Category Archives: BBC bias

Love listening to Planet BBC, it is another world.

The 1400 year war between the Sunni and Shia?  The BBC asks will it become the 30 year war of our time on the Today programme (o8:50).

And apparently this  1400 year old war between two religious sects is not a religious war merely a ‘sectarian’ war….a 1400 year old war that started…guess when….in 2003 with the Iraq war when those multicultural Iraqis who loved each other and thrived in their mix of Shia, Sunni and Kurds (not the usual BBC narrative when blaming Sykes Picot for imposing an unwanted national identity on naturally antagonistic communities) were traumatised and turned into sectarian bigots by the invasion.

Kind of misses out the real history of the Sunni Saddam Hussein brutally suppressing the Shia and Kurds…hence them kicking off when his boot was off their throats….funny how the BBC can forget inconvenient history…

Who are the Iraqi Shia?

Shia Muslims were oppressed by Iraq’s Baathist regime for more than 30 years and excluded from the highest ranks of power.

They make up the majority of Iraq’s population – accounting for as much as 60% – and their support is seen as vital if any new Iraqi government is to have legitimacy.

Oh yes and you know what….how did our guest (Mary Kaldor…usual lefty academic) explain the problem of ‘extremists’ creating sectarianism?…people aren’t naturally sectarian apparently and you see children, ‘if UKIP were to use violence on our streets then the divisions between being British and not being British would be much more acute.’

Yes she really did compare UKIP to the terrorists in Iraq and John Humphrys said absolutely nothing to correct her.

Have you noticed the difference between how the BBC reports that the Swedes have started to control migration and the alarmed rhetoric we got when ‘Right-wing’ Hungary did the same?

No claims of fascism or Nazism or racism as levelled at the Hungarians….in fact the Swedish story has vanished off the BBC pages to be replaced by one about Denmark reacting to the Swedish actions.

The BBC isn’t resorting to the same abuse that it did with Hungary when we were told that the problem with East Europeans is that they are stuck in the dark ages due to their history and that their innate racism hasn’t been educated out of them yet, however Sweden is still treated to the glare of disapproval however moderately expressed….

Denmark has tightened its border controls with Germany, hours after Sweden imposed similar measures to deter migrants entering from Denmark.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen said the decision was “not a happy moment” but Denmark “must respond” to Sweden’s restrictions.

Stojberg, Denmark’s integration minister, said the measures taken by Sweden meant Denmark was “faced with a serious risk to public order and internal security because a very large number of illegal immigrants may be stranded in the Copenhagen area”.

The move is expected to cause serious disruption to traffic flows from Denmark.

Danish Transport Minister Hans Christian Schmidt called the checks “extremely annoying”.

Holly Snaith, a British academic who commutes from Malmo to her job at Copenhagen University, told the BBC that the changes had added at least half an hour to her journey.

“We are all on tenterhooks hoping that the Swedish government will resolve things soon,” she said.

Nicholas Bean, who commutes from Malmo to his marketing job in Copenhagen, said: “Travellers aren’t happy about the Swedish government’s action… There has to be a better way to handle the problem.”

A similar set of border closures in eastern Europe in October left thousands of migrants stranded in poor weather conditions.

Apparently nobody is happy with Sweden which has taken such an irresponsible action…and oh those poor migrants ‘stranded in poor weather conditions’…should have stayed in sunny Turkey then…or one of the refugee camps provided at great expense but ignored for some reason as the migrants preferred to head for the land of milk, honey and free housing.

Oh yes…more BBC propaganda designed purely to push the line that we must accept refugees…nothing to do with ‘reporting’ in the slightest…you may have heard John Simpson’s attempt to persuade us that allowing millions of refugees into Europe is a good and humane thing to do, he used the fact that 250,000 Belgium refugees were allowed into the UK during WWI to bolster his case….what he didn’t mention was that as soon as the war was over the government forced nearly all of them out and sent them packing back to Belgium…Simpson should know that history as the BBC told it to us last year…..

“It was the largest influx of refugees in British history but it’s a story that is almost totally ignored,” says Tony Kushner, professor of modern history at the University of Southampton.

Syria might be in need of all those people itself when the time comes to rebuild…..but the BBC has decided that’s not a good idea.

Will the government send Syrians et al packing?  We know that ain’t going to happen with Syrians and others from the Middle East, or from wherever, today as once they get there feet across the threshhold they know they are here to stay…so the best thing is to keep them out from the start and care for them in locations closer to their own homes from where they can be repatriated when the time is right.

Simpson does admit to the real problem…Islam…

Yet there is one major difference between these waves of migrants in the past and the one we have seen in 2015.

Professor Alex Betts, director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, explains: “What’s dramatic about today is that this is the first time Europe has faced people coming in from the outside in large numbers as refugees.

“The fact that many are Muslims is perceived as challenging Europe’s identity.”

European societies are changing very fast indeed as a result of immigration.

Unfortunately he doesn’t go further and dodges the major conflicts that will ultimately arise from invasion of millions of Muslim migrants and instead blames bad government…

The influx of migrants reinforces people’s sense that their identity is under threat.

But how can the world deal conclusively with the problem?

The former UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Sir John Holmes, blames poor global governance.

We have endured an entire century of exile and homelessness and the cause is almost always the same – conflict and bad government.

Unless these are dealt with, the flow of migrants will never be stopped.

Actually the migrant flow can be stopped…Hungary proved it…you just shut the border.  The reason we get so many flooding towards Europe is because they heard Merkel’s siren call that all would be welcome…..when they start to realise the borders are shut they will stop coming in their millions….Turkey and other such transit countries will be lumbered with those ‘stranded in poor weather’ and will soon start to shut their borders…ala Denmark….a domino effect all the way back to the countries of origin.  Simples.

The BBC says we cannot stop them and we’d better get used to mass migration [Mark Easton™] but we can stop them if there is the will.  Just say no you’re not coming in.

Alright, 2016 has now really kicked in, Monday arrives and so does this NEW Open Thread. The floor belongs to you!!! Detail that bias here.

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.