Don’t know if you watched the Andrew Neil hosted This Week last night? Mr Neil continues to be the exception that proves the rule regarding BBC bias. He is scrupulously even handed and should be what all BBC journalism aspires to. Instead, he is the aberration but nonetheless always worth watching. Last evening he interviewed Asim Qureshi, the “research director” at “human rights” organisation CAGE. Asim is a vile piece of work, in the view of many, and Neil allowed him to dig a grave for himself with consummate ease. However what struck me as the MOST telling comment was when Michael Portillo wondered out loud WHY the BBC had allowed Qureshi show a free reign across its airwaves for the past week? In the case of This Week it is clear he was there to be dissected – and a good thing – but on the majority of BBC programmes he has been able to get away with his deplorable and appalling excuse making for Jihad. Thoughts?

On time and for your attention – a brand new Open Thread for the weekend. This is where you detail the bias. I also wanted to thank those who came along for the BBC Question Time live chat last. The system seemed to work ok and so I hope many more will click the link, register, and join in the fun and games next week.

Jeremy Bowen has been accused of being anti-Semitic after tweeting that Israel Prime Minister, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when he  addressed the US Congress ‘once again plays the Holocaust card ‘.

Bowen is upset that people find his words offensive..

Have been reading some recent tweets sent my way. Suggestions I'm an anti semite, or a denier of the Holocaust, are untrue and offensive.

— Jeremy Bowen (@BowenBBC) March 4, 2015

The BBC defends him…

A BBC spokesperson said: “Jeremy was using Twitter and journalism shorthand whilst live-tweeting PM Netanyahu’s speech. The context of his comment is that a major part of PM Netanyahu’s critique of the proposed Iran deal was based on the spectre of another holocaust. Jeremy’s tweet was designed to reflect that context. He absolutely refutes any suggestion of antisemitism.”

‘Journalistic shorthand’?  So the BBC is once again excusing bad or malign journalism by telling us that their professional journalists are unable to produce coherent and intelligent comment when streaming comment ‘live’ just as they excused Tim Wilcox’s suggestion in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings that Jews in Europe should expect to be attacked because of Israel’s actions.

It’s not as if Bowen is sat in the audience with his iPhone…he’s sat in the journalist’s ‘edit room’ with all the equipment necessary to double check what is said in the speech…

Having looked at Bowen’s Twitter stream it is apparent that such failings are not the result of working ‘live’ but a determined attempt to attack Netanyahu.   Bowen’s comments are entirely negative and overly critical, if not just plain wrong, of Netanyahu’s speech.

During a Netanyahu speech at AIPAC a day earlier Bowen Tweets this….

Bowen goes down the ‘Jewish Lobby’ route…not as if every other interest group doesn’t have ‘lobby’s’ but you might think so from BBC comment….

Back to Netanyahu’s speech to Congress and you can see Bowen eager to criticise the speech…..

Trouble is that Netanyahu didn’t say that…he said that only if Iran increases the number of centrifuges enormously it could make nuclear weapon fuel in weeks once the agreement expires…as confirmed by Kerry…..with the present number of centrifuges such a scenario would take longer…but even then Israel assesses that would be less than a year…as said in the speech…

Iran’s nuclear program would be left largely intact, Iran’s break-out time would be very short — about a year by U.S. assessment, even shorter by Israel’s.

Then we get to the bit Bowen Tweeted about….

Iran’s Supreme Leader says that openly. He says, Iran plans to have 190,000 centrifuges, not 6,000 or even the 19,000 that Iran has today, but 10 times that amount — 190,000 centrifuges enriching uranium. With this massive capacity, Iran could make the fuel for an entire nuclear arsenal and this in a matter of weeks, once it makes that decision.

My long-time friend, John Kerry, Secretary of State, confirmed last week that Iran could legitimately possess that massive centrifuge capacity when the deal expires.

 

Bowen then tries to suggest Iran’s brand of Islamic terrorism and expansionism is totally different to the ‘Islamists’….

As Iran’s proxy armies are rampaging across the Middle East and Iran has indicated its desire to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ and works closely with Hamas some might think Netanyahu has a point about the dangers of Iran.

And finally back to the so-called ‘Holocaust card’.  Did Netanyahu ‘play’ that card?

He certainly mentioned it…firstly in the context that Iran poses not a problem just to Israel but to the world…just as the Nazis were not just a problem for the Jews….

Iran’s regime is not merely a Jewish problem, any more than the Nazi regime was merely a Jewish problem. The 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis were but a fraction of the 60 million people killed in World War II.  So, too, Iran’s regime poses a grave threat, not only to Israel, but also the peace of the entire world.

Later in the speech, the bit Bowen thinks is ‘playing the Holocaust card’, he says this……

My friend, standing up to Iran is not easy. Standing up to dark and murderous regimes never is. With us today is Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

Elie, your life and work inspires to give meaning to the words, “never again.”

And I wish I could promise you, Elie, that the lessons of history have been learned. I can only urge the leaders of the world not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Not to sacrifice the future for the present; not to ignore aggression in the hopes of gaining an illusory peace.

 

Israel is all about the Holocaust, it was created as a safe haven for Jews in recognition of the threats that they face as an often persecuted minority, threats that once again Jews are having to face in Europe, threats that the BBC tries to downplay or excuse as ‘acceptable’ because of Israel’s defensive actions.

The BBC itself constantly issues ‘warnings from history’ about the threat of the ‘Far Right’ goose-stepping its way across Europe again, strange that Bowen thinks Israel shouldn’t be allowed to raise the spectre of a similar danger, not just to the Jews, but to the world posed, this time, by Iran.

It does look like Bowen has been caught ‘playing the ‘playing the Holocaust card’ card’ ….a card played by the critics of Israel and Jews….The Jewish Chronicle saying…

Mr Bowen did what only the antisemitic extremists used to do, reduce the invocation of the Holocaust to a common sense indicator of ‘Zionist’ bad faith and something to disdain.

Bowen’s ‘once again’ damns him completely.

Carelessness, bad journalism or bad will?  You decide.

Hi all. Tonight marks the RETURN of the above once popular feature, thanks to the help of one of our many great supporters here on Biased BBC. Can you hit the link – register, and then join the fun later on?

Here’s the story…

Nigel Farage backs Australian-style immigration curbs

 

UKIP would restrict migrants over the age of 45 from coming to the UK, Nigel Farage has said.

He told LBC Radio his party would adopt “sensible” measures to control unskilled migration based on an Australian-points based system.

Those with criminal records and life-threatening illnesses would be barred.

Has Farage done a U-turn on UKIP immigration policy with his new fangled Aussie points system?

Strange if he had…because that was a BBC report from July 2014.  Sounds rermarkably like his immigration policy announced today.…so not a U-turn and not ‘Making it up’ as he goes along as a BBC sub-heading suggests.

Odd that dropping the 50,000 cap is a U-turn when the Australian points system would have limited immigration to 27,000…and UKIP would still allow up to 50,000 migrants to come here…

UKIP would cut the numbers allowed into the UK to work but would not set an annual target, Nigel Farage said.

The party wants immigration to return to “normal” levels, said Mr Farage, with between 20,000 and 50,000 migrants given work permits.

Mr Farage said that under the Australian-style points-based visa system he wants to see, 27,000 people would have qualified to come to work in the UK last year.

 

A very curious ‘U-Turn’!

The BBC says this today…

A UKIP spokesman said last week work-related immigration should be capped at 50,000 a year.

 

But in fact this is what UKIP actually said…as linked to by that BBC report…

…within the points based system UKIP commits to bringing UK net migration down to 50,000 people a year for employment.

Ah so hang on….around 50,000 people based on a  points system…em…how different is that to what Farage said in his speech today and in 2014?  No difference.

Listening to the BBC reports of this on the radio and I had the distinct impression that the BBC was trying to make out that Farage had abandoned his immigration control policies and had essentially joined the ranks of Cameron and Miliband…and therefore anyone thinking of voting for UKIP on the basis of their immigration policies would be wasting their vote.

The Telegraph, not a friend of UKIP, confirms that line of attack, if somewhat less subtly…

Is Nigel Farage just like all the others?

Ukip voters must be looking at this U-turn and wondering if Mr Farage is any different from Miliband or Cameron

Whilst you expect the Torygraph to adopt a partisan line and do what it can to undermine UKIP the BBC is supposed to be above such things…the whole reaosn for the BBC is to stand aside, apart from the fray, and deliver the unvarnished truth to the Public so that they can make genuinely informed decisions on the best available information.

If the BBC cannot deliver that truth then its whole existence must be brought into question.  What is the point of the BBC if it acts in the same way as all the other broadcasters and news providers who have their own agendas?

There is no point, at least as a public service funded at the pont of a gun, so to speak.

How can the licence be justified if the BBC fails to fulfill its most basic purpose, its whole Raison d’être?

Who needs facts when you can just make stuff up.  Vote Tory and your relatives will die in hospital.

Two things you can be sure of in life…death and taxes…and that the BBC will lie through its teeth to put Labour back in power.

OK…Three things that you can be sure of in life….

When reports about events at Stafford Hospital finally came out the BBC ducked and dived to avoid mentioning Labour’s role in the chaos in the NHS that resulted in hundreds of deaths…the BBC preferring to place the blame solely onto hospital management.

Now in the run up to an election the BBC has changed its mind about pointing the finger of blame, in fact it has gone one better, instead of just blaming the encumbent government for any deaths in the NHS they have predicted, well, speculated,  that Tory reforms of the NHS will result in another ‘Stafford’ with patients dropping like flies.

The BBC’s Nick Triggle asks disengenuously…

Is another NHS scandal brewing?

Now that’s a curious opening to a report on another deadly scandal that happened under Labour’s watch.  Surely the BBC’s report’s thrust should be on the actual scandal and not on sensationalist, and highly political, speculation.

What does Triggle base his speculation on? Curiously it’s on yet another report of a scandal, under Labour….and yet once again you’d be hard pushed to know that as ‘Labour’ isn’t mentioned.

You might in fact be misled into thinking this was a scandal that occured under this government on reading Triggle’s opening lines…

Lethal. Shocking. Unacceptable. Dysfunctional. Failures at every level. So said the report into maternity care at Cumbria’s Furness General Hospital.

But as was pointed out repeatedly as the inquiry published its findings on Tuesday, the parallels with Stafford Hospital are chillingly similar. In fact, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt went as far as calling it a “second” Stafford Hospital – albeit it on a smaller scale.

Certainly it took until 2011 for the scandal to ‘break’ but it had been going on since 2004…hardly down to the Coalition you might judge….and one reason it didn’t ‘break’ was because Labour signed off on Trust status for the hospital and was told that legally the Department of Health couldn’t then intervene (page 10)…..

As the application had been deferred in 2009, rather than rejected, the Trust did not go through the quality assessment newly introduced by the DH in the aftermath of the Mid Staffordshire affair, and the DH received legal advice that it should not intervene, as the application had already received the Secretary of State’s approval in 2009.

Triggle goes on to suggest what happened could still be going on now…

In both cases it led to unnecessary suffering – and it was left to patients to expose the truth. So can we be sure this is not happening elsewhere?

Dr Bill Kirkup, the chair of the Morecambe Bay Inquiry, named after the trust which ran the hospital, admitted as such. He said “there could be elements” of what he found happening elsewhere when pressed by journalists.

But then again ‘There might not be.’  Pure speculation.

Triggle suggests a cause for the scandal…changes in the NHS…

Why? The report lists in detail a series of missed opportunities by the North West Health Authority, Care Quality Commission and Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman to tackle the problems at an earlier stage.

This spanned a period when the structure of regulation and monitoring was changing. Some of this was part of the constant state of revolution the NHS finds itself in, but other changes were being made in light of the Stafford Hospital scandal.

Triggle’s final paragraph slips the knife in to the hilt and makes the claim that Coalition (ie Tory) reforms to the NHS will result in similar scandals and deaths…

The NHS has just under gone one of its biggest ever reorganisations with the dismantling of regional health authorities and primary care trusts.

It begs the question: in a couple of years could we be in the same position we are now?

Must be an election coming.

The BiasedBBC Question Time Chat may be returning!

Some excellent work by our very own Julio has produced software which seems suitable. We’ve tested it behind the scenes and now it’s time for the Public Beta trials.

You can find it here.

We would be very grateful if you could take a look. Leave any feedback in the Comments themselves and we will read them. At certain times today we’ll be replying to them real-time in the chat too.

There’s a Registration link on that page which you will need to use first. Standard disclaimers apply … we don’t know, care, check, remember or outright give a rat’s scrotum about your registration details.

Please give it a go and let us know what you think!

AllSeeingEye

Well then, wonder what you thought of the BBC’s coverage of the Netanyahu speech to Congress? Betraying my own bias, I thought it was fantastic BUT I got the distinct impression that the BBC were outraged that the Israeli PM was daring to stand up to Obama’s dodgy dealings with the Mad Mullahs. A favoured line spewed out by Jeremy Bowen was that this was “electioneering” by Bibi. Gosh – just imagine that – a politician electioneering. Thank god we have principled politicians like Ed Miliband who never electioneer and ‘weaponise” healthcare, right? The rousing reception he got must really annoy the BBC.

Here you go, a new Open Thread. I see there was more welcome news on the economy this morning with the suggestion that  average income back to pre-crisis levels.  On Today, I heard the BBC interview ponder what wages would be had we not had the economic crisis! Oh dear – as Ed’s ‘cost of living crisis” narrative goes off the rails the comrades are doing their best for the glorious leader!!!

From the Telegraph:

Mohammed Emwazi’s younger brother voiced support for the radical Islamic cleric who inspired one of Lee Rigby’s killers, the Telegraph can disclose.

Omar Emwazi, 21, indicated that he admired Sheikh Khalid Yasin on his Facebook profile, which was deleted shortly after his brother was identified as “Jihadi John”.

Yasin is an notorious American preacher who converted from Christianity to Islam and is believed to live in Manchester. He was named by Woolwich terrorist Michael Adebowale as his inspiration for converting to Islam.

Adebowale, 22, said that lectures posted online by Yasin taught him the purpose of life.

In 2011 the BBC broadcast a ridiculously biased film (some things never change) attacking anti-Islamist Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

The film portrayed Sheikh Khalid Yasin as a moderate, describing him as “an American Muslim teacher…on a mission to de-radicalise”.

Here are a couple of my blogposts from 2011 about the Wilders documentary which detail the BBC’s disgraceful whitewashing of Yasin’s radical views:

BBC Geert Wilders Hit-Job

Khalid Yasin Update

Think about that for a moment. The BBC was so determined to use anything it could to attack Geert Wilders it broadcast a film that pretended the guy who inspired one of Lee Rigby’s murderers was a moderate.

I wonder how many young Muslims had their paths to radicalisation informed, in part, by that piece of BBC propaganda.