https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy0cO_UYILM
The BBC has been relentlessly attacking Saudi Arabia for some time now whilst, as always, telling us what a wonderful, enlightened and moderate state Iran is…or would be if it weren’t for the Great Satan which sets out to surround poor little Iran with enemies necessitating an Iranian hardline response.
Any thought that perhaps the BBC’s take on Saudi Arabia is coloured by its security correspondent’s grudge against the Saudis?
Frank Gardner was shot on the streets of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia in 2004
The horrifying attack left his BBC cameraman Simon Cumbers dead
Now fresh batch of documents reveal he was offered £1m in compensation
But Saudis never paid up which Gardner said he was ‘pretty miffed with’
Here’s Frank analysing the situation in the Middle East…A gulf between them: Understanding the Saudi-Iran dispute
His conclusion….
When the Arab Spring protests erupted in 2011, Iran, which had crushed its own democratic protest movement two years earlier, claimed the credit for sparking reformist movements across the Arab world.
Today, Iran once again has a relatively moderate, pragmatic president in the form of Hassan Rouhani, while Saudi Arabia has embarked on a new and aggressive foreign policy that has seen it bogged down in an unwinnable war in Yemen.
Interesting to know that the Iranians claim the ‘credit’ for the Arab Spring which led to Syria et al….not the BBC narrative which blames the Iraq war and the West.
What of that ‘moderate, pragmatic’ Iran and the nasty aggressive Saudi foreign policy?
That’ll be the Iran which supports Hamas in its effort to ‘wipe Israel off the map’, which has essentially annexed Lebanon, which fights to support the murderous Assad in Syria, which interferes in Iraq and supported anyone from the Taliban to Iraqi insurgents who wanted to fight British and US troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan…and is involved in stoking the rebellion of Shia populations inside Sunni ruled states.
Aggressive Saudi Arabia? Maybe it has just-cause in the name of self defence.
The BBC complains of the brutality of the Saudi regime as it executes ‘so many’ people…why, the BBC asks, do we maintain diplomatic relations with them? Why then do we maintian diplomatic relations with the US which also has the death penalty? Or indeed Iran which has executed far more people than the Saudis and with whom we have just opened diplomatic relations.
Nicky Campbell ambushed defence secretary Michael Fallon a while back talking (18th December) about extremism and ISIS. He asked if Fallon was totally against beheaders, abusers and torturers….you could see the trap a mile off and knew what was coming next…Campbell was not now talking about ISIS…and indeed when Fallon said he was naturally against such things Campbell leapt in and gleefully demanded what he was going to do about Saudi Arabia then? All very childish and student politics, as we expect from Campbell and co.
What is curious about all the BBC’s anti-Saudi Arabia rhetoric is that, apart from never having been similarly disposed to attack Iran for its murderous regime killing gays and young girls, hanging them and flogging them, the BBC fails to mention the Saudi money and ideology that floods into the UK, and the rest of the world.
British Muslims are heavily under the influence of the Saudi fundamentalist theology, not only that but all levels of British society and the Establishment are also being subborned by Saudi money which pours into universities, schools, business and sport…the Royal Family (PBUT) and British politicians all are at the beck and call of the Saudis and their money….the FCO is infamously ‘Arab’.…including this memorable example...’Fucking Jews’….”If I had my way, the fucking international community should be sent in and if the Israelis got in the way, they’d be blown off the fucking earth.”‘
The BBC admits frequently that the Saudi ‘brutality’ is guided by Islamic sharia law and yet they fail to link that to what is being brought into this country. If it is bad in Saudi Arabia which is a Muslim country how much more unacceptable is such culture and law in a secular western democracy? The BBC don’t like to ask in case some people of a certain ideology get upset….one of them might be their favourite extremist poster boy, Moazzam Begg, against whom the evidence of his extremism mounts rapidly…the Mail having done a large scale exposé of him over the last couple of days…ignored totally by the BBC of course….Fanatics’ campaign of hate on campus is revealed: Islamic zealots who backed Jihadi John are poisoning the minds of students.
The BBC’s Phil Mackie (who insisted the Trojan Horse plot was a hoax) reported from Birmingham’s Green Lane Mosque and told us of how moderate it was and how it was fighting against extremism…this was the mosque which was at the centre of C4’s Dispatches ‘Undercover Mosque’ exposé of Muslim extremism…it is also a mosque with close ties to Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, it’s mission in life is Dawah…the spreading of Islam. The BBC is either entirely naive or dishonest in its reporting about such things….seemingly covering up the extremist nature of many in the Muslim community in the interest of community cohesion…which is a very short sighted approach as the extremists are just biding their time to take over.
Green Lane Mosque tells us that a Salafi Muslim…
‘Is not of the sects of the Shi’ah who hate and curse the Prophet’s Companions and claim them to be apostates, claim that the Qur’an has been altered, reject the authentic Sunnah and worship the Prophet’s Family, peace be upon them.’
Now as a Mosque, a Muslim mosque you might emphasise (not so funny when you know that the BBC disregards what Muslims say and invent their own intepretation of Islam to suit the BBC’s own narrative…there’s the Muslim Islam and the BBC Islam), you might think that they knew what they were talking about when they explained what they were about. Not so. The Mosque says there is great enmity between Sunni and Shia….the BBC begs to disagree as Frank Gardner, the expert, in the Times told us today (Pay-walled)….
So the conflicts between Sunni and Shia Islam has nothing to do with Islam or religion per se…it’s all about power…but power of what? It’s about which religious intepretation dominates…it’s all about religion and Islam, which version of Islam is correct….and if you get the chance to read Gardner’s piece in the Times you realise the truth of that as he admits this again and again despite his headline denying the truth of that…
In practise this has led to a sort of quais-arms race for influence, with both Iran and saudi Arabia exporting and promoting their own versions of Islam.
Why does the BBC still insist on downplaying the role of Islam in conflicts around the world…and yet at the same time admits that it plays a role just as it admits the Saudi ‘brutal’ regime is guided by Sharia law and yet refuses to make the link to the export of Saudi religious fundamentalism to the UK?