Richard dawkins has stirred up a bit of a Twitterspat with a completely innocuous comment.

 Caitlin Moran decided Dawkins was declaring war on Muslims:

The Telegraph’s Tom Chivers put a but more effort into coming to the same conclusion:

Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging, as a fan

Dawkins may believe that he is criticising only the religion, and its effects on the people who hold it, rather than the people themselves (“don’t hate the player, hate the game”), but his gleeful hurling of rhetorical stick-bombs doesn’t make that sort of distinction. Is he being racist? Maybe not, depending on how narrowly you define it. But whatever he’s being, it’s not nice, and it certainly isn’t advancing the various causes of secularism, atheism or everyone just bloody getting along.

Richard dawkins replies:

Calm reflections after a storm in a teacup

Funny that Steven Berkoff said something very similar about ‘the Theatre’  a few days ago whilst also criticising the BBC:

‘….his criticism was not reserved for the corporation as he claimed that in the last 30 years the theatre has not produced a single actor of worth and there is more talent in street performing.’

No one seems to think he was declaring war on the Theatre loveys.

By the by, the BBC reported the Telegraph’s version of Berkoff’s comments but failed to mention that he also said this:

Berkoff also reserved criticism for the “cringing banality” of Twitter, claiming that Stephen Fry is a fan “because this man loves attention. He has a million, million and half dopes listening to the utterly crawling banality of this man’s mind.”

The BBC has so far failed to mention the row over Richard Dawkins Tweet.  I wonder why…is it like the UKIP member who wanted to introduce Sharia law and chop off hands that they also didn’t report on?….the BBC seems not to report things that don’t reflect their view that Islam is the Cradle of Civilisation from which everything good springs.

Perhaps they realise that Dawkins isn’t actually being controversial and that he speaks the truth…if so the BBC might not want to draw attention to that.

Is Dawkins speaking the truth?

What has Mehdi Hasan got to say?  I’m not sure you could accuse him of launching a war against Islam:

He states that there are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world….and between them they have a total of 10 Nobel prizes.  The Jews, with a population of 12 million have 150 Nobel prizes.  All 6 Jewish Universities are in the top 20 in a world ranking.  There are no Muslim universities in the top 200.

 He goes on to say:

We wonder why we are losing battles, we are not being out fought, we are being out thought.

We are not under armed, we are undereductaed.

We have lost the ability to think, to acquire knowledge, to advance intellectually and then we wonder why our community is in such decay.

Which is why you might wonder why Hasan has recently Tweeted this praising the pompous  Owen Jones for calling Dawkins a racist bigot because of his Tweet about Islam’s lack of Nobel prizes:

Mehdi Hasan ‏@mehdirhasan 8h  “Dawkins dresses up bigotry as non-belief – he cannot be left to represent atheists” – a superb @OwenJones84 on fire:

Hasan also quotes from this fellow , who must presumably also be considered an anti-Muslim bigot…despite, like Hasan, being a Muslim:

Pervez Hoodbhoy is professor of nuclear and high-energy physics at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad. This article is based on a speech delivered at the Center for Inquiry International conference in Atlanta, Georgia, 2001.

Fearful of backlash, most leaders of Muslim communities in the US, Canada, and Europe have responded in predictable ways to the Twin Towers atrocity. They have proclaimed first, that Islam is a religion of peace; and second, that Islam was hijacked by fanatics on the September 11. They are wrong on both counts.
First, Islam – like Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any other religion – is not about peace. Nor is it about war. Every religion is about absolute belief in its own superiority and its divine right to impose itself upon others. In medieval times, both the Crusades and the Jihads were soaked in blood. Today, Christian fundamentalists attack abortion clinics in the US and kill doctors; Muslim fundamentalists wage their sectarian wars against each other; Jewish settlers holding the Old Testament in one hand and Uzis in the other burn olive orchards and drive Palestinians off their ancestral land; Hindus in India demolish ancient mosques and burn down churches; Sri Lankan Buddhists slaughter Tamil separatists.
The second assertion is even further off the mark: even if Islam had in some metaphorical sense been hijacked, that event did not occur on September 11, 2001. It happened around the 13th century. Indeed, Islam has yet to recover from the trauma of those times.

In the twelfth century Muslim orthodoxy reawakened, spearheaded by the cleric Imam Al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali championed revelation over reason, predestination over free will. He refuted the possibility of relating cause to effect, teaching that man cannot know or predict what will happen; God alone can. He damned mathematics as against Islam, an intoxicant of the mind that weakened faith.

Islam choked in the vicelike grip of orthodoxy.

It was the end of tolerance, intellect, and science in the Muslim world. The last great Muslim thinker, Abd- al Rahman ibn Khaldun, belonged to the 14th century.

For Muslims, it is time to stop wallowing in self-pity: Muslims are not helpless victims of conspiracies hatched by an all-powerful, malicious West. The fact is that the decline of Islamic greatness took place long before the age of mercantile imperialism. The causes were essentially internal. Therefore Muslims must introspect, and ask what went wrong.

Today Muslims number one billion, spread over 48 Muslim countries. None of these nations has yet evolved a stable democratic political system. In fact, all Muslim countries are dominated by self-serving corrupt elites who cynically advance their personal interests and steal resources from their people. No Muslim country has a viable educational system or a university of international stature.
Reason too has been waylaid. To take some examples from my own experience: You will seldom encounter a Muslim name as you flip through scientific journals, and if you do, chances are that this person lives in the West.

Though genuine scientific achievement is rare in the contemporary Muslim world, pseudo-science is in generous supply. A former chairman of my department has calculated the speed of Heaven: it is receding from the earth at one centimetre per second less than the speed of light. His ingenious method relies upon a verse in the Qur’an which says that worship on the night on which the Qur’an was revealed is worth a thousand nights of ordinary worship

A more public example: one of two Pakistani nuclear engineers recently arrested on suspicion of passing nuclear secrets to the Taliban had earlier proposed to solve Pakistan’s energy problems by harnessing the power of genies. The Qur’an says that God created man from clay, and angels and genies from fire; so this highly placed engineer proposed to capture the genies and extract their energy.

We have but one choice: the path of secular humanism, based upon the principles of logic and reason. This alone offers the hope of providing everybody on this globe with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Note that all important phrase: Islam choked in the vicelike grip of orthodoxy.

Orthodox Islam…in other words fundamental Islam, the real Islam.  In other words all those scientific advances  of the ‘Islamic Golden Age’ were performed under an Islam that wasn’t really ‘Islam’…it was a loose, convenient interpretation that allowed Jews and Christians a great deal of freedom which they used to further their interests in science and learning with the side effect of helping the imposed ‘Islamic’ regime.　

 The real Islam choked such advances in a ‘vicelike grip’.

 The reason people like Caitlin Moran feel able to attack Richard Dawkins and claim he is racist or anti-Muslim for his completely sensible comments is because organisations like the BBC have refused to delve into the history and meaning of Islam, the real history not the hagiographys that they produce deifying, ironically, Muhammed and glorifying Islam whilst hiding its darker side.

An example of which might be that whilst the BBC has covered extensively Stephen Fry’s comments about homophobia in Russia they refuse to acknowledge the very same thing on our own doorstep amongst certain communities as revealed by the ubiquitous Mehdi Hasan about his own homophobia as induced by Islamic teachings:

So let me be clear: yes, I’m a progressive who supports a secular society in which you don’t impose your faith on others – and in which the government, no matter how big or small, must always stay out of the bedroom. But I am also (to Richard Dawkins’s continuing disappointment) a believing Muslim. And, as a result, I really do struggle with this issue of homosexuality. As a supporter of secularism, I am willing to accept same-sex weddings in a state-sanctioned register office, on grounds of equity. As a believer in Islam, however, I insist that no mosque be forced to hold one against its wishes.

Two girls have acid thrown in their faces on a Muslim majority Island.

The BBC think this may be one of Mark Mardell’s ‘senseless tragedies’…

‘….it was the first time visitors to the island had been attacked in this way, describing the incident as “alien” to both the police investigating and the victims.

Officers had no idea as to the motive.‘

But just in case anyone should be speculating they highlight this:

 “It was not a civilised act, it is not Islam.”

Why would anyone say that if there was no idea as to the motive?

Compare the BBC’s version of events to that given in the Telegraph:

Zanzibar acid attack: finger pointed at radical Islamic group as five questioned over assault on British teenagers

Five men are being questioned by police over the acid attack on two British charity volunteers in Zanzibar as suspicion grew that a radical Islamic group may have inspired the assault.

The BBC tells us (last updated (15:07 9th Aug) the police have no idea of the motive and that this is a completely alien event.

The Telegraph tells us that there is a likely motive and that it has happened on the island before, though not to a tourist….so not such an ‘alien’ incident to the police in reality.

Blimey but time flies! This is overdue but now underway! Off you go … detail the bias!

‘The Changeling’ takes you into a Catholic world of blurred edges and deepest shadows where you cannot trust that what you see is true.

The Cambridge Student newspaper 2007

You may have been following the spectacle of the academic, historian and all round cosmopolitan Tim Stanley trying to handbag working class Tommy Robinson for his views on Islam.

The most recent cause of Stanley’s angst is, he tells us, because:

EDL leader Tommy Robinson tweets link to anti-Semitic website. That’s the company he keeps

Stanley writes in the Telegraph but regularly moonlights at the BBC and the Guardian amongst other media outlets. He typifies the snobbish, patrician, over educated, over mannered and self regarding pompous metro sexual self proclaimed elite that inhabits the corridors of the BBC that preaches to us all….as he himself admits:

Tim Stanley ‏@timothy_stanley 1h   Yes, I’m a snob towards the EDL. Since when did despising Right-wing violence become bourgeois?

Aahh…so…he can despise the EDL but the EDL can’t despise or criticise Islam….and it seems you can’t criticise Stanley’s  opinion as ‘comments’ are off under both his anti-EDL pitches.

His fellow Telegraph blogger and BBC correspondent Jake Wallis Simons is beating the same path…could they be BBC ‘deniable operatives’? Saying things that the BBC would love to say but can’t…so it gives the nod to its ‘outliers’ to put the boot into the EDL in non BBC publications.

Here JWS falsely claims a Facebook memorial page for Lee Rigby was an EDL front………as highlighted on BBBC.

Here he has another go at the EDL.

Stanley’s Hypocrisy

Stanley claims it is the ‘violence’ of the EDL that he loathes when the reality is it is their stance on Islam that he hates, which is odd really…you would have thought an academic would be all for encouraging debate….as his student newspaper, The Cambridge Student, reports Oxford Union did when they debated this in 2007:

The motion at the Union last Thursday was incendiary:  ‘This House Believes that Islam is incompatible with Western Liberalism.” In the crowd sat an unusual amount of Muslims, waiting expectantly to see if they were ‘incompatible’ or not, and what was going to be done about it.

So, once again, it is fine for the intellectually and morally superior to debate Islam but not a ‘working class chav’ like Tommy Robinson?

Stanley criticises Tommy Robinson for retweeting a link to an article which finishes on an anti-Semitic note….

Odd from a man who works for the Guardian, that well known publisher of anti-Semitic tracts…and the BBC, which has probably done more to incite violence and contempt against the Jews of Israel than most other news organisation….or so the Balen Report probably would tell us….and who used to support the Labour Party but now backs the Republicans in the US…both Partys which were the joint instigators of a ‘war against Islam’ as the left like to tell us.

Stanley has nothing to say about the revelations in this video:  Undercover Mosque…but then again nor did the BBC, it completely ignored the revelations preferring to conduct a week long witch hunt against Jade Goody.

Nothing to say about Mehdi Hasan’s revelations about anti-Semitism being rife in the Muslim community…‘Our dirty little secret’ as he called it.

It seems some anti-Semitism is OK…just not if you’re white and working class…that’s if you believe that Tommy Robinson’s retweet indicates at all whether he is anti-Semitic or not.

Nor has he anything to say about this exchange on Tommy Robinson’s Twitter feed  immediately below the Tweet he claimed was evidence of Robinson’s anti-Semitism….with someone who says they are Muslim, about Rochdale and the Muslim rape gangs:

Tommy Robinson EDL ‏@EDLTrobinson 5 Aug Sick dirty way of thinking #islam pic.twitter.com/5EQkpEkpMx

Normani Kordei ‏@NormaniKordei97 5 Aug @edltrobinson wft you twat. How is it a dirt way of thinkin you fuckin wank stain.

Victoria ‏@VixxyLix 5 Aug @NormaniKordei97 @EDLTrobinson grooming and rape of underage girls and calling it trade is disgustingly sick!!!

Stanley is also a Catholic…and yet has he anything to say about the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion, homosexuality, women’s place in society, child abuse or Islam?…after all it wasn’t so long ago that the then Pope said this:

Muslim religious leaders have accused Pope Benedict XVI of quoting anti-Islamic remarks during a speech at a German university this week.

“Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Religious leader Ali Bardakoglu said the Pope’s comments represented what he called an “abhorrent, hostile and prejudiced point of view”.

If the Pope can say that why can’t the EDL?  Is the Pope a racist bigot?  Tell us what you think Stanley?

I imagine Stanley supports Islam as it has a very similar cultural stance to all those things (mutual dislike between Christianity and Islam aside). If he didn’t support Islam and its stance on  misogyny, its homophobia, its anti-abortion stance and child abuse, its desire to control and rule over its congregation he couldn’t very well claim to be a Catholic. Support for Islam is really part of the battle against the atheists…my enemy’s enemy is my friend…at least for now….defending Islam is part of the strategy to keep all religion, as an idea, mainstream and legitimate…..

‘On abortion, on homosexuality and on abuse, the mainstream media has it in for the Catholic Church.’

And what of Peter Foster, Stanley‘s good friend and colleague….does he think Foster is an idiot or racist bigot?

‘Peter is a Catholic, but he writes in the Daily Telegraph of his dislike of Rick Santorum thus: “I can’t escape the whiff of the witch-hunt about Mr Santorum, who is of a breed of Catholic unfamiliar to us English: a man of the strictest Catholic theology … I find Rick Santorum so, um, scary.”’

But Stanley doesn’t denounce or disown Frost…he doesn’t vilify him or call him racist or a bigot…..how is it that Frost can write about fundamentalist Catholics in those terms and not be denounced by Stanley as he denounces the EDL for their criticism of Islam?

Stanley is a hypocrite attacking a working class man for daring to have views of his own not handed down to him by the likes of Stanley, and having the guts to act on those thoughts…unlike Stanley who hisses loudly from the safety of his blog.

Stanley has completely lost his way in his desire to defend Islam…his latest article is a classic example of cultural cringe, the fear of offending, the complete surrender of his own cultural, religious and political values and beliefs…..

 Islam is way more English than the EDL

Muslims cling on to values that were once definitively English and that we could do with rediscovering. Islam instructs its followers to cherish their families, to venerate women, to treat strangers kindly, to obey the law of any country they are in (yes, yes, it really does), and to give generously.

Well you can certainly argue against all those points…but what about the inconveniently violent aspects of Islam? They seem to be completely missing from Stanley’s considerations.

What drives Stanley’s massive hypocrisy, his love of Islamic teachings and culture?

Let’s take a closer look at the life and times, and ‘thoughts’, of Chairman Tim.

Tim Stanley unsuccessfully ran for a sabbatical post on Cambridge University Student’s Union, standing in 2007 for Welfare Officer. His manifesto consisted of a handwritten note simply reading:

“This is hand written because I was too drunk to write a manifesto. There is no better testament to my character”.

Only 6 years ago. So drunk he couldn’t string a coherent thought together and get it down on paper…..Has anything changed?

He tells us that ‘I took a PhD in history at Trinity College, Cambridge in 2008.’

He was born in 1982 and so essentially Stanley has been a student for most of his life until he was 26, then he went into academia, teaching, and of course graces our lives with regular stints in the media.

So the cloistered life of a student, back into academia as a lecturer, media poppet and now religious fanatic on the quiet….not a good mix for telling others how to lead their lives.

Perhaps events occurring during his time as a student at Cambridge shaped his character, values and beliefs?….Here a report from The Cambridge Student….

Student witch-hunt

The row over academic freedom has been reignited in Oxford, as a group of students have tried to remove a Don due to his political beliefs. A student petition has made against Professor David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford and co-founder of the think-tank Migration Watch UK.

The petition has been launched by Oxford Student Action for Refugees.

Colleagues at Oxford University have risen to Professor Coleman’s defense, calling the petition a “student witch-hunt” and arguing that students should debate their views with Coleman, not call to sack him.

Professor Coleman has called the petition “a shameful attempt, of the most intolerant and totalitarian kind, to suppress the freedom of analysis and informed comment that it is the function of universities to cherish.”

And another example of student intolerance of differing views, also from The Cambridge Student 2007:

An investigation by The Times Higher Education Supplement has revealed students’ widespread abuse of academics by means of the internet.  Lecturers have been publicly attacked on networking websites, coming under, sometimes sexually explicit, abuse. Insults to their professionalism and appearance have been broadcast to a potential audience of millions via the web, as lecturers have been attacked online as “useless” and “rubbish”. One has even been branded a ‘waste-of-space bitch’.

The refusal to debate subjects they don’t want to see criticised openly, the attempts to eradicate free speech and intellectual argument, the use of abuse and smears on the internet to undermine opponents.

Guess nothing has really changed since his student days, you can see where he developed his politics and religious views, and his methods of dealing with those whose views he holds in the deepest contempt…..smear, vilify and libel them, attempt to deny them any place in the debate by undermining their character and reputation.

What of his religious convictions? Does he have values, beliefs or principles, or any that he sticks to for long?

Not really…..he is a bit of a ‘changeling’…..　

‘The Changeling’ takes you into a Catholic world of blurred edges and deepest shadows where you cannot trust that what you see is true’  The Cambridge Student 2007

This is how he describes himself:

I define my politics as Anarcho-Catholic – an eclectic kind of pacifistic, red meat eating, gun loving, tax hating, Buddha hugging voodoo. I’m temperamentally conservative, but neither a Tory nor a Republican. I love America deeply and I suspect she is the last hope for mankind (I really don’t want to have to learn Chinese).

To which the BBC adds.…‘who supports the right-wing Tea Party, which he describes as “misunderstood”.’

How long before he changes religion yet again…he doesn’t seem too happy with his latest venture into Catholicism…..how long before he jumps ship and converts to yet another religion? Stanley seems to jump aboard whatever fashionable movement or cultural trend is the most popular….recently Catholicism was on the up, now it is Islam.

Stanley would probably have been on the streets with Mosley’s Black Shirts in the 30’s…telling us Hitler was ‘misunderstood’…Stanley is a man who has no convictions, principles or values of his own as we can see from his journey through the political and religious spectrum up close and personal……

Politics 

Stanley joined the British Labour Partyat the age of 15. He was Chair of Cambridge University Labour Club in 2003-4, and stood as the Labour candidate for his home constituency of Sevenoaks at the 2005 general election, where he came third. He has since distanced himself from the Labour Party, and has been arguing in support of the US Republican Party….and is now a Tea Party supporter.

Religion 

In October 2012 Stanley stated he was “raised a good Baptist boy”. He is a convert to Roman Catholicism.  Previously, he considered himself to be an Anglican, beginning around “one glorious summer” in 2002, and was baptized as an Anglican in Little St. Marys, Cambridge, in New Year 2003. He later aligned himself with the Church of England’sAnglo-Catholic wing before becoming a Roman Catholic.

Tim Stanley is a religious fascist, a fanatic, he loves the smell of burning heretics in the morning and the clanging shut of the Iron Maiden, but a fanatic who doesn’t have the strength of character to be fanatical …he hides behind the Papal skirts of a civilised Catholic Church peering out longingly at the other more strident, violently assertive religions of the world wishing he could be like that.

How long can it be before he takes the ultimate step and commits himself to Islam, that stridently self assured and confident religion that likes a bit of ‘fire and brimstone’?

He doesn’t like the ‘culture of sober reflection and ecumenical goodwill’ that envelops the Catholic Church at present…the silence and contemplation. He wants extremist fundamentalism, if you believe then you should follow those beliefs…it is no good picking and choosing only those bits of the Faith that you like…‘It makes no sense. For what is a Catholic except someone who accepts Catholic doctrine? Isn’t that what defines us?’

He says that he can’t accept that ‘Bishops prefer tolerance to Truth.’

Which is strange really as Stanley spends his time preaching tolerance of Islam at the expense of the Truth.

He admits: ‘There is, in many quarters, a scent of death about the Catholic Church. We are waiting for our extinction at the hands of barbarians or old age.’

Who are those ‘barbarians’?

Stanley is a Muslim, he just won’t admit it to himself yet.

He denies that will ever be the case but you can see he prefers and longs for the violent assertiveness of Islam as no one any longer expects the sadly missed Spanish Inquisition…..

I will definitely die a Catholic. No doubt about it….They accept their mortality and submit to the will of God…But I often find it hard to live like a Catholic. Part of the problem is that I am a convert…..As a personality type, I am a fire and brimstone evangelical.

As a child (brought up as a Baptist), I was taught that everything you need to know about God and man is found in the Bible….The most ubiquitous phrase was “God willing.” It articulated an almost Islamic faith that God was behind every action and consequence.

God willed it and it was done. And you didn’t ask any damned questions about it.

Baptism reinforces its tenets every day with aggressive proselytizing. Not so Catholicism. Catholicism is a religion of silence and contemplation.…[but is] a little too quiet for my taste. Bishops, it can feel, prefer tolerance to truth.

Priests bend over backwards to reassure people of other faiths but are reticent about pushing the validity of their own.

This is the phenomenon of “I’m a Catholic but…,” and it really makes no sense to a former Baptist. No Baptist would ever say, “I’m a fundamentalist but I don’t believe in all of it.” That would be a contradiction and a rejection of faith and might even get you excluded from the church.

It makes no sense. For what is a Catholic except someone who accepts Catholic doctrine? Isn’t that what defines us?

There are many complex reasons why the “I’m a Catholic but…” phenomenon is widespread. But a good insight into it is offered in a fine blog post by my friend and colleague Peter Foster. Peter is a Catholic, but he writes in the Daily Telegraph of his dislike of Rick Santorum thus: “I can’t escape the whiff of the witch-hunt about Mr Santorum, who is of a breed of Catholic unfamiliar to us English: a man of the strictest Catholic theology … whose message is transmitted through a distinctly evangelical amplifier … I’m afraid I can’t find much that’s terribly sympathetic or merciful in Mr Santorum, and I’m not sure that’s a particularly good quality in a man who wants to assume the awesome responsibilities of the US presidency……I find Rick Santorum so, um, scary.”

I don’t find Santorum scary. In fact, I find his tone on moral matters refreshingly clear. But here is the likely difference between me and Peter. I was raised in an evangelical culture that is largely imported from America. He was raised in a cradle Catholic community that is steeped in the modern Catholic culture of sober reflection and ecumenical goodwill.

There is, in many quarters, a scent of death about the Catholic Church. We are waiting for our extinction at the hands of barbarians or old age.

I shall close on a quote from Buchanan’s memoirs, Right From the Beginning: “There was an awe-inspiring solemnity, power, and beauty about the old Church, which attracted people who were seeking the permanent things of life … Not only did we proclaim ourselves to be “the one holy Catholic and apostolic Church,” under the watchful eye of the Holy Ghost – with all others heretical – we were gaining converts by the scores of thousands, yearly … Ecumenism was not what we were about; we were on the road to victory.

Why compromise when you have the true Faith?”

This part gives the lie to Stanley’s tolerance of Islam:

Priests bend over backwards to reassure people of other faiths but are reticent about pushing the validity of their own.

This is the phenomenon of “I’m a Catholic but…,” and it really makes no sense to a former Baptist. No Baptist would ever say, “I’m a fundamentalist but I don’t believe in all of it.” That would be a contradiction and a rejection of faith and might even get you excluded from the church.

It makes no sense. For what is a Catholic except someone who accepts Catholic doctrine? Isn’t that what defines us?

He is saying that Catholicism should assert itself, its beliefs and doctrine…but to do that means denying and denouncing Islam…for the two are diametrically opposed to one another…Islam denying the central tenets of Christian faith.

Either Stanley believes in Christianity and thereby must denounce Islam as a false religion, or if he still attacks the EDL for criticising Islam , he must himself become a Muslim…or an atheist…he certainly cannot remain Catholic and be a cheerleader for Islam which quite happily defines him as a Kafir whilst demanding brimstone and hellfire from the Catholic authorities imposing the ‘Will of God’.

So Dr Tim Stanley what are you?  Catholic, Muslim, Heretic?  Maybe all three…a very unholy Trinity.

There’s always the new priesthood….that of the BBC which has taken over the role of the Church in the UK….thanks to Is the BBC biased? from which I stole this link:

‘Is the BBC a friend or foe of the Catholic Church?’

So, the Government announces an extra HALF A £££ BILLION for ‘struggling A&E”‘s in England.  Labour responds by saying this is not enough (when is it ever enough for the comrades?) and the BBC dutifully follow up by wheeling on  Dr Clifford Mann, president of the College of Emergency Medicine to inform the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that  he had “real concerns” about how the money would be allocated.

“It seems disingenuous, and in many ways demoralising to those that managed to apparently perform satisfactorily, to understand or realise that they will benefit from this not at all,” he said. “It is a short-term fix. It does not address the underlying cause – we have a shortage of doctors.”

It is almost as if the BBC mission is to have an instant rebuttal unit that dampens down each and every initiative from the Coalition. In truth, the meme is that NOTHING this Coalition does is any good (apart from Overseas Aid and Gay Marriage). Makes you wonder if the BBC has agenda?

Apologies to anyone who has covered this in the comments….I haven’t read them yet.

 The BBC seem to have lost all sense of journalistic direction and proportion with the latest manufactured UKIP ‘scandal’……it proves the BBC is way, way out of touch with ‘normal’ people who more than likely agree with UKIP….as indeed a majority of the emails and texts into 5Live today seemed to ….it’s not as if the UKIP MEP was a ‘purveyor of death and fear’ now was it?

Further to David’s post on UKIP the BBC has been highlighting this strongly all day…and it is all over their website.

Unlike the UKIP candidate who said he wanted to introduce sharia law and cut off people’s hands…the BBC didn’t mention that at all….as I noted in a previous post.

But what else is going on out there on the fringes of the political world?

 Tory Candidate Marcus Simpson Jailed for Smuggling Guns from Serbia

The judge told Simpson:

“It’s not an exaggeration to describe you as a purveyor of death and fear.”

That report was also in the Daily Mail print edition and presumably other papers…..so no excuses for the BBC to not report it….

…and yet…nothing from the BBC, the world’s finest news broadcaster with more journalists than any news organisation outside of China…as Mark Thompson told us..

This is the best the BBC could do…a link to the Daily Star:

Elsewhere on the web

The BBC seems to be running a series of attacks on UKIP. The latest one uses the old “bongo bongo” riff from many years ago and does everything possible to demonise UKIP’s Godfrey Bloom. The source for the attack is the BBC’s print arm, The Guardian. One can understand WHY the BBC loathes UKIP and I am sure that ahead of next year’s Euro elections, we will see much more of this sort of thing.

Well, Monday’s open thread is heaving at the seams so this is timely. Has the BBC shown overt bias, care to tell us about it? The floor is yours!

We’ve already shot Hilary Andersson’s Panorama programme full of holes, but I’d like to drive over the body all the same.

That was it? The BBC’s big song and dance about Tamerlan Tsarnaev and white supremacist literature, which it spent all yesterday gleefully reporting in its bulletins and news programmes, boiled down to roughly 20 seconds from the Panorama programme. Here’s the relevant segment (h/t to Craig from Is the BBC biased? for the transcript. Check out his take on the programme, too.)

“And we found out that Tamerlan’s interests here at home were not just Islamic. He subscribed to publications about government conspiracies, gun rights and white supremacy. He also read about mass shootings. Tamerlan was perhaps not so much the true radical jihadist as a deeply troubled young man who latched onto Islam.”

The actual evidence was on screen for 3 seconds. We weren’t even told what the literature was or how long Tamerlan had subscribed.

Andersson didn’t identify the literature shown but I can confirm that it was, as I said yesterday, the anti-Semitic weekly paper the American Free Press (AFP). Unlike the clip used in Andersson’s news report (which was deliberately blurred out by the BBC) the same footage in Panorama is clearer and the writing can be read.

That page is a book review which can be seen on the American Free Press website. It is dated 24 April, 2013 – 9 days after the Boston bombing and 5 days after Tamerlan’s death. It seems the BBC couldn’t even get hold of hard copies of the editions the older Tsarnaev was supposed to have read. Notice the name and date of the paper are still blurred at the top. [Update – Alan points out in the comments that while the online article Cosnpiracies Are Real is dated 24 April, it did appear in a print version of the AFP in March.]

Here’s the opening couple of sentences of the book review just to prove it’s definitely the AFP she’s looking at:

Conspiracies assume many different forms. In some instances an entire family is cursed, as Kennedy blood and tragedy have seeped across the decades from Dallas (JFK) to L.A. (RFK), Chappaquiddick (Teddy) and Martha’s Vineyard (JFK Jr)

The book is Conspireality by Viktor Thorn who writes regularly for the AFP.

As I mentioned yesterday the American Free Press promotes conspiracies and blames the Jews for just about everything, it sympathises with Muslim grievances, and its contributors appear on Iran’s Press TV to rant about worldwide Jewish control of the media. Who knows, maybe Press TV first turned Tamerlan on to the AFP. And let’s not forget that the AFP thinks the Tsarnaevs were probably framed.

So why didn’t Hilary Andersson point out any of that? Because it would complicate the message. The programme wanted to show that Tamerlan was only “a Muslim of convenience” and it used his apparent interest in unnamed right-wing white supremacist literature as proof of this. Pointing out the similarity in rhetoric of the Jew-hating AFP and jihadi literature would not have been helpful.

Andersson said the programme had been months in the making. How embarrassing.