Category Archives: BBC bias

The BBC narrative on events in the Middle East has always been that Britain, and actions Britain has taken over the last century, have been to blame for events today….this narrative takes on more urgency for the BBC as the refugees flee the Middle East and head for Europe…the BBC needs to pin the blame for the war in Syria on Britain in order to induce guilt about the plight of the refugees and make them our responsibility…after all we ‘carved up the Middle East’ in a secret agreement with the French, didn’t we?  We’ve looked at this several times on this site, just two days ago the latest example, and the BBC’s remarkable ability to ignore the actual facts and make up their own account of history to suit their own agenda.

The Sunday Times by coincidence has published a similar correction to the BBC narrative, a narrative that serves only to recruit terrorists for ISIS and other Islamic extremist groups…..which is ironic really as the BBC is always telling us we need to change the narrative in order prevent the radicalisation of ‘young British Muslims’ as the BBC always likes to describe them. In fact only this Saturday we had the finest and most senior BBC journos giving us the benefit of their analysis of world events and the likely way they will unfold in 2016…they told us that this was a battle of ideas, that we need to battle the narrative that makes those ‘young British Muslims’ act out their religious duty for real.  We also  heard that launching a war against ISIS would only serve to make Muslims think that once again Muslims were the victims and would result in more recruits for ISIS.   This of course is the favoured BBC narrative in its effort to stop military action….unfortunately it doesn’t make the slightest sense….though that didn’t stop Nicky Campbell in an interview with Michael Fallon(39 mins) telling us this would be seen as ‘yet another example of a war against Muslims’.

Firstly you cannot leave an apocalyptic religious cult intent on murdering their way across the world in power.  Second why would ‘young British Muslims’ think attacking ISIS was an attack on Muslims?  Isn’t another BBC narrative that ISIS is not ‘Islamic’ and has no relation to Islam, Jihaids are not ‘Muslims’ apparently….and no right thinking Muslim believes they are?  If they are not ‘Muslims’ how can attacking them be attacking ‘Islam’?  And anyway, if they are ‘Muslim’, and they are, why would it be wrong to attack them when they are quite clearly committing horrendous crimes across the world?  Why would ‘young British Muslims’ get angry about such a group’s demise?

Back to the Sunday Times and the BBC’s anti-British narrative…..here’s what the Times said about that ‘infamous carving up of the Middle East’ narrative  favoured by terrorists and the BBC….

ISIS proclaimed itself as the Islamic State caliphate with two propaganda videos, one of which was entitled ‘The End of Sykes-Picot’.….a gunman in  the video said ‘This is the so-called border of Sykes-Picot.  We don’t recognise it, and we will never recognise it……Inshallah we break other borders also but we start with this one Inshallah.’

The Sykes-Picot agreement is thus an integral part of ISIS’s philosophy of hatred and resentment…..‘feeding people’s own narratives of themselves as playthings of outsiders.’

However, ISIS’s Sykes-Picot narrative is a myth, as the historian Sean McMeekein has persuasively argued in his book, The Ottoman Endgame.

ISIS’s propaganda ‘bears little resemblance to the history on which it is ostensibly based.  The partition of the Ottoman empire was not settled bilaterally by Britain and France in 1916 but rather at a multinational conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1923’.  Neither Sykes nor Picot played a significant role at Lausanne where the dominant figure was Kemal Attaturk, the Turkish nationalist leader.

‘Even in 1916,’ McMeekin points out, ‘Sykes and Picot played second and third fiddle to Russian foreign minister Sergei Sazonov who was the real driving force.’

‘None of the most notorious post-Ottoman borders were drawn by Sykes and Picot…even the ones they did sketch out were jettisoned after the war.’

In short, the ISIS myth about the Sykes-Picot agreement might animate its followers profoundly, but historically it is simply bunk.

Simply bunk….the ISIS/BBC narrative,  simply bunk.  Dangerous bunk but bunk.

Alan Kurdi’s aunt: ‘My dead nephew’s picture saved thousands of lives’

Why do BBC journalists insist on changing the name of Aylan Kurdi to Alan Kurdi?  Are they trying desperately to make the name more familiar, less ‘alien’ to Brits so that we feel more empathy for the boy?  Does the BBC really think nobody feels any empathy and that they have to manipulate us by disrespecting and exploiting the death of a child in order to make us feel anything?

The BBC journo even changes the name when written by others as ‘Aylan’….

Peter Bouckaert, Emergencies Director of Human Rights Watch, who wrote a blog post on why he felt it was justified to share the picture. “But in this case, I thought it was really important to share this image of a drowned boy because two Alan Kurdis are drowning every day on this journey.”

Here is what Bouckaert wrote…

I thought long and hard before I retweeted the photo of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi.

Not the first time the BBC has tried to manipulate the truth in order to persuade its readers of something…as when BBC reporters altered the name of the father of a child killed in Gaza from Jihad to Jehad….and of course claimed that he was killed by Israeli bombs when the truth was he was killed by an Hamas rocket.

The Iraqi army retook Ramadi and is in the process of finishing off the ISIS die-hards whom you may think have not a chance in hell of winning Ramadi back…..unless you listen to the BBC which downplays the hard-won victory and sees only more war, destruction and of course refugees coming out of more such attacks on ISIS positions.  The BBC’s reports following the main battle seemed solely concerned with the suffering of the civilians rather than the extraordinary victory of the Iraqi army which the BBC has always written off as undisciplined and lacking moral and at odds with the Sunni tribes.

That has now all been turned on its head…the Iraq army defeated ISIS forces in the hardest form of combat, urban warfare, and they did it with the help of Sunni tribal militia…who the BBC now admits were present…

Over the weekend Iraqi troops and allied Sunni tribal fighters helped civilians to safer places in Ramadi.

Listening to the BBC report on FOOC you knew you were being ‘groomed’ to be expected to accept more refugees due to the war and that the plight of the civilians was so awful that they had no choice but to flee to Europe….only as an after thought did the Iraqi army’s victory get a word or two of modest praise for their achievement.

The BBC’s unwillingness to ring the bells is nothing new of course…..it has spent years attacking the British army and doing everything it could to prevent it doing its job by making the politicians run scared of casualties both ours and civilians….

A former Army commander says there is a “real risk” that Britain could lose the conflict in Afghanistan.

Col Stuart Tootal, writing in the Sunday Mirror, said a lack of political will could damage the military campaign against the Taleban.

Col Tootal said that if the conflict was lost “it will not be in places like Helmand, but in the corridors of power in cities like London and Washington.

“Counter-insurgency conflicts are rarely lost by the fighting troops, but in the arena of domestic public opinion when there is a lack of the political will to make the right commitment to see them through.”

Col Tootal said he believed the campaign in Afghanistan to be “winnable”.

But he added: “Mounting casualties and an incoherent and under-resourced strategy paint a pessimistic picture.

“It will take statesmanship to put extra troops, helicopters, equipment and proper development programmes in place, but the benefits are considerable.”

The politicians are lacking the will because they know they will be hung out to dry by the BBC….a BBC already licking its lips at the prospect of British troops being dragged through the courts once again due to ambulance chasing lawyers drumming up allegations of abuse from any Iraqi they could get to make the claims.

David Vance said it all way back in 2009…

It must be awful to be a UK military family listening to the BBC for news of the campaign in Afghanistan. Radio Taliban would be less depressing than the State Broadcaster. The meme concerning Afghanistan has now morphed into the same one that prevailed when we were in Iraq. The cause is hopeless, we cannot win, UK lives are being sacrificed for no reason, we must get out. It’s defeatism, of course, and it is something the BBC excels at promoting.

Nothing has changed…here’s the BBC today trying its best to paint an entirely negative picture of British airstrikes in Syria……Are UK bombs making a difference in Syria?

Despite the vote, the focus of British military action has continued to be on Iraq. The RAF’s much lauded brimstone missile has not yet even been fired over Syria.

The prime minister’s claim that the RAF would make a “meaningful difference” there has yet to be borne out.

It is worth recalling that David Cameron argued for Britain to join the Syria air strikes.

Before the parliamentary vote, David Cameron admitted the situation on the ground in Syria was “complex”.

But his assertion that there were about 70,000 Syrian opposition fighters, who did not belong to extremists groups, still seems fanciful.

Britain’s very limited involvement in Syria, along with its limited number of aircraft, still raises questions and doubts.

Is the UK really making a “meaningful difference”? Or was the vote on 2 December as much to do with politics as military effect?

Note the sneering tone and negative language.  The reporter asks if the Syria vote had a political element….he asks as if this was some sort of secret…and yet we always knew that the US was the main provider of airstrikes and that we would be providing very few but it was important to have that option and to stand alongside our allies especially as the Russians were getting more and more involved…..

David Cameron set out the “moral” and “security” case for bombing Isis in Syria in the Commons last week, saying it was morally unacceptable to leave the US, France and other allies to carry the burden. “If not now, when?” he asked MPs.

Cameron also stated that…

I’m not saying that we will solve this problem simply by crossing a line from Iraq into Syria.

“We’ll solve this problem if we have a political strategy, a diplomatic strategy, a humanitarian strategy.”

It is an irony that the BBC, which complains so bitterly about airstrikes happening, is now complaining that there aren’t enough of them.  It seems that the BBC is solely intent on creating negative news about the war and about the government.  Also an irony that it is the BBC et al who always say that bombing alone cannot defeat the likes of ISIS…..and now complain impatiently as Cameron pieces together a political, diplomatic and humanitarian strategy as well as the necessary intelligence to complement and guide the military action…after all getting all those ‘moderate’ rebels to unite won’t be a quick  nor easy task.

And let’s not forget...the UN sanctioned action against ISIS….

The resolution unanimously agreed at the UN security council on Friday gives us a compelling mandate to act – legally and morally.

I’m guessing the BBC must be desperately casting around for as much negativity as possible in light of the UN approval pulling the rug from under their usual anti-war rhetoric.

The BBC was shut down for a while by hackers.  You wouldn’t put it past them to have organised it themselves in order to generate an ‘OMG!!!  Where’s the BBC?  What am I going to do with my life without the brilliant BBC, I miss it so much!?’ reaction in the run up to charter renewal…however of course that is conspiracy central nonsense….it was hackers practising their dark arts as they prepared to go to war with the Islamic State, its websites and social media presence.

Have to say the hackers couldn’t actually have started in a better place if they wanted to attack a news service and website that produces endless streams of pro-Muslim terrorist narratives.  That would definitely be the BBC.

The Guardian reports…..

Activists who say their goal is to disrupt online propaganda by Islamic State have claimed responsibility for a cyber-attack on the BBC website.

The New Year’s Eve attack took down the iPlayer and other services for a few hours, according to Joe Lynam, the BBC’s business correspondent.

Lynam told BBC Breakfast that the technology correspondent, Rory Cellan-Jones, had received a tweet from a group calling itself New World Hacking (NWH), claiming responsibility for a distributed denial of service (DDoS). It bombarded the system with 600 gigabits a second of messages.

Lynam said: “Their ultimate goal, believe it or not, is not to attack the BBC but to go for Isis, the group which often calls itself Islamic State, and all their servers so they cannot spread propaganda from various different websites.

ISIS, the BBC, The BBC, ISIS.  Yeah, I can definitely see why they’d start with a dry run at the BBC.

If only we could see ourselves as others see us.

The Left has an everpresent and unfounded conviction that they, and their ideology, are the end of history.  They are wrong, that would be Islam über alles.  They make a desert and call it peace.

You can see the Left’s self-deceiving belief in action in the way that they report on the Republican Party as if it was toxic and the Democrats the Second Coming….a classic line illustrates that..‘When Donald Trump says something that I would consider insane’.…..that line says it all….there’s no analysis, no looking at the reasons for Trump’s comments…they’re just ‘insane’…why?   Because I, the lefty commentator, don’t agree with them!   For the Left there is no alternate way of looking at life, just through a soft left lense.

You can see it in the way they report on the ‘crazies’ who inhabit the internet with, shock horror, opinions of their own that don’t compute with the Left’s vision.  Such opinions should not, cannot, be allowed.  We’ve seen Tommy Robinson run out of town and climate sceptics derided and scorned before being silenced by the BBC, but it’s always interesting see the latest bit of railery against ‘unacceptable’ opinion and the demands for censorship that go with it.  The Internet and bloggers are of course a major annoyance for the entrenched self-interested opinion formers who used to dominate the airwaves and print.  No longer do they have a monopoly on information, no longer can they get away with disseminating one-sided propaganda without challenge, and more importantly no longer can they silence and cut out of the debate those who have other opinions who are able to voice them on the internet even as the likes of the BBC still block access to their own networks.

The funny thing is of course that they don’t ever see themselves in their critique of the Internet and its freeflowing opinions….for instance this from the Guardian…the description is one that fits, for example, the BBC, or the Guardian itself,  to a tee…

Is Facebook the enemy of truth and civic unity?

Every new technology threatens to kill off some revered institution. But in the waning months of 2015, more than a few smart and tech-savvy commentators began suggesting a radical hypothesis: that the rise of social media threatened to deliver a death blow to civic consensus and even to truth itself.

“The news brims with instantly produced ‘hot takes’ and a raft of fact-free assertions,” Farhad Manjoo observed in the New York Times. “The extremists of all stripes are ascendant, and just about everywhere you look, much of the internet is terrible.”

In the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum went so far as to demand that Mark Zuckerberg donate the entirety of his fortune to undo the damage Facebook has done to democracy. “If different versions of the truth appear in different online versions; if no one can agree upon what actually happened yesterday; if fake, manipulated or mendacious news websites are backed up by mobs of internet trolls; then conspiracy theories, whether of the far left or far right, will soon have the same weight as reality. Politicians who lie will be backed by a claque of supporters.”

The BBC, the enemy of truth and civic unity?

The BBC which refused to reveal the truth about Labour’s mass immigration plot, the BBC which refuses to challenge the ‘consensus’ on climate change, the BBC which has decided you are wrong about immigration and does all it can to persuade you to change your mind, propaganda not news, the BBC which supported the Labour narrative on the economy, the BBC which campaigns against all military action and puts our troops in danger, the BBC which is still fighting the Iraq war, the BBC which has joined forces in effect with Muslim terrorists in order to justify its own actions regarding the Iraq war, the BBC which believes Jews are legitimate targets in Europe, the BBC which supports terrorist organisations which seek to destroy Israel, the BBC which thinks ‘conservative’ Islam is no different to British values, the BBC which manages to find far more people who voice support for Europe than who support Brexit, the BBC which hates the nation state,  the BBC which seeks to destroy any sense of ‘British’ identity in order to create a mongrel nation where no-one ‘beloings’ so therefore, the BBC thinking goes, everybody belongs.  Shame the utopian dreamers of the BBC have no idea of human nature.

Democracy, free speech, British values and identity, national cohesion and a civil society, truth.

All things the BBC is the enemy of, not the Internet or Facebook.  Far from supporting and maintaining them the intolerantly ‘liberal’ BBC is the real enemy of truth and democracy and civil society.  The internet is the one thing that protects us from the power of the BBC, it gives us access to, and the ability to broadcast, vast amounts of information that before was jealously guarded by the likes of the BBC.  Knowledge is power. The BBC can no longer get away with with impunity with its one-sided world view that pumps out allegedly liberal, progressive views that are ironically defended by the illiberal and intolerant method of silencing the voices who don’t adhere to the orthodoxy.  And the BBC hates that fact.

The BBC, too arrogant, too conceited, too full of sacred illusions, too big not to fail.

H/T  Dave S in the comments….

The BBC’s a winner….

The 2015 Dishonest Reporter of the Year: Why the BBC Won

When we looked back over our 2015 archives, it was clear which media outlet deserved this year’s Dishonest Reporter Award. The honor goes to perennial contender, BBC News.

At any given time, the insidious nature of the BBC’s anti-Israel bias is its constant drip, drip effect. But this year, the pipes burst with some genuinely shocking moments of coverage that generated a huge amount of anger and offense.

Not one the BBC will be trumpeting from the rooftops as they normally do when they win an award for their journalism.

Well folks, welcome to 2016 and here is your starter open thread for 10! Detail the bias here.

Turkey’s Islamist president has been praising Hitler’s Germany and looking towards a political system that brought Hitler to power…from the Telegraph…

Turkey’s president says all he wants is same powers as Hitler

The BBC doesn’t bring you this disturbing news…or rather does but doesn’t prefering to downplay the rise and rise of the fascist Islamic fundamentalist leading Turkey by saying he doesn’t really understand English very well and doesn’t know anything about European history….well he’s speaking Turkish and seems pretty well versed in European history.

Wonder why the BBC would seek to hide this story away…you have to Google it to find a BBC report [on iPlayer] as it’s not openly on the website despite being a prominent story today.

The BBC reports:

French soldiers shoot car attacker outside mosque

The motive for the attack, which occurred between prayer sessions when many people were outside, is not known.

Police say the man drove twice at the soldiers. They shot him when he reversed his car and came at them again after the first attempt, AFP reports.

The driver is said to be 29 years old and from Lyon, an hour away from Valence.

Motive unknown…but importantly we know the attacker lives an hour from the scene of the crime.

However the motive might be guessed at if the BBC provided all the information…

France: Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar” tries to run down soldiers guarding mosque

One man of North African origin, aged about thirty years, was driving. He twice rushed his car at the soldiers, and according to several witnesses, was shouting “Allah akbar.”

The driver acted alone. “We have seen this person, he is of North African origin,” one of the imams of the mosque, Abdullah Dliouah, told AFP.

The BBC isn’t as bad as the Independent however.  The BBC merely leaves you guessing and asuming this was an attack on the mosque…the Independent claims it was one…despite not providing any further evidence of this in the actual article….

France mosque attack: Soldiers open fire on car ‘attempting to ram mosque’

The Guest Editors on the Today programme have been the ‘usual suspects’, even the supposedly right-leaning’ ones carefully selected to be sure they present the correct meassage.

We’ve had the actor who was a socialist, anti-Tory and pro foreign aid spending, a cyclist who voted for Gordon Brown and gave us a broadcast on behalf of the Corbyn fellow, an immigrant wife of someone famous who preached immigration, a disabled person who filled Today with stories of disabled people and a black person who couldn’t get over slavery…..and tomorrow a ‘famously gay’ oil businessman….I imagine he will not surprise us with tales from the left bank.

Oh yes, not forgetting one of Osborne’s advisors, so putatively right-wing, Rohan Silva, who was invisibly low profile  in the background all week as the Today programme’s business editor…did anyone notice?

Let’s take a look at the ‘right wing’ Silva…..

So first off he ticks the ‘ethnic’ box…his immigrant parents came to the UK from Sri Lanka.

And just how influential is he in government and what policies does he espouse?

Funnily enough, just why did the BBC choose him?, he’s big on progressive policies…on open data, aid spending and he’s big on visa’s for people with ‘exceptional talent’…so immigration likely to be a subject he talked about.

All things the BBC will look approvingly upon.

Oh but one other thing….to undermine the BBC’s and Labour’s narrative about the Tories and race [Possibly timely given the ‘outrage’ about Letwin’s comments]….

It is a curiosity of the present generation that despite the Coalition being derided as out of touch, or dominated by Old Etonians, the two advisers spoken of as being the most influential within No 10 have brown skin and didn’t grow up in London.

One is Ameet Gill, protégé of Niall Ferguson, who partly through the historian’s executive TV producer Melanie Fall — twin sister of Prime Ministerial aide Kate Fall — caught the eye of the Cameron coterie. The other is Rohan Silva.

For the past five or six years, if you asked late twentysomethings in the Westminster milieu which young adviser had the most impact on policy, the answer was often reliably “Silva”.

The Guest Editors were just the BBC on steroids giving us the usual left-wing fare with an excuse to be particularly partial as guest editors, choosing subjects that I suspect didn’t surprise anyone, least of all those in the BBC who chose this dull, tokenistic, backward looking, jaded bunch knowing full well that they would load the programme with ‘right-on’ left-wing kitsch.