Author Archives: Sue

Only Joking

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Hilarious conversation with Hazel Blears and John Humphrys about new policy against political correctness. (Inability to mention certain things.) This new policy of abandoning political correctness, (Unfortunately P.C. prevents us from saying out loud what we really mean,) is, for some coincidental reason, designed to prevent radicalisation.
Up till now political correctness has prevented us from making jokes about the Irish, Welsh or Scots. (To name just a few.)


“Of course we mustn’t allow racist jokes. People will say we don’t want any part of that. Because it’s not even funny’ (Well, not always)
“Muslims are not offended by us celebrating Christmas! We celebrate their rituals, after all.”
“Sorry, political correctness prevents us from telling us exactly who we’re afraid will be radicalised. “

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Bono Nono

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Blanket coverage for Bono

Unfortunately with the wrong kind of blanket.


Bono is very busy; hassling world leaders, campaigning, singing in an American accent.


“You may not know much about it, but I bet you RECKON something”

(David Mitchell)


Celebrity opinions are just like any other opinions, but more passionate.


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Hey Presto!

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At least 400 BBC employees, goodness knows how many Muslims, Annie Lennox and several MPs declare their abhorrence of Israel ‘for Gaza’. They accept Hamas’s allegations without hesitation or deviation (but with repetition.) Discussions on the BBC reduce the issue to a simple contest; who is the biggest victim, and whose warfare is fair, and whose is a crime.

Squabbling over what is and what is not a war crime, over whether Israel should endure random rocket attacks permanently because retaliation would automatically incur the crime of murdering civilians who were, or were not, imprisoned in an overpopulated hellhole with no way of escaping; disagreeing over white phosphorous, accuracy of targeting, who is a legitimate target and who is a civilian, whether this or that was deliberate or unavoidable, and who is the biggest villain, is a road to nowhere. While all this has been going on front of house, behind the scenes something else has happened.

Slowly but surely, by sleight of hand, the BBC has maneuvered Hamas into the position of graduating by stealth as a fully-fledged legitimate political entity in the eyes of the public. The BBC constantly pleads “talk to Hamas” because not to do so would be churlish, since the BBC has, with its magic trickery, legitimised, normalised and humanised it. There is only one thing worth saying: Recognise Israel’s right to exist, renounce violence, and re-educate your followers. Agreeing to any of that would entail no longer being fundamentalist extremist Islamists, so what’s the use?


The BBC has made up its mind already because it is not concerned with history, geography or a piddly little existential threat.

However many Fitnas or Panoramas we are shown that tell us there is a fundamental incompatibility between Islam and the west, the media still stops short of connecting this, multiplied several times over, with the threat Israel faces. They don’t like terrorism when it rears its head here, but are unable to empathise with what Israel has lived with since 1948.

These arguments obfuscate the real issue, which is: why is Israel fighting? Why is Hamas, fighting? Why are Syria, Iran and other assorted Arab states involved? In this topsy turvy way, by not asking these questions, the BBC has manipulated public opinion to back the wrong horse.

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Go With the Flow

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Anyone who is conscious of BBC bias should read Howard Jacobson’smoving piece in the Independent. Then read the vitriolic comments it has attracted.

Over many years the BBC has influenced swathes of people, who quite rightly and naturally, feel a strong sense of injustice at what they have been shown. All the BBC has done is to report what is happening, is it not? They have seen something happening and said “Hey, look at that!”

A friend was travelling back from some far-flung trouble spot. Sitting next to him on the plane was a journalist-in-chief. “We’re covering this newly emerging trouble” he confided. “Why then, are you travelling home?” asked my curious friend. “Well, I’ve set them up and told them what shots I need, why would I stay?” was the reply.

BBC denies antisemitism and bias against Israel. Its case might look credible if it did something to redress the balance. The recent Panorama programme raised the question of Islam’s incompatibility with the west. It was a small start. Memorable images are affecting and bound to influence opinion, and perhaps a number of viewers began asking themselves some questions.
Awareness that this kind of exposure doesn’t help Islam’s public face explains why images of extremism in the film ‘Fitna’ were the focus of such strenuous efforts to suppress and condemn them.

Most of the virulent loathing expressed by Israel-haters demonstrates huge factual ignorance and misunderstanding by the public. The underdog theory falls apart when you know the geography, the stolen land theory falls apart when you know the history, and the deliberate baby-killing theory falls apart when you know the facts.
I believe there smoulders an undeniable suspicion and dislike of Jews in Britain, always ready to reignite at the smallest spark. But I wait for the day when the BBC commissions a programme, informative, educational and entertaining, that sets the record straight. I fear I’ll be waiting a very long time.
MPs need to be very determined and steadfast to get where they are, and no doubt high ranking BBC executives and commissioning editors do too, but they still need other people’s approval to keep them in power. They have deliberately or accidentally ‘set up the shots’ over many many years. Now the current is so strong, who is going to risk swimming against it?

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Hearts and Minds

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Headline and soundbite from ex MI5 Dame Stella RimmingtonUsing Fear of Terror
Measures to combat terrorism are causing fear. (What, more fear than terrorism itself?) She says people in Britain feel as if they are living “under a police state because of the fear being spread by ministers.”


(She must have said that before she saw last night’s Panorama.)

So, what about the fear being spread by extremist Islam? What about fear being spread by the government’s delusion, heavily promoted by the BBC, that a moderate version of Islam can be set against an extreme version to bring about a multicultural paradise?

Frank Gardner now says Stella Rimmington rang the BBC to say that she had been slightly misreported. (Surely not!)
Frank Gardner thinks she meant something about winning hearts and minds.

Maybe, if we adopt some Sharia law as recommended by the Archbish, cover up our wimmin and confine them indoors, keep gays underground, wipe Israel off the map, and eradicate those annoying Jews, that would do the trick. Maybe those measures would win hearts and minds. Someone very clever indeed or very stupid might be able to argue that it would bring our civil liberties back. But would it stop all that violence and terror? It didn’t do Frank (Help me I’m a Muslim) all that much good, did it.

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Careful what you Wish For

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Tonight’s Panorama is going to tackle two issues troubling the government. First, terrorism and violence. They Don’t like it.

Second, the new one they they’ve just noticed. In a slight shift from the diversity agenda where ‘there’s no right or wrong, only different’ – now they’ve noticed that preaching against western values is not such a good idea either.


Even our good friend Lord Ahmed is on board. In a sudden reversal of policy he now says:
“We need to empower the mainstream Muslim leadership and the scholars so they can actually hold the arguments and debates within the Muslim society.”


Just keep Geert Wilders out of the way, though, eh.

As per interview on Today it seems new Muslim thinking is: Good Muslims oppose terrorism. Although they believe man-made laws cannot be supreme, they must put immutable words of the Koran on one side and disregard God’s law while living in countries that practice man’s law. I assume they must just be content to introduce Koranic ideologies gradually, by democratic means, such as those of great philosopher Sheikh Khalid Yassin


“If you prefer the clothing of the Kaffirs [non-believers] other than the clothing of the Muslims – most of those names on most of that clothing is faggots, homosexuals and lesbians.”

Watch out Beeboids!


Oh yes, and don’t forget, it’s all because of Gaza, and this country’s foreign policy.

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Join the Dots

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BBC radio 4. Sunday programme with Roger Bolton. Interview with John Mann, M.P. for Bettislow, chairman of the all-party Parliamentary Group against Anti-Semitism and co-founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Anti-Semitism.

He is chairing an inaugural conference, co-hosted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of all places, on Tuesday. One hundred parliamentary representatives are attending, from over forty countries.

The conference is about the alarming rise in antisemitism in UK and worldwide.


Roger Bolton:
“Some of the incidents are pretty low level.”……“relatively small amounts of physical assaults.” ……“ Israeli governments say any criticism of Israel is antisemitic.” etc. etc.

World Service:

Feedback type programme called “Over to You”


Listener asks why the BBC sent hundreds of BBC people to report events in Gaza and hardly any to report events in Sri Lanka where there were far more casualties.


News Editor:

“People are more interested in Gaza.”

Join the dots.

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Balen Out?

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We may well be one step closer to seeing what’s inside the notorious Balen report, but the appeal process may succeed in dragging it out forever and a day. Whatever happens, the fact that they’ve gone to such lengths to keep it quiet speaks volumes, probably far more than actually revealing what’s in there. It’s been concealed for long enough to have gathered mythical status.

Some say it’s not all that damning of the BBC in any case, and even if it is, people will discredit it as they always do. There are already several outfits monitoring anti-Israel bias such as Honest Reporting, Just Journalism and so on, and they are routinely dismissed as biased by those who don’t like their findings.

Everyone is bound to wonder what’s in a report that has been kept so secret. Protestations that it contains inner workings of BBC procedure and is none of our business just make one think ever more suspicious thoughts. What is going on in this mysterious BBC? It’s not the flipping Magic Circle, is it? Are there secrets that, if let out into the open, will destroy some vital mystique forever and ever? And then, abracadabra, the BBC will wither and die. That’s ridiculous, surely.

Too much water has gone under the bridge now since the Balen report was first prepared. There has been another onslaught of bias since then, so we need another Balen report.

Anyone who has ever been personally involved in an event that gets into the newspapers will know that as soon as it goes into print it appears distorted and acquires handfuls of errors.
Anyone who reads a wonderful book and then sees the film is usually hugely disappointed. Or they may find it okay, but not in the same way as the original. Someone else’s interpretation can’t be anything but someone else’s interpretation.


Jeremy Bowen can make as many Panoramas as he likes. He is a man with a partisan view, and that’s his business. But the BBC must provide balance. It must counteract the damage done by biased reporting by people with a grievance. Because the ‘wrong-is-right’ acceptance of Islamist alien cultural norms together with ever increasing waves of antisemitism are a tinderbox, and like a bush fire, we mustn’t say we didn’t see it coming.

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Geert

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Despite the fact that it dominated the airwaves all day yesterday, the subject of freedom of speech vis-à-vis Geert Wilders is by no means exhausted. Of all the coverage in the mainstream media, the BBC didn’t come out too badly. The best of a bad lot. Sky made a great fuss about airports, planes landing and Wilders on an escalator, but it amounted to little. What I saw of Channel 4 was pathetic. The BBC had the most memorable moment. It had to be Miliband, after condemning this vile hateful deliberately provocative film, with exquisite Comedy Timing, admitting that he hadn’t seen it.

Several things struck me about the whole media coverage fiasco.

1. Hardly anyone brought up Lord Ahmed’s disgraceful threat to mobilise ten thousand Muslims if Wilders was allowed in, and no-one at all alluded to him crowing about this ‘victory for Muslims’ to the Pakistani press.

2. All the people who were speaking in support of Wilders, Baroness Cox, Lord Pearson, and co., did so in the name of free speech; they were all
oh-so-careful to insist that they ‘did not agree with him’, giving the impression that they disagreed entirely with his views on Islam, rather than the more nuanced disagreement I assume they meant. (that the Koran should be banned altogether)

3. All this potential violence that is waiting to be unleashed. – Who by?” Is it to be “Islamophobic” violence against Muslims stirred up by the film, perpetrated by those violent Jews and gays? Or is it violence by members of the religion of peace, enraged at criticism of the very Jihadi extremists they are supposed to disapprove of?

The content of Fitna was repeatedly described as ‘shots of horrific acts of violence juxtaposed with selected Koranic verses’. “Revolting!” “Repulsive!”


In the light of the loudly proclaimed assurance by Lord Ahmed that every single word of the Koran has equal importance and is of vital significance, I can’t see many grounds for the oft heard claims that that the majority of Muslims are moderate, and that Islam is the religion of peace. Furthermore, footage of ranting mullahs and suicide bombers which furnished the most undeniable examples of incitement to hatred and violence in the film were largely overlooked.

4. As for Salma Yaqoob, the only member of last night’s QT panel who actually spoke up for Geert’s visit, (in the name of free speech, naturally,) and the member of the Quilliam Foundation, I think it was Maajid Nawaz, who spoke in a similar vein in another programme, I can’t help feeling that they were not being entirely honest. I suspect that if they hadn’t known that Geert Wilders had already been safely and securely sent packing, they would have been singing a different tune. But taking advantage of the moral high ground from a position of safety by pretending to be magnanimous wasn’t very convincing.

5. Have they banned Hizb-ut Tahrir yet?

Thank you

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Where’s Geert?

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Please tell me I’m wrong. I can’t find anything on the BBC about the message Geert Wilders has received from Irving N. Jones on behalf of the Secretary of State for the Home department.
(If anyone hasn’t seen Fitna yet it can be seen on Jihad Watch).


Wilders barred from UK: “would threaten community harmony and therefore public security”

The Telegraph’s report also seems rather inhibited, or am I imagining things.
“A spokesman told the daily Telegraph “The government opposes extremism in all its forms.” ” It will stop those who want to spread extremism hatred and violent messages from coming into our country”


So by stopping someone from coming into this country who wants to stop extremism hatred and violent messages, the government is stopping extremism hatred and violent messages?

Pull the other one.

Whatever side you’re on, it’s certainly a big news story, but maybe the BBC thinks making a big fuss would threaten community harmony and therefore public security.

If the BBC is not reporting this, or is playing it down, it is far more sinister than just another victory for Lord Ahmed.


Update:

A report has now appeared on the BBC website. Was I too quick to post or was the BBC a bit slow?


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