The BBC is having a crisis.  It hasn’t been able to settle on a position yet on how to report the case for military action against ISIS.

Its natural stance would be to oppose any military action as it did with Afghanistan and Iraq but with ISIS displaying unhelpful signs of being out and out evil and a vast majority of MPs voting in favour the BBC has had to hold its tongue.

That of course will only last until the first civilians get killed by allied bombs or ‘boots’ appear on the ground and ‘mission creep’ sets in.

For now the BBC settles for making sure there is no definitive answer as to whether military action is the correct course to take by continually raising ‘for and against’ questions. keeping the waters muddy.  Good job the same bunch of BBC people weren’t around in WWII…Hitler would have his own show to justify his actions.

However the BBC does still like to keep up its own mantras that it nurtures and propagates, mentioning them as often as possible…..

• The Sykes-Picot agreement between Britain and France ‘carved up the Middle East’ and caused all the problems we see now.

• Islam is the religion of peace.

• Iraq 2003 gave birth to ISIS.

• And you can’t fight an ideology.

All of those claims by the BBC, stated frequently by its journalists, can be disproved with very little effort.  Which might go to show that the BBC’s position is more political than journalism based on integrity.

John Humphrys many years ago scoffed at the idea that we could have a ‘war on terror’ claiming…‘The ‘War on Terror’ is a misnomer isn’t it?  How can you have a war on an idea?’

This was a frequently repeated bit of semantics trotted out by opponents of that ‘War on Terror’.

On Saturday he repeated that claim that you can’t fight an idea with a bullet….and it was the first question on  ‘Any Questions’…..‘Can you bomb away an ideology?’.

The trouble is of course you can…..if you don’t fight the ideology it will only become more established and will grow ever stronger.

And the Jihadists don’t have a problem propagating that ideology with a bullet…after all they are only doing what Bin Laden said they should do….

‘The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates…Platonic ideals…nor Aristotelian diplomacy.  But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun.
…Islamic governments have never and will never be established through peaceful solutions and cooperative councils.’

We spent 40 years fighting Communism with hundreds of thousands of troops based in Europe facing off the Soviets.  Diplomacy and fine sentiments didn’t keep the Russian hordes at bay….tanks, guns and nuclear weapons did.

An ideology is only an idea when it is in someone’s brain…put a bullet in that brain and that kind of puts a stop to things….at least to the people with intentions to impose that ideology using violence.

So you can fight an ideology. It’s really very simple in concept unless you’re a smart arse journalist with an axe to grind because you’ve been caught lying about what Blair said.

Of course you have to remember that the BBC once claimed Al Qaeda didn’t exist, it was a ‘nightmare’ dreamt up by the American government, and therefore it was only an ‘idea’, a figment of the imagination…the ‘war on terror’ was therefore based on a lie fighting an imaginery foe.

The BBC might like to revisit that claim and whilst there they might like to think again about declaring ISIS ‘unIslamic’… even Muslims realise this isn’t true:

The current US strategy negates the cultural and social underlying causes for the rise of terrorism in the Middle East. The US decision-makers should realise that IS, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra Front and similar groups are not just a terrorist group but also an ideology coming from the heart of the Wahhabi-Salafi-Hanbali doctrine.

This school of thought enjoys a deal of support amongst Sunni-Arab countries. From their perspective, the US is practically re-launching the post-9/11 “war against Islam”. The fact is that the US cannot fight an ideology through air strikes.

So the religious ideology of Al Qaeda et al is one happily embraced by many Middle Eastern countries….what a surprise.

Shame the BBC doesn’t read its own material.

Speaking of which today we had this from the BBC:

Karen Armstrong on War and Religion

Karen Armstrong argues against the notion that religion is the major cause of war.

Listening to this programme you hear many facts that you  can agree with but then there comes the interpretation, an interpretation which is often distinctly at odds with the facts the same person has just laid out before us….the problem, as with the BBC, is that they allow their own prejudices and views to colour that intepretation.

Armstrong seems to have a particular dislike of Israel…she claimed the Jews for a thousand years had a taboo against going to the Holyland and setting up a state [Clearly a claim intended to undermine the existence of an Israeli state]…..and that peace for Israel means others being subjugated with merciless violence.

She also blamed the West for all the ills in the Middle East…the humiliation of Muslims subjugated by the colonialists practically overnight leading to their desire to fight the world.

She of course doesn’t even consider that Islam conquered, colonised and subjugated the populations of the Middle East and that that colonisation has been the ultimate cause of all this upheaval….as well as the medieval backwardness of those countries.

We also heard that Iraq 2003 is the cause of the Shia/Sunni rift…according to Armstrong a modern phenomenon….never mind 1400 years of conflict…or indeed the Iran/Iraq war.

Also that Iran is the key to defeating ISIS….so we must join forces with them.

Oh, and suicide attacks were invented and exported by the West.

Only 25% of Muslims really understand the Koran Armstrong suggests…curiously Armstrong tells us that it is only when Muslims go to prison that they have the time to get to know the religion in depth…and whent hey do they realise God is good and wants you to be good…hmmm…does she mean as with fundamentalists Qutb and Maududi, and oh yes , Hitler who wrote ‘Mein Kampf’ in prison…. “the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.”?

So that kind of nullifies her point that Jihadis don’t know their scriptures…. so many having come out of prison radicalised even more so.

The programme was in many respects quite surprising in its admissions about religion and violence…..however, as said, they seemed to rush back into the safety of the ‘narrative’ that the BBC also likes….Islam the religion of peace, The West the cause of all the evil in the ME, and  Muslims as the victims of Western oppression, their violence merely a reaction against that oppression and humiliation.

Another surprise might be this clip on 5Live Drive [whole report from 2 hr 22 mins] the BBC played of George Bush in 2007 predicting the rise of terrorism if there is a failure to completely deal with the Jihadists in Iraq…as when Obama chose to withdraw the troops……but listen to Anna Foster trying to blame both Bush and Obama for the rise of ISIS whilst the ‘expert’ clearly blamed Obama….Bush pumped in 30,000 troops in a surge that successfully cleared out Al Qaeda….the troop withdrawal by Obama gave the Jihadists room to come back….along with Assad helping them.

Here is the Telegraph’s take on Obama:

Obama is rewriting history on Isil. It won’t wash

Given how completely Barack Obama’s foreign policy has been upended by the rise of Isil in Syria, it is not surprising that the president should try and gloss over the scale of his own miscalculation when it came to the threat posed by the jihadists – but that doesn’t mean he should be allowed to get away with it.

This weekend Mr Obama had the cheek to blame his intelligence agencies for the fact that the White House was “caught by surprise” by the sudden rise of Isil.

Some spooks are already challenging the basic truth of this, but intelligence aside, what Mr Obama conveniently glosses over is that it was his decision to let Syria burn that created the chaos – and that a good many people, from his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton downwards, warned him loud and clear of the risk he was taking by doing that.

It was Obama’s decision to let Syria burn.…and Ed Miliband’s…who influenced Obama.

It is curious how Miliband rarely seems to get a mention in all of this.  Just how much blame can be attached to him for the rise of ISIS?

The BBC doesn’t ask.

Others do…..

French President Blames Ed Miliband For ISIS

A new week dawns and so a new OPEN THREAD requires your attention! Detail the bias here please.

The BBC’s Lisa Jardine gives us her point of view…..

A point of view: When historical fiction is more truthful than historical fact

Fiction has the power to fill in the imaginative gaps left by history, writes Lisa Jardine.

In my search for understanding the motivation of those who joined the race to produce the bomb whose use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki appalled the world, I eventually decided to turn from fact to fiction. If historians could not fill the gaps in the record that made the knowledge I was after so elusive, perhaps storytellers less shackled by documented evidence might do so.

Yes, less shackled by documentary evidence…that is a bit of pain isn’t it having to have evidence for your journalism.

On that basis I imagine the BBC prefers this method of interpreting the Koran....

‘This reading of the spirit of Islam, its true core meaning, transcending any scriptural formalities.’

Documentary evidence and actual scriptual formalities such as what the Koran actually says are such a nuisance and an unnecessary curb on our particular understanding of any subject.  So much better to make it up to fit in with your own world view…just say ‘Islam is the religion of peace’…..and all the pain goes away.

Always interesting who the BBC plucks from off the street to present its programmes…Giles Fraser, Stacey Dooley, Michael Portillo and Lisa Jardine who writes such delightful tomes such as  What’s Left?: Women in Culture and the Labour Movement  and Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory.

No surprise perhaps that in this article Jardine manages to have a go at Mrs Thatcher…managing to quote this:

“Dorothy did not have a very high opinion of Thatcher,” she went on. “As a chemist she thought her average; as a politician she deeply disapproved of her.”

One of the most popular reports on the BBC website is that the UK economy is in a double dip recession…a story from 2012.

Even then it wasn’t a true story:

There was no UK double dip recession, ONS data suggests

Britain’s double-dip recession may be erased from the history books after the Office for National Statistics said the construction industry grew more strongly than thought at the start of last year.

Even the BBC admitted as much:

UK double-dip recession revised away

Could it be union activists trying to distort the news?  Or perhaps it could be all those lefty Daily Mirror reporters doing their research trying to cook up an anti-Tory story such as they did with this: (From the Telegraph)

Brooks Newmark sex scandal: How a tabloid newspaper tried to snare Tory MPs

The Telegraph’s report delves into the Mirror’s entrapment of the Tory MP and its attempts to snare others and looks at the rules in regard to ‘Public interest’ journalism.

The BBC isn’t very interested, limiting its exploration of the issues on the Labour supporting Mirror’s actions to this:

Asked whether he thought Mr Newmark had been entrapped, Mr Fallon said he was unable to comment as he “hadn’t seen the details”.

Looks like a very dirty election….and think about it…this is a Labour paper setting out to trick a Tory MP into doing something for which he is then forced to resign his position.

If that had been a Murdoch paper the BBC would have been all over this questioning the malign influence of the right wing Press on UK politics.

Evan Davis was so upset about the homeless migrants in Calais living hand to mouth in makeshift shelters that he cried all the way to his second home in France.

He could of course give some of them a room in one of his homes if he cares so much about them.

Next time anyone reading this is passing through Calais I recommend you hand out Evan Davis’ email address, along with his fellow pro-immigration advocate’s and tell the migrants to give them a call.

Don’t suppose Davis and Co would be all that keen on immigrants then…. the ones that take your job, your home, your kids place at the school, your place in the queue for medical treatment, the ones that rob and rape and kill you…they don’t mind so much about.

BBC employees like Davis are well insulated from the downsides of immigration with the money to keep the unpleasantry at a distance…though of course they do their bit for the immigrants by employing them…cheaply…at the expense of the local workers.

And no surprise the BBC often uses Davis to front its programmes and interviews on immigration.

I see the BBC are bigging up this welcome news.

Hundreds of people have taken part in a protest led by France’s leading Muslim cleric against the beheading of a French hostage by jihadists in Algeria. Dalil Boubakeur, head of the French Council of the Muslim Faith, told the crowd outside the main Paris mosque that the killers had no claim to Islam. He said French Muslims were united against “barbarism”.

However, the BBC seems unaware of this…

Up to 15 percent of French people said they have a positive attitude toward the Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The share of ISIS supporters is largest among France’s younger generation,

So, maybe not ALL Muslims? I wish they would give us balance, but they won’t.

I see the BBC is playing down the fact that this was a MUSLIM who cut the head of a fellow worker having tried to convert others to the religion of peace. The name for this is Fort Hood syndrome.

A thread to take us across the weekend. Detail the bias as you see it HERE!

Well, it must have been such a tough one for the Comrades. I am referring to Red Ed’s absolutely woeful keynote speech at #lab14 and that unfortunate business of “forgetting” to discuss the Deficit and Immigration! How to spin THAT one, then? As we get closer to next May, the BBC are going to have their work cut out portraying Miliband as the next Prime Minister. It’s a bit like Michael Foot all over again.

How’s about THAT then, boys and gals?