I see that John Kerry is in Baghdad and is pushing the Obama line that the staggering success of ISIS is the creation of lack of “inclusivity” by the Maliki Government. The BBC appears to accept this opinion  and no challenge is offered back on the topic. Whilst I can understand Kerry pushing this line there is the OTHER possibility that the growth and success of ISIS is down to the Obama doctrine of leaving field of battle and then declaring this a success when in fact it is obvious that the situation was highly volatile and that ISIS have filled the void that Obama created.

I heard lots of outrage on the BBC today concerning the judgement of the Egyptian court that has sent three Al Jazeera journalists to prison for being Muslim Brotherhood enablers. One of the three, Peter Greste, is a former BBC journalist and so the comrades are enraged at this “tyrannical judgement”. However the BBC were ardent cheer leaders for  the “Arab Spring”  and all the chaos it has wrought so why are they now bitching when it doesn’t follow the trajectory that they had hoped for? And as for the “Cairo Three” the fact of the matter is that the Muslim Brotherhood ARE a wicked terrorist organisation and Egypt has a right to deal with any who enable on their behalf. Would that our Government took a similar approach to those within the BBC that have shilled for the IRA for years, never mind the dhimmis that excuse Islamofascism in the UK. Thoughts?

Better late than never, here’s a new Open thread! Detail the bias please!!

Amazing that the BBC denounces a whole country and its population over a boxing match, especially as the BBC’s interpretation of what happened in the match is coloured by the colour of the two opponents…one black, one white…guess which has the BBC’s sympathy?

England’s shame

The boxing match between a freed slave and a sporting star

In the brutal world of bare-knuckle boxing a fight, more than 200 years ago, between a freed American slave and a Bristol-born boxer remains one of the most controversial and bloody battles in boxing history.

The contest – the first ever world title fight – between Tom Cribb, the son of a Bristol coal worker, and Tom Molineaux, a slave who won freedom with his fists, is an “an incredible story of racism, intrigue, gambling and above all courage”.

There may well have been racism…but not the sort the BBC want you to believe:

From Tom Cribb vs. Tom Molineaux (1st meeting)

Strangely, the main problem that England had with Molineaux had nothing to do with his color–the extreme racism of the late 19th century was still some time off. In fact, the British people were quite willing to give Molineaux credit as an excellent boxer, and his numerous affairs with white women were by and large overlooked. The much greater offense, in their eyes, was the hideous fact that he was an AMERICAN! The idea that a foreigner could take the sacred trophy of British sporting was unthinkable.

Pierce Egan’s Boxiana is the source for the majority of this fight narration. It was composed at a time shortly after this Cribb-Molineaux fight took place by a man who had seen most of the fights of the era.

The BBC gives the impression that Cribb was thoroughly beaten throughout the fight and only won through ‘dirty tactics’ such as a punch to the throat (a potential Tory MP?)…

Cribb was brought time and time again to his knees while the crowd, who sensed a Molineaux victory, subjected the US fighter to appalling racist abuse….

…Molineaux battled on for two more rounds. He threw Cribb to the floor but hit his head against one of the wooden ring stakes which concussed him. Sensing his moment Cribb punched Molineaux in the throat.

Broken, lying on the floor Molineaux raised his hand and said “Massa Richmond, me can fight no more”.

……but such tactics seemed to have been normal…Molineaux for instance putting Cribb in a headlock and punching him repeatedly in the head….Cribb put Molineaux down just as many times.

As for that ‘appalling racist abuse’ the BBC doesn’t list it nor provide a reference where it can be checked…it presumably isn’t in the contemporary report from Pierce Egan unless they mean the anti-American abuse….if so strange they don’t make that clear and prefer to give the impression the abuse was based on Molineaux’s skin colour.

The BBC doesn’t say much about Molineaux’s manager, Bill Richmond, also ‘black’:

Here perhaps is why:

Bill Richmond was a better pugilist than Thomas Molineaux in 1805 and 1815.  He was such a familiar face on the English boxing scene, as pugilist/corner man/trainer, that he would be cheered over White opponents late in his career. 

And perhaps confirms being American was the real problem people had with either of them:

Bill Richmond, despite ‘tainted’ as American born, was thoroughly British.

And it seems that the manipulation of the system was a regular occurrence with Cribb and so nothing to do with ‘race’:

‘….a Cribb/Bob Gregson 1809 English Championship bout.  Gregson was dominating by the 22nd round, a 10-1 betting odds favorite, until suddenly it was over by the 23rd round with Tom Cribb the victor.  Richmond was openly suspicious that Cribb’s patronage and power was affording him more than the legal 30 seconds following a knockdown while an opponent had no mercy.  The combination of patronage (which Cribb had) and gambling wages (better to ‘cheat’ than lose) leaves suspicion over several Tom Cribb victories.‘

Still not sure why the BBC has labelled this as ‘England’s Shame’.  It might well be Tom Cribb’s shame but to somehow transpose that onto a whole nation seems somewhat ambitious even for the BBC’s historical revisionist section that rewrites world history with a leftward, anti-Brtiish, anti-white slant.

BBC getting excited about this:

Berlin House of One: The first church-mosque-synagogue?

Berlin thinks it is making religious history as Muslims, Jews and Christians join hands to build a place where they can all worship. The House of One, as it is being called, will be a synagogue, a church and a mosque under one roof.

Liked this:

Rabbi Tovia Ben Chorin. “From my Jewish point of view the city where Jewish suffering was planned is now the city where a centre is being built by the three monotheistic religions which shaped European culture,” he told the BBC.

Yep….Let’s compare the critical, adverse reaction to Islamic terrorism and cultural supremacy to the Nazis imposing the Holocaust upon the Jews….and as for shaping European culture…if Islam had been the dominant force over the centuries we would have been an economic, scientific, artistic and cultural backwater as just about every Muslim land is now….not my verdict but that of a Muslim (and Mehdi Hasan himself admitted as much in his infamous video…how many Nobel Prizes are in Muslim hands, how many books get translated, how many Universities are in the top 200?):

Compare Churchill’s remarks with those of a modern Gulf businessman from Dubai, whom the travel writer Jonathan Raban quizzed about Arab oil wealth.
The Dubaian rejected any delusion that this constitutes genuine prosperity: ‘Rich is education . . . expertise . . . technology. Rich is knowing. We  have money, yes, but we are not rich. We are like the child who inherits money from the father he never knew.
‘He has not been brought up to spend it.
‘He has it in his hands; he doesn’t know how to use it . . . is a country rich that cannot make a brick, or a motor car, or a book?’

Good of the BBC to serve us up this pap so uncritically, their intentions being blatantly obvious….let’s all play nicely, and look how wonderful Islam has been, and how terribly Muslims are being treated now.

Did enjoy the photo of the Architect though…and I have to say what an inspiring design of building, clearly the result of much thought and years of study…sponsored by Lego no doubt:

Here’s a joke…

A rabbi, a vicar and an imam walked into a pub…….

I’ll let you provide your own punch line…though not to the throat.

The BBC this morning reported some of ‘what the papers say’.…and gave us this gem:

Kinnock said part of the reason the rightwing press was going for Miliband was because it knew he was bold and a threat to Tory victory hopes.

The BBC didn’t bother to provide some contrasting balance to that and reveal that half Miliband’s party think he is a dead duck, that the grass roots think he is a dead duck….and the right wing Guardian thinks he is a dead duck…the BBC preferred to cherry pick one rather deluded statement from Kinnock rather than the general thrust of the anti-Miliband narrative that abounds left and right:

From Guido:

Yesterday I saw that Diane Coyle had thrown her hat into the ring and applied for Patten’s old job.

This morning on R4 I heard that the application process had been extended due to the lack of quality of the applicants…they didn’t mention Coyle had applied funnily enough.

Not sure a person who has helped preside over the failing BBC Trust should then be appointed to lead it.

From the Times (£):

BBC Trust post struggles to woo top applicants

The deadline for candidates to apply to be the next chairman of the BBC Trust has been extended by a week amid concern about the calibre of those seeking the role.

It is understood that few applicants deemed to be of sufficiently high quality had applied to Saxton Bampfylde, the firm of headhunters hired to lead the search for a replacement for Lord Patten, before Friday’s deadline.

The only figure publicly to declare her interest is Diane Coyle, who has been acting chairwoman since Patten stepped down because of poor health last month.

I’m sorry but I have no real sympathy for IDS when he moans…

“Iain Duncan Smith has launched the strongest government attack on the BBC since the last election, accusing the corporation of being a ‘bigger opponent’ of welfare reform than even the Labour Party. The Work and Pensions Secretary reacted with fury yesterday after the BBC led its bulletins with more criticism of the Government’s changes to the bloated benefits system.

The corporation seized on leaked documents showing that the costs of employment and support allowance, the main sickness benefit, were rising, meaning the Government was ‘vulnerable’ to a breach of its new welfare cap.  Ministers said the suggestion they would exceed their own limit on benefit spending was ‘outrageous’ – saying the whole point of the reform was to ensure that if the cost of one type of benefit increases, others must be cut to compensate.”

Look, we all KNOW the BBC are the broadcasting arm of the Labour Party. The only way of dealing with this is to unhook the BBC beast from the public purse via the license tax. The Conservatives have shied away from this, scared of the BBC. They then pay the consequences.

Some things never change. The senior management of the BBC still loath the fact this country remains 82% WHITE and this causes them great stress as they seek to change that on our screens; 

The BBC has pledged to increase the number of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people on air by more than 40% over the next three years and almost double the number of senior managers from those groups who work at the corporation by 2020.

The BBC director general, Tony Hall, has unveiled a number of measures, including spending £2.1m ringfenced development fund to help fast-track BAME talent and programme ideas on to the screen, in a bid to increase what actor and comedian Lenny Henry recently called the “appalling” percentage of black and Asian people in the creative industries.

Speaking at a press launch for the diversity measures on the set of BBC1 soap EastEnders on Friday, Hall said: “The BBC gets much right on diversity, but the simple fact is that we need to do more.

The BBC already has an OVER-representation of ethnic faces, if one chooses to believe Andrew Marr, so why do they seek to go even further in their discrimination against white faces?

The police and the likes of the BBC are usually very quick to claim that Islam has nothing to do with the various attacks and planned attacks that Muslims have or have tried to put into operation.

They quickly move in to play down such associations in the interests of community cohesion.

How different when a Muslim is killed.

When a Saudi Arabian national, Nahid Almanea, was stabbed to death in Colchester the police couldn’t wait before suggesting that it may have been a religious crime…though paradoxically saying they had absolutely no evidence this was the case.

The Media, including the BBC, put that claim into their headlines:

Colchester murder: Religious hate crime a line of inquiry

Why do the police not list all the other ‘lines of inquiry’ that it has in mind:

Officers said there was no evidence of it being a religious hate crime but it was “one of the main lines” of inquiry.

Why highlight the Islam angle knowing full well the Media will not just report it but go  to town on it?  Could it have been a deliberate policy exploiting the Press’s eagerness for scandal and outrage in order to get a certain message out?  Guess the Press haven’t learnt from Hillsborough.

The Daily Mail was just as bad as the BBC, but is out to sell papers whilst the BBC should be standing back from the fray with a more considered approach.  Ironically the Mail also printed this story on the same page:

‘I call upon any brother to take up a knife and kill as they did #colchester’: British ISIS fighter who threatens to come back to UK urges British Muslims to avenge murder of Saudi woman in Essex

So what we now have is a ‘God given gift’ to the Jihadis, courtesy of Essex police, the BBC and the Daily Mail et al, that is perfect for whipping up the frenzied faithful.

Perhaps that’s why Essex police are rowing back on that claim of an islamophobic attack:

Essex Chief Constable Stephen Kavanagh and the county’s police and crime commissioner, Nick Alston, said in a joint statement that it is not yet known if Ms Almanea’s Muslim dress prompted her murder.

They warned against jumping to conclusions, saying this would be “deeply unhelpful, wrong and dangerous”.

Bit late now.

The Mail at least mentioned the similar death of James Attfield in Colchester in March from multiple stab wounds, his killer not being found yet.

The BBC didn’t mention that link at all in its first reports despite having an appeal on Crimewatch about the murder:

James Attfield murder

No one knows who  or why either victim was killed but it seems that some sectors of the Establishment are all too ready to make claims of Islamophobia regardless of the facts, or lack of them…just as the BBC were all too ready to accept the exaggerated claims of ‘Tell MAMA’ without doing any fact checking themselves.

This is a perfect example of the BBC’s and other’s willingness to use any event related to Islam to either promote Islam or silence its critics.

By labelling this attack islamophobic they don’t actually care whether that is true or not but are intent on generating a perception that Muslims are under attack, it is Islamophobia, and it is an Islamophobia generated more often than not by ‘hostile’ press coverage of Muslim affairs….hoping of course to either silence or at least make editors more reluctant of being critical of Islam, and to encourage the police to take a more hardline approach against anyone who criticises Islam, and eventually to persuade politicians to legislate ever more rigorously to deal with these so called hate crimes in the Press,  on blogs or social media…or even Christian preachers on street corners.

The police are now looking at other lines of inquiry…including someone who allegedly attacked a jogger in the park…

Police question 19-year-old man over Muslim student’s murder

An attempted assault on a jogger close to the scene of Nahid Almanea’s murder results in the arrest of 19-year-old suspect who is now being questioned over her murder