Author Archives: Sue

False dawn

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I switch on the radio. “They’re firing from mosques and hospitals” a voice is saying indignantly, “Fighting in a most underhand way. They’re taking off their uniforms and wearing civilian clothing and using women and children as shields”
“At Last!” I’m thinking. “The BBC has finally recognised exactly how Hamas operates, and understands what Israel faces whenever it tries to defend itself. “
But of course I was mistaken. It was not Hamas he was getting so worked up about. It was Gaddafi’s troops in Libya. But you knew that.

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Reflections on the Theme of Time Management. or: Me Me Me.

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I’ve been writing on this website for a couple of years or more
and it don’t seem a day too much,
but there aint a broadcasting corporation livin’ in the land
as I wouldn’t “swop” for a bit of honest reporting.

However for all my efforts, and those of David Vance and the others, nothing changes at the BBC. In fact, things have taken a turn for the worse now that the chair of the BBC Trust happens to be a known pro Palestinian advocate.
The situation seems to be this. The BBC, and therefore the liberal unintelligentsia, have given special status to Islam by conferring a unique religious diplomatic immunity upon it. By qualifying as a religion, Islam as a whole is awarded sanctity which exempts it from being criticised. This applies in varying degrees to other religions and holy things. For example, in order to give vent to one’s antisemitic urges, one must stick to Israel-themed criticism. You’re not supposed to admit that this has anything to do with your distaste for Jews.
Christianity is an open target, and Catholic misdemeanours have made it acceptable to condemn the entire religion, whereas similar unmentionable Islamic practises are given a free pass or regarded as unrepresentative.
However, desecrating something holy is still thought not nice, particularly setting fire to it. So if Nazi ideology were elevated to the status of a religion with Herr Hitler as its prophet peace be upon him, it would immediately be distasteful to point out the racist, supremacist and murderous proclivities therein, and Mein Kampf would be a holy book, the fire-resistant immutable word of God speaking through the prophet. Can you imagine, post WWll – “It’s their culture, innit” ”Only an extremist minority” “Not inherent to the ideology”
and it would then have to be “ because of the Jews” rather than “because of Israel”

Being an atheist, I don’t see why anything should be given a free pass, or absolved from accountability, yet, perhaps inexplicably for some, I still have values which encompass what is loosely called right and wrong, and I don’t ask for God’s backing to justify them.

The BBC is a crazy mixed up place. In a good way, viz: On one hand it is all patriotic, with the most unlikely celebrities performing Royal Wedding-themed antics, and talking about ‘the big day’ as if the ordinary viewer regards it as such, and on the other, it’s giving air space to staunch republicans. I like that in principle, although I am more than indifferent about the topic. Or should that be less than indifferent. (Meaning I couldn’t care less) like when people mistakenly say something can never be underestimated when they mean overestimated.
But crazy mixed up in a bad way is when they eulogise about the uprisings in the Arab World without a care or a thought about the rise of Islam, and what this will mean for Israel, and the Jews and others who are trying to live there.

If you look back at my incontinent output, just click on the anti Israel tag in the label cloud, you’ll see that I’ve covered a myriad of variations on the theme, and not made one iota of an impression on the BBC.
Call me an idiot and knock me down with Louise Bagshawe, but how’s that for a waste of time?

“An Israeli teenager wounded when a Palestinian rocket hit a bus has died of his injuries.
Daniel Viflic, 16, was on a school bus in southern Israel on 7 April when it was hit by an anti-tank missile fired from the Gaza Strip.
The driver was slightly hurt in the attack, which happened just after the other children had been dropped off.

Nineteen Palestinians died in the ensuing wave of Israeli air strikes and Palestinian counter-attacks.
It was the most serious violence since Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009.
About 1,400 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, and 13 Israelis, including 10 soldiers, were killed.”

This hideous example shows that the BBC cannot report the death of a boy at the hands of terrorists without adding gratuitous references to previous unverified and disputed death-toll statistics; and by various weasely words, making light of the attack itself.

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Ken Cons The World

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A Website called “We Are For Israel” is shocked that the BBC refers to the late Vittorio Arrigoni as a peace campaigner. H/T Daphne Anson.
This may seem like a trivial matter. For one thing, he was, in a way, a peace campaigner, that is if you define peace as a Middle East without Jews.
The BBC may or may not be aware of Mr Arrigoni’s reputation, but to take even the slightest interest in his murder at the hands of Ultra Islamist Salafist terrorists is to know that he was not popular in the pro Israel blogosphere.
Any news outlet that pretends it hasn’t noticed that the interweb has been ablaze with obituaries detailing the exact nature of his ‘peace campaigning’ must be blind.
However, when you take into consideration that Ken O’Keefe, the deranged cartoon baddie who became a spokesman for flotillas was repeatedly invited to disgorge his bile on the BBC, well what can you expect? He was even given a whole Hardtalk. I’m all in favour of giving ridiculous people a platform on Hardtalk – I’m sure Sarah Montague deserves every minute of it – (joke) But giving Ken, or Kenneth as he is respectfully entitled here, the credibility of appearing on what is meant to be a serious vehicle for debate beggars belief.
The whole point is that the BBC has lowered our expectations to such an extent that we have to assume that they have abandoned reason, and we must learn to live with it.
So we have every right to complain when the BBC describes this person as a peace campaigner, but we know that nobody at the BBC will see that there’s anything for us to make a fuss about.

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Wishful Thinking

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As a member of the Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport, I imagine Louise Bagshawe bumps into Jeremy Hunt quite a lot.

I was wondering, since she has taken an interest in the BBC’s bias against Israel, whether she had drawn Mr. Hunt’s attention to Melanie Phillips’s open letter about the very same subject!

According to the Jewish Chronicle, the BBC has backed down over their lack of coverage of the murder of the Fogel family. As it happens, the BBC’s report concerning the arrest of the perpetrators belatedly describes the crime in the detail it neglected to include at the time.

If the Jewish Chronicle is merely going by Helen Boaden’s mealy-mouthed statement, I’d say the term ‘backing down’ is wishful thinking.

Louise Bagshawe was not satisfied, I was not satisfied, and no doubt the thousands of people who wrote messages of support to Ms Bagshawe were not satisfied. So BBC, please could you come clean and admit your “lack of evenhandedness” as your genetic proclivities
urge you to do.

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Unexpected Aberration?

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Nick Cohen wrote: “……….. Jeremy Bowen is blinking at his cameraman in Tripoli, like some startled, uncomprehending mammal who has been shaken by the convulsions around him from a hibernation that has lasted for most of his career.”
He’s still blinking. Caught in the headlights in Tripoli, I think he has suddenly woken up! He’s telling us that the rebels in Libya might not be all they’re cracked up to be. And despite all our efforts, Gaddafi. Aint. Bovvered.
Meanwhile Orla Geurin has gone to the intensive care department of a hospital to emote about civilian casualties inflicted by Gaddafi’s army. I’m always suspicious of broadcasts from hospital wards, especially those direct from intensive care. While the BBC is trying to get us onside in the war against Gaddafi, Bowen is warning us that we should give some consideration to the ‘better the devil you know’ theory.
Now I see that General Lord Dannatt doesn’t think this kind of thing is ‘helpful.’
Just to be clear, I’m ambivalent about our involvement in Libya. But that is neither here nor there. When the BBC is overtly campaigning for something I automatically become suspicious.
Is this really me, or have I metamorphosed into someone else. …. because I’m wondering if Jeremy Bowen has suddenly ‘grown a pair’?

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Them and Us

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The way the recent upheavals in the Middle East have been reported by the BBC show clearly that it’s beyond their collective imagination to wonder whether the Arab/Islamic population is really and truly full of ordinary people just like us.

Even though Jon Donnison and Jeremy Bowen have spent considerable time in the Arab world, they still can’t grasp the concept that there is a “them and us” and that *their* worldview is antithetical to *ours* . Would Jeremy Bowen send his young relatives off to prosecute holy jihad wearing a suicide belt? Would Jon Donnison support the stoning of an adulteress or the limb amputation of a thief? Would he expect to enter Paradise if he copped it in the fog of struggle? Probably not. But they must know that these beliefs exist and can’t be shrugged off with a casual “I’m sure they don’t really mean it.”
The BBC’s reporting on the escalation of attacks from Gaza is an example of this moral equivalence. Towards the end, the BBC’s report demonstrates how the writer identifies with Hamas, “Last month saw some of the worst violence since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in December 2008, says the BBC’s Jon Donnison in Gaza.” reminding us as usual, of Cast Lead.
“In one week in March, at least 10 Palestinians – including several civilians and children – were killed by Israeli attacks” Donnison begins, adding:
“In the same period, militants in Gaza fired more than 80 rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel.”
This implies that Israel killed “several” (how many?) innocents, then Hamas responded, pitifully, killing no-one.
“Hamas had pledged to try to restore a ceasefire that ended on 16 March when an Israeli air strike killed two of its militants in the Palestinian territory.”
This makes no sense. Would or could Hamas ‘try to restore’ a ceasefire that was allegedly broken by Israel?
“However, Israel said it had suffered “bouts of terror and rocket attacks.”
Israel said? Hamas has pledged? Which is more reliable, a *say* or a *pledge*?
“Despite recent calls for calm, neither side seems to be able to stop firing, our correspondent says. Both say the other started it. Israel says it holds Hamas responsible for all attacks coming out of Palestinian territory, even if it is other militant groups carrying them out”
Read Melanie Phillips and Honest Reporting on that kind of remark.

While I’m at it – “Attack on Bus” Why does Hamas attack just *a bus?* Is ‘damaging a bus’ their intention? When rockets land without killing any Israelis, is that intentional?
Also, when is a teenaged boy a child? When he’s a Palestinian, of course. Israeli children are ‘people’ or teenagers, young Palestinian resistance fighters are counted as children till they get the key of the door.
The invariable chronological inversion of attack and retaliation and the habitual emphasis on the retaliation and downplaying of the provocation is automatic for the BBC. Not many people used to know that, but thankfully more and more people are starting to notice.
Even Sky has:
“The violence began when Gazan militants launched an anti tank-missile at a school bus in an apparently deliberate escalation.”

The BBC prefers to begin their article by concentrating on Israel’s military might, emoting a disproportionate response to a damaged bus.
“Israeli tanks, helicopters and planes have struck Gaza after an anti-tank missile fired from the Palestinian territory hit a bus in southern Israel.”
If the BBC understood what is happening it could have speculated that the escalation in hostilities might be related to the “Arab Spring.” It might have occurred to someone that Hamas has been emboldened by the the Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood’s prospective rise to prominence throughout the Arab world.
Here’s a quote from a thought-provoking article everyone should read.

And, as in much other coverage of the Middle East, the journalists – take a bow, BBC – did not bother to exercise the elementary functions of their craft: to be inquisitive, to question assumptions, to look beyond the overheated excitement. Having written the script, they were determined to stick to it in breathless, eye-moistening interviews – “live and direct from Tahrir Square” – with self-selecting, highly educated, English-speaking protesters.

And just as the media made their bizarre extrapolations and re-wrote the script, they also changed their language. In less than a month, Mubarak had made the seamless transition from “moderate, pro-Western Egyptian president” to “corrupt, tyrannical dictator”.

I blogged something like this myself not so long ago.

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Inverted Reporting

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The BBC has changed its opening line from:
“Israel Shells Gaza City after Palestinian mortar strike” to
“Gaza: Israeli forces strike after attack on bus”
No idea why, apart from the fact that deleting the word Palestinian skews the report against Israel a bit more. At any event, as usual they’ve reversed the roles of attack and retaliation, which probably explains why the average viewer sees Israel as the eternal villain. Note Jon Donnison’s observations.
I’m going to leave it to CiFWatch to expand on this, because this time it’s the BBC rather than the Guardian that is being criticised for its blatant bias.

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Significant Strands of Opinion

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In his new online magazine The Commentator, Robin Shepherd writes about the BBC in the light of the recent observations about the BBC by Michael Buerk and Peter Sissons. He concludes:

“Three possible strategies come to mind: work to reform it; work around it by pressing for a freeing up of the regulatory environment so that a robust competitor can be established in the private sector; or work to abolish it.”

The first has been tried. That is no reason not to try again. But the rot runs so deep that we may have to face the prospect that the BBC is simply unreformable.”

I’m not certain who has tried to reform the BBC. I understand it has been tinkered with from time to time; a new appointee here and there, a few MPs have grumbled. Then there’s this website as well as frequent references on other websites where the BBC’s bias is taken as read. (Or should that be red.) But this hardly constitute a *strategy*.

The second is a good idea regardless of what the BBC does. In an open society it is deplorable that the state should dictate who can say what in the public domain. The airwaves should be free.

Whatever regulatory restrictions there are that prevent robust competition, the BBC will always have the upper hand, as the residual effect of its reputation for excellence and impartiality still lingers in the public’s perception, despite its own suicidal efforts to squander the lot.
Look at the way everyone sneers at Fox Sky CNN etc. The only one they praise is Al-Jazeera.

“Looking to the long term, the third (Working to abolish it)
is a less remote possibility than it might currently appear. While today’s political establishment is largely supportive of the BBC, there are significant strands of opinion taking shape within it that have grave misgivings about the way things have been going.”

We are ‘a strand with grave misgivings’, but so what? Where’s the motivation for a parliamentary decision to scrap the licence fee, or whatever it would take? Politicians and the BBC need each other, so MPs are hardly likely to be so radical.

I must say I regret the disappearance of the BBC spokespersons who used to engage with us here on B-BBC. One of them implied that doing so was frowned upon by the powers that be, so a fatwa of some sort might have been decreed. On the other hand, they might have dismissed us as a bunch of right-wing mouth-frothers unworthy of whatever credibility any of their precious attention might bestow upon us.
People complain that we don’t want unbias, only our kind of bias. As has been noted, true impartiality is strictly for inanimate objects. There is one kind of bias that we should embrace, bias towards ’good’ and against ‘bad.’ We certainly differ over what constitutes good and bad, but meddling with omissions, emotive language, selectivity and disproportionate emphases in news reporting is irresponsible and dangerous.

Finally, I saw some comments on Guido’s blog, and I’ve seen similar here too, to the effect that some people don’t see why they should care about the Middle East. About The Commentator:

“Israel, arentcha sick of hearing about it? It’s alright in small doses to keep informed about what’s going on, but it’s tedious having it front and centre on a new centre right site. Boring.”

and:

“ The reast of the world would be happy if the whole bloody middle-east were just to fuck off and die, quietly please.”

People boast about their own ignorance when they haven’t got the brains to see that they should be ashamed of it. We can’t all be interested in everything, I know, and it takes all sorts etc., and no doubt such people have opinions about something or other, otherwise they wouldn’t bother to comment on a blog. But I wonder what has made them think that displaying perverse bravado is a good idea, rather than a gigantic embarrassment.

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