The BBC just keeps on giving…..anything to do with Trump sets them off on a furious tirade of nonsense and abuse never mind the facts…

Trumplomacy: Bromance with an autocrat

When I was based in Egypt during the 1990s, we regularly got human rights reports about dreadful abuses in military prisons.

What particularly sticks in my mind, though, is a report on what happened in police stations: even people picked up for petty crimes were tortured.

Egypt’s security state has always been ruthless, but in those days the brutality was more under the surface.

Under George W Bush the administration began to question the wisdom of seeking stability at the expense of democracy.

Barack Obama went further. He rolled with the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring, then shunned the strongman, Army General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, who took power in the debris of its aftermath.

The brutality had risen to the surface: Sisi oversaw a vicious security operation that killed hundreds of protesters in the streets. He has since jailed tens of thousands of his opponents.

But he has also cracked down on Islamist terrorism, and that is the language the Trump administration speaks.

So President Sisi has been rehabilitated, validated by a visit to the [Trump] White House.

Is this Washington reverting to the comfort zone of supporting Arab autocrats, in a time of great instability?

Yes.

Ah Trump the friend of brutal autocrats…and Putin….and he wants to crack down on Islamic terrorism…and the BBC doesn’t?

Hmmm…OK…but….also from the BBC…..’Pope Francis will travel to Egypt later this month. In a statement, the Vatican said the Pope had accepted an invitation from President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’…..Can there be two al-Sisi’s running Egypt…the badass chumming it up with Trump and the angelic one meeting his Popishness?

Dialogue marks faiths’ response to the Westminster attacks

Following the recent attack in Westminster, the temptation to increase tensions between Christianity and Islam was rejected almost immediately.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, the Chief Rabbi and two British imams gathered on Westminster’s North Green, embodying interfaith unity in the shadow of a horrifying attack.

“We are each drawn from the historic Abrahamic faiths,” said Archbishop Justin Welby, “faiths that teach the primacy of love and compassion over antagonism. We have come together to push for a more peaceful future.”

It was an immediate effort to reject the narrative that Khalid Masood was an agent of Islam at war with the Christian West. [Good luck with that]

The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, will embark upon a more adventurous pilgrimage. He will take four British imams to meet with Pope Francis at the Vatican, also on Wednesday. The BBC has been invited to travel with the cardinal’s party.

“Pope Francis is committed to engagement,” the cardinal says. “When he was archbishop of Buenos Aires, he repeatedly visited mosques and engaged with the Muslim community. And his willingness to welcome our British imams is a further sign that he regards interfaith dialogue as being of the utmost importance.”

To further emphasise this commitment, it has just been announced that Pope Francis will travel to Egypt later this month. In a statement, the Vatican said the Pope had accepted an invitation from President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Roman Catholic bishops, the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and the grand imam of Cairo’s Al-Azhar mosque.

Oh hang on…one last BBC jibe at Trump as the report ends…

But by continuing the dialogue, these faith leaders are sending a clear message to the communities they serve: that faith without works is dead and that dialogue must always trump conflict.

Is this an example of ‘alternate facts’…one set for the Pope and one for Trump?  Good old truthful, unbiased and honest BBC.

Illegal incursion into #British #Gibraltar Territorial Waters by Spanish Navy patrol ship Infanta Cristina this afternoon. #BGTW pic.twitter.com/IkYadi8XNn

— HM Govt of Gibraltar (@GibraltarGov) April 4, 2017

The BBC has certain narratives that it promotes….a couple of recent ones being that Britain is a nastier more racist place #DuetoBrexit and that Michael Howard [not PM] was a deluded fool for referencing the Falklands and the resolve Thatcher showed in standing up to military aggression.  In order to promote those narratives the BBC has of course got to suppress the truth and any news that might undermine the themes so lovingly created by the BBC, and it is ‘The BBC’, the message about what line to take must come from the Head of News and probably approved by Lord Hall Hall himself.

The attack on the Iranian Kurd was heavily promoted by the BBC as a racist attack and instantly associated with Brexit and it was the leading story on the news bulletins all day…however a stabbing of a black man by two other black men just streets away in Croydon from the ‘racist’ attack has all but been ignored by the BBC despite the fact that the stabbed man died and the police announced yesterday that they were launching a murder enquiry…the news of which didn’t even make it to the BBC’s London page….the only reference I can find is on their ‘updates’ page that in itself is only a link to a newspaper report…

Quite astonishing how the BBC ignores this attack….especially when there is so much concern about black on black murder and knife crime.  Why do they ignore it?  Because to report it would undermine its story of a peaceful community torn apart by racist whites…and never mind that the BBC has wiped from its pages its only mention that the police were looking for some black suspects in relation to the attack on the asylum seeker…the BBC does not even publish pictures of the white defendants in the case in its latest report…again why not?  Could it be because they would then have to keep publishing the photos of the black suspects…again undermining the white racists narrative?

I guess black lives and other ethnic minority lives only matter when they can be exploited for the BBC’s own political ends….the more asylum seekers who get attacked the better…..blame Brexit and the racist whites.

Similarly why has the BBC not mentioned that a British warship has had to see off a Spanish gunboat from Gibraltan waters?  Again is the BBC trying to keep up the illusion that this is not about sovereignty and that Spain has no serious intent to take over Gibraltar one way or another?  Sky reports….

Spanish gunship in illegal incursion into UK waters off Gibraltar

A Spanish gunship has made an illegal incursion into British waters off Gibraltar amid rising Brexit tensions over the territory.

The Gibraltan government said the ship entered territorial waters on Tuesday.

How can the BBC not report that when Gibraltar and Spanish imperialism is making the headlines right now?…also considering that this has happened several times this year already?  The BBC is trying to keep up the pretence that it is Britain and its trigger happy politicians like Howard that are the problem whilst the peace-loving Spanish are the victims.

Brexit and Apocalypse in the same BBC sentence…who’d have thought….balance and impartiality…who’d have thought?

Hotels, restaurants and tourism may face staff shortages

The hospitality sector raises fears of potential economic damage if EU immigration is heavily restricted.

Dover delays: Could they become the norm?

Port of Dover boss warns backlog of HGVs could become normal in the absence of free movement of goods.

It seems some people think the BBC is above scrutiny and accountability…enough is enough we hear….leave the BBC alone!

Nick Robinson: the referendum is over – now the BBC must fight a new Brexit bias

“Many people with strong views find it hard to accept that on the BBC they will often hear people they disagree with saying things they don’t like”

Welcome to another week of moaning about the BBC. “Stop being so pessimistic. Stop talking the country down. Stop ignoring the will of the people.”

A week in which the stopwatches and calculators are out, as first one side, then the other, time our interviews and add up the number of Remainers and Leavers and so-called optimists and pessimists we invite on air.

Robinson must be responding, been sent out to respond, to News Watch’s detailed take-down of the BBC’s Brexit coverage in which it was found to favour the Remain camp to a remarkable extent….BBC Business News coverage of Brexit ‘continues Project Fear’

A report by News-watch into the BBC’s coverage on Brexit covering the six month period after the referendum vote  has found  overwhelmingly negativity about Britain leaving the EU – breaching the Corporations rules on impartiality.

The report into the BBC flagship Today programme on Radio 4 found that of the 366 guest speakers who appeared in the Business News segment, 192 of them (52.5%) were negative about the impact of the vote and only 60 (16.3%) expressed opinions which were pro-Brexit or saw the post-referendum economic outlook as positive. There were 114 (31%) neutral contributions.

That there were three times more anti-Brexit speakers than pro-Brexit ones invited by the BBC to participate in the prestigious slot breaks its charter requirements to be impartial.

Robinson continues…

The referendum is over. The duty we broadcasters had to “broadly balance” the views of the two sides is at an end. Why? Because there are no longer two sides, two campaigns, two rival sets of spokespeople reading out those focus-grouped slogans.

The BBC’s job is not to look over its shoulder wondering whether a report, interview or discussion will provoke letters of complaint or a tide of tweets from Remainers or Leavers – who, like fighters who emerge after months of hiding in a bush, seem not to accept that the war is over.

That may come as a surprise to many who have taken a close look at the BBC’s referendum coverage….by no means was it balanced or impartial…it was profoundly pro-Remain, attacking the Leave statements with relentless vigour and forensic scrutiny whilst being very reluctant to challenge the highly alarmist and exaggerated claims made by the Remain camp as part of their Project Fear conducting only the most casual of ‘Reality Checks’ that were more fantasyland than reality.

What does Robinson mean by ‘balanced’?  He doesn’t define it.  All everyone expects is that each side gets a fair chance to state their case…maybe they did and maybe they didn’t on the BBC, but certainly when it came to the analysis it was guns out for the Leave campaign.

The BBC now does still have a continual duty to be balanced, meaning impartial, accurate and honest, but once again that is not the case.  What we are served up with is a relentless diet of doom and gloom about Brexit, everything is a problem and things are only going to get worse.  Jon Pienaar regailed us with his fake news about the ‘extravagant promises’ made by the Leave campaign [and er what were they?…They don’t exist]. Even this morning Mishal Husain casually suggested that Lloyds was practically packing its bags and setting off for the Continent despite the fact that Lloyds has stated unequivocably that London will remain its main financial centre…..“London will remain the major financial centre for Europe. It’s certainly going to remain the major financial centre for Lloyd’s.”….‘Lloyd’s will always be centred in London and that is not about to change.’…’The decision to leave the EU has no impact on Lloyd’s financial strength, which remains incredibly strong, with Fitch and A.M. Best ratings of AA- and A. S&P also affirmed Lloyd’s A+ rating on the same week as the referendum vote.’  Goldman Sachs may move several hundred jobs to the EU but it has 6000 here in the UK and similarly insists London remains central to its plans….“Whatever the outcome [of the Brexit talks], London will remain for us a very significant regional hub and a significant global hub. London will remain a very significant important centre.”

Oh and JP Morgan?…‘The head of JP Morgan has admitted he will not move many jobs out of Britain in the next two years as a result of Brexit, in a U-turn on his pre-referendum warning that a vote to leave the European Union could mean as many as 4,000 jobs moving across the Channel.  Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of the Wall Street giant, said that the bank will need to obtain licences and permissions to operate across the EU, but that it can still service European clients from the UK.  “This does not entail moving many people in the next two years,” he said in a letter to the US investment bank’s shareholders.  Rather than seeing Britain as a basket case for leaving the EU, Mr Dimon now fears that if the EU fails to address its own problems then the union could break up, with much more serious economic consequences.’

Robinson has a nerve to say this…‘like fighters who emerge after months of hiding in a bush, seem not to accept that the war is over.’…when the BBC itself is promoting the idea that the referendum is not in fact over and instead of working to unite Britain and encourage a can-do attitude it collaborates with the Remain campaign to undermine Brexit…which can only in the end be the worst of all possible worlds as even if we were to return to the EU fold it would be on hugely disdvantageous terms….and it peddles the EU narrative on everything…such as Gibraltar.

The war continues and the BBC aids and abets giving plenty of airtime to the Remainers to make their own films attacking Brexit as if there was still a choice and Brexit can be reversed…

Robinson ends with an arrogant jibe…as usual it’s the other peoples’ problem…they just don’t undertstand…

We must, of course, ensure that we display no bias. The bias I worry about most is the bias against understanding. 

We understand all too well…you are biased and you don’t want to answer for that bias preferring instead to act the victim and demand no one dare challenge you…sounds a familiar tactic beloved of the Muslim community….let’s hope you aren’t radicalised and start force feeding everyone the Guardian…oh, too late.

The BBC’s coverage of the Gibraltar business is sadly of a standard and form we have long come to expect as the BBC sides with the EU and Spain and blames Britain for the ruckus….and Michael Howard should be ignored because he is a former PM [Yep, I seem to have promoted Howard from leader of the Tory Party] who isn’t in government anymore….so why does the BBC give headline status to the other PM has-beens, Blair and Major?  Could it be because they say all the right things about the EU and Brexit, all the things the BBC likes to hear?

The BBC has been insisting all day that sovereignty is not in question…but of course it is...back in June 2016 this was said…

Britain rejects Spain’s talk of joint sovereignty for Gibraltar

In an interview on Friday morning, Spain’s acting foreign minister, José Manuel García-Margallo, said the referendum result had significantly advanced the prospect of a Spanish flag flying on the rock of Gibraltar.

“I hope the formula of co-sovereignty – to be clear, the Spanish flag on the rock – is much closer than before.”

Absolutely clear what the Spanish want, and what the EU terms give them now…a right to determine Gibraltar’s future.  What is remarkable is that the BBC does not think the EU’s interference is in anyway remarkable…in effect they are annexing Gibraltar on behalf of Spain.  Campbell this morning had a phone-in entitled ‘Gibraltar…should we give it back?’   A pretty leading way of introducing the subject compounded by a typical Campbell comment ‘You’re future is with the EU…you voted to stay’...and ‘Would it really be so bad if you were Spanish?’…..how about a discussion about Spain’s colonial possessions or Catalonia or indeed the borders of Europe as they constantly change? How about East Germany being handed back to Russia?  Or indeed, Spain to the Moors?

Islamic State: “We Will Take Spain Back”

And not just IS that has such desires to reclaim Spain for the Muslims…

“The loss of Andalusia is like losing part of my body,” H.R.H. Prince Turki al-Faisal told me.

I had asked him what the loss of Andalusia meant to him as an Arab. The son of King Faisal, widely celebrated in the Muslim world, Prince Turki heads The King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s preeminent think tank, and has been Saudi ambassador to the U.S. and the U.K.

Astonishing how the BBC is so keen to hand over British territory and people to other countries as it continues to work to break up Britain and sell us out to the EU.

And what of Michael Howard’s remarks?…according to the BBC and the Guardian he suggests we must go to war with Spain…

The Guardian…

Theresa May would go to war to protect Gibraltar, Michael Howard says

The BBC…

Lord Howard raised the spectre of military action, saying that 35 years ago, “another woman prime minister sent a taskforce halfway across the world to protect another small group of British people against another Spanish-speaking country.

Trouble is Howard didn’t suggest we engage in a bit of gunboat diplomacy as the BBC tells us he did…all he said was that May should show the same resolve Thatcher did and stand her ground.  He said nothing about bombing Madrid….just more BBC fake news….

So the BBC plasters an attack on an asylum seeker in Croydon all over the news relentlessly today…and yet…not a peep about an actual murder today… in Croydon…by two black men….

Croydon murder: Bjorn Brown, 23, dies in hospital after being stabbed repeatedly in south London street

A murder probe has been launched after a young man who was repeatedly stabbed in a south London street died in hospital.

Bjorn Brown, 23, was attacked by two men in Thornton Heath, Croydon, on Wednesday evening, police said.

He was stabbed repeatedly in Kelling Gardens and attempted to cycle away from the scene of the attack before he collapsed.

The first suspect is described as a black man, of a heavy build and approximately 5ft 6ins tall. He wore a dark “puffa” style jacket and dark trousers.

The second suspect is described as a black man, of a slim or average build and approximately 5ft 5ins tall. He also wore a dark “puffa” style jacket and dark trousers.

Was Bjorn Brown white?  And if so why have the police not come out instantly and said this may be a racist attack?  Where is the BBC report on the frontpage?

Whatever the colour of the victim why no BBC mammoth coverage?  I will be listening to Nolan tonight as he discusses ‘Black’ knife crime and the sus laws.

No, just checking…story still not on BBC…they do have this though, breaking news...hold the frontpage…..

Two teenage boys have been arrested on suspicion of trespassing on a protected site after a barrier was climbed at the Palace of Westminster.

The Metropolitan Police said no access was gained to any Parliament building and the incident lasted approximately 30 seconds.

When Croydon and crime is in the headlines right now why is the stabbing and murder not immediately a priority?  Are the BBC trying not to distract from the ‘racist’ attack angle of the other story?

Here’s the Met Police news time line...which the BBC obviously reads…still, I suppose two out of three stories ain’t bad……..just the murder the BBC isn’t interested in…..

Two youths arrested on suspicion of trespass at the Palace of Westminster

News   •   Apr 03, 2017 21:38 BST

The incident is not being treated as terrorist-related.

Murder investigation launched in Thornton Heath

News   •   Apr 03, 2017 20:43 BST

Police have named the deceased as 23-year-old Bjorn Brown of South Norwood, Croydon.

LATEST: Attack on young asylum seeker in Croydon investigation

News   •   Apr 03, 2017 19:24 BST

​Detectives investigating an assault in Croydon on Friday 31 March, which is being treated as a suspected hate crime.

Oh and did we hear about this assault at another bus stop in London two days ago all over the BBC?

Appeal following assault in Islington

Detectives from the Met’s Roads and Transport Policing Command are appealing for information following an assault at a bus stop in Islington.

The offence occurred on Tuesday, 28 March at 15.30hrs. The victim, a 44-year-old man, was boarding a Route 43 bus on Upper Street, Islington N1, near to the council offices.

As he did so, another male who was about to board the bus suddenly punched him in the face. The victim was then thrown on to the pavement before being further assaulted by the suspect. He then walked off in the direction of the Angel.

The suspect is described as a black man, aged about 25-35 years and of athletic build.

 

The BBC obviously doesn’t want to be name checked as an ‘Uncle Tom’ (©Sadiq Khan) for helping the Rozzers catch some boyz in the hood…..after looking at David’s earlier post I checked the BBC’s latest on the 17 year old lad beaten up by ‘racists’ in Croydon and the BBC doesn’t seem totally keen to help the police with their enquiries…no photo of the people the police hope to speak to in relation to this attack on their latest frontpage report...there is a photo of the bus stop and of some grafitti saying ‘refugees welcome’….but no indication that some of the attackers may not be KKK members…

The photo above was from the BBC site…but buried on the London page…and now, even that has gone missing from that page as far as I can see, or not see….to see it you’d need to know it was archived somewhere and have the link already.

The Guardian has a nice picture of the courthouse but not of any suspects…

Would like to know where the police got the information that this was a racist attack and that the boy was asked where he came from…was it from his two friends?  Hardly going to be the most reliable source……have to say the victim doesn’t himself look as if he really is the quiet studious type who stayed out of trouble that the Guardian suggests…

You have to ask what was really said to start the fight…did he in fact start it, did he slag off one of the girls and it all kicked off, did he say something about Britain and the British, did he say something about the black youths?

You’ve got to think there is more to this than is coming out right now…but as David said the BBC is all over it and eager to press the ‘racist’ angle….Nolan, encouraging the idea of ‘racist Britain’ last night had some immigrant on telling his tale of woe…found him in Sheffield I think…apparently a car drove past him and splashed him….gotta say welcome to the real world.  Then we had the usual immigration charity on to tell us how racist Britain is especially since Brexit.

All smacks of the last time the BBC made up allegations that an attack was almost certainly racist…

David Keighley’s BBC Watch: ‘Race hate murder’ linked to Brexit was just fake news

This dates back to the death last August 31 of a well-liked Polish man, ‘Arek’ Jozwik, after a late night fracas in a pizza parlour in Harlow. This sent the BBC news gathering operation – which then as now was hell-bent on a mission to undermine Brexit – into overdrive.

BBC1 man-on-the spot Daniel Sandford alleged most prominently in his report that the crime – prematurely said by him to be a ‘murder’ – was being investigated as a frenzied attack by a gang of six local youths triggered by race hate stirred up by the referendum vote.

And later that evening, on BBC2’s Newsnight, correspondent John Sweeney’s outro to his feature about the death was a quote from a friend of Mr Jozwik, who declared that Nigel Farage had ‘blood on his hands’.

Fast forward to the present. It has since emerged that Mr Jozwik’s death was not murder at all. Nor, say the police, was race hate involved, and nor was the crime committed by a frenzied gang of race hating youths.

Instead, a sole 15-year-old youth has been charged with manslaughter.

This time the police have charged one person with racially motivated GBH…but as above, it will be interesting to see what the real facts are and what really started the fight.

Oh yes…..Thanks to Mice Height for this…maybe a row over cigarettes…

Just confirming the above here… pic.twitter.com/Fud1lnJtHI

— UK Rants: Waiting on a statue of Thatcher (@uk_rants) April 3, 2017

One of the BBC’s most active areas is pushing the left wing narrative that the evil uncaring Conservative government is doing all it can to make the poor in our society even poorer. So when a poverty hustling propaganda group such as The Child Poverty Group come out with a new (coughs) “study” that shows hundreds of thousands of little waifs are being driven into poverty by Conservative Policy then you can se sure the BBC will be to the fore in pushing it. The BBC are on a mission – to blacken the Government and advance left wing narrative uber alles.

Acts of violence against ANY person are to be condemned without reservation. However the BBC went into overdrive when a young “Asylum seeker” was brutally attacked by a gang a few days ago. At one point this led their UK news agenda. The comrades were doing all they could to slyly suggest that this defenceless young man was attacked by white supremacists on a way to a Brexiteer meeting.

Today, the Police have realised an image of some of the suspects….bit awkward, eh?

Here you go, a new Open Thread on which to detail the egregious bias of the BBC!

I was interested to hear the BBC announce on the news this morning that many companies and banks were ‘deserting’ the Square Mile #DuetoBrexit.  Well some are setting up subsiduaries on the Continent but like Lloyds are not actually abandoning London which many think will remain the world’s financial centre….Lloyds only generating 11% of its profit from Europe.

Jenni Murray is being hounded for her opinions on Transgender people…apparently some students want to no-platform her for her views….much as the BBC no-platformed climate change sceptics…speaking of which…as the BBC pours cold water onto Brexit, we have take another look at some BBC concerns about the reliability of scientifc research…..note climate change is not mentioned…from 2014….

Everything We Know Is Wrong

Every day the newspapers carry stories of new scientific findings. There are 15 million scientists worldwide all trying to get their research published. But a disturbing fact appears if you look closely: as time goes by, many scientific findings seem to become less true than we thought. It’s called the “decline effect” – and some findings even dwindle away to zero.

A highly influential paper by Dr John Ioannidis at Stanford University called “Why most published research findings are false” argues that fewer than half of scientific papers can be believed, and that the hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true. He even showed that of the 49 most highly cited medical papers, only 34 had been retested and of them 41 per cent had been convincingly shown to be wrong. And yet they were still being cited.

Again and again, researchers are finding the same things, whether it’s with observational studies, or even the “gold standard” Randomised Controlled Studies, whether it’s medicine or economics. Nobody bothers to try to replicate most studies, and when they do try, the majority of findings don’t stack up. The awkward truth is that, taken as a whole, the scientific literature is full of falsehoods.

Jolyon Jenkins reports on the factors that lie behind this. How researchers who are obliged for career reasons to produce studies that have “impact”; of small teams who produce headline-grabbing studies that are too statistically underpowered to produce meaningful results; of the way that scientists are under pressure to spin their findings and pretend that things they discovered by chance are what they were looking for in the first place. It’s not exactly fraud, but it’s not completely honest either. And he reports on new initiatives to go through the literature systematically trying to reproduce published findings, and of the bitter and personalised battles that can occur as a result.

What?  Relatively few scientific papers are tested and of those that are 41% were convincingly shown to be wrong and yet they kept being cited in journals and presumably the media.

Scientists spin results to grab headlines and for career reasons, as well as no doubt due to pressure from other scientists who already hold such opinions…such as string theory…

In 2008 Physicist Lee Smolin’s book ‘The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science and What Comes Next’ was published.

What he had to say about the way science worked and how ideas and theories were produced and then supported regardless of reality was a stinging rebuke to those people who jump on a bandwagon and base their career and funding on the ‘truth’ of that idea….if the idea is discredited so are they, and the funding dries up…..

Here is what he says about String Theory and its proponents….

‘….with a cry of joy, most of these scientists seized on string theory as the answer. But their enthusiasm was such that they came to think not that it might be the answer, but that it must be. They formed themselves into a cult. Dissenters and apostates were not just scorned, they were denied posts in universities. Einstein the thinker could not now get a job in any leading physics department. For any young physicist, it was easiest simply to suppress one‘s doubts and go with the stringies.‘

Is this limited to medical science and string theory or is it widespread across science…such as in the climate change community?…I think we know the answer to that…one reason they hate sceptics asking questions, the answer to which might prove embarrassing….still its good that the BBC’s finest, english graduate Roger Harrabin, has decided he knows better than even scientifically educated sceptics and has decided that they should be no-platformed.