Throw in Fox News and it’s too much for BBC political correspondent Ross Hawkins to resist:
Farage tells Fox there hasn't been prosecution for FGM in UK. CPS tells me trial of 2 men for FGM offences begins Mon. Both plead not guilty
— Ross Hawkins (@rosschawkins) January 13, 2015
Desperate stuff.
There is that old joke about ‘Hoping you’ll be in Heaven half an hour before the Devil knows you’re there’…..and comes to collect you.
Reminded of it by this cartoon:
Tim Wilcox is feeling the heat:
The Daily Mail explains:
Not badly chosen words at all…just the usual BBC mantra that the Jews in Europe somehow bring retribution upon themselves by Israel’s policy of defending itself when under attack.
That’s one ‘backlash’ that the BBC seems to approve of.
Perhaps Wilcox should apologise to his fellow ‘Tim Wilcox’ who hasn’t been impressed by the attention he’s receiving:
Fair enough.
Christopher Hitchens gives a very measured and scholarly take down of Islam…..is it ‘insulting’ or respectable, intelligent and ‘acceptable’ comment?
The BBC is already mounting its counter punch to the ‘defiant’ Charlie Hebdo cartoon published in reaction to the murders of its staff. The Today programme (07:36) brought on someone from the Muslim Association of Britain…an extremist outfit and the British offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Then on came Prince Hussein of Jordan who condemned the publication and was outraged at suggestions that Islam might be a threat to the European civilisation.
Naughtie asked how he thought Europe should deal with the situation..what is required on our part?…hmmm…is it us that is the problem then?
An irony eh?
The publication of a cartoon is yet again portrayed as insulting and provocative, one that the BBC abhors…and yet the Muslim reaction of intense, extreme violence is explained away, excused and justified.
Print a cartoon satiring violence and you are a neo-Nazi Islamophobe…savagely kill those who produce such cartoons and you are quietly feted as defenders of a Great Faith insulted.
Naughtie thinks it is merely a problem of a few extremists blackening the name of Islam…you can count them on the fingers of one hand perhaps.
Hussein hopes that the media can be more aware of the importance of sharing the knowledge, analytical knowledge [about the issues]….just after he wished that people used the #JeSuisAhmed hashtag [Naughtie giving a snort of approval]…..which I analyse here for his benefit.
There is nothing less likely from the BBC than that, they are extremely reluctant to open the box on this one and when they do they are not going to pay the slightest attention to the findings.
As noted previously the BBC is making a lot of room on the airwaves to push the Muslim side of things…but the BBC’s approach is to deliver this in such a one sided format that it is nothing more than propaganda…..this may well be in the same vein:
I haven’t listened to it but let me think….the narrative is that the ban on the Burkha is just one of many instances of Islamophobia and racism that French Muslims have to put up with and hence we must expect a few murders in response to this outrageous restriction on their religious freedom.
Let me know if I’m on the money if you dare to listen.
#JeSuisAhmed was a hashtag started by Islamist Dyab Abou Jahja and taken up by Muslim activists such as Mehdi Hasan and Myriam Francois-Cerrah. He initiated it with this tweet….
Just so we know…Dyab Abou Jahjah…Muslim activist and opponent of ‘integration’ who stated after 9/11:
“Most of us … felt that day something that can not be described as joy, or as happiness, but rather as that sweet revenge feeling. We all had – except that small minority- a “what goes around comes around’” attitude”
Naturally he now claims not to hold those views. Looking at his tweet I might suggest he still does hold them.
The Tweet tells us that the death of the cartoonists is of no consequence, you may infer from it that the deaths were possibly justifiable in his eyes, and in those who retweet it.
Ironically what the Tweet does tell us is that those same Islamist activists who also complain of those ‘multiple levels of alienation that foster terror’ are wrong.
Ahmed, a Muslim and an Arab, was a police officer….so how did he avoid the rampant Islamophobia and racism rife in France? He had a job, a good job at the heart of the establishment. The killers also had jobs and were not apparently ‘disaffected’ by their lives in France…..what got them into radicalism? Meeting the radical preachers who persuaded them that Muslims were being slaughtered and abused in Iraq by the West….never mind most Muslims were actually being killed by the self-same radicals.
So is that narrative of disenfranchised, disaffected, alienated Muslims the real cause of radicalisation? We know Panorama says it is not, this Tweet suggests it is not. The facts suggest it is not.
After all there are may people from all communities who are in similar positions and yet who are the terrorists? They are Muslim.
Why? Not poverty, not alienation, not joblessness.
The problem is not foreign policy but puritanical Islam and the expoitation of young Muslim’s idealism and fellow feeling for other Muslims …both given divine sanction by the Koran which tells Muslims to fight in order to defend other Muslims ‘under attack’….supposedly oppressed by the West.
What is this plight to which Europe has been reduced?
The vast quivering mass of tormented, bewildered human beings
Who wait in their cities and their homes
And scan the dark horizons for the approach of some new form of Tyranny or terror with the sullen silence of despair.
But for the Great Republic across the Atlantic Ocean saving
Europe from ruin and enslavement The Dark Ages would have Returned in their cruelty and squalor.They may still return.
The salvation of the common people in Europe from war and servitude
Must be established on solid foundations,
And must be created by the readiness of
All men and women to die rather than to submit to tyranny.Let Europe arise.
Churchill, paraphrased from a speech in 1946
The BBC’s Panorama produced a programme about Islam in Britain that totally destroyed the BBC’s carefully contrived narrative of the ideology that is intended to lull us into a sense of false security and persuade us that there are no issues with Islam, that the problems stem from a very small minority of extremists, criminals, madmen even, who pervert the great religion for their own ends.
Panorama was on last night, and I asked what is the likelihood of the truths revealed in that programme finding their way into the BBC’s everyday coverage.
Already we have the answer….not a chance in hell.
The Today programme (06:39) tried to enlighten us about the dark underbelly of the Pegida protests in Germany.
Ostensibly, note that sly little word ‘ostensibly’, the BBC said, Pegida is about extremist Islam.
That additional ‘ostensibly’ tells you everything you need to know about how the BBC’s report would approach this subject. It was a subtle maligning of the intentions of Pegida…the classic ‘liberal’ smear tactic that suggests the real motive is racism.
Indeed the report went on in precisely that vein….the good folk in the Pegida marches are ignorant, they don’t understand the great joys and benefits that immigrants bring (so already off the subject of Islam)….it’s up to politicians to enlighten them! LOL.
However we are told ‘They are not all neo-Nazis’….implying that most are. Proof of that? How about this instead…… ‘Not all Muslims are fanatical Koran thumpers but…..’ Not something you will hear from the good liberatti but they are happy to label anyone who does anything they don’t like as Nazis…quite extraordinary….are the four million marchers in France ‘neo-nazis’?
‘Amusingly’ the report ended from a place close to where a synagogue was destroyed on ‘Kristallnacht’ and we were told that ‘People (ie ignorant Pegida types) don’t learn from history’….what an irony eh? Trying to take the image of the Kristallnacht just days after a Jewish shop was attacked and the free Press brutally murdered by extremist thugs and use it to suggest that people who are protesting about extremism by the very people who committed those crimes are the same as the Nazis!
We’ve just had a programme laying out the extremist ideology that pervades much of the Muslim world, Panorama remember told us that this ideology is ‘mainstream’ in the UK now, and yet only hours later we’re being told that this is something to celebrate in our midst and we’re being lectured that we don’t learn from history.
I might humbly suggest that the people who don’t learn from history are those who bury their heads in the sand and ignore the very dark future that is rapidly approaching.
Remember this well….Labour MP and former minister Shahid Malik quoted this from Islamic scholars:
“It is necessary by sharia to abide by the laws of the country one lives in, regardless of the nature of the law, as long as the law doesn’t demand something that is against Islam….
“It is necessary upon a Muslim to listen to and obey the ruler, as long as one is not ordered to carry out a sin.”
Of course that means a sin in the eyes of Allah as defined by the Koran and Sharia….in other words Sharia law, not British law, is the final arbiter of how a Muslim should live in the UK according to Malik….If British law demands you do something that is ‘unIslamic’ you should refuse to do it.
The Daily Mirror told us in 2006 that:
WE MUST NOT GIVE IN TO MUSLIM BLACKMAIL
As a result of demands such as these…..
Dr Syed Aziz Pasha, secretary-general of the Union of Muslim Organisations of the UK and Ireland, demanded the British institute Sharia Law in England and grant Muslims national Islamic holidays… “If you give us religious rights we will be in a better position to convince young people that they are being treated equally along with other citizens.”
In other words more Islam is the answer to the extremists demand for more Islam….clever huh?
This was the MCB’s tactic when trying to impose an Islamic ethos into secular schools just a year later….something remarkably never mentioned by the BBC when it eventually got around to reporting the current attacks on our schools in the Trojan Horse plot…..the man at the centre of that plot being the same man who authored the MCB ‘guidance’ for schools in 2007. Something that might have been of note perhaps.
As pointed out the BBC has already decided to ignore the ‘warnings from history’ and the warnings from its own revelatory report on the subject of just how mainstream ‘conservative’ Islam is in the UK.
It does everything it can to prevent ‘Europe arising’ to defend its values and beliefs, culture and society. The BBC would rather you be crushed and oppressed by an extreme ideology than for you to ‘offend’ or ‘insult’ those who wish to impose it by reiterating your own beliefs and values.
Standing up for democracy, freedom of thought and expression, freedom to leave your religion, freedom to criticise an ideology…..all are apparently ‘insulting and offensive’ to certain people.
The BBC would rather have the ‘sullen silence of despair’ than for you to be allowed to voice your concerns.
David Goodhart said, on the BBC, and subsequently ignored….
It has become clear that to remain liberal the state may have to prescribe a clearer hierarchy of values.
The gulf between conservative Islam and secular liberal Britain is larger than with any comparable large group….for those of us who value an open, liberal society it is time to explain why it is superior to the alternatives.
Some claim that if people understood Islam more everything would be fine, they would be more tolerant, I think quite the contrary….the more they understand about it the more alien they would find it…authoritarian, collectivist, patriarchal, misogynist…..all sorts of things that Britain might have been 100 years ago but isn’t now.
Tolerating the intolerable is not a sensible attitude however ‘liberal’ you profess to be…sometimes you just have to stand up and say No! A time when compromise must end.
As tens of thousands of Germans take to the streets to protest the Islamification of their Country, the BBC does all it can to downplay this movement and tar it with a Nazi type image. The BBC has a problem with any Nation showing patriotism and has been quick to support Merkel’s demonisation of the Pegida movement.
Here is the latest Charlie Hebdo cover. On BBC Today, they stated that the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail were not running with it. I was contacted by a DT Journalist who said that the web version of the Telegraph ran it at 11pm last night. She also pointed out the BBC did not appear to be wanting to show it. So, has the BBC the courage to PUBLICLY run this image or were all their #jesuischarlie words simply empty?
I have now watched the Panorama programme, The Battle For British Islam, and I will admit to having been astonished. The programme could have been written by this site and is an utter condemnation of the BBC’s approach to Islam and how they report it day in day out….most notably over the last few days.
There are many points to note…one that Muslims who don’t toe the conservative Muslim line face one of those infamous ‘backlashes’, a serious and intemperate backlash, but from other Muslims…..on the making of a music video based on the song ‘Happy’ the makers were told that they are the perpetrators of a bad PR stunt to promote integration…which of course they were really…the intention behind it was quite obvious. What Panorama didn’t mention was that similar videos from the same production team were made around the world….well intentioned propaganda organised by someone intent on persuading non-Muslims that Muslims are carefree and fun.
That aside we get to the really serious stuff….we are told that the extreme Islamic views, once on the fringe (allegedly), are now becoming mainstream. Panorama even points the finger at the MCB which it points out thought that extremist views were merely ‘conservative Islam’ in action.
We heard that the MCB would label any criticism of that conservative narrative as Islamophobic…which one Muslim said she found ‘very troubling’.
Then we had various voices of ‘conservative Islam’ highlighted…..one from the Muslim Association of Britain, which is, unmentioned by Panorama, part of the Muslim Brotherhood (and has close ties to the SNP). He had no problem with killing apostates or any other Islamically sanctioned punishment however draconian.
We also heard that they would use democracy in order to undermine democracy and forge a path for theocracy to be imposed. Which is an echo of the famous comment by Turkey’s islamist leader Recep Erdogan who said that democracy was a bus that he would ride until he got to his destination….an Islamic state.
Later we got to the real meat of the matter…the Muslim grievance industry…the grievance narrative that Muslims are oppressed by the West and foreign policy is anti-Muslim.
This grievance narrative we were told, again by a Muslim, was false and very unhelpful. It feeds into the narrative of those who want to create a them and us society.
It is dangerous and dishonest to blame foreign policy!
The narrative of Muslims under siege, Muslims oppressed, of Islamophobia demonising Muslims was rubbished as a cause of radicalisation.
And the problem is not foreign policy but a puritanical Islam.
The programme ends on a question….will events in France be the trigger for some soul searching amongst Muslims leading to reform?
The last comment didn’t sound too hopeful and gave the probability that such a conclusion would only come at the cost of much bloodshed and over the course of many years, decades, hundreds of years possibly.
All very powerful and iconoclastic….it totally undermines the BBC’s own ‘mainstream’ narrative of the Muslim grievance industry, Islamophobia and the effect of foreign policy as the cause of radicalisation…..The real problem is ‘puritanical Islam’.
Good luck with sorting that out….then again look what Cameron did to the ‘nasty party’……completely emasculated it in no time.
So the question now is what will the BBC do next…will we see a counter narrative to that grievance industry and tackle Islamic extremism or will the BBC dodge that and resume its lazy, convenient narrative of oppression and foreign policy?
Craig at Is the BBC Biased has watched Panorama and is praising it for its honesty in discussing Islam in the UK….
Panorama: The Battle for British Islam
Credit where credit’s due.
Tonight’s Panorama by John Ware was an outstanding piece of reporting.
It fully faced up to the fact that Islam is the problem, and that a radical reformation of Islam is needed
I haven’t watched it yet but I will take Craig’s word for it that John Ware, usually reliable on this subject, has done the business. Let’s hope I don’t appear on tomorrow’s Today programme ala Fox News and Birmingham for relying on other people’s research.
From the BBC blurb:
John Ware hears from Muslims facing an angry backlash for trying to promote a form of Islam which is in synch with British values. They believe that the way Islam has been practised here has more in common with extremist ideologies than some police officers, politicians or Muslim leaders have been prepared to admit.
An extreme but non-violent form of Islam pushes Muslims into the arms of the extremists…a version of Islam that can’t exist with core British values…and one that is growing.
Here’s the issue though…all very well a specialist BBC programme making these waves and digging into the subject to unearth the truth…but as always how does that translate into the everyday presentation of these events when it is filtered through the likes of Nicky Campbell, Peter Allen and Adrian Chiles?
Kind of suspect, as long experience tells me, that it will be completely ignored and the ideas and information within that programme will not get disseminated to other programme makers.
If you don’t watch the programme, and how many do watch Panorama now?, you will be left the unsuspecting victim of a tidal wave of pro-Islam programming that talks about the threat from the Far Right and makes Muslims the victims of that mythical backlash.
The BBC has long treated us to Muslim propaganda programming designed to make us love Muslims and Islam….Friday we had yet another…Hip in a Hijab.
Listen and groan…it’s pure propaganda…listen to how free and powerful Muslim women are…how the hijab empowers them and is a symbol of freedom and feminism….however the idea that Muslim women can wear alluring and eyecatching Hijabs and Burkhas is ridiculous…it defeats the purpose of those devices which is to cover their modesty and stop them attracting unwanted (by their husband/father/brother) male attention.