from Wight we have this gem in which he celebrates somebody reporting Hopkins to the police for incitement to racial hatred…..

Katie Hopkins and The Sun editor reported to the police for incitement to racial hatred About time!

All a bit curious really when he himself incites anti-religious hatred….

George Bush: ‘God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq’ A better argument against religion you will not find.

And here fulminates against Islam saying that Muslims who practise their fundamental beliefs as ISIS says it does  must be sent to their graves and their complete and utter destruction…..

Emwazi is a medieval sectarian beast who, along with his acolytes within the so-called Islamic State, is embarked on a mission to turn the Middle East into a graveyard of those whose only crime is to practice a different religion than them, or practice the same religion in a way they disapprove of.

The only place for an ideology that fuels such barbaric movements and sanctions such grotesque carnage is the grave, along with those who adhere to it. The threat such ideologies pose to the very foundations of civilisation, their violation of the most fundamental belief in the sanctity of human life, demands nothing less than their complete and utter destruction.

Naturally though it is all ‘our’ fault in the West….’We’ are the enemy….

IS has spread and its ideology proliferated on the back of the destruction of Iraq and the unquantifiable trauma suffered by the Iraqi people, radicalising the entire region and young Muslims across the world at the same time.

This is why it is true to say that we have met the enemy and he is us.

 

Here is another of those ‘concerned’ citizens employed by the Guardian to watch over us and police our thoughts and language…Zoe Williams who thinks Hopkins is the harbinger of a new Dark Age…

Katie Hopkins calling migrants vermin recalls the darkest events of history

Hopkins’ phrasing was interesting: “These migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit ‘Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984’, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb.” The following morning, as an LBC shock jock, she rolled back her position slightly, suggesting the best way to solve the refugee crisis was not to shoot them once they were in the water, but to “burn all the boats in North Africa”.

This characterisation of people as less than human, as vermin, as a “virus” (as she did elsewhere in the article) irresistibly recalls the darkest events in history.

Compassion is such a rich part of the human experience and yet such a shaming thing to express, because you will always fall short of what your own words demand from you. You will never do enough.

People knew that you don’t respect the dead by staying silent about what killed them.

Firstly Hopkins didn’t call them ‘vermin’, that is a pejorative term deliberately chosen by Williams to sex up her attack on Hopkins. As to that claim that Hopkins wrote that the migrants should be shot in the water and that she later ‘rolled back on that‘….complete hogwash and another deliberate lie…..Hopkins advocated using gunboats, as the Australians do, to shepherd the migrants boats back to Libyan shores….

“It’s time to get Australian. Bring on the gunships, force migrants back to their shores and burn the boats.”

Nothing about shooting anybody…no mention of ‘vermin’….Williams says she compares them to a virus…well…only the violent ones…

“Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad – I still don’t care,” she wrote in her Sun column.

“Because in the next minute you’ll show me pictures of aggressive young men spreading like norovirus on a cruise ship.”

But then Churchill used similar language to describe Communism…..

‘In a speech to the House of Commons on November 5, 1919, Winston Churchill said: “…Lenin was sent into Russia … in the same way that you might send a vial containing a culture of typhoid or of cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy. No sooner did Lenin arrive than he began beckoning a finger here and a finger there to obscure persons in sheltered retreats in New York, Glasgow, in Berne, and other countries, and he gathered together the leading spirits of a formidable sect, the most formidable sect in the world … With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian State depended.”‘

Sounds kind of familiar doesn’t it that description of how a violent ideology is spread around an unwitting victim country?

 

Here is yet another Guardianista, Suzanne Moore, on the rampage about Hopkins…once again making her out to be at the head of a genocidal anti-immigrant movement….and once again, like Wight, tells us that we must not stop immigration….

‘On immigration, the language of genocide has entered the mainstream

Desperate people die at sea and are talked of as insects, not human at all. This is the natural conclusion of the toxic attitudes on proud display in British politics

I have no interest in the personality of that exoskeleton of solidified bile that is Katie Hopkins. None. But as dead bodies are taken out of the sea, destined for unmarked graves, we might ask how the language she speaks, and the flaunting of murderous wishes towards people who have nothing but the clothes they are found in, has become so mainstream.

To see the vocabulary of genocide casually used by Hopkins in her Sun column has disgusted many, but it does not come out of nowhere. The “debate” around immigration is rarely a debate at all; it has become a void which people fill with more and more extreme and disconnected statements.

Those who preach “honesty” – Nigel Farage staring down the camera, telling us that we at home are thinking what he is thinking, that unlike other politicians he will “tell it as it is” – are lying. The far right’s fantasy of pulling up the drawbridge to stop this great flow of desperate humanity in transit is just that: a fantasy.’

 

Note the hypocrisy about the intemperate language as she herself, and Wight, savagely abuses Hopkins in far worse a manner and then tells a blatant lie saying that Hopkins wants to murder the migrants claiming she uses a ‘vocabulary of genocide’.

Moore claims that those who seek to control immigation are cowards who don’t see the whole picture and of course she equates UKIP with the BNP…..

The “tell it as it is” crowd don’t tell it as it is at all. They are cowards. Our political class, both Tory and Labour, has been pulled so far right that it cannot, and will not, tell the complicated truth about the consequences of conflict, about a globalised economy, about our interconnected world, a world that we cannot simply step off, or stop.

Funny how these free-speech warriors only ever pick on those already worse off than them in every conceivable way – and now we see the logical conclusion of legitimising hate. Their rictus grins as they feast on actual corpses.

The discourse of the BNP, the EDL, and now Ukip – which, whatever it says, attracts out-and-out racists – has contaminated public life.

You have to ask who is it that is really hiding the facts about immigration…it’s certainly not the likes of Farage.   The real ‘cowards’ are the Left, the BBC, which refuses to explore the real issues about immigration preferring to stick with heartrending pictures of migrants being dragged from the sea to encourage us to empathise but not think.

The BBC’s Chris Mason yesterday told us that there were really two solutions to the migrant crisis…stop them coming over which he thought wouldn’t happen, or to rescue them from the sea…however he stopped there and didn’t expand on that, no exploration of what rescuing them would then entail and the consequences that would result….even more migration and massive social and political upheaval and conflict with an eventual breakdown in society engulfed by a continuous stream of migrants.

Australian experience would say otherwise…

‘If you want to stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean, don’t let them set foot on land’: Australian PM urges EU to adopt their tough policies… which HAVE proved a success

 

One of the ploys used by the BBC and others is to give the impression that a majority of the migrants are from Syria or the war torn Middle East, but that’s not true, many are of course but the vast majority are from Africa and are economic migrants….not to mention mostly male…..

Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa at a detention centre in Misrata, Libya.

 

Back to the Left’s lies about Hopkins….here they claim she has said all Palestinians are ‘filthy rodents’

Katie Hopkins ‘Tweets Palestinians Are Filthy Rodents’

The unofficial winner of Rent-A-Gob 2013/14 appears to have posted a series of tweets accusing Muslim men of being wife-beaters and calling Palestinians “filthy rodents”.

 

Now it is obvious she was talking about the Hamas terrorists who tunnel into Israel with the intent of killing as many civilians as possible and not Palestinians as a whole…..however here’s our old friend John Wight giving his two penneth worth….

It looks like the Left are willing say and do anything to discredit someone who refuses to remain silent about the horrors she sees and the hypocrisys of the Left which has so often been the cause of so many of those horrors.

They try to suggest that Hopkins does this all for show, to deliberately cause outrage merely to sell newspapers, but in fact I think she does believe what she says in her forthright and blunt manner, revealing the underlying truths about situations that are too uncomfortable for the Left  to admit and deal with, and which they prefer to brush under the carpet and ignore….prepared to let people die so that they can blame the Right for those deaths in the hope that it will silence them on the subject of immigration.

Whatever you think of Hopkins her opponents are far, far worse, and far more dangerous.