Category Archives: BBC bias

This post combines the concerns of the last two posts….namely the BBC’s love-in with Islamist extremists and its so oft noted preference for loading a panel with those who have the same interests as the BBC.

The Reunion on R4 today brought together former inmates of Guantanamo Bay, the hooman rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith and, in sole opposition to them, Colonel Mike Bumgarner, guard commander at Guantanamo, whose diffident and brow beaten performance hardly merits the word ‘opposition’ as he caved in to the ‘evidence’ weighted against him and Guantanamo.

Moazzam Begg, the BBC’s Islamist poster boy, was back on the BBC, when isn’t he?  This time not as a representative of the Islamist group Cage but as a ‘victim’ of American injustices.  He rattled off a long list of abuses but failed to offer any evidence other than his own word that this was true.  Sue MacGregor asked him if he was a radical…he denied it and then went on to claim the Americans didn’t care anyway, they picked up anyone regardless…and suggested he was an innocent victim of bounty hunters.  Only much later in the programme did MacGregor remind him he had signed a confession that he had trained at terrorist camps….which of course he denied…the confession was beaten out of him!  MacGregor didn’t challenge that at all.

The tenor of the programme was set entirely against Guantanamo and every word was carefully chosen to create a negative perception of events.  Everyday events that would occur in many jurisdictions were described as if they were extreme and abnormal….for instance prisoners having had their heads shaved….reason?  Likely for their own health…de-lousing.  We heard that they were chained to their aircraft seats….well yeah….a good idea if you are at 20,000 feet in a plane full of potentially violent prisoners.  Finally we heard that one had been sedated….no explanation for that….could he have been violent?  Most likely.  But we’ll never know from the BBC.  All we got was a self-serving tone of reprimand and disapproval from the BBC journo, his own deliberately slanted take on events.

The ‘Reunion’ was an outright propaganda coup for the Islamists and they took every opportunity to spin their version of events with absolutely no proof that any of what they claimed happened in the way they said it did. The US guard’s immediate reaction team that dealt with unruly prisoners was presented as unnecessarily violent but there was no attempt to provide any undersatanding of why they were sent into action….no attempt to reveal what the prisoners were up to that forced such interventions…..interventions that are just as common in British prisons by officers in riot gear….and sometimes by military personnel drafted in for their expertise and perfection of the use of force in quelling disturbances and hostage rescue.

We were told of Korans being deliberately desecrated but there was no proof, we were told of other abuses and violence and again no proof, and we were told that inmates had committed suicide but were driven to it by their treatment at the hands of their captors.  Stafford-Smith told us that we must find out what drove them to their suicide as suicide is unIslamic and therefore their treatment must have been very terrible.  Has he never heard of 9/11 or 7/7 or the hundreds if not thousands of Muslim suicide attacks?

In the same way that Islamists were trained to lie about their treatment in captivity and to conduct ‘lawfare’ against their captors the suicides were thought to be a continuation of that, asymetric warfare….an attempt to get the world’s attention onto the camp and pile on the pressure to get it closed with as much scorn and opprobrium as possible pouring down upon the heads of the Americans.  Stafford-Smith, and the BBC, failed to mention that the Americans suspected he had himself helped organise the mass suicide as a political act.

Stafford-Smith has another pre-packaged tale to tell in order to illustrate the evils of Guantanamo, and this one is just as dubious as the last one….here his organisation ‘Reprieve’ spells it out just as he did on the programme…

‘I am working at the charity Reprieve at the moment whose lawyers were counsel in the infamous case of Mohammed el Gharani. He was just 14 years old when he was seized for a bounty in Pakistan. His US interrogators used a Yemeni translator, but Mohammed spoke Saudi Arabic. The word zalat meant ‘money’ to the interrogators; to Mohammed it meant ‘salad’. He could not understand why they wanted to know what zalat he had taken to Pakistan with him. He said he could get it anywhere he wanted. They got excited, and demanded to know where. He described various market stalls around Karachi. They thought he was an Al-Qaida financier and as a consequence, he then went on to spend seven years in Guantánamo before a conservative federal judge found the intelligence was so woeful that they could not even work out how old he was. Mohammed’s interrogators had heard what they expected — or wanted — to hear.’

Unfortunately the reason the boy was held was because the Americans believed he ‘ had stayed in an al Qaeda-affiliated guest house in Afghanistan, had fought in the battle of Tora Bora, had served as a courier for senior al Qaeda operatives and was a member of a London-based al Qaeda cell.’   The story about the salad and money is a nonsense spun by Stafford-Smith to try and mock the Americans and make them look foolish and as far as I can see he seems to be the originator of the story himself with no-one else deeming it news worthy.

The reason he was released…

‘On January 14, 2009, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon ordered the release of Gharani because the evidence that he was an enemy combatant was mostly limited to statements from two other detainees whose credibility had been called into question by US government staff. Gharani’s attorney Zachary Katznelson said after the ruling “Judge Leon did justice today. This is an innocent kid when he was seized illegally in Pakistan and should never have been in prison in the first place.’

Nothing to do with salad.

Bumgarner said he felt that Guantanamo was a necessary facility…Sue MacGregor leapt in and suggested he thought it was a ‘necessary evil’….so in her opinion Guantanamo was ‘evil’.  Just so we’re clear where we stand.

Programmes like the BBC’s ‘Reunion’ are just another part of that assault on the West and its fight against the terrorists.  The BBC is siding with the enemy either by design or by naivety.

The Conservative’s Liz Truss was completely outnumbered on ‘Any Questions’, the rest of the panel were of the left or giving left wing answers and the BBC presenter, Ritula Shah didn’t show a great deal of steel in challenging any of their answers.

The audience was either packed with Corbyn supporters or they were just a very loud component of the audience and the questions seemed designed around Corbyn’s concerns or to enable him to justify his position on issues like ISIS.

Interesting how they all, Truss apart, wanted to open the borders but refused to put numbers on this….it was a bit of an ‘ethical fashion parade’ with Toynbee, Corbyn and historian Dan Jones taking the easy and cowardly stance of open borders, flaunting their compassionate credentials….none of them wanted to say the truth about the dangers of mass migration as they live in fear of being labelled racists…which is the intended effect behind the barrage of abuse that descends upon anyone in public life who suggests limiting immigration.

Interesting that they completely dismiss the majority view and sneer at the majority who want to control immigration.  For all the Left’s talk of equality and listening to the voice of the people it seems that isn’t the case when the interests of the people don’t coincide with the Hampstead progressive’s interests.

I’m pretty sure Jeremy Clarkson would be hunted down and, at the very least, removed from the public sphere by the Left.

Would they be so keen to do the same to other Jeremys?  It seems they would.  Just what do they have against the ‘Jeremys’ or is that the jeremiahs?

Somebody in the Labour Party has apparently suggested that ‘If you took  all the Jeremys in the Labour Party, and the people who vote for them and shot them in the back of the head there would be a brighter future for us all.’

Actually it was Jeremy Hardy, BBC comedian, who said this ” If you took everyone in the BNP and everyone who votes for them and shot them in the back of the head there would be a brighter future for us all” .

Which is ironic now that he complains so bitterly about Labour apparently trying to cleanse the leadership election voter register of people it finds objectionable.

Hardy seemed quite ready to literally wipe out people who have political views he doesn’t like and yet suddenly he has scruples when it’s his turn to be ‘sidelined’, purged.

Laugh?  Oh yeah!

The Politics of Betrayal

If you have been listening to the BBC on the radio all day you will have come away possibly impressed with the apparently principled moral stance of Jeremy Corbyn and his proposal to apologise, on behalf of the Labour Party, for the Iraq War.

What was missing from the BBC’s reporting was the essential piece of information that informs you about his stance….that Corbyn is the Chair of the Stop The War Coalition….a highly discredited organisation with highly dubious links to people who would seem to be actually supporters of the people who are engaged in the war against the West.

Ironically not only tacitly supporting ISIS but also Assad…

Stop the War Continues to Promote Assad Apologists

Stop the War Coalition is a British grassroots group that ostensibly lobbies the West to “change its disastrous foreign policies.”

In truth, as the Spectator writer James Bloodworth notes: “[Stop the War] isn’t so much opposed to war as has accrued a sorry reputation for supporting the other side in every conflict it has pretended to oppose.”

Stop the War has a long history, in fact, of working in support of Iran and her allies, Syria and Hezbollah. In 2007, one of the speakers at Stop the War’s annual conference was “Somaye Zadeh of Campaign Iran”, who used her speech “to counter the imperialist lies [about Iran].” Somayeh Zadeh, whose real name is Somaye Bagherzadeh, is a member of the anti-sanctions lobby group CASMII, whose Directors are closely involved with senior Iranian regime officials and institutions.

Why has the BBC failed to mention that crucial link between Corbyn and the Stop the War Coalition?  The BBC mentions that he has always opposed the war, and here that he has been ‘prominent in the anti-war coalition’ but what does that mean to the audience when the damning links to islamic extremists goes unmentioned?  It makes him out to be a man of principle when the opposite would seem to be true and fails utterly to reveal the true nature of the STWC.

The BBC, as many people have noted, has been reluctant to tackle Corbyn on allegations about such links and his connections to terror groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas.  It was only after Louise Mensch slammed the BBC in this article that the BBC seems to have been forced into challenging Corbyn on those links.  Mensch says…..

‘Examining Jeremy Corbyn’s association with anti-Semites is unpleasant, but necessary. It is quite stunning that the BBC refuses to ask the favourite for Leader of the UK Opposition any difficult questions about the racists he’s supported.

Corbyn is not exactly refusing to answer; the BBC is obligingly just not asking him. I wonder how it would fly if Boris Johnson were found to have given money to Nick Griffin, attended his rallies, called the English Defence League his “friends,” and then added airily ‘but I hate racism and I’m just opening a dialogue?’

It wouldn’t work and rightly not. But because the racism in this case is directed at Jews, the BBC is washing its hands.’

Just what is it with the BBC and people who enjoy the company of Islamists?

I see Corbyn is on ‘Any Questions’ in 10 minutes…and counting….might be interesting.

Seen this?

A left-wing comedian has said he was told by the Labour party that he could not vote in its leadership election. Jeremy Hardy said he paid £3 to become a Labour member in order to become eligible to vote, but that he has supported other parties in the past. He said he received a letter sent to people who are turned down, which said Labour had reason to believe that he “didn’t support the aims and values” of the party.

Hardy supports Corby – shock horror – and is a stalwart of what passes for comedy on the BBC. This is the funniest thing he has ever said.

It strikes me that the BBC are now fully paid up members of the Jeremy Corbyn fan club. His latest suggestion that if he becomes Leader he will apologise for the Iraqi war has the comrades in a paroxysm of pleasure. He is saying so many of the things the BBC approves of that I believe they are now repeating his propaganda on a daily basis with such frequency that it makes the prospect of his getting elected all the more likely. This is odd since they must know he is unelectable as PM but I suppose five years of hard left rhetoric and agenda setting pleases them?

Friday arrives and time for a new Open Thread! The floor is yours – please detail the bias here!

Here’s something that should shame many a BBC journalist, all those, such as Mark Mardell and Kevin Connolly, who report with all too much pleasure the rise of ISIS and the destruction of the nations of Syria and Iraq, those nations they tell us with disdain that were so carelessly ‘carved out’ by France and Britain, the border lines drawn so imperiously and casually and now being erased by the reincarnation of the Muhammedan blitz on the Middle East 1400 years ago.

At least one man had the guts to stand up for something he believes in, and to die for it…

Remembering Khaled al-Asaad, the Syrian archaeologist who dared to stand up to Isis

Erudite and bespectacled, he was the sort of Arab the Islamic State loathed. Khaled al-Asaad, an 81-year old archaeologist, was for the past four decades inseparable from Palmyra’s ancient ruins.

Beheaded in part for his role shielding them from the militants, they strung his headless body up on Graeco-Roman columns he once restored. His remains dangle there still.

On the coat-tails of a pornography of violence which saw the immolation of a captured pilot and the sexual enslavement of a captured aid worker before her murder, Isis still found, somehow, a way to shock.

In all this, one humble octogenarian dared, as the West has not, to defy the most chilling murders the present century has yet seen. And when a new Syria one day confronts the impossible task of rebuilding itself, one elderly academic’s quiet resistance in the name of antiquity, like David against Goliath, will provide a stark example of dauntlessness and civilisation amidst the rubble of its bleakest hour.

Whilst the BBC seems to cheer on ISIS in its own inimitable anti-Western way, others recognise the real dangers to the world and, in their own little way, try to fight it.  Not the BBC and its journalists who all too often are seen to be the ‘friends’ of such ‘radical’ groups and their grievances.

The BBC couldn’t resist for long.  There was their ex-economics editor, Paul Mason, announcing the wake for Capitalism in the Guardian ad nauseum and they’d missed out.

No matter, one phone call to their old mate and it’s all fixed and up he pops with Dutton and Sarah (1 hour 16 mins) being put on the rack, his feet to the fire and his most cherished illlusions and delusions being challenged and dashed….well, not really.

Mason had a lovely benign time on the programme in an ‘interview’ that lasted a good 40 minutes or so, the bit about capitalism anyway.  The problem with interviews like these where the guest is treated as a ‘friend’ and there is a reluctance to upset them with tough questions, is that the guest is allowed to get away with murder, and indeed Mason was allowed to ramble on in fantasy land about the brave new world he proposed.

Sure the interviewer will ask a relevant question but then lets the guest ramble on and evade giving an answer if the question puts him on the spot.  Humphrys would continue digging, usually, but in interviews like this the presenter lets it slide, its almost like they feed the guest a question about something controversial or problematic but only in order to allow them the chance to explain it away…the presenter then doesn’t challenge the answer and moves onto the next ‘feeder’ question.

That’s essentially what the Mason interview sounded like….the presenters just wanted him to keep talking and to ‘get along’, can’t upset a guest who is supposed to be there for an hour or more.

For instance no challenge came when they asked if he was a Marxist and he said no, but then said he did believe in what Marx said.  Or when he said because he was a public sector broadcaster he had to be neutral, before giving Corbyn a good talk up…or when he started backtracking on his thesis….apparently Capitalism is broken and needs replacing….or is it?….. now it’s just ‘parts’ need refurbishing, or when he laid out that grand thesis on on his alternative economy…..with time banks, alternative currencies and co-operatives….don’t all those exist already in one shape or another and aren’t they just different forms of the same thing, it’s still trading, manufacturing, buying and selling, capitalism?

Sarah Brett was quite happy quoting a commentator saying that the EU had ‘smashed Greece’ and she raised no objection to Mason adding that ‘the democratic will had been overturned and the EU is unaccountable’.

Is that true?  Didn’t Greece smash Greece with massive overspending and borrowing?  Was the ‘democratic will’ overturned in Greece?  Hardly.  The Greeks wanted to have their cake and eat it, get rid of economic stabilisation and still reman in the EU….in the end the Greek Parliament ‘voted’ to stay in the EU and continue austerity.  And now the Greek people will have a chance to vote on that decision….hardly democracy overturned.  If you’re in the EU club you have to obey the club rules and the Greeks really, really want to be in that club.

And something for Mason and the BBC to consider….Just what did Capitalism do for China?…

China has almost wiped out urban poverty. Now it must tackle inequality

Yet-to-be-released data shows that China has all but eradicated urban poverty. For a country with huge numbers of poor people streaming into its cities, many of whom living initially in conditions of abject misery, this is an extraordinary success. It has been achieved, in large part, because of a government subsidy paid to urban dwellers to bring incomes up to a minimum level of 4,476 yuan ($700 or £446).

I have yet to hear Mason come up with the real problem with Capitalism…cheap and easily available credit.  We know full well that was the reason we had the last crash, made worse because our own government borrowed huge sums on the basis that the good times would keep on rolling, bankrolling their largesse….and in order to keep things going the government turned a blind eye to what the banks were up to and failed to regulate them…running a risked based economy as Gordon Brown boasted.

Mason has no solutions just naive, simplistic utopian fantasies, childlike in their optimism and failure to recognise the pitfalls and insurmountable problems that make such dreams unworkable.

Still good of the BBC to let him back to ramble on amiably.  Trouble is he probably left the studio thinking ‘that all went well, they seemed really receptive, maybe I’m on to something….better give Russell Brand a call’..  We’ll hear no end of this now….though he doesn’t seem to have the social media draw of Brand…his recent video winning a mere 10,175 views…which is amusing as Mason is pretty obsessed with the power of t’Web….didn’t it spawn the Arab Spring after all?  Looks like the Revolution is a long way off yet…….

Here you go, a new Open Thread to detail the bias!