Author Archives: Sue

Guardian Angel

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Breaking News. Al Jazeera and Alan Rusbridger-Assange of the UK’s leading liberal arm of the Goebbels Reich Ministry of propaganda have Wikileaked thousands of protocol documents, which appear to show that the Palestinians have offered to concede even more than absolutely everything to the swaggering intransigent illegal Israelis.

The Guardian is quoted as saying ”This selfless Palestinian generosity demonstrates the weakness of their leadership and has nothing to do with making Israel appear intransigent, swaggering and illegitimate.”

Loveable rogue and chief negotiator of what appears to be the Middle East ‘peace process,’ Saeb Erekat says: “It’s a pack of lies.”

Warning: The above is facetious. Read a sensible analysis on CiFWatch.

“Standing in stark contrast to the Guardian’s Palestine Papers narrative – of Israeli intransigence and Palestinian weakness and humiliation – their own documents corroborate the widely reported Israeli offer, during the 2008 negotiations, which Mahmoud Abbas rejected: a contiguous Palestinian state representing roughly 94% of the West Bank with land swaps (part of Israel which would become part of the new Palestinian state) making up for the remaining 6%. The offer also included a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem.”

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Blackening the Whitewash

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Early this morning Jon Donnison said something which I’ll paraphrase: “Israel has investigated its own conduct over the Mavi Marmara and it’s about to publish its findings. If, as reports suggest, it exonerates itself, it will be regarded as a whitewash.”

All day, BBC News 24 has featured the news about this investigation, taking care to emphasise the Turkish reaction.
Luckily for me, Elder of Ziyon has already tackled the BBC’s treatment of this topic, so I don’t have to.

Although the investigating committee did include outsiders, I would point out that any ‘self-generated’ investigation automatically faces the issue of impartiality, and I’d love anyone to suggest any other body that would investigate this more thoroughly and more self-critically than the Israelis. As Elder says, one glance at the report itself shows that it is “far from a whitewash, and it takes its mandate seriously.”

If the BBC is going to dismiss any investigation unless it’s done by pro Palestinian sympathisers, I despair.
Update.The BBC has altered the original report, changing the sub headings and much of the content. The new version includes several quotations from the Turkish perspective, and an additional article with some overlapping content has appeared, entitled : Turkey criticises Israel report.
From bad to worse.

(I can’t find any reference to this story on NewsSniffer.)

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All in the Mind

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Looking again at Justin Webb’s recent remark that US broadcasters see British rules about impartiality as an attack on freedom of speech, I did wonder whether he sees it that way too. I also wondered what he thinks impartiality actually is. Maybe he sees it as not being free to lay his own political views on the table during political interviews. Maybe instead of playing devil’s advocate, he longs to just play devil. But he’s not allowed to, so he dutifully does his job as best he can.
However, as we know, when we criticise the BBC, reining in their personal opinions a little bit is not what we mean by impartiality. We detect it in tone of voice, ‘interruption quotient’, imbalance of subject matter, selectivity of interviewee and expert witness, and much much more. One of its most slippery manifestations, though, is bias by omission, and this shows up particularly in material that has anything to do with Islam.
The fear of “stirring something up” is palpable. The most recent example is the ‘Asian grooming’ issue, which can’t be discussed freely for fear of inciting the BNP, or causing a backlash, or worse, major civil disobedience.
I often link to Elder of Ziyon’s website, which is an invaluable source of information for anybody with an interest in Israel and the Middle East. It tracks the astonishing political shenanigans that take place in the Arab World as well as Israel-related goings-on.
If only the BBC were to tell us of some of the vitally important things they studiously ignore, I could probably hang up my keyboard, and we could live happily ever after. Or maybe not.
There is considerable evidence that most Arabs and their leaders are far from the earnest seekers of peace the BBC would have us believe they are. Their mindset is light years away from ours. We considers duplicity to be a character flaw. In stark contrast, many Arab leaders seem to relish getting away with trickery and deceit. With considerable ingenuity they tailor the speech to suit the audience, proudly providing each party with what it wants to hear, inciting hatred and whipping up self pity and smouldering resentment in front of their Islamic audience.
Mahmoud Abbas for example, our so-called partner for peace, has been telling the West that he wants peace with Israel, while addressing the wider Arab world in Arabic, in speeches calling for their help in eliminating Israel.

Even those who view the situation exclusively through BBC’s Palestinian-promoting news-filtering mechanism must view the assumption that peace will automatically follow on from the establishment of a separate Palestinian state with some suspicion. All the violence, terrorism and religious extremism that blights the Islamic world isn’t enough to convince the Western world that the I/P conflict is neither a regional dispute over land, nor a flashpoint that justifies the whole Muslim world’s discontent. We should see Israel as the West’s canary. Its vulnerability symbolises our own, and its potential annihilation would presage our own. Islam is causing trouble everywhere. Pakistan, Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey, everywhere.

In Lebanon Jeremy Bowen is too preoccupied with his vineyard story to notice that Hizbollah cannot accept that the UN might hold it responsible for the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister. A minor detail – they were responsible for it. Much of the trouble emanating form this will be directed at Israel.

Several Qassam rockets have been fired from Gaza recently, but the BBC Twits are too busy tweeting politically-motivated gossip amongst themselves to notice.

A fascinating article on Elder of Ziyon’s blog which originally appeared in a German magazine called Cicero describes an interview with a 23 year old, highly educated resident of the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. She studied here in the UK and has a fetching English accent. It explains that UNRWA has bestowed, exclusively upon Palestinians, everlasting refugee status. For Palestinians alone, this can extend over the generations. This young lady is passionately determined that one day there will be a single state – ‘from the river to the sea’ – where eight million descendants of the 1948 refugees will return to settle in Israel. She will be satisfied with nothing less. She herself has never been there, and she may or may not know that 54% of East Jerusalem Arabs would rather live in Israel than in a future Palestinian state.

This gives a glimpse of the mindset that is making peace unachievable. Another compelling study of the Arab state of mind is set out in the form of an excerpt from an awesome piece of journalism from the 1960s by the redoubtable Martha Gellhorn. I know following links is tiresome and tedious, but please if you only follow one, let it be that one. Elder has selected a passage from Gellhorn’s lengthy and detailed study of the history of Palestinian Arabs. Now that’s Journalism. Is there anyone at the BBC who is capable of undertaking such a project, even if there was a sudden, miraculous, uncharacteristic desire to try?

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Fizzing, But Not Popping

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I was going to post this morning on the topic D.B. refers to below, the stark contrast between the BBC’s treatment of two stories. Events overtook.
So belatedly here’s another post with the same starting point.(No Pasarani)

The left wing media’s laughably un-self-aware fantasy that violent metaphors are the prerogative of ‘the right’ is looking very ridiculous now. In their determination to blame the Tea Party for the Tucson shooting they ignored the facts and still went on contorting, finding ways to justify themselves rather than offering a simple retraction. It’s contortionism gawn mad.

Then the BBC’s bizarre reporting of religiously-motivated, Islamic-inspired violence in Egypt . As many of you have commented, they somehow manage to report a religiously-motivated Islamic-inspired shooting without blaming religion or Islam. In fact, like something straight out of the Basil Fawlty school of not mentioning the war, they go to the trouble of particularly mentioning that they haven’t allocated blame.

Robin Shepherd has written another superb article on what’s been happening in Egypt. It starts: “I had to rub my eyes a couple of times this morning as I opened the BBC website to find two more stories about the ongoing violence against Christians in Egypt.”
We’ve been rubbing our eyes over the BBC website for quite a while.
The contrast between the BBC’s anomalous positions over these stories clearly spotlights their hypocrisy, and begs the question, why?
What good does it do to suppress discussions about the rise of Islam? Will it make it go away?
The tendency of the left, even the moderate left, to side with Islam because of their hatred of Israel and America, and perhaps Britain, is beginning to look more and more irrational and less and less easy to explain or justify. No matter how many accusations of ‘incitement by gun-totin’ metaphor’ each side fires off against the other, the BBC’s Islamist heroes fire real bullets, and commit real violence. This ought to knock the left off any moral high ground they think they occupy.

Perhaps these verbal contortions are the last vestiges of the BBC’s institutional repression which will one day have to find an outlet. Perhaps all these suppressed inconvenient truths will suddenly burst forth like Jack Straw’s fizzing and popping testosterone, but the longer they put it off, the worse it will be.

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The Straw that Nearly Broke the Camel’s Back

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Jack Straw was being fashionably outspoken, and the admirable Douglas Murray and Mohammed Shafiq all shouted at once in a Newsnight chaired by Stephanie “toss-tosterone” Flanders.
The best way they could deal with the question of Muslim racism against non-Muslims in a suitably non-racist way was to identify the practice of ‘men of Pakistani origin’ abusing vulnerable white girls, as a criminal rather that a culturally-motivated issue.
Someone proposed that the police unfairly target Asian men, and if they took the trouble to look they would find this crime equally rampant in any other community. Here is yet another manifestation of the contortions we go through so as not to be thought racist. We must insist that there are good Muslims and bad, or there are criminal Muslims and law-abiding Muslims, but never that there is a culturally based racism in Muslim communities that paints non muslims as inferior and unworthy of respect.

If criminal or bad Muslims are indeed a tiny minority, what is stopping the good majority doing their bit, wholeheartedly co-operating with the police, or condemning such behaviour loud and clear, or in their own ethnically cultural way, issuing a fatwa against it.

It’s only about fifty years since liberation from Victorian type stifling of human sexuality occurred in the West. Before the 1960s premarital and extramarital sex was considered shameful, and single mothers were put under enormous pressure to give up their babies, oh yes, and homosexuality was illegal.
When the revolution took place people were encouraged to throw off the shackles of shame, prudery and repression and love themselves and each other. Then, as is the way of things, the pendulum swung too far, and along came overt promiscuity and sexualisation of everything under the sun including children.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that chauvinistic male-centerd Muslim culture is entrenched in the distant past, and their fear and loathing of our debauchery, combined with their, dare I say it, racist insularity is what lies at the heart of what they call ‘Asian men’ grooming and abusing vulnerable, unloved white girls.
For heaven’s sake don’t let’s think we can or should reintroduce pre 1960s attitudes to sex, but we need to examine our own exploitative culture too.

If they really want to stop being marginalised, Muslim communities who live geographically in the west but emotionally in the east must revolutionise their attitude to sexual and male-female relationships, and liberate their young men from the sexual stifling and repression that causes this so-called “fizzing and popping with testosterone,” and make sure that the “outlet for that” doesn’t amount to abusing the non-Muslims they think of as ‘easy meat’.
Jack Straw was one of the bunch that orchestrated the Asian invasion. Now he’s surprised at the consequences.

The BBC is slowly but surely exposing this problem, albeit more tentitively than it should, but it’s hampered by an over-sensitive wariness of a backlash that might threaten ‘community cohesion’ if it’s discussed openly. They pretend this is a fear of a purely right wing BNP style reaction, but of course openness is also taboo in the Muslim world, and Mohammed Shafiq, the Muslim spokesman on Newsnight admitted that he has received threats from his own community “for speaking out”.

Here endeth the sermon. Come on BBC, let’s stop walking on eggshells and get down to the nitty gritty.

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Mad World

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I’ve been reading Melanie Phillips’s address to Ariel Conference on Law and mass Media, 30 December 2010.
I find long articles more user-friendly read straight from the page like in the olden days, so I printed this one off. Whichever way floats your boat, do read it.

The commonplace dismissal of her as Mad Mel had me stumped. How could such an eloquent, logical thinker be considered mad?
I now see this ill-chosen soubriquet as the contemporary equivalent of mankind’s reception to the proposition that the world’s a sphere. An insight likely dismissed as bonkers by those who clung obstinately to the notion that the earth was flat. Now we know it’s round, it seems we are still looking for ways to fall off it. I’m saying Mel is right, and the naysayers just don’t get it.

If you follow the saga of Middle East, and you know something of the complex political and religious situation, you’ll understand Melanie Phillips’s words of wisdom; to you, her language will sparkle and resonate.
But many will be mystified, because the selective reporting dished up by the monolithic organisation that is obliged to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, has left an uninterested, misled, misinformed audience out in the cold, and they’re the ones who dismiss her words as inflammatory, scaremongering hyperbole.

Many well-intentioned people say Israel has a right to exist, but not to defend herself, or that things would be easier if Israel was ‘not there’, or that Moslems are the new Jews. I don’t know if the eradication of Israel, or the extinction of Jews would bother them much, but I do know that being thought antisemitic bothers them a great deal.

People often question the Arabs’ contribution to mankind’s development, and accuse them of stagnating, from the 6th century to the present day. But there is one area where their creativity and innovation is unsurpassed, an area as contemporary as could be; by deft management of public relations and presentation they have turned everything upside down, and seduced the world into doing the same. “The Arabs brilliantly reconfigured the Arab war of extermination against Israel as the oppression of the Palestinians by Israel.”

As the process of appeasement and whitewashing of Islamism gets more and more indefensible, and as the demonisation of Israel gets more and more incompatible with the evidence, the truth must surely dawn, the penny must surely drop, and things must surely right themselves. But is there time to sit back and wait?
Society currently finds itself “immersed in a total inversion of truth evidence and reason,” Melanie says. Israel has allowed itself to be pushed into a defensive position, and she urges it instead to bolster the efficacy of its strikers. (The football terminology is mine.)
The media must be recaptured and put to work for the home team. It must inform the misinformed, re-educate the ill-educated, and somehow scoop up the bigots and ineducable and carry them along with the tide.

There is a long way to go. This morning Jeremy Bowen and Wyre Davies did their bit towards putting the case for the opposition. Wyre regurgitated the misconception that settlement building in ‘illegally occupied Palestinian land’ is the obstacle to peace, and Jeremy announced triumphantly “There’s been a steady toll of Palestinian deaths in Gaza at the hands of Israelis since the January 2009 war…..… and rocket fire into Israel has been increasing recently.” Someone from the LSE, professor Fawaz Gereges completed the anti Israel triumvirate. This is not balance. At least the people who object to Israel’s point of view being aired, in any shape or form, will be happy.

By drawing attention to the reporting omissions and bias of the BBC, we endeavour to redistribute the imbalance, and turn its far-reaching influence over the worldwide audience from negative to positive. Some hopes.

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The Mohammed Divide

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Even the BBC is finding it impossible to deny that there is a link between Islam and terrorism. So they do what has to be done. In concord with the government they manufacture a distinction between ‘Good Islam’, and ‘Bad, terrorist-type Islam’, and proceed to distance one from the other, relentlessly.
This means the BBC can continue to insert Islam-related features into hundreds of programmes, the latest example being Five Guys Named Mohammed. (In doing so they had to admit what they had swept under the carpet just a few weeks ago, that Mohammed, not James or Oliver, was the UK’s commonest, most popular name for new baby boys.)

Robin Shepherd has recommended a superb article in Standpoint by the heroic Douglas Murray. “This is the sort of piece that deserves to be read far and wide. So take a look and pass it on to all your contacts.”

It’s long. I printed off all seven pages, and slipped into something more comfortable to read it; I heartily recommend that you do the same.
It relates to Cordoba House, the Mega-Mosque proposed for Ground Zero, and the controversy it has engendered. Douglas Murray has watched and participated in debates in New York, and has seen at first hand what is happening there. He fears America is about to succumb to the malady that is affecting Europe and the UK, namely mass denial of self evident and demonstrable truths about Islam, which is exactly what has already happened here. Do take time to read his article.
Here’s a taster:

In October, the debate reached one of its nastiest points with an over-booked and badly-chaired studio discussion-cum-slanging-match on ABC. Daisy Khan, the wife of the imam of the proposed mosque, Feisal Abdul Rauf, was one of those who appeared on Christiane Amanpour’s panel. The anti-building side were repeatedly defamed. Robert Spencer of the Jihad Watch blog was accused by one of the other guests of being in league with neo-Nazis and was not allowed to respond. On both sides, people who had lost family-members on 9/11 slugged it out. The effect was bitter. At one point, Daisy Khan claimed that her opponents were throwing her “into the arms of al-Qaeda”. The author and former Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali came on via video-link. “What are you complaining about?” she asked. “You are sitting here at ABC TV. You’ve got a great job. You have freedom. Nobody is throwing you anywhere. Your rights are protected. I think that it’s your perception of being a victim.” Khan glared at her: “I am not a victim, Ayaan, stop calling me that. You’re the one running around with a bodyguard.” The studio audience greeted Khan’s taunt with laughter, applause and cheers. They almost drowned out a single man in the front row shouting at Khan: “And why do you think that is?”

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Bloody Sunday

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Hooray. Three cheers for Yolanda Knell’s report on the recent bomb attack in Egypt against Copts. A balanced report at last! She rectified the omissions we’ve been pointing out on B-BBC, and more. Listen to her report, then skip till just after halfway, when Kevin Bocquet starts his “analysis” of Islam v the West.

Boo. Kevin Bocquet undid all the promise of Yolanda Knell’s integrity by reverting to obfuscation, moral equivalence and politically correct mumbo jumbo, and by the way, Muslims admire America, and modestly dressed women embrace free speech, particularly the freedom to praise the burka.

In particular Bocquet pitted all of fundamental Islam against Pastor Terry Jones as if they represented opposite examples of extremism. To him, Jones’s Koran-burning threat counterbalanced the whole of radical Islam’s terrorist attacks, treating them as though they were equal combatants in a philosophical, moral conflict.
The mind boggled till Stephen Pollard pointed out how ludicrous this and many other things in Kevin’s report were, only to be shusshhed by Ed “Holy book” Stourton, and again later when Pollard had the audacity to mention the upsurge of Islam-fuelled antisemitism on campus.

Indy/ Church Times columnist Paul Valley mentioned intolerance, and Stourton assumed he was referring to Stephen Pollard. But he denied that. For a fleeting second I thought he was referring to the ROP. Silly me, he was referring to Stephen Pollard after all, albeit indirectly. He was, of course, alluding to our intolerance of Islam.

I think I see what Helen Boaden meant about impartiality.
In the debate between God and the Devil, the BBC proudly sits on the fence. In the struggle between good and evil, they’re impartial. Tolerance is handed out to all indiscriminately.

Just as after some Islam-fuelled violence the Egyptian authorities round up equal numbers of Islamists and Christians for the political expediency of appeasing radical Islam, the BBC rounds up equal numbers of Muslims and non Muslims for balance, struggling over who to blame for Islam-fuelled discontent, forever locked into their impossible quest to resolve irreconcilable differences.

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Accentuate the Negative, Eliminate the Positive. (Don’t mess with Mister In- Between)

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I wrote the following article last week, but events prevented me from finishing it. Now I see that E.O.Z. has written on a similar theme, and has come to similar conclusions. So here’s mine.

I’ve touched previously on the fate of refugees from the Horn of Africa after their perilous journey to Israel. Many of those that survived had been subjected to rape and abuse along the way. Strange that they took the trouble to make for such an evil, brutal, racist country.

The BBC obliquely criticises Israel for putting a limit on the numbers to whom it can provide sanctuary. They utter nary a peep over the reasons they seek refuge, nor a squeek of condemnation of the people-traffikers murderers and rapists who foment their harrowing predicament, because they’re too busy implying that Israel should accept unlimited illegal immigration.
The BBC is fixated solely upon the measures the Israeli government has taken to stem the flow, because a wall is being constructed to secure Israel’s pourous border with Egypt, a wall which the BBC impliedly deems to be a racist apartheid separation barrier.

Meanwhile, back at the UK, we proudly boast about our reputation for tolerance. Some would say the reckless pursuit of this ideal might be about to turn round and slap us in the face. Some may wonder, what if those we have bent over backwards to accommodate don’t reciprocate? Some might speculate that there’s little sign that they will.

Could we, ourselves, one day, be outsiders wondering where to seek refuge? Some might think that in our haste to embrace diversity and multiculturalism, we’ve embraced our own extinction, and little baby tolerance has been thrown out with the bathwater.

Israel was envisaged as a homeland and sanctuary for Jews. An insurance policy which history tells us is a must-have. Nevertheless, Israel is diverse and multicultural, and refugees from far and wide already squeeze in, but Israel must prioritise the preservation of its Jewish identity, or it will cease to be fit for purpose.

Not that the BBC will understand this need. Having backed the total abandonment of our own national identity, the BBC rigidly perceives Israel as racist, that it has no business trying to retain its Jewish identity, and it must do the decent thing and abandon it. before it can be seen as a decent country like Britain.

This article is typical.
The first paragraph sets out the plight of the African migrants in bold type. The emphasis is on Israel’s efforts to limit overwhelming mass illegal immigration. It concentrates on personal ‘human interest’ stories, leaving Israel looking hard-hearted and racist for putting ‘full up’ on the door. Someone from an organisation called Hotline for Migrant Workers is wheeled in to criticise the Israeli governent without a trace of sympathy or understanding of a dilemma which has not been taken into consideration at all.

Some would say this is the usual fare, e.g. reporting from Israel which ignores historical context, disregards Israel’s omnipresent existential stuggle and fails to acknowledge that its citizens are under constant threat from hostile duplicitous and violent neighbours who are hell bent on exterminating them.
In other words it treats Israel as though it was a London suburb.

The BBC must get real and grasp the fact that Israel isn’t London. They should also get into their heads, if it isn’t too late, that as things stand, even London isn’t London.

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