Category Archives: BBC bias

Remarkable thing isn’t it?  Boris, foreign secretary and cheer-leader in chief for Brexit isn’t allowed to comment on progress and what Brexit should look like but all the Remainers in cabinet are able to not only comment but actually try to hijack the process and make up policy whilst May was on holiday?  What’s more remarkable is that the BBC’s finest political stooges for Remain don’t notice the hypocrisy.

Amber Rudd appears on Marr and the BBC headline with Brexit: Boris Johnson ‘back-seat driving’ over Brexit, says Rudd.…never mind that it was Marr who put those words in her mouth.  What the BBC doesn’t tell you is that Rudd is an ardent Remainer and anti-Boris fanatic who is hoping to be Party leader….so many reasons for her to put the boot in to Boris…but the BBC doesn’t notice as it happily quotes her bashing Boris about his article.

Oh hold on….that article that Rudd is castigating Boris for…she hasn’t actually read it…..’Asked if she had read his article, Ms Rudd said: “Unfortunately not. I had rather a lot to do on Friday. There was a bomb that nearly went off in Parsons Green.’

What is also remarkable of course is that she and the BBC didn’t hyperventilate so much and sensationalise about a real intervention when Phillip Hammond actually tried to change Brexit policy whilst May was on holiday.  Do you remember all the fuss and excitement from the BBC and the likes of Rudd when he did that?  No…because he was doing what they wanted….backseat, or was it frontseat, driving Brexit in the directon they wanted…ie no Brexit….Rudd in fact jumped into the frontseat with him…as Sky reported….

Theresa May departed for her annual hiking holiday in the Swiss and Italian Alps on Monday – but if you thought that might lead to a pause in politics, think again.

The BBC also gives us this on Boris’ article….

Meanwhile the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority has written to Mr Johnson, questioning his decision in the 4,000 word article in Saturday’s Telegraph to refer again to a disputed figure used by Leave campaigners during the referendum about the UK’s EU budget contributions.

“I am surprised and disappointed that you have chosen to repeat the figure of £350m per week in connection with the amount that might be available for extra public spending when we leave the European Union,” Sir David Norgrove said.

“It is a clear misuse of official statistics,” he added.

Trouble is it is more that Sir David Norgrove is abusing his position and misusing offcial statistics when he criticises Boris because Boris is in fact right as we’ve noted in a previous post.  Boris says we will ‘take back control of £350 million’….and that figure is correct if the rebate is included. The point is is that the rebate is still the EU’s to give or take back…it can revoke that privilege and indeed, as we noted, seems intent on doing so….thus ‘taking back control of £350 million’ should rightly include the rebate figure.  Perhaps Sir David Norgrove should sit down and actually read and understand what is being said instead of involving himself in the politics.  Perhaps the BBC should also sit back and take a more critical look at what he says…but then as he is voicing the Remain narrative why would they do that?

Note Norgrove also that Boris doesn’t take into account the fact that payments that come back to the UK to pay for projects here will probably still have to be paid for….that proves the point that Norgrove doesn’t understand Boris’ point…it’s about who decides what that money is spent on not the actual amount.  Perhaps someone in such an obviously important and influential position should be more careful about their interference in politics.

Not only should Brexiteers get more proactive promoting Brexit and Britain’s glorious future but maybe should also be more active and critical in judging how the BBC is reporting Brexit…the BBC clearly cannot be trusted one inch to bring us an honest and accurate picture of events.

For instance here’s their analysis….

In his article, Mr Johnson had said the UK should not be giving the EU any money to gain access to the single market after Brexit and said he would like to see a lot of the money recovered from Brussels going to the NHS, repeating the disputed referendum claim that exit could provide an extra £350m for the health service.

Except he did not say anything like that…he said some of the money could go towards the NHS, he did not say all of that £350 million could go on the NHS.  The BBC report it in this way so that they set Boris up for later interviews in which they will claim he did say that and he will have to spend his time denying what is a BBC lie rather than giving the good news about Brexit.  It is a deliberate misinterpretation of his comments that the BBC knows is wrong…he does not think there is £350 million extra to spend as the BBC says he says…his point is that we should decide how to spend it not Brussels.  The BBC, and it seems Norgrove, deliberately or otherwise, misreport that.

EU should ‘undermine national homogeneity’ says UN migration chief

The EU should “do its best to undermine” the “homogeneity” of its member states, the UN’s special representative for migration has said.

Peter Sutherland told peers the future prosperity of many EU states depended on them becoming multicultural.

It should have been long apparent that the EU’s freedom of movement dictat is not about economics but about politics, culture and crucially identity.  The policy drive to move populations around Europe is intended to break people’s links with their own country, their nation, their identity and their loyalty.  The EU wants to create an EU superstate and to do that it needs EU citizens loyal to it…and its unelected government.  Thus politically, culturally and ethnically European nation states are ‘cleansed’…not by removing people but by moving in massive numbers of people who will not be loyal to their new state and nationality and who, as they see the homeland they left also destroyed by cultural and political invasion, they then look to the EU for governance, laws and protection.

The BBC of course is on-board but has its own reasons…very similar but it adds into the mix ‘race’…the BBC, along with Blair’s Labour Party wanted to ‘brown’ hideously white Britain and ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’….hence the BBC’s extremist drive to force open Britain’s borders to allow in as many non-white, non-Christian people as possible without regard to the consequences.

Tim Black in Spiked thinks this is the aim of the EU’s, and the Left’s, freedom of movement…

The newly christened EU citizens were never treated by the EU oligarchy as ends in themselves, as autonomous individuals with lives freely to lead. They were treated, rather, as means, tools, instruments. And not just economically. They were treated as cultural instruments, too, as vehicles of social and attitudinal change, a means to challenge and morph the make-up of national societies, to challenge and morph the attitudes and values of largely indigenous, provincial working-class populaces, to dilute and stigmatise their sense of nationhood and, ultimately, their sense of national sovereignty. And, at the same time, the migrant was therefore a means to usher in the brave EU world, consisting of a transnational entity run by an oligarchic pool of national elites who had stumbled on a way to govern apart from the older national democratic structures.

Blair himself was central to the EU’s use of immigration as a means to re-engineer society, turning it away from the nation state and towards the transnational EU. Between 1997 and 2010, New Labour oversaw the quadrupling of net migration from 48,000 people in 1997 to 198,000 by 2009. As Labour speechwriter Andrew Neather infamously put it in 2009, ‘mass immigration was the way that the government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’. So spectacular was New Labour’s achievement that UN migration chief Peter Sutherland went so far as to pay tribute to the UK’s immigration policy, on the grounds that it undermined the ‘homogeneity… of the people who inhabit [the UK]’.

The BBC continues to peddle the idea of a ‘soft Brexit’ as the best and only possible option, a ‘hard Brexit’ as a cliff edge disaster, in the hope that voters will shrug their shoulders and make no protest as Remain politicians try to neuter Brexit, failing that it ‘suggests’ a second referendum, the ground having being laid by the BBC’s torrent of pro-EU and anti-Brexit propaganda, or failing that it works towards forcing another general election that brings in a government that refuses to complete Brexit…hence its continued attempts to suggest May is weak and on borrowed time when there are absolutely no grounds for thinking so.

Of course a soft Brexit is no Brexit at all.  The use of such terms is a delibrate attempt to influence how people think about Brexit…Brexit, or ‘Hard Brexit’, that was democratically voted for, is bad,  ‘Soft Brexit’, ie continued membership of the EU, is good but was not voted for, it was rejected but the BBC wants you to change your mind.

From the Telegraph:

The biggest problem with Soft Brexit is that it’s not attainable

In the first of two extracts from their new book, Liam Halligan and Gerard Lyons say the commonly held belief that Britain would be better off inside the single market and customs union is misconceived

There has been much talk of “Hard Brexit” versus “Soft Brexit”. Such labels are ubiquitous during these Article 50 negotiations – used freely by the broadcast media – yet they are partisan and deeply misleading. Hard Brexit makes leaving the European Union sound extreme and damaging, suggesting isola­tion and a bleak economic future. Soft Brexit, conversely, conveys a comfortable, ongoing relationship with the EU, with Britain still “part of the club”.

Leaving the single market and the customs union isn’t Hard Brexit – even if the name is deliberately coined to sound painful. It is simply Brexit. Staying inside the EU’s two main legal constructs, meanwhile, isn’t a harmonious Soft Brexit. It amounts, instead, to a deliberate and cynical failure to implement the 2016 referendum result.

A political narrative has developed that Britain would clearly be far better off staying inside the single market and customs union. As such, anyone wanting to actually implement Brexit, by leaving both, is seen to be obsessed only with sovereignty and immigration – and prepared for the economy to suffer, as long as they get their way.

Remaining a member of the single market and/or the customs union, in contrast, is presented as an enlightened “Soft Brexit” compromise, a balance between the Leave side’s “hard” ide­ology and Remain campaigners’ common sense. These are the terms of the UK’s Brexit debate, as viewed by much of our political and media class as we enter the autumn of 2017 and these EU negotiations heat up. Yet they are wrong on every level.

Soft-headed

Many Parliamentarians say they “respect the referendum result” but want “Soft Brexit”. Attempting to negotiate such an outcome, though, would seriously damage the UK, the EU and the vital ongoing relationship between them.

While Soft Brexit is often presented as liberal and progressive, the single market promotes the interests of producers over consumers while entrenching the advantages of large corporations – which are far better able than smaller rivals to handle the complex regulation. Freedom of movement rules provide big firms with a ready stream of cheap, easily exploitable labour, while suppressing the wages of the UK’s most financially insecure workers. The single market also facilitates large-scale corporate tax avoidance.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Soft Brexit is that it is unobtainable. Back in December 2016, the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier said: “The single market and its four freedoms are indivisible – cherry-picking is not an option.” Yet this is precisely what the Soft Brexiteers are attempting, breaching EU rules by seeking single market membership along with a special dispensation from freedom of movement that no other country has.

That’s why “Soft Brexit” will actually end up being “Messy Brexit”. Pushing for this outcome puts the UK in direct and absolute conflict with the EU’s core principles – which, if seriously breached, could tear the bloc apart, as others demand the same deal. The most likely Soft Brexit outcome would be a diplomatic stand-off, along with chronic uncertainty for citizens, investors and businesses, risking serious economic and political damage.

The UK will, of course, continue to trade and collaborate with the EU ex­tensively after Brexit. Complaints that we are “cutting ourselves off” or “pulling up the drawbridge” are infantile and absurd. With a hung parliament, though, and the Conservatives vulnerable in the Commons and the Lords, the Soft Brexiteers sense this is their moment.

Far from “respecting the referendum result”, they are promoting an unobtainable outcome and sowing parliamentary chaos. Their aim is nothing less than to reverse the June 2016 referendum and, in doing so, topple the Government.

Odd how the BBC makes absolutely nothing of the revelation that George Osborne, much like James Chapman [a BBC goto remainer], seems a tad overwrought about Brexit, and wants to murder Theresa May and do very odd things with her…

Osborne’s animus against May is complicated in origin — personal, political, ideological, tactical — but purely felt. When I met him at the Standard this past spring, he was polite enough about the prime minister. But according to one staffer at the newspaper, Osborne has told more than one person that he will not rest until she “is chopped up in bags in my freezer”.

The BBC also looks the other way when it comes to left-wing ‘hate’.  When a right-wing Whatsapp group talked of gassing chavs the BBC were on the story right away and yet nothing about a left-wing group making similar comments…

Labour supporters 'jokingly' encourage fellow student to gas, poison or burn his Tory housemates https://t.co/TXvg9rJe5w

— Daily Mail U.K. (@DailyMailUK) September 10, 2017

 

After the Brexit vote, the Leave side stopped campaigning – and this was a massive error. It has allowed Brexit to be defined by its enemies. Sure, the forecasts of an immediate recession didn’t come to pass. But that has made the publications who predicted it even more angry, and determined to portray it as a disaster. The human need for vindication has created a new media bias in much of the coverage, and we now see Brexit being attacked more vociferously now than in during the referendum campaign. So the government needs to step up its positive message – and activate its greatest messengers.

Fraser Nelson

Boris has written an article in the Telegraph spelling out why Brexit will be great for Britain.  He talks of many things but the BBC are only interested in targeting two of these…one, they insist this is a challenge for the leadership of the Tory Party [the BBC keen to stir the pot and encourage a general election which they believe Corbyn would win]…Fraser Nelson in the Spectator notes….

Needless to say, it [the article] was greeted with shock by his critics, whose main weapon against him is to accuse him of a leadership bid. I was on the BBC News channel earlier and asked why, if it wasn’t a leadership bid, he started his column with the words ‘My friends’. The answer is that Boris always talks in this way, especially to readers of the Telegraph and The Spectator whom he genuinely regards as friends.

…..and two, the BBC makes what is a deliberately dishonest statement about Boris’ claim regarding the £350 million.  It is an outright lie and complete distortion of his comments by the BBC to mislead the audience in order to discredit the Leave campaign.

The BBC has been telling us all morning that Boris said we would ‘save £350 million after Brexit’ or that ‘Brexit would make us £350 million per week richer’….but that is a lie.  I know it is a lie because I have read Boris’ article and I am pretty sure the BBC must have read it too and yet have decided to give the public an utterly false summary of his words…here’s the BBC spreading a lie of Orwellian proportions…..

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has repeated the controversial claim that leaving the EU would save £350m a week, which could be spent on the NHS.

But what did Boris actually say?…he said we’d take back control of ‘roughly’ £350 million…an entirely different meaning…and he didn’t say it could all be spent on the NHS as the BBC report…..

Once we have settled our accounts we will take back control of roughly £350 million per week.  It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS.

The BBC also tells us…

The figure, used by Leave campaigners before the referendum, was “misleading”, the UK statistics watchdog later said.

Actually no he did not…he said ‘potentially misleading’ but only because he felt the rebate and funds the EU spends on UK projects should be made clearer….the gross figure is in fact correct as the above chart shows [in fact it would be £377 million for 2015 as it changes each year]…..not sure you could get all that on the side of a bus….

The use of the £350 million figure, which appears to be a gross figure which does not take into account the rebate or other flows from the EU to the UK public sector (or flows to non-public sector bodies), alongside the suggestion that this could be spent elsewhere. Without further explanation I consider these statements to be potentially misleading. Given the high level of public interest in this debate it is important that official statistics are used accurately , with important limitations or caveats clearly explained.

Boris, and not the BBC, is correct…we will take back control of the money.  Even the rebate is still under EU control.  It is essentially only given to us on a whim and can be removed pretty much on a whim as many in the EU want….

UK got out just in time! EU plots to SCRAP budget rebates to Brussels’ contributors

Such limitations or caveats aren’t made clear by the BBC….but it does claim that the rebate shouldn’t count anyway as it doesn’t actually physically go to the EU…

The UK’s gross contribution was actually £361m, but – crucially – the rebate is removed before any money is sent to the EU.

Why does that make the slightest, never mind ‘crucial’, difference?…it is still money the EU would take off us but doesn’t purely because we have negotiated a rebate…one that can  be taken away at any time….and let’s not forget the Remainers would like to hand it back anyway. The EU still controls that money in effect….it’s called a ‘rebate’ for a reason.

The seemingly left-leaning ‘Fullfact’ site tells us...

£350 million is what we would pay to the EU budget, without the rebate.

Who am I to argue with such an august body?

And Fraser Nelson says…

Isn’t he supposed to be hanging his head in shame about that claim on the side of a bus? Not a bit of it: he’s repeating his (accurate) point that Britain will be ‘taking back control’ of the weekly £350 million sent to the EU. And yes, it’s a lesser sum once you factor in EU spending on Britain but the word ‘control’ is crucial.

As for the money the EU kindly spends in the UK the EU decides how to spend it and demands we thank them for doing so.  The BBC, whilst telling us Boris is lying and that we don’t send the EU £350 million per week because much of the money is spent on UK projects, then tells us, when it wants to promote the EU and encourage us to think how wonderful and generous it is, that the money it spends here is ‘EU money’….so on the one hand the BBC claims we don’t get the money back Boris claims we do because the EU spends it here and then the BBC tells us that it is EU money when it suits the BBC’s pro-EU agenda….all that deliberately misleads people as to the real point of the Leave claims…that this is about taking back control of how that money is spent not about the exact amounts of the contribution.

The BBC is trying hard not to discuss that real issue and instead tells a very obvious lie, one of huge proportions that the Leave camp should go straight to Ofcom about bypassing what we all know will be a wilfully hopeless response from the BBC complaints office [lol]

The BBC fails to note some other interesting comments in the article…..

There were lifelong Eurosceptics who decided at the last monet to remain; and a great many, in my view, whose heart said leave, but whose resolve was finally shaken by the warnungs of the Government, the BBC, Barack Obama, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the CBI, every major oltical party and much of the media.

Unemployment is at record lows, and manufacturing is booming “in spite of Brexit”, as the BBC would put it. (Have you noticed that any good news is always “in site of Brexit”?)

And always odd how Putin and the Russians perhaps interfering in US politics [what’s new?] is a BBC hot topic and yet Obama interfering in British politics is entirely uncontroversial.

Here we go, a new Open Thread on which to detail the egregious bias of the State Broadcaster.

R4 has been treating us to its interpretation of why we feel the need to identify as ‘English’.  The clue to the BBC’s narrative, and it’ll be no surprise to those who already familiar with the BBC’s attitude towards English and British identity, is in the title…‘The English Fix’.   It’s just a subtle version of ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’ type attack on those who don’t think of themselves as stateless citizens of the world.  Apparently ‘Englishness’ is only invoked in times of emergency, real or imagined…and naturally, again no surprise to find the BBC had an endgame, this was used as just another BBC attack on Brexit. The last episode tells us there is nothing wrong with the EU, any problems we now mistakenly blame on Brussels will still be with us and we will have to find someone else to blame them on.

The whole series was threaded through with almost subliminal anti-Brexit, anti-nationalism, messages… naturally all this Brexiteering and nationalism is merely nostalgic pining for a lost golden age that never really existed and an angry howl against progress and modern life. We heard pro-nationalists aplenty but who had the final say and whose word was treated as the authoritative voice?  The anti-nationalist voices that were brought on to ‘discuss’ what had been said and then give us their conclusions about the ‘dangers of popular patriotism’  The messages slipped into the programme based upon Orwell gives us another clue as it tried to build a comparison between the Germans blitzing London and those who want Brexit….the Germans were only normal folk ‘serving their country’….look how easy it is to slip from that into being a Nazi!

We of course, the BBC tells us, need more international interaction and cooperation rather than narrow nationalism [which will be the inevitable result of Brexit!?…..er…as Britain throws open its doors to the world for trade and cooperation] and English identity must be made inclusive [ie watered down and replaced by immigrant culture and values]….we also heard that many people might think of this nationalism as racist, and indeed, the BBC told us, some is racist.

Immigration is not a burden, the Poles are not a ‘horde’ invading Britain…and you know what…refugee Poles saved us in WWII…..hmmm….didn’t we in fact go to war in order to try and help the Poles rather than the other way around?

Brexit is all about prejudice, hatred and ‘othering’ immigrants…and all based upon invented, imaginary threats and hubris….the final word?…Pride comes before a fall.   Oh right…the BBC sanctimoniously telling us pride in country will ruin us.  Brexit is going to fail then?

Trust the BBC to spin a fantasy of lies and contempt in a programme ostensibly about one thing but really designed to send a message. You voted for Brexit?  You’re a Nazi.

Saw this trail in the Telegraph…

Fake news is about more than just elections: it can topple banks, sink firms, and ruin lives

….not just fake news….real news can sink banks and ruin lives if revealed injudiciously and without regrd to the consequences.

Ten years ago the once BBC’s Robert Peston’s desire for a scoop caused a run on RSB and banking confidence to fail thus triggering the banking crisis in the UK.  He reported that the Bank of England was loaning RSB emergency funding despite knowing that this might cause panic in the markets and on the high street as people banking there would be alarmed and would then head to the bank to withdraw their money as indeed happened.

The BBC’s Robert Peston was accused of helping to trigger the tumultuous fall in UK bank shares on Tuesday by breaking news of a private meeting between the Chancellor and bank bosses.

Viewers and listeners awoke to hear the Corporation’s business editor reveal that three of Britain’s biggest banks  –  Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB  –  had asked Alistair Darling for billions of pounds in funding.

But the report by Mr Peston  –  rapidly becoming known as the man who moves markets  –  set off a fresh bout of chaos in the City, with shares in RBS plummeting by almost 40 per cent, wiping around £10billion off the bank’s value.

City traders were angered by his report, which unleashed renewed market turmoil, and there was astonishment at the Treasury and fury within Government that news of the secret meeting had been given to Mr Peston.

Amid speculation over precisely who ‘leaked’ what to the BBC man, one political website described him as a ‘market menace’.

Mr Peston revealed details of the meeting  –  clearly highly sensitive at a time of unprecedented City jitters  –  on air and on his BBC blog early on Tuesday morning.

Under heavy selling pressure, shares in all three banks fell after Mr Peston’s report, fuelling fears over the health of Britain’s banking system.

Peston denies it all...his defence is that he was reporting the truth and would do so regardless of the consequences….

He told the Treasury select committee he had acted responsibly in reporting the facts, which were from multiple sources and had been checked.

Mr Peston said he had never held off from reporting a story he knew to be true to serve a wider interest.

However he did admit elsewhere that his reporting caused a meltdown…

Three years later, in another article, Mr Peston admitted: ‘In my naivety, I had thought I was merely doing an impartial reporter’s job of describing Government thinking, based on conversations with ministers and officials in Downing Street, the Foreign Office and the Treasury.

‘But this was one of the rare occasions when a news story became a political event in its own right.

‘Markets went crazy, share prices went through the roof, enjoying their biggest-ever one day rise.

‘The reverberations were felt in bond markets and foreign exchanges  –  and caused the occupants of numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street to lose their bearings.’

What was the purpose of Peston’s revelation?  It served no good purpose other than to provide him with a scoop.  Revealing the emergency funding would cause only harm and it did.

Peston’s defence of reporting the truth doesn;t ring true because he also revealed in his book that he knew the economy was on the rocks and that a crash was coming but he didn’t report that…he deliberately held it back.

“We are from Allah and to Allah we shall return. I am informing all brave Muslims of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. And whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr, Allah Willing. Meanwhile if someone has access to the author of the book but is incapable of carrying out the execution, he should inform the people so that [Rushdie] is punished for his actions. Rouhollah al-Mousavi al-Khomeini.”

The BBC continues to promote the musical career of a Muslim man who said he would kill Salman Rushdie for blaspheming about Islam.

5 Live interviewed Yusuf Islam [14:15 ish], aka Cat Steven, and rigorously challenged him on his previous statements about Salman Rushdie.  LOL…don’t be silly…never going to happen.  Nihal expressed delight about him…‘Oh what a guy!’ never mind that Nihal usually has the biggest chip on his shoulder about alleged racism or anything that he thinks is a generalisation which he will challenge with an abrupt put-down more often than not.  But a guy who wants to kill people who blaspheme about his ideology?  He apparently gets the thumbs up from Nihal.  Oh what a guy Nihal is.

Nihal raised the subject of Islam’s statements but did so in a way that managed not to mention ‘killing’,  saying only that Islam had not exactly been ‘on the frontfoot on condemning the fatwah‘….we weren’t told what the fatwah commanded….see above….mass murder of anyone involved in production and sale of Rushdie’s book.

Islam denied he agreed with the fatwah and said he had been ‘entrapped’ in the situation and that the media had invented stories about him…he told us that he never said ‘kill Rushdie’….a lie he has used consistently…

I never called for the death of Salman Rushdie; nor backed the Fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini—and still don’t.

This was accepted by Nihal and co who then went on their merry way laughing and joking with Islam.  Trouble is Islam was lying through his teeth as even the slightest research by Nihal and Co would have shown had they bothered to do it.  One can only imagine they just didn’t want to do it…or worse they knew and decided to allow Islam to cover up his Islamic extremist views.

On 21 February 1989, Yusuf Islam addressed students at Kingston University in London about his conversion to Islam and was asked about the controversy in the Muslim world and the fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie’s execution. He replied, “He must be killed. The Qur’an makes it clear – if someone defames the prophet, then he must die.”

Two months later, Yusuf Islam appeared on a British television programme, BBC’s Hypotheticals, an occasional broadcast featuring a panel of notable guests to explore a hypothetical situation with moral, ethical and/or political dilemmas. In the episode (“A Satanic Scenario”), Islam had an exchange about the issue with the moderator and Queens Counsel Geoffrey Robertson.^[5][6] Islam would later clarify the exchanges as “stupid and offensive jokes” made “in bad taste”, but “part of a well-known British national trait … dry humour on my part.”^[1]

Robertson: You don’t think that this man deserves to die?
Y. Islam: Who, Salman Rushdie?
Robertson: Yes.
Y. Islam: Yes, yes.
Robertson: And do you have a duty to be his executioner?
Y. Islam: Uh, no, not necessarily, unless we were in an Islamic state and I was ordered by a judge or by the authority to carry out such an act – perhaps, yes.
[Some minutes later, Robertson on the subject of a protest where an effigy of the author is to be burned]
Robertson: Would you be part of that protest, Yusuf Islam, would you go to a demonstration where you knew that an effigy was going to be burned?
Y. Islam: I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing.

The New York Times also reports this statement from the programme: ‘[If Rushdie turned up at my doorstep looking for help] I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I’d try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is.’