The BBC is living in hope..it’s all a bad, bad dream soon to be over with ‘Frau Europe’ back in the driving seat….

Many Europeans eye the months ahead with foreboding. They see anti-establishment parties on the ascendancy. Angela Merkel – for so long Frau Europe – may lose power. And the financial markets are skittish over the possibility of a Marine Le Pen victory in France. Every edge up in her poll ratings sends bond yields rising.

And yet an entirely different scenario may play out. It is quite possible that before the end of the year observers will declare that the Brexit-Trump tide has turned and that European integration has found new champions.

The BBC starts off telling us that the ‘anti-Establishment’ movement is one we should view with foreboding, then admits that Trump was right when he said the EU was a vehicle for the Germans, and then cheerleads quietly for a more united Europe.

An interesting article from the fair, free and impartial BBC.

This is on today at 14:15 on R4….

A World Elsewhere: The Return

Rida, a Glasgow Asian teenager, was radicalised on the internet and travelled to Syria. Now eighteen months later she has returned and been arrested at Glasgow Airport. This drama explores what happens to Rida next. Will she be charged? Will she receive a custodial sentence? Whatever happens how will she deal with the past and what kind of future can she expect?

Let’s think about our ‘fictional’ terrorist and how this may run in the BBC’s mind…so radicalised on the internet and nothing to do with her being inspired by her Islamic faith, nothing to do with anything taught in the Mosque and nothing to do with what her parents tell her about how Muslims are supposedly treated?  She is a victim.  And when she returns she should be treated with sympathy and understanding never mind that she knew exactly what ISIS stood for and the acts committed in its name…she just didn’t like the conditions out there so came back to the comforts of home…she woud still be out there if she could live a nice life.

More pro-Muslim propaganda from the BBC excusing terror and hiding its roots.

Marr and Bragg sell themselves cheap as they allow their programmes to be hijacked to peddle the BBC’s political and cultural agendas.

This week Marr told us that his programme would be about national identity and generational conflict [the BBC seemingly keen to promote that] and that next week’s programme would be about the compulsion to build walls….no surprises there as to the main ‘culprits’…Trump, Israel and Brexit….

On Start the Week Kirsty Wark explores what it means to live either side of a wall, and whether barriers are built to repel or protect. Supporters of the US President urge him to ‘build a great wall’ along the Mexican border but the journalist Ed Vulliamy points out that there is already a wall and border guards, supported and funded by US Presidents for decades. And yet still drugs, guns, money and people continue to move north and south. Israel has been building its own separation barrier since the turn of the century, but Dorit Rabinyan is more interested in psychological barriers that drive Palestinians and Israelis apart. The map-maker Garrett Carr travels Ireland’s border to explore the smugglers, kings, peacemakers and terrorists who’ve criss-crossed this frontier, and asks what it will become when the United Kingdom leaves the EU.

Odd the BBC doesn’t mention the ‘peace walls’ in NI rather than the border which has no ‘wall’ at all….and look how it now admits there is a ‘wall’ already in the US…but only to tell us it doesn’t work.  So how is Trump ‘racist’ for wanting to improve it?

Bragg’s programme frequently has an underlying message, a lesson or warning from history, as we are told the historical events parallel own today…..last weeks was a rehash of the usual line about the glories of the Muslim golden age of science.  What a sell-out.

The BBC spends its time sugar-coating La-La Land, infantilising its audience and refusing to face up to reality.  A classic case is Sweden and Trump’s comments for which he has been savagely attacked and mocked.

The harsh reality is that Trump will have the last laugh because the concerns he has are about events that have happened, they are all too real as Sweden implodes, and are a future that is coming to all of us, one that is here already in fact but kept out of the news as much as possible by the likes of the BBC….a future not helped by politicians who fail to take the necessary measures to stem the flow of migrants, or in the case of Merkel, actively blow apart any attempt at control.  Even today Michael Fallon was ‘warning’ us that 4 million Afghan males may head towards Europe if we don’t keep troops in Afghanistan…but this is nothing less than an invitation to Afghans to come here….they’ll hear his words and start out en masse on the journey declaring they are under threat from the Taliban and quoting Fallon’s words as their ‘visa’ just as they quoted Merkel’s.  Europe is committing suicide and the BBC cheers it on.

What other inconvenient facts are there?

How about NATO?  Trump says it is obsolete, or so the BBC tells us without qualification in its bulletins…what he in fact said was that it’s main priorities were obsolete and that it should concentrate more on terrorism and Islamic radicalisation. He also said that the countries who benefit from its protection should pay their way and not expect America to fund them and their welfare budgets.  There was great outrage at his comments and a refusal to cough up the money…which is strange…all these countries that are outraged, telling us how vital NATO is, and yet don’t want to pay for it.

Or how about Trump’s ‘racist’ wall?  If he’s a racist then the deplorable Hillary Clinton must be one too…

Why Hillary Clinton voted for the anti-immigrant wall

4 October 2006

Last Friday, however, she did exactly that, joining Senate Republicans and the majority of her Democratic colleagues in voting for an ignominious piece of legislation known as the “Secure Fence Act of 2006.”

“I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in,” Clinton said “and I do think that you have to control your borders.”

“As president, I will not support driver’s licenses for undocumented people and will press for comprehensive immigration reform that deals with all of the issues around illegal immigration, including border security and fixing our broken system.”

Who actually deported more migrants than any other President?  The racist Obama…from ABC news..

How many people have been deported under Obama?

President Barack Obama has often been referred to by immigration groups as the “Deporter in Chief.”

Between 2009 and 2015 his administration has removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders, which doesn’t include the number of people who “self-deported” or were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

How does he compare to other presidents?

According to governmental data, the Obama administration has deported more people than any other president’s administration in history.

In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.

What of that ‘Muslim ban’?  The ‘Muslim Ban’ that the BBC continually insists was imposed on ‘Muslim majority countries’  Why do they keep mentioning that when it is irrelevant to the decision making process by Trump…and Obama…the criteria used are clear.

Is it a Muslim ban?  Clearly not as most Muslim countries face no such travel restrictions.  Anyway, if you look at the facts instead of broadcasting half-truths and outright lies, you’ll find the actual criteria, laid out by the Obama administration, as to why those countries were chosen…

(ii) Criteria In making a determination under clause (i), the Secretary shall consider—

(I) whether the presence of an alien in the country or area increases the likelihood that the alien is a credible threat to the national security of the United States;

(II) whether a foreign terrorist organization has a significant presence in the country or area; and

Not a mention of the crime of being ‘Muslim’…though of course most terrorists are Muslim these days.

What about Trump’s Fascist assault on the Press?  Obama was like-minded…’“To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based,” the Washington Post wrote at the time.’

Why It’ll Be Hard for Trump to Surpass Obama’s Record of Chilling Press Freedom

Many in the mainstream media are reacting with righteous indignation over comments from a senior Trump adviser suggesting the administration views the traditional media as an opponent. But if we’re to take these apostles of press freedom seriously, they should first explain why the Trump Administration is worse than the Obama Administration.

After all, the Obama Administration literally tried imprisoning an uncooperative journalist, monitored journalists’ every digital move, and “hammered” at least one challenging reporter with IRS audits.

The Obama Administration began with lofty promises of being “the most transparent administration in history.” Instead it ended up setting a record, by the Associated Press’s count, for denying the most Freedom of Information Act requests.

As the administration’s popularity began tumbling early into its first year, the Obama White House declared war on Fox News. The White House director of communications, Anita Dunn, warned they would henceforth treat Fox News “like an opponent,” insisting, “we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Just a few counters to the large scale, industrial lies that the BBC propagates against Trump…never mind the false  ‘isolationist’ tag, Obama was cheered on by the BBC for his isolationsist, non-interventionist policy…and look where that got us in Syria.  The BBC is also happily propagating the idea that Trump is crazy, mentally ill, in need of therapy…hardly a day goes by when someone doesn’t make that claim, either a presenter or a guest who goes unchallenged or is applauded for their wit.  What a quality outfit the BBC.  As much a tabloid as any of the newspapers the BBC so disdainfully dismisses as trash.

The BBC is always keen to press the ‘Brexit what done it‘ button when it comes to finding a cause for hate crime…perhaps they should think again before spreading such politically motivated slurs ….[H/T Guido]…

ESSEX Police has refused to blame the vote to leave the EU for the rise in hate crime despite reporting the biggest rise since comparable records began.

The majority of the nation’s police forces reported the highest number of incidents in the three months following the Brexit vote than in any quarter since 2012.

Essex Police claimed greater awareness and confidence in the police response was the reason why 33 of the country’s 42 forces experienced the highest number of reports on record at the same time.

 A spokesman for the force said: “There is no evidence to suggest any increase has been specifically and directly caused by any one event or issue”.

“There has been an increase in reports of alleged hate crime across Essex, which mirrors a national trend.

“Hate crime is significantly under-reported and we believe that greater awareness and confidence in the police response has contributed to these increases in reporting.

“Whether it’s an incident that takes place online or in the street, it’s important to let us know about hate crime to give us a chance to investigate and prosecute offenders and to ensure that victims and the wider community are protected.

“We can’t deal with the problem unless it is reported to us.

“We have also introduced 28 hate incident reporting centres where victims or witnesses can report crimes to specially trained hate crime ambassadors.”

What event was Trump referring to when he mentioned Sweden?  We don’t know [Trump has confirmed that he was referring to a report on Fox about the effects of migration on Swedish society…and note he never referred to ‘an attack’, terrorist or otherwise, in his speech…and yet all his critics say he did…just who is providing the fake news as well as burying their heads in the sand about migration?].

The BBC ignores the rape and crime statistics from these countries just as it ignored Rotherham for so long, just as it ignores the Jewish exodus from Europe and even today it ignores the reports of yet another probable  ‘Trojan Horse’ plot by Muslims to hijack a British school….on the frontpage of the Times this morning and in other papers now.   This remember is the BBC that told us the first Trojan Horse plot was a hoax driven by racism, paranoia and Islamophobia, the BBC that failed to mention that the ringleader was the same man who authored the MCB’s 2007 instruction manual to schools on how to ‘accomodate’ Muslim pupils and make them feel more welcome…this document was described by the official reports into the Trojan Horse plot as a blueprint for the plot.

A counter extremism expert claimed to the Sunday Times there was a “significant problem” of Islamist infiltration in Oldham.

Then again the BBC spends so much time trying to report, parse and discredit every word that comes out of Trump’s mouth that it is no surprise that they have no time for real journalism…and indeed spend much of it on Twitter telling us how clever they are…or, in the case of Jon Sopel insulting Jews….[H/T Craig at is the BBC biased?]…’oh dear’…did Sopel not spot the Jewish man in amongst the journalists before laughing about Hitler salutes?….

And probably no surprise that the banner photo on Sopel’s Twitter page is of him with Obama indicating his bias and a grand conceit.

Anyone who is concerned about mass, uncontrolled immigration, those of you whom the BBC suggests might be spiteful, drunken Far Right Nazis who want to gas immigrants in concentration camps, feel free to have your say about the BBC’s world view on the new open thread….

Oh..and don’t feel that the BBC is singling you out for special treatment…oh no…Trump and his supporters get tarred with the same brush as well…H/T Craig at Is the BBC Biased?…From the BBC…

Mr Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy have led to comparisons, from some quarters, with the rise of the Nazi party in Germany….The US president’s use of “enemies of the people” raises unavoidable echoes of some of history’s most murderous dictators. 

The BBC really is a disgrace…this is genuine hate crime against leave voters and Trumpers, demonising them and giving licence to the alt-left thugs to attack them….let’s not forget a Brit already tried to kill Trump…did the BBC’s constant contemptuous attacks on Trump drive him to it and ‘enable’ him?

The BBC is the enemy of the people, of free speech, of a truly democratic and liberal state.  It serves the ‘Liberal’ elite’s dictatorship.  To the BBC ‘The People’ are the enemy, to be suppressed, censored and silenced.  ‘Populism’, ie democracy, is unacceptable to the BBC.

Who is more self-important, full of bluster and bull, the BBC’s Jon Sopel or The Donald?  Jon Sopel edges it I think.

The BBC is very pleased with its boy after his rudeness to Trump at the impromptu press conference and has been replaying his ‘impartial, free and fair’ joust with the President throughout the day with glee.   The Today show naturally had a pop at Trump and brought on Sopel to double up on his smugness. [08:23]

Sopel gave us a comedy routine rather than any real analysis of what was going on…for instance he comments on Trump’s hatred of the Media but instead of saying it was fully justified as the vast majority of the Media set themselves against Trump during the election, and that includes the BBC, Sopel told us he had decided that Trump must be watching the cable TV all day instead of governing.  Sopel’s so proud of that analysis, in fact he thinks it’s the only point really worth making, that he puts pen to paper and lays out the full glory of his journalism for us to see…

And here’s my one curious takeaway.

The media that he professes to hate and despise he seems to spend an awful lot of time watching.

You wonder, when does he find time to govern?

Never said that about Obama when he was on the golf course.

He then came up with a tale of a Republican senator contacting the Media and saying Trump was in need of therapy….no mention of who that senator was or whether he was one of those utterly opposed to Trump from the start.  The BBC doesn’t like Trump’s behaviour and takes a superior attitude towards it…Sopel says he might ‘quietly’ suggest things aren’t going smoothly…never mind that no other administration has gone in anyway differently.  Sopel decides that Trump does not like the drudge and detail of goverment…it’s all chaos…he just loves the adoration of the crowd.  Just another smug put down.

The BBC then makes the mistake of bringing on Peter Oborne who gave Sopel both barrels for his hypocrisy, his ‘sneering, superficial, arrogant smugness’, telling us that what is going on is nothing new and that Sopel was a fawning Blairite sycophant who never said such things about Blair despite Blair being so very similar to Trump in so many ways.  The rather shell-shocked Webb and Sopel laugh this off rather than admit to the reality and truthfulness of the comments.

Sopel was later [Radio 2  around 12:07] also dismissed as irrelevant by one of his own BBC colleagues, Mark Lawson, in an indirect way as he stepped up to ‘defend’ Trump or at least put Trump’s case for him…though he still managed to slip in several remarks about psychiatrists…guess you just can’t take the BBC out of the man….and Vanessa Feltz asked if we thought Trump was absurd, crazy and dangerous or maybe he is talking directly to the people…no bias there then.  Lawson thinks Trump has many bad points but says so had every other President…the difference is how it’s being reported…by the likes of Sopel perhaps?  As for a ‘chaotic’ administration, well Trump’s only been in office four weeks and other administrations hadn’t appointed all their officials after years in office…so a couple of weeks is nothing…and of course people get dismissed all the time even as they are announced as the new appointee.

I’m guessing the Media doesn’t like being called out on its bias and anti-Trump messaging….if only more politicians put the boot into the smug shysters of the media the world would be a better place.  And I reckon you could quite truthfully accuse Sopel of showboating and enjoying the limelight just as he accuses Trump of doing…and of not bothering with the detail…though the BBC never did as it ignored Trump’s policies during the election and settled for shouting him down as a racist, sexist Islamophobe instead.

Why is the BBC spending taxpayers’ money to perpetuate the fairy tale of a golden age of Islam? Why is the Beeb peddling a PC myth that is skewed and reductionist at best and ideologically freighted and erroneous at worst?

The BBC’s re-creation of the Middle Ages depicts Cordoba in Muslim Spain with ‘street lighting and running water.’ In contrast Londoners ‘lived in timber-framed houses and used the river as their sewer.’ ‘Muslims were going to beauty parlours, using deodorants and drinking from glasses, at a time when English books of behaviour were still telling page-boys not to pick their nose over their food, spit on the table, or throw uneaten food onto the floor,’ says Auntie, brainwashing school children in her history lessons.

The West was in the gutter while the Muslim world was bathing in perfume. That’s right, says the BBC. Islamic civilisation extricated Europe from the Dark Ages and brought her kicking and screaming into the Enlightenment. Is the Beeb telling us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?  From Conservative Woman

Ever think the BBC would piss on you from on high and tell you it’s raining? Well they may not be giving you golden showers but they are showering us with a load of old bull with their narrative about the ‘Golden Age of Islamic Science’…yet again.

Melvyn Bragg was pushing the narrative on ‘In Our Time’ which has become very political with subjects so often chosen to be lessons or warnings from history paralleling events today from which we must learn.

Bragg introduced the programme with the thought that Islam and the Koran were the driving forces behind the urge to learn during the ‘Golden Age’.  However, Jim Al Khalili, not a Muslim, disagreed and put a spanner in the works as he said that actually until the Abbasid rule there was no rush to learn and that it was in fact the Abbasid’s obsession with the Persians and their long tradition of learning and scholarship that influenced Muslim era scholars.  Amused to hear Bragg immediately jump in and suggest to Al Khalili that surely Islam and the Koran demanded Muslims learn…I can imagine Bragg silently urging Al Khalili to keep to the narrative….which he then obediently reverted to before going back and saying no, really it was the Persian thing which did it.

Bragg tells us that the Koran and Hadith impress upon Muslims the need to learn….and indeed they do but not in the way Bragg is claiming…as an intellectual knowledge of the world.  It is religious knowledge of the Koran and its commands that is necessary for Muslims to learn….that is why non-Muslims are described as ‘ignorant cattle’ because they have no knowledge of Allah.

When the Koran commands you to read it means read the Koran not the Encyclopedia Brittanica…

The Holy Quran is a divine book in which Allah (s.w.t) has blessed us with a complete code of conduct. Quran includes every aspect of life which a person needs to know about. The best of all education in this world is Qur’an and acquiring it is mandatory for every human being. It is the primary and highly signified learning which is solution to all problems and issues of our life. Learning Quran is a full time benefiting and comforting work which is worth doing.

Quran learning is a very noble act, which should be performed by every Muslim man and woman. It gives him/her knowledge about all aspects of life, brings near to the Creator, and will be a proof of the rewards of his/her good deeds on the Day of Judgment.

Quran learning is equally mandatory on Muslim men and women.

The benefits of Quran learning are unlimited with primary benefit of guidance towards the straight path.

Read! In the Name of your Lord Who has created (all that exists).He has created man from a clot (a piece of thick coagulated blood). Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous. Who has taught (the writing) by the pen. He has taught man that which he knew not” [al-‘Alaq 96:1-5]

We learn this from a Hadith that best of all are those who are associated with Quran(by learning it and imparting its beneficial knowledge) as RasulUllah(s.a.w) said:

“The best of you is he who learnt the Holy Quran and taught it to others.” (Bukhari)

Just the usual pro-Islam propaganda from the BBC.  More post-truth ignorance and fake news.

The Obligation of Jihad

“Allah hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight with their goods and persons than to those who sit (at home). Unto all (in Faith) hath Allah promised good. But those who strive and fight hath He distinguished above those who sit (at home) by a special reward,” Quran Chapter 4: The Women, verse 95

Graeme Wood’s The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State reminds us of something that ought to be obvious: Islamic State is very Islamic. “The reality is,” Wood wrote, “that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” “The notion that religious belief is a minor factor in the rise of the Islamic State,” he observes, “is belied by a crushing weight of evidence that religion matters deeply to the vast majority of those who have travelled to fight.”

Pankaj Mishra, someone so pro-Islam it must hurt.  Someone so pro-Islam that he is in complete denial about the very real effect of the ideology upon its devotees.  Someone so pro-Islam the BBC would inevitably want to exploit his thinking.

We’ve already had a look at Pankaj Mishra’s first outing on Book of the Week and concluded that it’s no coincidence that his pro-Islam, anti-Trump, anti-Brexit, anti-Hindu rhetoric gets pride of place on the BBC and that perhaps ‘Butterflies and Wheels’ is correct when they conclude about his writing that….‘It’s ugly, nasty, bullying, innuendo-laden stuff…. patronizing clueless nonsense.’

Listening to today’s serving and it just confirms my initial thoughts as we get a determined defence of Islam and the usual narrative that is peddled by the BBC and Muslim activists in the UK trying to distance ISIS from their own radical activities.

What we got was an attempt to airbrush Islam out of the picture as he tried to suggest that Muslim terrorists had no  religious intentions but were in fact religiously illiterate and driven by globalisation not religion….there is no scriptural imperative…which kind of ignores the facts on the ground.  He tells us that ISIS recruits are all petty criminals with a liking for drink, drugs and women and whose knowledge of Islam is limited to what they can glean from ‘Islam for Dummies’.   That’s of course a narrative pushed by the likes of Mehdi Hassan, who as a Shia has no liking for the Sunni ISIS but is himself an Islamist. A narrative that deliberately ignores all the highly educated and devout recruits who head out to Syria to join ISIS….the same sort of people who, had they remained in the UK, would be fêted by the BBC as devout Muslims in need of protection from the Islamophobes.

So all those Muslim terrorists who do it in the name of Islam, all those terrorists who shout Allah Akbar as they pull the trigger, all those Muslims who rush to join a fundamentalist Islamic State, they’re none of them real Muslims.

But again we’ve looked at this many times…and that’s a narrative that’s a huge lie…it has everything to do with Islam and until you accept that truth you will never find a solution.

Tom Holland: We must not deny the religious roots of Islamic State

Salafism today is probably the fastest-growing Islamic movement in the world. The interpretation that Isis applies to Muslim scripture may be exceptional for its savagery – but not for its literalism. Islamic State, in its conceit that it has trampled down the weeds and briars of tradition and penetrated to the truth of God’s dictates, is recognisably Salafist. When Islamic State fighters smash the statues of pagan gods, they are following the example of the Prophet; when they proclaim themselves the shock troops of a would-be global empire, they are following the example of the warriors of the original caliphate; when they execute enemy combatants, and impose discriminatory taxes on Christians, and take the women of defeated opponents as slaves, they are doing nothing that the first Muslims did not glory in.

Such behaviour is certainly not synonymous with Islam; but if not Islamic, then it is hard to know what else it is.

Then how about an expert on ISIS?  Could he tell  us if the religion of peace is the source of so much trouble?  You betcha…

Graeme Wood’s The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State reminds us of something that ought to be obvious: Islamic State is very Islamic.

Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. In Islamic State’s propaganda, they certainly are. Sayings attributed to Muhammad that foretold how the armies of Islam would defeat the armies of the Cross serve their ideologues as a hall of mirrors. What happened in the Crusades is happening now; and what happens now foreshadows what is to come.

How much does Islamic State actually believe this stuff? The assumption that it is a proxy for other concerns – born of US foreign policy, or social deprivation, or Islamophobia – comes naturally to commentators in the West. Partly this is because their instincts are often secular and liberal; partly it reflects a proper concern not to tar mainstream Islam with the brush of terrorism.

“The reality is,” Wood wrote, “that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” The strain of the religion that it was channelling derived “from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam” and was fixated on two distinct moments of time: the age of Muhammad and the end of days long promised in Muslim apocalyptic writings. Members of Islamic State, citing the Quran and sayings attributed to the Prophet in their support, believe themselves charged by God with expediting the end of days. It is their mandate utterly to annihilate kufr: disbelief. The world must be washed in blood, so that the divine purpose may be fulfilled. The options for negotiating this around a table at Geneva are, to put it mildly, limited.

“The notion that religious belief is a minor factor in the rise of the Islamic State,” he observes, “is belied by a crushing weight of evidence that religion matters deeply to the vast majority of those who have travelled to fight.”

When Wood asks Hamza Yusuf, an eminent Berkeley Sufi, to demonstrate the group’s errors by relying only on the texts revealed to the Prophet, he struggles to do so: “Yusuf could not point to an instance where the Islamic State was flat-out, verifiably wrong.” This does not mean that it is right but it does suggest – despite what most Muslims desperately and understandably want to believe – that it is no less authentically Islamic than any other manifestation of Islam.

The achievement of Wood’s gripping, sobering and revelatory book is to open our eyes to what the implications of that for all of us may be.