Amused to read this comment under Aaqil Ahmed’s interesting post on Jesus the migrant…

4. Posted by Tim

on 14 Aug 2015 15:13

Wonderful to see how scholarly BBC entertainment is reporting this! “The Dean of Durham, Decanus Borealis, wrote in a blog:”. Does no one know that Decanus Borealis means Northern Dean! The Dean of Durham’s name is Michael Sadgrove!

And indeed he is right, the BBC did name the Dean of Durham as ‘Decanus Borealis’ without noting it is in fact his blogger name….

Prominent figures from the Church of England have defended the programme including the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, who tweeted: “The love of Christ is freely offered to all, celebrated everywhere, for everyone to know, well done #SongsOfPraise and @giles_fraser”

The Dean of Durham, Decanus Borealis, wrote in a blog: “I’m glad that SOP can be there to give the migrants air-time in a broadcast forum where it would be so easy to pretend they don’t exist.”

[He is of course a Guardian reader]

And here he is, Michael Sadgrove…or as he is better known now….

Decanus Borealis

    On Blogger since November 2008

 

My blogs

• Wool gathering of a northern dean
• Michael Sadgrove’s Sermons & Addresses

The BBC’s head of religion has sent in the Hot Gospellers from Songs of Praise to stir things up in Calais. (H/T Guest Who) and he insists this is not a political move.

It is, of course, patently a highly political intervention by the BBC and is fully intended to stir up debate and put pressure on the government to open the borders as the BBC continues to drip feed us, if ‘drip’ is the right word, maybe deluge is better, with tales of hardship, danger and ‘desperation’ of the migrants intending to generate sympathy, empathy and compassion for them and a subsequent capitulation and surrender of all reason, common sense and intelligent debate in favour of short term emotion which long term will produce far more conflict and ‘desperation’ for all than is being ‘suffered’ now as economies and societies collapse under the massive weight of these migrants and tribalism and war breaks out.   The BBC could bring you endless tales of desperate lives from any country in the world including on our very own streets in the UK.  Why not send Songs of Praise to the back streets of Delhi or Mumbai and then suggest that perhaps all the residents should move to the UK….what is the difference other than the location of the ‘desperate’ and downtrodden…are those in Delhi or Mumbai not also in need of salvation and sanctuary? Or Shanghai or Moscow or perhaps Ferguson in the USA?

Not political?  Very few programmes seem to have come from abroad…I could find only one recent one which came from Kenya.  There are churches all around the world and yet the BBC doesn’t send in the Songs of Praise squad to visit them and to comment/intervene on the political issues of the day there…..clearly it is not the church at Calais that is of interest but the fact that the congregation is made up of migrants.

This is what Ahmed admits is the pupose of the programme..

Almost two weeks ago, I read about the make shift church in the Calais camp known as ‘The Jungle’.

It started a conversation with the Songs of Praise team about the faith of the people who built and use the Church in the camp, what is the Christian response to the migrant issue in Calais and would it be of interest to our audience. Songs of Praise is not only about Christian music, it also explores contemporary issues and modern themes from a Christian perspective. 

What would be the Christian response to the migrant crisis?  Exploring contemporary issues and themes?  Sounds just a little like this is highly political as this next quote illustrates as he lays out what he thinks the Christian response would be…let ’em all in basically…

The Gospels themselves are full of stories and teachings of Jesus to help those in need, to find the dispossessed and vulnerable and to love your neighbour as yourself, whether that’s close to home or in a global context.

Ahmed is of course Muslim…far be it from me to suggest an ulterior motive, but I have yet to hear a Muslim in the public sphere who doesn’t use his job to promote Islam.  Mishal Husain said she would use her position on the Today programme to improve people’s perceptions of Islam and Baroness Warsi in her role as minister for faith promoted the idea of more influence and a bigger role for religion in society knowing that promoting Christianity meant the government would also be obliged to do the same for Islam and provide it with similar privileges and powers.  A slightly more sophisticated version of ‘my enemy’s enemy’.

Ahmed knows that many, if not the majority, of illegal migrants and those claiming to be asylum seekers are Muslim…any chance he has stitched together this programme to promote migration and thence to further increase the Muslim population of Britain?  This Songs of Praise is about a Christian church but the real narrative is about migrants and if they should be allowed to come into the UK and Europe as a whole in uncontrolled numbers…and it would be uncontrolled…..have you ever heard a pro-immigration advocate name a figure which when reached migration could then be ‘controlled’?  The very same hue and cry about ‘desperate’ migrants would then kick off again and the well practised moral blackmail would be churning out of the BBC filling the airwaves.

If Ahmed is so enthralled with Christian values perhaps he should convert himself and adopt them rather than pay lip service to them and make a pretence of respecting them when we know that Islam condemns Christians and Christianity.

As for Ahmed’s association of migrants with Jesus as a refugee, well there’s plenty in the Bible that we could use for inspiration….how about killing all the first born? Or seeing how far food banks get with a couple of loaves and a few fish.  Or, as Jesus was crucified, perhaps, like in the film Spartacus, we could line the roads with crucified migrants as if they were so many Jesus’ living and dying as he lived and died.  If Ahmed wants the Bible to be taken as gospel and a guide for our lives let him be the first to try…..

No?  Too far?

Or perhaps like Jesus the migrants would have no need for boats and the Chunnel…..why not just walk on water across the Channel to Britain?…

The Jewish Chronicle has some serious concerns about Jeremy Corbyn’s associates:

We are certain that we speak for the vast majority of British Jews in expressing deep foreboding at the prospect of Mr Corbyn’s election as Labour leader.

Because, although there is no direct evidence that he has an issue himself with Jews, there is overwhelming evidence of his association with, support for — and even in one case, alleged funding of — Holocaust deniers, terrorists and some outright antisemites.

If Mr Corbyn is not to be regarded from the day of his election as an enemy of Britain’s Jewish community, he has a number of questions which he must answer in full and immediately. The JC asked him earlier this week to respond. No response has been forthcoming.

The Jewish Chronicle goes on to say:

In a nation where, thank heavens, racism and extremism are now regarded as beyond the pale, it is little short of astonishing that a man who chooses to associate with racists and extremists is about to become leader of one of our two main parties and could conceivably become Prime Minister.

Strong stuff.  You might think that such powerful sentiments as this ‘expressing deep foreboding at the prospect of Mr Corbyn’s election as Labour leader‘  would immediately find themselves being reported by the BBC.  Certainly if this had been said by a Muslim organisation about a leader with close associations to the EDL you can pretty much guarantee the BBC would be giving it plenty of coverage and Nicky Campbell would be dusting off his tired old phrases about the wonders of Islam whist expressing shock that someone so obviously connected to an ‘Islamophobic’ organisation could have the opportunity not only to lead a political party but perhaps to be Prime Minister.

However the BBC has shown not the slightest interest, despite a Labour MP also raising the same concerns…

Ivan Lewis, the shadow Northern Ireland secretary, attacked Mr Corbyn’s “anti-Semitic rhetoric” and said the party must have “zero tolerance” for such views.

On the Today programme BBC reporter Tomos Morgan (08:40) brought us yet another one of the BBC’s infamously emotive pleas on behalf of migrants everywhere as part of the BBC’s continuing campaign to undermine government immigration and refugee policy and to paint those who want to get immigration under control as something akin to Nazis.

Morgan presented us with a report about migrant traffickers who are probably British. He paints a picture of violence, threats and danger for migrants.  The intent?  Certainly not merely to ‘report’ but to impart a message….the migrants are suffering greatly therefore you must open your hearts and the borders.  What he doesn’t say of course is that the migrants don’t have to deal with these traffickers at all…it is entirely their own choice…and indeed they could have claimed asylum in France, or in any of the likely eight countries they travelled through to get to Calais with no need for traffickers at all.

To help with the message he tells us (around 08:48) that ‘In Calais walls of metal fences topped with barbed wire are continuing to be built around the port…it is beginning to look more and more like a prison everyday.’

No Tomos, it’s not a prison.  The fences are to keep migrants out not in, they are free to roam France or indeed Europe or the world in theory….maybe Morgan hasn’t quite got the idea of what a prison is….perhaps he takes his inspiration from the BBC’s reports that present the wall that surrounds Israel keeping terrorists out as a prison for Palestinians.

Starting to sound very much, more and more, like the BBC’s reporting from Gaza…it can’t be long before someone starts to call the migrants the new Jews of Europe….oh..hang on….here’s Laurie Penny in the New Statesman today….‘ The chosen minority must summon the fears of every social class at once. That’s why migrants, the bogeyman of choice, are presented as a paradox, just as the Jews were in the 1930s.’

The BBC must have taken fright that Morgan had gone too far and made the mistake of making it far too obvious that he was trying to manipulate the audience’s emotions and perceptions...in this website rerun of the clip it’s been edited (1 min 20 secs) to say merely that ‘More and more fences are being built around the port of Calais everyday but that is a short term solution for a long term problem.’

Have a read of this cloying PR for Joe Biden from the BBC’s Jon Sopel. I can’t imagine the BBC bigging up a GOP contender in this way and to honest Sopel’s view

The BBC brought us (08:30….and repeated during the day) a woeful tale of the growing ‘tension and anger’ in Kos as immigrants flood in and the situation spirals ‘out of control’.

Couldn’t help thinking that this is the same BBC that promotes open borders and no limits on migrant numbers, and about the number of times that we have been told of the huge  economic benefits and the blessed diversity that migrants bring to a country….why is Kos not happy to be awash with migrants?  Surely its economy should be booming and its inhabitants expressing delight at the cosmopolitan atmosphere so may different migrants bring to the island.

Of course the BBC was using the problems on Kos as  lever to apply pressure on ‘Europe’ to speed up the entry of migrants…..no thought that to do so would just increase the flow even more…and why are these migrants coming from the perfectly safe, and Muslim, country of Turkey when so many of them, we are told, are from Syria and Afghanistan?

Could it be that migrants are not really interested in asylum and safety but money as Migration Watch suggests, as does the aggressive attitude of the, what I thought, rather ungrateful to be safe on Kos migrants?

The main motivation to cross the channel is not to seek asylum (France is a safe country) but the ambition to work illegally in Britain and send money home. Furthermore, these migrants calculate, correctly, that they are very unlikely to be deported to their home countries. The report traces the decline in the credibility in the UK immigration system over the past twenty years and calls for early action to reverse the perception that, once across the channel, these migrants are home and dry.

The travel firm Thomson announced that profits would be down due to the effect of the terrorist attack in Tunisia…you could hear the sneer in the voice of the BBC news reader as she read out the number of dead and then said Thomson was blaming their deaths for its profits fall.

However on the flip side the BBC is happy to use Thomson’s profit’s plight to push a pro-immigration fast tracking of migrants off the island of Kos...Thomson boss: Greece needs help to tackle migrant ‘tragedy’.

We hear that …

It is time for European governments to help Greece deal with the migrant issue, coming as it does hard on the heels of the economic crisis.

“Here we have another tragedy unfolding in terms of those migrants and we have to have empathy and sympathy for them……I think the Greek authorities are doing all they can to be thoughtful and caring towards these migrants and process them through the system so they can go from the islands to the mainland where it will be easier to assist them.”

“I worry about the publicity putting people off going to the Greek islands,” Mr Long said.

“Those poor unfortunate migrants are located at the moment in Kos town and we have hotels throughout the island.”

“Therefore I hope the Greeks are able to process [the migrants] and I’m sure other European governments will look at ways of helping them through this difficult situation with so many migrants arriving at the same time.”

Hmmm….Cameron is castigated for de-humanising migrants with the word ‘swarm’ and yet a business boss who wants to get rid of migrants asap so he can continue to pull in the profits from his hotels on Kos is fine and dandy?

I guess when something coincides with a BBC interest anything goes and hang posturing on the moral high ground.

Elsewhere on the BBC we have a wonderful, heartwarming tale of a welcome ‘on the buses’ from a German, immigrant, bus driver to other immigrants…..the BBC of course holding it up as an example for us all…

Germany: Bus driver’s migrant speech goes viral

A German bus driver has garnered nationwide media attention after pausing to give a welcome speech to a group of migrants on his bus.

Sven Latteyer made the impromptu announcement as was driving around the quiet Bavarian town of Erlangen, with about 15 young foreigners – some from Africa – on board, the local Nuernberger Nachrichten paper reports. A fellow passenger recounts that the driver grabbed his microphone and said, in English: “Excuse me ladies and gentlemen from all over the world on this bus, I want to say something. I want to say welcome. Welcome to Germany, welcome to my country.” He then signed off with: “Have a nice day!”

The speech was greeted with stunned looks followed by laughter and applause, “including from the Germans”, the passenger says. “One of the African lads wiped a tear from his eye.”

Mr Latteyer says that he felt moved to make the speech by the experience of his brother-in-law, who fled the Kosovo conflict in the 1990s, and his grandfather, who was wounded in World War Two.

Curiously the BBC hasn’t bothered with this genuine and probably more important news story from Germany…

EU Immigration Crisis: German Police Want Border Controls In Europe To Address Migrant Flow

Germany’s police union is calling for a return to passport controls along the border to combat a growing migrant crisis in the country and across the continent, Agence France-Presse reported. The chairman of the German Police Union Tuesday made the argument for re-regulation along inter-European borders, saying it is a good idea from a policing standpoint.

From a policing point of view, a return to border controls would be the best of all measures,” said Rainer Wendt, the chairman of the German Police Union. “Germany should not take the threat of bringing back [border] controls off the table too readily.” Police have already ramped up security checks along some inter-European train lines, highways and at international airports.

Wonder why the BBC does not think you ought to know about the German police’s concerns about a ‘growing migrant crisis’.

Been away so sorry for the delay in the new Open Thread. Here you go – detail the bias!

Eric Pickles says that political correctness is allowing electoral fraud by immigrants to continue unchecked…

In Tower Hamlets, police and council staff failed to tackle intimidation – often in foreign languages – both inside and outside polling stations. Just as we have seen with child sexual exploitation in places such as Rochdale and Rotherham, institutionalised political correctness can lead to the state turning a blind eye to criminal conduct. But the law must be applied equally and fairly to everyone. Integration and good community relations are undermined by the failure to do so.

As a minister, I found within Whitehall a complete reluctance by officials to take action on the warnings from local councillors and journalists of systematic corruption in the Tower Hamlets mayoral administration. Yet when I subsequently sent forensic investigators into Tower Hamlets, they quickly found shocking financial irregularities. These were only the tip of the iceberg – further cases of alleged planning irregularities and financial misconduct couldn’t be followed up due to documents disappearing or written records not being kept.

Across the country, electors from abroad are not properly checked to ensure that they qualify to vote when they register. Fraudulent registration is frequently tied to illegal immigration, as illegal migrants sign up to make it easier to get credit or a mobile phone. Such illegality feeds through to further crimes, such as benefit and housing fraud.

Our nation has a proud heritage as the mother of Parliaments, yet the worrying and covert spread of electoral fraud threatens that reputation. While all politicians want high turnouts, we cannot sacrifice integrity and confidence in our democracy through misplaced political correctness or woolly concerns over “political engagement”. It is time to awake from our state of denial and take action against the electoral crooks who threaten our elections.

The Guardian at least reports Pickles’ statement but dodges around mentioning any link to immigration.  The BBC has so far completely ignored Pickles…..but then the BBC has always tried to downplay the events in Tower Hamlets, for a long time ignoring the revelations by Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph about Rahman and his associates.

An astonishing and very obvious pattern is apparent in the BBC’s recent coverage of any news report that has any link to immigration that reflects badly on the BBC’s own philosophy of immigration as a good thing.

A Pakistani background youth stabs a black teacher and the BBC covers up his ethnicity and encourages people to think this was a case of white racism.

Two people are murdered in Sweden by asylum seekers and the BBC hides their identity until they come up with a narrative to draw attention away from the immigrants….the real danger not being immigrants stabbing people but an alleged backlash against such murders by Swedes…..laughably those famous ‘Dark Forces’.

Then we had Phillip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, saying Europe will economically and socially implode under the weight of mass immigration…the BBC again avoided mentioning his words until, once again, they came up with a narrative that tried to counter what he said….the BBC resorting to in essence calling him a racist who was inflaming anti-immigrant hatred with his dangerous rhetoric..his ‘tone’.

And now they ignore a serious issue raised by Eric Pickles about electoral fraud, immigration and the threats to democracy.

Well, ignoring it for now….what narrative will they come up with when they do eventually report his words?  Will he be demonising immigrants for faults that are inherent in the system or using a ‘tone’ that incites anti-immigrant paranoia?  Probably.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx3qLKDvO6A

The BBC censored the identity of the murderers of two Swedes at an Ikea store.  The BBC has now come up with a narrative that allows them to reveal the truth about who killed the Swedes whilst managing to paint the murderers as motiveless madmen and asylum seekers as the real victims of the murders.

The real big issue revealed by the murders?  Sinister Swedish ‘dark forces’ that are set to attack the asylum seekers. The BBC has no problem with asylum seekers attacking Swedes, members of the ‘Dark Forces’ or not.

Sweden Ikea knife attack: Security boosted at refugee centres

Police in central Sweden have increased security at refugee accommodation centres after two Eritrean asylum seekers were arrested on suspicion of murdering two people at an Ikea store.

Local officials feared a backlash from “dark forces” who wanted to exploit the case, police chief Per Agren said.

Only when they have set the scene of asylum seekers under attack do we get to hear about the dead...’A mother and son died in the knife attack which took place inside an Ikea store in Vasteras on Monday.‘…and that’s it…oh wait there’s more….the BBC has worked really hard to let us know something about them…they were… “ordinary shoppers” .

The murders were dismissed as ” an act of madness.”  No motive, no blame, no responsibility.  Not the immigrant’s fault.  As Mark Mardell might say we have a senseless tragedy perhaps devoid of deeper meaning.

Are Muslim Fundamentalists A Danger To Other Britons?

That’s not a question you will ever hear coming from the BBC.  In fact they work strenuously to put across the opposite idea…the well known phrase that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ is one we hear constantly spouted by BBC presenters.  The BBC in fact promotes the idea that Islamic fundamentalism is a good thing…Mark Easton infamously favourably comparing Muslim extremists to Ghandi, Churchill and Mandela.  This is the BBC that suggested that if Muslim fundamentalists wanted to take over schools, and if that is what some parents wanted, then we should let them do that.  The BBC has long supported the Muslim anti-war narrative that has fed and ‘jusitified’ the radicalisation of Muslims and been overly sympathetic to the ‘plight’ of Guantanamo Bay inmates.

So no, you won’t hear the BBC asking that question…despite a least one Muslim a day being arrested on terrorism related charges.

Which begs the question why they are happy to demonise Hindus in what seems like a campaign against them and their place in India?

Here is just the latest piece of anti-Hindu rhetoric from the BBC…

Are Hindu nationalists a danger to other Indians?

Why does the BBC selectively choose Hindus in India?  Muslims are just as likely to be the instigators of violence there…it was Muslim insistence on a Muslim state that led to the creation of the breakaway state of Pakistan and the subsequent million deaths and millions of people being ethnically cleansed….and such Muslim attempts to annex parts of India didn’t stop in 1947, they continue to this day, never mind Bangladesh and the millions dead there…however if you read the BBC report you will come away with the idea that violence started by Muslims  or started by a random incident was in fact a Hindu plot to attack Muslims.  Where is the BBC article asking are Muslims a threat to Christians in Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Malaysia or the Maldives or Egypt, or the Sudan…..and so on and so on and so on?

The BBC has  along history of demonising some religions…notably it is those religions that are involved in conflict, often not by choice, with Muslims…inevitably the BBC presents Muslims as the victims…as in Burma where the fact that there has been a Muslim ‘Jihad’ going on since the 1940’s as they try to set up their own state in Burma is pretty much ignored or dismissed as fantasy by the BBC.  The BBC of course had no problem denouncing Buddhism as a violent religion just as they are happy to similarly picture Christianity in a negative light whilst conversely not only refusing to acknowledge the violence done in the name of Islam but  to actually work to deny that that is the case, that Islam is a violent religion….even the Islamist Tariq Ramadan has admitted that the Koran incites violence (24 mins) upon its readers….I paraphrase….

‘I wouldn’t say Islam is a religion of peace…..People are naturally violent and religion channels that violence to serve its purpose…to get peace…it’s the way towards peace but it’s not the peaceful reality’

He then tries to turn it on its head….the problem, he says, is not the book but the reader….but the reader is reading a text that accepts people are violent and encourages people to use violence….so the problem is the text…non?

Use violence to move towards peace…but what is peace in Islam?….the domination of Islam over all other religions….with Islam on top there is no need for war…..‘They create a desert and call it peace’.

Ramadan slips away from whether Islam is violent into describing peace as being ‘inner peace’ brought to you by knowledge gained through religion rather than the peace we get when there is no fighting.

Ramadan also states that we must understand the fundamentals of the religion to understand current events…..perhaps the BBC should take note….what exactly does the Koran and the Hadith say about violence?  Need to know that to understand what is happening now.

If the BBC is going to look so closely at Hindu, or Buddhist, or Christian extremism then the same close examination must be carried out on Islam.

And today we have yet another example of the BBC promoting a Muslim narrative…

How the Uighurs keep their culture alive in Pakistan

Ostensibly about Uighurs who migrated to Pakistan (where all is lovely) from China but is in fact just a vehicle to attack China and its ‘atrocities’ against innocent Muslims in China.