Been a busy few days so here’s the new OPEN Thread to see us off into the wide blue yonder of the weekend!

Last week Labour Brent councillor Zaffar Van Kawala was found guilty of dangerous driving and ABH after he drove his car at a female fellow councillor.

Today UKIP councillor Robert Ray admitted drink driving after police found him behind the wheel of his car in a hotel car park.

Guess which of the above stories is the only one you’ll find on the BBC’s website?

Yup.

Incidentally – 266 words from the BBC on the UKIP councillor, but only 107 to report the fact that 20 men were today charged with rape and child prostitution in the North East. (The list of names of those charged may give an indication why the BBC isn’t making a big deal about it.)

And while I’m on the subject, spot the only mention of “Labour” in this report about the scandals in Labour-led Rotherham council. 36th paragraph, and then only in an oblique way. Imagine if a similar scandal emerged under a UKIP-led council – the BBC report would be littered with the party name from headline to final sentence.

Listened this morning to Mishal Husain interview (08:44) Rabbi Arnold Saunders on the subject of anti-Semitism in the UK.

Was left wandering who it was committing all those anti-Semitic acts….other than the Rabbi mentioning ‘Morons’ it was left unsaid.

Now the Rabbi might be shy about broaching the subject especially with a Msulim interviewer (Why did the editor choose Mishal Husain for the interview?  Perhaps Tim Wilcox should have done the interview) but surely a hardened journalist with fearless integrity could ask just who might be the worst offenders?….is it white neo-Nazis, Muslims or maybe it’s very left-wing anti-Israeli Jews?

Who knows.  None of us do after the less than enlightening interview.

Did anyone else see Ed Ball’s car crash interview on Newnight last evening? Here is it for your enjoyment and a great example of accidental public SERVICE broadcasting. Poor Ed.

Middle of the week and time for a new thread. I noted that Jeremy Bowens was referring to the Islamic savages that burned the Jordanian pilot alive as “fighters” last night, although on the Today programme this morning I heard the word “terrorist” used, which was welcome if overdue. Anyway, here’s a thread for your use!

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

Islam and Neo-Conservatism in unholy allliance…once again……apparently…

We have another of the BBC’s favoured sons, Adam Curtis, who once told us that Al Qaeda didn’t exist, purely an invention of the government to keep us frightened and obedient, again given a platform on the BBC to spout his obsessive conspiracy theories and anti-Western rhetoric.

He has now produced a continuation of that theme first aired in his ‘The Power of Nightmares’ with his latest effort  ‘Bitter Lake’ in which we get his very own special intepretation of history… as his introduction reveals:

Increasingly we live in a world where little makes any sense, events come and go like waves of a fever leaving us confused and uncertain.  Those in power tell stories to make us make sense of the complexity of reality but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow.  This is a film about why those stories stopped making sense and why that led us in the West to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world.

The blurb to the film tells us…..

The film reveals the forces that over the past thirty years rose up and undermined the confidence of politics to understand the world. And it shows the strange, dark role that Saudi Arabia has played in this.

But Bitter Lake is also experimental. Curtis has taken the unedited rushes of everything that the BBC has ever shot in Afghanistan – and used them in new and radical ways.

He has tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really happened in Afghanistan. A counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.

 

 

Very nice that the BBC provides a platform for someone who is an ardent, and very obsessive, conspiracy theorist to peddle his theories.

The Guardian asks…

In his latest iPlayer-only film Bitter Lake, furtive filmmaker Adam Curtis uses his dreamlike documentary style to make sense of the west’s involvement in Afghanistan. But is he an audacious auteur or a dangerous contrarian?

 

 

Here is an example of his take on history…

Curtis is about to return with a new film, a two-and-a-half-hour BBC iPlayer-only epic called Bitter Lake. It takes as its premise a meeting in February 1945 between the then US president Franklin D Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Sitting on a yacht on the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal, the pair struck a deal: the US would support this newly formed state and, in return, the Saudis would ensure a continuing stream of oil to the west. From that one point, argues Curtis, came the spread of Wahhabi Islam….

 

 

 

A very simplistic and childish view of history from Curtis with the benefit of a rather unreliable but convenient hind-sight.  He seems to think no one should do anything as a single action might have terrible unforeseen consequences…or that is what he must infer following his own logic and scathing conclusions in the wake of historical US actions and their repercussions as he sees them.

Does Curtis think that the oil would have stayed in the ground had there been no agreement?  Saudi Arabia would still have raked in the cash whoever bought the oil and provided ‘protection’ for the Saudi regime…..the USSR would have quickly stepped in as it did with Syria and Egypt….and the funds to spread fundamentalist Islam around the world would still have flooded into the Saudi coffers….no coincidence that the Russian state broadcaster finds ‘Bitter lake’ a superb bit of TV….BBC documentary ‘Bitter Lake’ is ‘too dangerous’ for TV

The film  concentrates on Afghanistan and adopts the BBC’s approach of painting the war there as an utter failure…and uses the ‘prism of Afghanistan’ to illuminate the tumble of world events over the last few decades.

Once again we have a confirmed lefty telling us we understand nothing, that we are being lied to, and he has the answers.

Well, People understand quite a lot thanks…People understand the BBC has been lying to them about immigration, Europe and Islam for years now…they understand that and vote UKIP.

People understand.  They don’t need some self-appointed left-wing, intellectual film maker patronising them and ‘teaching’ them what to think.

They know what is going on….despite all the BBC’s best efforts to kid them.

And this Curtis film is just more evidence that the BBC doesn’t get it…or rather does, and doesn’t like what it sees as people flock to UKIP….and I have to say it is just another example of the Left’s hypocrisy over Islam….attacking Saudi Arabia, which is the spiritual and actual home of Islam, and yet telling us that the Saudis don’t really represent the authentic Islam….and then telling us that Muslims in the UK who follow the same Saudi traditions, are ‘moderate, tolerant Muslims’.

What did the Americans think about the Saudi King in 1945?…..

In the estimation of Colonel Eddy, who knew the

Arabs probably better than any other American of

his generation:

‘The Guardian of the Holy Places of Islam,

and the nearest we have to a successor to the

Caliphs, the Defender of the Muslim Faith

and of the Holy Cities of three hundred mil-

lion people, cemented a friendship with the

head of a great Western and Christian nation.’

Sounds pretty certain that Saudi Arabia is the epicentre of the Islamic faith and not some propagator of a false version of Islam…they should know after all….Muhammed having come from that very region himself.

Curtis’ film is essentially a YouTube polemic…scratchily put together made up from clips of film that he has taken a fancy to and supposedly tell a coherent tale….each one no doubt has meaning to Curtis but the viewer is left in a certain amount of bewildered confusion…ironic for a film that is supposed to bring the world into focus.  What do the clips mean in the context of the film?  Difficult to tell much of the time….you just wait until the narrative restarts and you get a semblance of order once more.

Curtis would have been better off sticking with a standard narrative form that told the story he wanted to get across.  Instead we have a ‘Tumblr’ type mash of images and themes that are more a stream of consciousness than a coherent and easy to follow story.

It would have been a lot shorter had he cut out the self-indulgent images that served only his own ideological purpose of protraying the West and its actions as ‘dangerous and destructive’.

For instance he related a tale about the construction of dams in Afghanistan…concluding that they caused the soil to become saline, which is true for some areas…and from that we were led to believe that poppies became almost the only crop that could be grown successfully there….so he blames the US for helping to build the dams and thence flood the world not with water but heroin.

Trouble is that’s not true….as this BBC article shows……a vastly different portrayal of Afghanistan and its history…..

Helmand’s Golden Age

Afghanistan once faced the future with confidence.
Caught here on film, it’s an era the world has forgotten

And despite the setbacks, Helmand began to bloom. Residents and visitors alike remember the bright green of the settlements and orchards along the Helmand river.

Farming increased, harvesting a surplus even at times of drought. Farmers grew and exported cotton for cash in thousands of tonnes. Few even recognised the flower of the opium poppy, according to Farouq Azam.

Agriculture, especially cotton and grain production, continued to expand until Helmand supplied a fifth of Afghanistan’s wheat harvest.

So already we have Curtis twisting history to his own purpose and painting Western aid to Afghanistan as the cause of much misery when that clearly was not the case….claiming that tribal and ethnic differences were stirred up by these projects….again the BBC’s own article refutes that…..

Approximately one million Afghans moved to the Helmand Valley at this time, drawn by the prospect of jobs, good schools and prospects. Very many of these were educated people – their children would be the first in Afghanistan to have the option of single-sex or mixed schools.

People of every ethnicity and many languages lived side by side in Lashkar Gah, some in modern American-built houses with lawns, low fences and front gardens.

“It was such a happy time,” says Saeeda Mahmood, daughter of Kamoliddin Mahmood, the civil servant who also ran the cinema:

The film is over two hours long and makes for a very hard watch….both from an aesthetic and technical point of view but also if you have any regard for the truth in history.

Curtis up to his polemical and dishonest tricks once again.

Not worth watching when there is so much out here of better quality and which doesn’t have such a hysterical and ideologically entrenched  view of history.  Life is too short to waste your time on this tripe.

Have a read of this scathing review in the Spectator of Curtis’ masterpiece...’the ‘televisual equivalent of a drunken late night Wikipedia binge with pretension for narrative coherence’…..it’s from an unlikely source…a Guardian journalist…

Adam Curtis’s Bitter Lake, review: a Carry On Up the Khyber view of Afghanistan

In fact Afghans have consistently demonstrated their wish to join the 21st century. After more than a decade of trying the Taliban have failed to gain more than a slither of popular support. Democracy in Afghanistan is flawed, but with Afghans continuing to go the polls, it has not failed, as Curtis baldly states.

As Lotfullah Najafizada, one of the country’s leading journalists, put it last year, a sneering western media might have written off Afghanistan’s ‘decade of war’. But, ‘for us, it’s a decade of peace’.

Jon Boone is Pakistan correspondent for the Guardian

Iimpressionist/comedian Rory Bremner tells us in the Sunday Times that…

‘I’m coming for you Cameron’

He went on to say that…

‘The Coalition has got away with colossal injustice’

He worries about Nigel Farage and the dark side of Boris Johnson…and yet he has nothing to say, in the interview at least, about Labour….sure he mocked ‘New Labour’ long ago…but was that more about their presentation (ala Alastair Campbell) rather than their policies?  It seems he has deep concerns about the Coaliton’s policies…and he is prepared to voice those concerns using his one-off comedy show…on the BBC….‘Rory Bremner’s Coalition Report’.

Apparently…

With a mixture of sketches, stand-up, songs and archive, Rory and the team take on the combined might of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband... and also Nigel Farage.

Perhaps he will do a hatchet job on Miliband’s policies as well…..just as the Now Show does week in week out….or not.

Here they concentrate on Miliband’s presentation not his policies…

Is this appropriate in the run up to an election……a show from someone who obviously has some issues with the Coalition’s policies and looks set to attack them?

As I said appearances count and this might give the appearance of anti-Coalition tendencies at the BBC…although a ‘one-off’ how many more such ‘one-offs’ will we be treated to in the next 94 days and counting?

Does look funny though…Tuesday night, BBC2 10 pm.

Sorry for the delay folks, but cometh the new week cometh same old server probs! Anyway, here is the overdue new Thread!

Just a quick  note to keep you up to date on the character and intentions of Muddy Hasan who never says a true word when a lie will do in the service of whatever nefarious plot he has on the  go at the moment….always muddying the waters….The Mail saw through him and didn’t require his services, shame the BBC still thinks he’s good value….but then again they still go to rent-a-quote Mo Ansar.

Here’s Muddy in his latest piece of dissembling…

Don’t let the ridiculous smears fool you: Syriza is no party of the radical “far left”

Political language, as George Orwell observed in 1946, is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. Seven decades later, consider the way in which mildly progressive political leaders are depicted by their right-wing critics.

Then there is Greece, where Syriza’s Alexis Tsipras, a mild-mannered, tieless civil engineer, was sworn in as prime minister on 26 January. Judging by the hysterical tone of the press coverage, you could be forgiven for assuming that the love child of Karl Marx and Che Guevara had been elected to office in Athens.

 

The clever Muddy Hasan had better remind Syriza that they’ve got it wrong then……

 

 

About SYRIZA

SYRIZA (Coalition of the Radical Left) entered a new stage in its life and action as a single party after its first (Founding) Congress (10-14 July 2013).

 

Syriza UK….

Who we are

We are the official London branch of SYRIZA, the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left.

 

Then again what should we expect from Hasan who tells us, as here in fact, that the BBC is the tool of the Right ‘skewing the debate to the right’.…

Syriza, we are told, by everyone from the Mail to the BBC and the Guardian, is a bunch of radicals, revolutionaries and extremists. It’s not centre left; it’s far left……. Is any more evidence needed of how our political debate has become so skewed to the right?

 

Just caught a film on BBC News 24 which owed more to the adman’s art than the journalist’s, it being pure propaganda with soft music and images and sentiments designed to induce guilt and sympathy for immigrants.   It was solely designed for one purpose…..to tug on your heart strings and persuade you with a large helping of emotional blackmail to fling open the borders and let the world in.  This was not News, this was something the likes of Michael Moore, Ken Loach or Adam Curtis would be proud of producing…..a very one sided, emotive message based not on reason or anything resembling sense but on a willing suspension of reality and disbelief in the sentimental hope that it will all turn out all right in the end.

Here the film maker, Darius Bazargan, writes it up in back and white, but you have to view it through rose tinted glasses for the full effect….

The huddled masses besieging Fortress Calais

He ends with this ‘plea’ to our better nature….

Mustafa the statistician from Aleppo, on the road with his 10-year-old son Izeddine. Ahmad, a video editor from Kabul. Hussein, an English teacher from southern Iran. And Osman, the engineer from Khartoum.

They know what it is like when the roadblocks go up, when the fires of war get closer every night, or when there is a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

These things happen somewhere in the world every single day of the year, and the fortress port of Calais is a testament to the instinct to flee in search of safety.

 

The whole is infused with a good dose of mawkish romanticism of the ‘refugee’ escaping from dire circumstances combined with the brute force of rhetoric backed up with the usual BBC clincher…the child in ‘peril’.

As I said not news but pro-immigration propaganda that pays no heed to the realities of life and the consequences of allowing in unhindered, large, unlimited, numbers of immigrants.

Ironically Bazargan says…

It feels as though the realities of the rest of the world are slowly encroaching on a Western European daydream.

Reality isn’t really encroaching in Bazragan though.

The ‘realities of the rest of the world’ have always been there…what’s new is fools like Bazargan who advocate and proselytise for anyone and everyone to come to the UK if they want to.

Which is strange really…Bazargan should know better, after all he made this film about the ‘realities of the world’ in Lebanon where sectarian violence is never far away in a nation divided by politics, religion and tribe…

You can go to any country in the world and film endless stories that are tragic and pitiful, many you could film in the back streets and estates of the Uk…..millions of these stories exist out there in the ‘rest of the world’……billions in fact. Is Bazargan with his sanctimonious and blinkered preaching suggesting we should scoop them all up and bring them here?  Just what does he think would happen?  Where are the BBC programmes exploring the real issues that arise from importing the problems of the world to this small island?

I guess when race riots, bombings and mass murder don’t effect you in your BBC bubble you can afford to be setting yourself up on the moral high ground…but how long will that last?  Importing the world’s rivalries, the world’s sectarianism, the world’s internecine and very vicious fights can only end one way…..

The future of bright sunny uplands?  Nah…more like a war zone with warlords and their private armies running the show…back to the dark ages then…..

The BBC…charged with promoting civil society and social cohesion……lol.