Here you go, pretty much on-time and awaiting your informed comments! It’s the Labour party conference this week so THAT should be interesting to watch how the comrades at the BBC cover their dear friends…

Alex Salmond inner self after the referendum

I’m still of the opinion that the BBC was leaning more towards Scottish independence than the Nats give them credit for…it would suit the BBC pro-Europe stance….divide and rule…splitting up the UK into small parts that are easy to pick off.

Throughout the run up to the referendum Salmond and Co were given an easy ride without too much rigorous questioning whilst the pro-Union campaign was ripped into.

When Cameron announced the new deal for Scotland before the referendum the BBC roundly panned it…based it seemed on the fact that a few Tory backbenchers opposed it…the same backbenchers who the BBC normally dismisses as a fringe bunch of rightwing backbenchers out to make trouble.

The BBC decided that the legislation for this deal could never be pushed through…however you might have thought that with all three leaders backing the promises and whipping their colleagues in to vote for it, it must stand a good chance of getting through the House….I can’t quite see why the BBC is so pessimistic.

After the referendum the BBC devoted most of its coverage to the impossibility of Cameron fuflilling his promises and the hopelessness of the No campaign.  I didn’t hear anything about the credibility of Salmond’s promises nor of the way he ran his campaign, hearing next to nothing of the bullying, intimidation and lies that the SNP indulged in….could Salmond fulfill those promises, were his figures on North Sea oil, the NHS and the economy credible?  The BBC didn’t seem too excited about exploring such issues.

The BBC did seem intent on stirring up Scottish nationalist’s anger by presenting the referendum as somehow undemocratic…er…because one side lost the vote…by a good 10%.  Apparently we now have to think of the 45% who wanted independence and not the 55% who don’t, and mould our policies to suit that 45%…there is much ‘negative anger’ out there we were told…and the BBC will not miss a trick in trying to whip that up into yet more anger about the result…Alex Salmond is already claiming ‘we was robbed’…the BBC’s asks…‘With all that anger the big question is ‘Can the Yes campaign work together for a united Britain?’….apparently we can no longer be Britain despite the vote to be British….Viewpoint: What now for Britishness?   Curious how democracy doesn’t work for the BBC.

Jon Pienaar came out after the vote telling us that Cameron was targeting Labour, he had ‘weaponised’ the politics by announcing he would seek to answer the ‘West Lothian Question’…. he isn’t looking for a consensus according to Pienaar who seemed to be making it up as he went along and  interpreting things in a way that sexed up his reports never mind that their wasn’t as yet any evidence that what Pienaar was saying had any basis in truth…it was mere conjecture presented as fact by Pienaar.

Pienaar cornered a Labour MP (can’t remember who) and tried to get him to say this was Cameron playing politics but the Labour MP steadfastly refused to say that and seemed aggrieved that Pienaar would seek to politicise this himself.

Perhaps the MP had already had a memo with the official Labour line….. that Labour’s then policy was to support the idea of English votes for English laws.

How do we know that?  Because due to a bit of a cock up two Labour MPs repeated exactly the same lines in the same interview with Sheila Fogarty. (3 hrs 53 mins)

Fogarty had Frank Field in to give us some spiel…he stated that we know Scotland can look after itself, the big question is how England can look after itself, Cameron has snatched victory from defeat, Labour must put its Scottish privileges over the English (that Labour Scottish MPs can vote on English laws) on the table and that Ed Miliband must represent the English party in England.  This is the project where Cameron can screw UKIP.  (In other words his gameplan is not to ‘weaponise’ the WLQ and target Labour, in Labour’s opinion…it is to target UKIP)

Then in came Labour’s Siddique Khan who hadn’t heard what Frank Field had said and launched straight into the exact same spiel…in a different way of course…..Cameron snatched victory from defeat, Scotland can look after itself, Labour’s Scottish privileges must be negotiated, Miliband must represent the English Party in England…and he even said Cameron is out to screw UKIP.

Fogarty and Field leapt in to close him down eventually in a bit of a panic as they realised he was reading from the same Labour script.

This was clearly a template message that Labour had concocted and sent out to its MPs to deliver if buttonholed by the Media…in their own words obviously…or not so obviously to some apparently.

The main message?  Labour supports Cameron’s wish to have only English MPs vote on English laws….and that this is about ‘screwing UKIP’ not Labour….not the message Pienaar was trying to claim Labour had.

Of course that seems to have changed now with Miliband opposing such a move.

Fogarty failed her big test there…any reporter worth her salt would have leapt in and demanded to know if this was the official Labour position if we had two MPs parroting the very same lines, almost to the word.  It is after all the major question of huge consequence as Fogarty alluded to in the interview when she kept asking if such a postion was really in Labour’s interest.

Fogarty’s wish to change the subject may just have been panic when she realised the interview was going awry but Pienaar has always been Ed Miliband friendly, Labour friendly.  I can’t say I’ve heard him utter much in the way of criticism of Miliband, in fact he ususally praises him…for price freezes on fuel and his Syria policy (opportunistic cowardice)….it has always been thus…when Labour was in power Pienaar would tell us that any policy announcement by the Tories looked good on initial impressions but if you delved deeper it started to fall apart…however Labour’s policies were a marvel of success and genius….and the fact that 12,000 manufacturing jobs a month were being lost in 2005 at the time of the election never got mentioned.

All in all I can’t say the BBC’s coverage of the referendum and all that has been anything but  somewhat one sided giving the SNP an easy ride, and now looks to be targeting Cameron whilst Miliband once again opportunistically changes his mind, doing a huge u-turn on ‘English votes for English laws’ backpeddling rapidly into the muddy waters of ‘consultation’ (post election naturally), and the BBC doesn’t notice even when the evidence is literally right in front of them.

From the Telegraph:

Miliband cornered over home rule

Labour leader refuses to say whether he backs PM’s plan to ban Scottish MPs from voting on English laws after referendum

Ed Miliband refused 13 times to say whether he would back plans set out by the Prime Minister for “home rule” in England in the wake of the Scottish independence referendum.

Maybe he missed the memo Frank Field and Siddique Khan received.

The BBC have been bombarding us with endless reports that Imams have signed a letter demanding the release of a British hostage by ISIS.

Clear what the message is…British Muslims, decent, moderate Muslims, have no truck with ISIS and its extremist, distorted version of Isam.

It’s an easy win for the Muslims….what can they lose?…they are saying nothing about their religion, making no objectionable criticisms of its tenets…but get the credit for speaking out against extremism…not Islamic extremism…just head-chopping off extremism.

The BBC have also been making much of a ‘Home Office insider’ who has revealed concerns that we are not dealing with a major threat…that of the Far Right.

Now just who could that Home Office insider be?  Could he possibly be one of those radical Muslims employed by the Home Office to help them tackle the radicalisation of Muslim youth?  Ahem.   Let me think.  Can we trust a word this guy says?  No.

Or could he actually be a genuine Whitehall voice?  If so why would he be speaking about this?

We have seen a flurry of articles in various publications that dismiss the ‘Islamic’ part of the ‘Islamic State’ and tell us that ISIS has more in common with modern European fascism or European medieval conflicts than Islamic history….an obvious misdirection attempting to ‘enlighten’ us…the message is that these lands were not Islamic and yet they were extreme and vioelnt,  therefore violence in Muslim lands or societies cannot be blamed on Islam, there must be other, underlying, causes common to all societies.   However…. ISIS is in fact a perfect, full colour replay of the establishment of Islam across the Middle East by Muhammed…who also felt no qualms about chopping off heads…some he did himself.  Perhaps Muhammed wasn’t a Muslim?

Is it possible that the government has been whispering in a few ears and is busy establishing a certain narrative across the Media designed to insulate the Muslim community from any fallout over the Islamic State and British recruits chopping off British heads?

Once again, with the supposed threat of the Far Right, we have that false comparative narrative that if it something bad happens in European, non-Muslim society, then that illustrates that ‘similar’ problems apparently linked to Islam have other underlying causes.  Part of that narrative is to create a straw man, to exaggerate the threat from the ‘Far Right’ and make out that white, working class youths are on the march and are just as dangerous as any Muslim terrrorist…hence, we, the British Public, should not criticise or condemn Muslims and Islam, because look….it’s not just Muslims who are radical and dangerous…and after all, the ‘radicalised’ white boys don’t read the Koran…only of course they do…which is why they march ….against it.

One other point is that the BBC links ‘Islamophobia’, or as a more truthful witness might say, justified and reasoned criticism of Islam, only with the ‘Far Right’.

What the BBC’s narrative does is to suggest that if you criticise Islam you must be ‘Far Right’ and your views are completely abhorrent to normal, decent human beings.

The BBC attempts to introduce a virtual blasphemy law…if you speak out against Islam and its practises you are labelled racist and ‘Islamophobic’.  The BBC attempts to close down debate and criticism by turning anyone who speaks out into pariahs.

Perhaps that ‘Home Office insider’ should be dragged in for a bit of a bollocking.  Far from reducing the likelihood of inter-communal violence he has increased it by trying to close down real debate and discussion of the real causes of Muslim violence and radicalisation…with a bit of help from the BBC.

Jon Snow  grandly, sententiously, told us he was ‘bearing witness’ to events in Gaza rather than reporting them in  a balanced and impartial manner.  Never mind the facts, the context, the causes of those events that Snow ‘bears witness’ to.

The BBC’s Archive on 4, Media and the Middle East, programme opened with Snow’s words.

And it went downhill from there as it explored how the Israel/Palestinian conflict has been reported….or at least that is how the programme was presented to us.

In fact this was a self serving piece of very, very carefully crafted BBC propaganda designed to tell us the BBC is not pro-Israeli and its seemingly pro-Palestinian stance is merely a just rebalancing of the media narrative which has been too heavily slanted towards ‘plucky’ little Israel.

The programme had two very revealing conclusions.  Firstly they told us that neither Israeli nor Hamas social media operations caught the Public imagination.  What did catch that imagination were the casualties in Gaza.

Now Hamas might consider that their social media offensive failing is hardly a disaster when they had a massive, powerful, respected, world wide broadcasting organisation such as the BBC pumping out their message for them…the exact message that Hamas were trying to generate…that of high civilian casualties.

In other words what caught the public’s attention was the Hamas message, courtesy of the BBC…and this was a deliberate BBC policy, carried out to the nth degree by the likes of Jon Donnison….undoubtedly overseen approvingly by his boss, Jeremy Bowen.

The second conclusion was that the narrative about Israel has changed over time…once the plucky little country fighting for survival, now the enormously powerful bully turning its might upon a weak and defenceless People who could barely fight back.

Now again that’s a narratve that is familiar…it is one we have heard repeatedly from BBC journalists, that Israel’s overwhelmingly powerful army is crushing a helpless, defenceless Palestinian opponent.

So once again the BBC has worked to completely alter the narrative of the conflict and has managed to create an image of Israel that bears little relation to the truth, missing out important context and causation…never mind that Israel is surrounded by enemies out to destroy it.

Curiously the BBC is far more sympathetic to Iran whom it explains is only so aggressive because of the enemies (The Great Satan) surrounding it.

From those two conclusions we can see just how powerful and effective the BBC’s attempts to manipulate the narrative in favour of the Palestinians and against the Israelis has been.

By coincidence this morning we also heard something about ISIS and what needs to be done to tackle and lessen its appeal to Muslims. The main answer, we were told, was to create functioning, decent states, societies and democracies in the Middle East.

Which, you may recall, is what was attempted in Iraq. What was the main obstacle on the road to a democratic, just State in Iraq?  The radical Islamists…..and who encouraged them to fight in Iraq?  The BBC….the BBC ‘fought’ the Iraq war all the way, declaring it illegal, Blair a liar and the army murderous.

The BBC was one of the obstacles to that fair and just State as it spent a decade pumping out anti-Iraq war messages that ensured Muslims were in a perpetual state of anger and anti-Western funk.

Once again the BBC has interfered in the Middle East with devastatingly dangerous consequences.

The programme seemed to concentrate more on Israel than the Palestinians or Arabs…..the clips played were all unfavourable to Israel, or intended that way.

We heard Pathe News was terribly pro-Israel…apparently the soundtracks accompanying the reports of Israeli victories in the various wars were far too triumphant ….personally, having heard many a Pathe News film clip, I’d say they were about standard for the time…nothing that would indicate it was intedned to be pro-Israel.

We heard that the BBC was at the mercy of the ‘Jewish Lobby’….a view later reinforced when Bowen came on to claim he was bombarded by complaints…..mostly as a result of orchestrated Jewish campaigns against him and the BBC….oh, yes the Palestinians also complained…but you know what, it was just that terrible old Arafat……not the lovely Hamas…nor the Palestinian people.

What we didn’t hear from Bowen was how his journalists were controlled by Hamas and the reports they sent out were censored by the terrorists…..something which the BBC of course denies.

Those were the most notable points from the programme which overall was just as you might expect…Israel in the wrong and the defenceless Palestinians doing the best they can in a cruel world.

But essentially as said, this was more about the BBC than about either Israel or the Palestinians.

A couple other notable points…one claim was that the UK was very pro-Israel as a bulwark against Arab nationalism….hmmm…well Britain was never enthusiastically pro-Israel and favoured the Arabs far more….not to mention the British long term support for the Muslim Brotherhood….as a bulwark against Arab nationalism….something the BBC fails to mention here for some reason.

One of John Lloyd’s final comments was that social media played no part in the ‘Arab Spring’…which is curious as that was a central theme for much of the BBC reporting at the time….the BBC itself being chastised for its casual use of the social media sources for ‘news’.

Interesting how the Arab Spring is now being quietly downgraded itself….could it be that the BBC prefers to lay the blame for the rise of massive unrest in the Middle East on the doorstep of the Americans and Blair after Iraq 2003?….which is odd really…as the BBC told us this:

“We had a clean revolution [In Tunisia]. The former president turned out to be a coward. He just ran away. Not like the others – like the poor Libyans, or in Syria – but it lit the fuse to all the other revolutions” Wassim Herissi, radio DJ

The downfall of Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali inspired pro-democracy activists across the Arab world.
Widespread discontent at economic hardship, decades of autocratic rule and corruption erupted into mass demonstrations in December 2010 after a young, unemployed man, Mohamed Bouazizi, set fire to himself after officials stopped him selling vegetables in Sidi Bouzid. Around 300 people were killed during the subsequent unrest, which forced Ben Ali to resign in January 2011, after 23 years in power, and go into exile in Saudi Arabia. He was later sentenced to life in prison in absentia.

Not the Iraq war then?  And ISIS?  It came out of the Arab Spring and Syria.  Again not from Iraq 2003.

It’s also interesting to hear all those Syrians and Iraqis who are proud of their countries and who intend to fight to keep them in one piece…..not a message the BBC likes, preferring instead to tell us that Sykes-Picot forced diverse ethnicities and religions unnaturally together, a ticking time bomb just waiting to explode…never mind the Ottoman Empire was constructed from all those various identities itself…and that the Arabs fought to create an Arab nation alongside the British against the Islamic Caliphate.

The BBC… which never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.

We had this story earlier in the month:

Illegal immigrant clung to axle of motorhome for more than 100 miles to get to Britain from Calais through the Channel Tunnel

Yesterday the BBC tackled it on 5 Live with Clare McDonnell, who, sad to say, could quite easily be mistaken for the much missed Victoria Derbyshire….who, you will be happy to know, brings her undoubted talents and take on the world to the small screen:

James Harding, the director of BBC news and current affairs, said: “Victoria has rightly won many awards for her ability to find the stories that matter in the lives of people in this country.

“We are very excited to bring her range of interests, determination to get to the bottom of the story, and her capacity to surprise, to a television audience.”

 

McDonnell interviewed the two Brits who were surprised to find an immigrant emerge from underneath their motorhome…and who promptly gave him a cup of tea, a sandwich and a banana.

To set the scene McDonnell wanted to give us a ‘a reminder of why immigrants are prepared to go to such lengths to get to Britain.’   I think you can see where she is going with this.

Naturally we hear tales of woe and a love for Britain, a desperate need to work and to live in such a lovely country where justice and law prevail and just how much they really want to contribute.

No doubt they wouldn’t dream of asking for the generous handouts available.

Back to the particular immigrant in question and McDonnell suggests that the couple were  naturally scared but that fear soon turned to sympathy for the poor fellow’s plight….asking if they now had compassion for immigrants…he maybe sent back…how does that make you feel?  she asks.

Indeed they did have sympathy…and then the husband said ‘….but of course this is a small country…can’t take ’em all’

McDonnell suddenly didn’t want to talk to him and turned to the wife asking how she feels…unfortunately she gave the same answer…essentially ‘we can’t take ’em all.’

Must have been a great disappointment to find two such sympathetic people, so obviously caring and generous…..and they turn out to be complete fascist nazi UKIP voting immigrant bashing little Englanders.

Have they learnt nothing from the years of BBC propaganda?

Just another sad little BBC attempt to tell us how hard life is in an immigrant’s home country and ipso facto how much he needs and deserves a home in the UK,  to tell us how hard a journey he has had to get here…again how desperate he must be….and therefore clearly so deserving of a home for his trouble, and look, he loves Britain, he’s not a scrounger, he wants to work, he wants to be ‘British’…..how can you refuse to love him and find a place not only in your heart but in your home for him?

The message was clear….you might fear immigrants but once you get to know them you can only have sympathy….therefore let ’em in, all of ’em….numbers no object.

Shame the BBC doesn’t interview all those people who have had relatives killed by immigrants, or people who have been raped, robbed, burgled, pick-pocketed, credit card scammed, shoplifted or otherwise attacked and abused by them.

In the last ten years more people have been killed by immigrants in the UK than were killed on 7/7…how many more were otherwise victims of crime by immigrants?

Which is more dangerous, terrorism or open door immigration?

Both of which the BBC seems to support in its own way.

I thought this was pretty good from Delingpole…!

“MEMO TO THE BBC: THE ‘FAR RIGHT’ DID NOT DECAPITATE DAVID HAINES NOR RAPE 1400 GIRLS IN ROTHERHAM”

Here you go, a new general OPEN thread to detail the bias!

Well, Scotland gets to decide if it stays in the UK today and I am putting up this post to capture all your thoughts on BBC coverage of this issue!

I can see why the BBC might find Islam attractive what with death for apostasy being a favoured way of dealing with critical ex-members of the cult.

Paxman is famously grumpy as he slowly grinds to a halt, and Paul Mason shows a distinct lack of loyalty as well…from The Spectator:

Former Newsnight correspondent Paul Mason seems rather happy to be free of Auntie, especially since the Scottish independence referendum campaign sent the establishment to panic stations: ‘Not since Iraq have I seen BBC News working at propaganda strength like this. So glad I’m out of there,’ he writes on his Facebook page, to the consternation of former colleagues. ‘It’s on my friends-only Facebook page so not meant as any great statement other than weariness,’ Mason tells Mr S, ‘it says what it says.’ Lucky, then that he is now at Channel Four News – that famed bastion of slant free news.

 

 

Nicky Campbell investigated ISIS this morning and what needed to be done about them.

First of all we have to think up a really uncool name for them…To call them the Islamic State is just addressing them in the manner they want to be addressed and gives them a legitimacy they don’t deserve.

Naturally they are ‘unIslamic’ but also barbaric, murderous and cruel terrorists…yes that’s right, terrorists.

Curious that when the BBC wants to defend ‘Islam’ anything that reflects badly upon the religion or community is deemed unIslamic, bad, mad or in this case terrorists.

Curious that when the BBC wants to attack Israel similar bad, mad, unIslamic ‘terrorists’ are described as ‘resisters’, militants heroically defending their land and people against a violent oppressor.

Campbell of course couldn’t make it through the programme without finding an excuse to bring Israel into the discussion.  When someone suggested ISIS didn’t follow the norms of most states or international rules Campbell claimed that there would be thousands of people screaming at the radio asking ‘What about Israel?‘

Why Israel?  Why Israel in particular when Russia has annexed the Crimea and has invaded the Ukraine, never mind its attempts on Georgia and Chechnya…never mind Syrian atrocities, or Iranian, or Pakistani?

Why does Nicky Campbell compare Israel to ISIS?  Must be all those ‘undocumented’ settlements…sorry, illegal settlements.  Again curious how illegal immigrants are welcomed to Britain by the BBC and yet Israeli ‘illegals’ in the West Bank are criminal war mongers.

At best this is Campbell trying to generate some cheap interest in his programme, trying to stimulate some controversy and argument by throwing Israel to the dogs.  At worst he is demonising Israel and legitimising attacks upon it.

From The Spectator:

Like it or not, Isis are Muslims. Calling them ‘monsters’ lets us off the hook

There are various pieties that politicians observe in the wake of some barbarity committed by Islamic fundamentalists and duly David Cameron observed them in his statement yesterday about the murder of David Haines. Of the perpetrators, he observed:

‘They are killing and slaughtering thousands of people – Christians, Muslims, minorities across Iraq and Syria. They boast of their brutality. They claim to do this in the name of Islam. That is nonsense. Islam is a religion of peace. They are not Muslims, they are monsters.’

I really wish he wouldn’t. It doesn’t add anything whatever to our understanding of Isis to say that they are not Muslims but monsters. They may not be our preferred kind of Muslims – my own preference is for the C of E sort you used to get in the former Yugoslavia – but they are, unquestionably Muslims of a particularly unattractive stamp. Calling them monsters is an impolite way of abnegating any effort to understand them.