Author Archives: Andrew

Sir, As a record producer, a black parent and a taxpaying citizen, I welcome David Cameron’s criticism of Radio 1’s promotion of music that encourages violence (People, June 13).

The BBC and other media continue to install “white liberals” and irresponsible blacks to brainwash our youngsters. The black community is silent and powerless: as in the days of slavery, we have no say in what music our people listen to. We sit back and allow ourselves to be driven down a precarious track, by drivers who are not on the vehicle.

The Government will not do anything until the senseless violence spills over into white suburbia. Three years ago when two young girls were killed in Birmingham, I and others protested about the promotion of violent music. I in particular named the BBC. The BBC continued, saying that there was no evidence that its music policy encouraged violence. Since then we have lost many young lives.

If the BBC has any responsibility to the black community, it will install a panel of responsible people, who will not only monitor the material, but create our own icons.

NEIL FRASER (aka MAD PROFESSOR)

London SE25

Hat tip: An anonymous commenter

Our persistent Spanish comment spammer, El Pajero (a.k.a. Hal, hippiepooter, Irishcustard, englishpatriotuk@hotmail.com etc.), comments (here and here in full):

“If you’re so absolutely confident that your fellow Contributors have absolute confidence in you, why not put this to the test to shut the likes of me up once and for all, and step down from B-BBC – relinquishing all your sabotage powers et al – and see if a few days later your fellow Contributors are willing to readmit you?”

EP, if you knew how Blogger works you’d know that any of my co-hosts with administrator powers (e.g. Natalie etc.) could easily remove me from Biased BBC any time they wish, and there is nothing I could do to stop them. Knowing this, hopefully you will now undertake, as you suggest, “to shut up once and for all”. El Pajero continues:

“I’m sure it has not escaped your attention that you have repeatedly banned me from the IP address I am posting from and a day or two later I have repeatedly been unbanned”.

Again EP, if you knew how Haloscan works you’d know that your ISP, Telefonica de Espana (a strange choice for someone so concerned with the BBC and British democracy, but I digress), has millions of randomly assigned IP nos. All that happens is that from time to time you get lucky and get one that isn’t banned yet. No one has ever unbanned you.

Frankly, none of my poor colleagues who you regularly send your unwelcome rants to has ever expressed any sympathy for you, let alone questioned whether or not you should be unbanned. Having said that, as I have already said, if you are willing to 1) apologise for your past behaviour; 2) accept that Biased BBC is private property and that we make and enforce the rules, I will unban you – it is as easy as that, and more than you deserve after your harassment and implied threats.

I am sufficiently fed up of your tedious attacks that I am tempted to set up an online poll to resolve your problem and shut you up once and for all, however such a poll could well be subject to abuse by Beeboids and their leftie sympathisers keen to get rid of me and the rest of Biased BBC (which may of course be your aim).

However, if any one of my co-hosts, Natalie, Ed, Laban, etc. asks me to leave the Biased BBC team, I will do so. If any of our readers wish me to stay or wish me to go, please say so in the comments on this thread.

If enough real non-leftie non-Beeboid non-obsessed people want me to go in contrast to those who want me to stay I will do so – I have no interest in wasting my time here if I’m not wanted – I do have a real life and other interests, and should probably spend more time on them anyway.

Likewise, if you like my posts and want me to continue posting then please also speak up – your support will be welcome – it’s safer to help me here than intervening in a real world mugging. If you don’t want to speak up in public, for or against, then email me: biasedbbc AT gmail.com. Copy it to Natalie (see sidebar) if you wish.

Thank you. Normal service will now resume, if enough people want it, and if they do, I hope that EP will be honourable enough to “shut up once and for all” if that is the prevailing view.

An agency set up to seize criminals’ assets has cost taxpayers around £60m despite only recovering just over £8m from law breakers since 2003.

The Asset Recovery Agency was set up to tackle organised crime. It was meant to raise enough cash to cover its budget.

Tory Grant Shapps obtained figures from the Home Office showing in the ARA cost four times what it recovered in 2005.

Presumably they mean Conservative MP Grant Shapps, or even Tory MP Grant Shapps, rather than the sneering pejorative style ‘Tory’ prefix used by lefties everywhere.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.

Palestinians may have caused Gaza beach deaths, Olmert says:

Both Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz indicated Sunday that Friday’s blast on a Gaza Strip beach that killed seven civilians may have been caused by the Palestinians, and not by the IDF.

Peretz told the weekly cabinet meeting that he had established an investigative committee headed by a major-general, which is to present its findings on Tuesday.

Peretz said the panel’s preliminary findings showed that the Ghalia family was not killed by a shell fired by the IDF ground forces or the IAF. Peretz said that one of six artillery shells fired by the IDF was unaccounted for, but that there was a gap between when the shells were fired and the time the Palestinians said the shells landed.

Peretz told the ministers that some 40 Kassam rockets were fired at Sderot and nearby communities over the weekend, and that Nati Angel – the Sderot man seriously wounded by a Kassam Sunday morning at a school near the city – was a “personal friend.” Peretz lives in Sderot, where he used to be mayor.

If this does turn out to be the cause, or even a distinctly possible cause, of this tragic incident, I expect the BBC, particularly given their intensive coverage of the original story, will be extremely keen to revisit the story in depth, in order to ensure that the truth is fully investigated and reported in an impartial manner, lest another serious falsehood is perpetrated and established. But I won’t be holding my breath while waiting for Haw-Hawley and co. to leap in to action.

Update: According to Funerals for Gaza beach victims:

The BBC’s Simon Wilson in Jerusalem says that Saturday’s rocket attacks appear mainly symbolic.

Try telling that to Nati Angel (see above). I can think of some a***s that could do with a symbolic rocket or two up them…

But a spokesman for Hamas’s armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam brigade, said next time the rockets would be longer range and hit deeper inside Israel.

Presumably for even greater ‘symbolism’, eh Mr. Wilson.

Hat tip: commenters dumbcisco re. JP link and Big Mouth re. Wilson quote.

by Christopher Hart of Rageh Omaar’s second book for Penguin, ONLY HALF OF ME: Being a Muslim in Britain. The review is well worth reading, highlighting various contradictions and errors in the former BBC star reporter’s account. A sample:

Never have books explaining Islam been more needed. And you might have expected much from a Somali-born, Oxford-educated Muslim and leading BBC journalist, especially when his book is the second in a two-book deal for which Penguin paid around £600,000. Unfortunately, Rageh Omaar’s book on growing up a Muslim in Britain, interspersed with asides about his homeland, the Iraq war and the general Wickedness of the West, is a crushing disappointment: bland, platitudinous, muddled, lazy, factually unreliable and morally reprehensible.

There is only a single moment here when the disorienting experience of cultural translocation comes alive: when his family first flew out of Somalia in 1972, stopping over in Rome, and the five-year-old Rageh gazed on the city’s fountains, astonished by both the naked statuary and the prodigious waste of water. Otherwise the biographical material here is thin and puzzling. He tells us that he lived around London’s Edgware Road from “five until I was 25”, and while taking A-levels would pop into the “Husseins’ shop to buy cigarettes”. This is odd because I remember him spending much of his time as a boarder at Cheltenham College, a smiley little chap in the fourth form when I was in the sixth.

Unlike Rageh’s book, which, if his first volume is anything to go by, will be heavily discounted and remaindered within weeks, the rest of the review is well worth reading too.

Hat tip: commenter Ralph for the ST link.

, by Graeme Wilson, the House of Lords BBC Charter Review committee has criticised Tessa Jowell for refusing to give Parliament more say over the BBC’s tellytax and the “democratic deficit” surrounding decisions on the tellytax and the long-term direction of the corporation. Jowell has rejected recommendations from two separate reports over the last eight months:

Lord Fowler, the committee’s chairman, said: “Parliament should have a much greater role in examining the BBC Charter and the BBC bid for an increased licence fee.

“The BBC now receives over £3 billion from the public. On the basis of the BBC’s bid this will rise to £4 billion in the next seven years. The way this bid is scrutinised is totally inadequate.”

The committee said it was deeply concerned about the “democratic deficit” surrounding both the licence fee and the BBC’s Royal Charter.

It continued: “We strongly believe that the government has too much unchecked power in these areas and that Parliament must be given a greater role.”

Hat tip: commenter Barker John for the DT link.

a fisking and a digging following the return of Jonathan Charles on the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent – a taster:

I emailed Dr Solis to ask if Jonathan Charles had represented his views accurately. Here’s his response in full:

I do not recall saying anything like, “all they’re thinking about is getting home alive,” although I did say that which precedes that phrase. I don’t believe I would have used the term “trigger happy.” I did say something to the effect that any lessons learned through classes on battlefield conduct would soon be forgotten and soon there would be further incidents involving the deaths of noncombatants.

I say “I do not recall” not as a weasel-worded phrase, but because I have recently spoken to many reporters, hosts and interviewers and it is impossible for me to recall with exactitude each phrase I may have used. But I am confident that I would not have said anything about getting home alive and I doubt that I would have used so trite a phrase as “trigger happy.”

Oh dear, has Mr Charles been sexing up his reports again? One might even begin to think that he has some sort of agenda.

Do read the whole thing.

– Thais complain as BBC ‘reopens tsunami wounds’ by Jan McGirk:

The BBC says its forthcoming mini-series, Aftermath, is a “thought-provoking drama of loss, survival and hope”. But for many Thais who lost their families in the 2004 tsunami, the film-makers are reopening wounds.

Further outrage has greeted the decision to hire Thais to play corpses at a cut-rate pay of £6 a day for the series, to be broadcast later this year.

However:

But Robert Reynolds, who runs a charity for tsunami orphans in Krabi province, was incensed after discovering Western extras were routinely paid 1,400 baht [£20]. He says he wrote to executives at the prize-winning Kudos productions, demanding that they take care not to offend. “Thais lost everything,” he pointed out to The Nation. “They had no homes to go back to.”

Maybe this story is something that could be included in BBC Views Online’s Ten Things we didn’t know last week column next week – perhaps this is a true story even, unlike last week’s Labour con that Views Online so happily fell for.

Please use this thread for off-topic, but preferably BBC related, comments. Please keep comments on other threads to the topic at hand. N.B. this is not an invitation for general off-topic comments – our aim is to maintain order and clarity on the topic-specific threads. This post will remain at or near the top of the blog. Please scroll down to find new topic-specific posts.