Author Archives: David Vance

Friday arrives and so does this new Open Thread! Enjoy.

I am sure many of you will have seen BBC coverage of the riots in Belfast in recent nights.  However is it possible that the BBC played a role in CREATING the riots through their very selective coverage? A Biased BBC reader writes;

” The BBC NI website was instrumental in making the band at St Patrick’s Chapel the biggest news issue around the 12th July. It was their main headline for about ten days  As a consequence, it became the defining issue of the summer – not the Ardoyne riots.

They used Sinn Fein-supplied video footage (just about acknowledged) of the circling band and did not put up any explanation or counter-view for days and then mostly on radio.

Ormeau Avenue staff were presumably in Donegal en masse and some junior was running the website. Normal news and views programmes were also off air.  (The website is and has been much more biased/unbalanced than BBC NI broadcast news over recent months in choice of stories, emphasis and headlines.)

BBC NI has a record of not sending journalists out to cover events at weekends, at night or during holidays presumably because of the ‘cuts’, we will be told, which, by the way, are not ‘cuts’ but consequent on the diversion of £1 billion of licence fee money from programming and news to the BBC Pension Scheme. The result is their website goes without updates for hours or days. Sinn Fein spotted that gap and supplied dream footage of the band.

The impression, uncorrected, was given that the band were playing at the church by choice and circling as an extra sectarian point. Both untrue. Circling happens when the parade stops for a time or rests, as happened in Donegall Street that day. There was one dubious tune played and a bit of shouting at the Sinn Fein camera team – duly recorded and displayed.

The result is that the focus of Belfast parading disputes has moved from the Ardoyne roundabout to that at Carlisle Circus, largely as a loyalist paramilitary response to the Sinn Fein challenge, so enhanced by the BBC spotlight. And we have serious rioting not dissimilar to that in East Belfast a couple of years ago.

The Parades Commission has not helped with its Alliance Party chairman coming on the radio in July making assertions in advance of receiving his team’s reports while developing new Commission policy as he went along.

There needs to be an independent (Leveson-style) enquiry into how the issue was handled by BBC NI and a policy enunciated on when and how they use film footage supplied by non-BBC sources, in particular by political parties.

Obviously the real issue is territory but the BBC prefers to concentrate on sectarianism which is usually seen as a Protestant preserve. Republican misbehaviour like the mistaken attack on a car belonging to nuns living in a Protestant area in West Belfast is addressed briefly, if at all.

Would that the BBC broadcast a livecam of life for Protestants in the Fountain area of Londonderry which has to be protected by two massively high steel fences?  The police now longer count sectarian incidents there as it would distort their crime figures so massively.”

Wednesday Open Thread for your edification…

So, after Kofi Annan’s abysmal failure in Syria the UN throws up (I use the term advisedly) UN-Arab League envoy  Lakhdar Brahimi, and the BBC gives him a very sympathetic hearing as he declares a pre-emptive pessimistic view of the task ahead of him, as he takes up his new post. But I was wondering if THIS Lakhdar Brahimi is in any way related to this guy?

 Lakhdar Brahimi was pro-Saddam when he was Minister for Foreign Affairs of Algeria from 1991 to 1993 and Under-Secretary-General of the League of Arab States from 1984 to 1991.

Not only did Brahimi endorse Saddam Hussein and remained a close ally to him, he also denied that Saddam Hussein, the glory of Arab Leader as he described him, had ever used chemical weapons. Brahimi announced on French radio that “The great poison in the region is this Israeli policy of domination and the suffering imposed on the Palestinians” as well as the “equally unjust support of the United States for this policy.”

In an interview, regarding the thugs and criminals in Faluja fighting United States forces, Brahimi said, “In this situation, there is no military solution.” He added, “There is never any military solution to any problem.”

Naturally the BBC sanitise all of this in their portrayal of this “peace envoy”.

Just imagine. The Thatcher Government is in power, The Miners are striking and police open fire killing 34 of them.  BBC would be in meltdown.

In South Africa, with the blessed ANC in power, the Miners are striking and police open fire killing 34 of them. Then, in a surreal move, the ANC government charges the Miners with making the police kill them. BBC explains this is “an apartheid  era” law. Ah, I see. Blame on the Apartheid, blame it on the boogie but DON’T blame on the murderous ANC.

Did you see that Labour’s Diane Abbott should not have made so many appearances on This Week since becoming a shadow minister, according to a ruling by the BBC Trust’s standards committee? BBC tried to skirt around it by pretending This Week not political!!

Those bad Jews.

An Israeli court has ruled that the state of Israel was not at fault for the death of US activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli army bulldozer in 2003. Ms Corrie’s family had brought a civil claim for negligence against the Israeli ministry of defence. The judge said the 23-year-old’s death was a “regrettable accident” and that the state was not responsible. She had been trying to stop Palestinian homes being pulled down in Gaza.

Erm NOT quite the full story, BBC. Ms Corrie was a terrorist enabler and grossly stupid.  The “Palestinian homes” she was so bravely trying to protect were being used by Palestinian terrorists to fire rockets into Israel and kill innocent Israelis. The truth is Corrie got what she deserved but the BBC plays along with the poor innocent Rachel “peace activist” meme.  Sickening bias and elevation of terrorist enabler Corrie.