Category Archives: bbc propaganda

AK-47s and AR-15s and Rocket Launchers – Oh, My!

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I’m a couple days late on this, but it’s still worth a laugh. The BBC sent one of the legion of Beeboids they have making video magazine reports in the US to Los Angeles to cover the special holiday edition of the city’s “Guns for Groceries” buy-back plan. Usually it’s useful for getting illegal guns out of the hands of the gang-bangers, allowing the politicians to wave some trophies in front of the cameras and scare the community a little bit. The gang-bangers like it because they can unload old weapons or ones they’ve used in crimes (these are no-questions-asked exchanges, remember) for some quick cash to buy more illegal guns. It’s win-win.

We’re told that, while “many Americans believe” that the 2nd Amendment gives us the right to bear arms, the mayor thinks there can be more controls. The annual buy-back program, we learn, is proof positive that there are too many guns out there, too easy to access.

The crowning example comes at the end, starting at around 1:10 in, where the police rep says that people were turning in AK-47s and “parts for AR-15s”. The BBC’s John McManus then says:

“If that sounds extreme, well, last year’s haul of 1700 weapons included an anti-tank rocket launcher.”

First of all, it’s opinion that having these weapons available is “extreme”. There’s no mention of whether or not any of them were legal or illegal or what. Their very existence is, apparently, extreme. The Beeboid is projecting opinion – what may very well be mainstream British opinion – onto a report about domestic affairs in a foreign country. And for all we know, the AK-47s came from Mexican drug gangs courtesy of the President’s “Fast & Furious” scheme.

But the really funny part is the freak-out about the anti-tank weapon. This may come as a complete surprise to parochial, close-minded media luvvies living in a bubble, but one can buy these online and at shows and other places. They’re military surplus, rendered inert before sale.

In fact, this year’s scheme brought in two of them. If the intrepid, impartial journalists at the BBC ever bother to read the NY Daily News, they’ll know that, and know that the weapons were already rendered useless. Not that it stopped the nannies from waving it in front of the cameras. You can bet there won’t be a correction coming from the BBC. That would detract from the agenda.

The scary rocket launcher is, in fact, quite harmless, but presented here to wind you up. A propaganda piece, advocacy plain and simple. Are lots of other media outlets singing from the same hymn sheet and getting it wrong? Sure they are. Does that make it okay for the BBC to do it? Remember, they sent at least one Beeboid to LA to film and investigate, so there’s no excuse for lemming journalism here.

I bet the dopey Beeboid doesn’t even know any of this. I’m sure he and his editor completely believe the angle he’s reported. Their bias on this issue prevents them from reporting honestly and accurately. If they do know that the rocket launcher was non-functional, then McManus is telling a lie the way he reported it. Either way this is a journalistic failure.

It’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t about the rights and wrongs of gun ownership, or anyone’s interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, nor is it about your opinion or mine of gun control laws. This is about a biased, misleading report from the BBC on a specific issue, where ideology informs and corrupts reporting. Even if you agree with the BBC’s position on gun control, you should still be displeased with them taking sides on any issue.

Bonus giggle: If I bought a nice Browning 1917A1 .50 cal machine gun and wanted to take it out the range, and I needed another can to carry my extra ammo, I could pick up a cheap one from the BBC-owned Lonely Planet website.

The BBC Continues To Lie About History And Censor Calls For Ethnic Cleansing

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Apologies for the lengthy title, but there are two issues here which need to be covered, and I’m combining them into one post. First, the BBC’s continued attempts to lie and rewrite history.

Q&A: Palestinian statehood bid at the UN

Most people here will know exactly what’s coming, and I know this has been covered here many times before, but it’s even more important to call the BBC out on it now because of the looming UN fight over creating a State of Palestine. For the benefit of those who don’t know the BBC’s bias about the “West Bank”, here’s the map they use to explain history to the public:


Notice on the left, the BBC is claiming that there was such a thing as the West Bank (i.e. Palestinian) Territory before the 1967 war. They’ve just erased a chunk of Jordan from history. As we all know, that was part of Jordan at the time, a country at war with Israel. Why else would Israel have invaded? This map indoctrinates the public with PLO propaganda, that Israel invaded sovereign Palestinian territory. Your license fee is being used to promote false history and anti-Israel propaganda.

Reality, on the other hand, is not Israeli propaganda. This map of Jordan – from a non-partisan source – and environs showing the borders during part of the 1967 war in question is fact, not fiction:


Notice the clear border lines of Jordan encompass the area about which the BBC is lying. Yes, I am accusing BBC News Online of telling a lie. I don’t care what some Beeboids personally believe about nasty old Israel’s land grab or the plight of the poor Palestinians or anything else. This is historical fact, and the BBC is lying about it. How can there be an honest Q&A about the topic when one of the answers is a lie? Until they remove that first map and replace it with an honest one, my accusation will stand.

Needless to say, this propaganda demonizes Israel in the minds of the public. Most people are seriously uninformed about the facts of Israel and 1967 and the “Palestinian Territories”. When one tries to explain the facts to get past the emotions, one is then accused of spouting Israeli propaganda. This is how the BBC’s editorial policy and style guide is blatantly biased, causing them to demonize Israel at every opportunity, although the BBC disputes this.

It’s impossible to have a civil discussion, national or otherwise, about the situation when the national broadcaster promotes propaganda for one side and demonizes the other. This then promotes anti-Jewish sentiment, but that’s a topic for another time.

Now for the BBC Censorship angle. Last week, Maen Rashid Areikat, the Palestinian ambassador to the US, said that there should be no Jews in a State of Palestine:

“Well, I personally still believe that as a first step we need to be totally separated, and we can contemplate these issues in the future,” he said when asked by The Daily Caller if he could imagine a Jew being elected mayor of the Palestinian city of Ramallah in a future independent Palestinian state. “But after the experience of 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it will be in the best interests of the two peoples to be separated first.”

Actually, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about their desire for a Judenfrei Palestine. He said the same thing a year ago. Not only that, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said the same thing last year, and went further:

Almost no notice was taken of another pre talks decision that the PA chairman revealed, as he announced clearly that if a Palestinian Authority state is created in Judea and Samaria, no Israeli citizen will be allowed to set foot inside.The PA chairman also stated that he would block any Jewish soldiers from serving with an international force stationed on PA-controlled land.

“I will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land,” Abbas declared.

Judenfrei, Judenrein. And the BBC has steadfastly censored all of this. Justin Webb didn’t bring it up to the feckless Lord Levy on Today, it doesn’t feature in any BBC News Online report about Israel or the Palestinians, and it hasn’t been mentioned anywhere else on the BBC. If someone can show me one single example of it, I’ll post it here, shocked but grateful.

Without the truth and all the facts, it’s impossible to have a rational debate and reasonable understanding of the situation. Yet the BBC actively prevents that, promoting propaganda for one side, rewrites history, and censors the Palestinians’ desire for ethnic cleansing.

ADDENDUM: Here’s Katty Kay interviewing US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, in which Katty states uncategorically that only Bibi Netanyahu is the problem, and Amb. Rice corrects here. No surprise that this is Katty’s belief as she recently tweeted to her followers that this New York Magazine article – which blames Netanyahu and uncritical, “steadfast” support for Israel in the US Congress as the only obstacles to peace – is “All you need to know about the frosty relationship between Barack and Bibi.”

Why, it’s almost as if there’s a groupthink on this issue extending across the spectrum of the BBC.

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An Irrational Fear of God at the BBC

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The BBC, along with the rest of the Left-leaning media, has from almost the very start tried to portray the Tea Party movement as a far-right, extremist movement. At first, their main Narrative was that racism was the primary motivating factor behind the movement, with a generic anti-government theme as window dressing. When the movement which the BBC at first ignored, then played down, kept growing far beyond their expectations, the next Narrative was that it was a primarily Christianist movement. This of course was intended to lead the audience into thinking that the Tea Party supporters were clearly off the deep end, as all good Liberals know that anyone who self-identifies as a Christian is halfway towards extremist beliefs anyway. The recent offerings from various BBC-enabled comedians on such programmes as Have I Got News For You and Radio 5 are proof of this mindset.

As we got closer to the mid-term elections in the US (to which the BBC reacted as if it was the second-most important election in human history), the BBC made all sorts of efforts to portray the Tea Party movement as extremist and Christianist as possible. The staggering number of times they mentioned Christine O’Donnell and the fact that the BBC only once mentioned Marco Rubio and Col. Allen West until about a week before the election (and then only in passing, with no features at all) betray the BBC’s biased agenda for what it was.

A few days before the election, the World Service’s “Heart and Soul” programme gave us an installment entitled “God and the Tea Party” (Oct. 27 podcast). Here, Matthew Wells went to Kentucky to speak to a number of Tea Party supporters. Without exception, no matter how much they professed their Christian beliefs and their attitude that the US was a “Judeo-Christian country”, based on Judeo-Christian values, all of them equally expressed their desire for government to stay out of people’s lives and stop the taxing and spending (Note to bigots at the BBC: If someone makes an effort to include the Jews, they’re not the bogeyman you’re looking for). Yet, Wells kept pressing each of them to express their Christianist goals anyway, as if they all harbored a secret desire to turn the US into the Christian equivalent of Saudi Arabia. Then Wells gave a good portion of the segment to far-Left journalist and think-tanker, E.J. Dionne, who said that yes, they’re all extremist Christianist, but don’t worry because the far-Right Christian movement is not going to last long.

At one point, despite what the people themselves told him, Wells stated that conservative, Christian social issues are “at the heart” of the Tea Party movement.

In August, Mark Mardell had the same thoughts, wondering if the Christian Right wasn’t really at the heart of the Tea Party movement. Again, he asks this in spite of everything they keep telling him. It’s as if he suspects it’s all a big smoke screen. Mardell could always be counted on to find the outlier that fits this agenda and let that color everything.

Then, of course, there’s Glenn Beck, whom the BBC kept trying to portray as being a leading light of the movement, even though he’s actually a social conservative who tried to jump on the bandwagon, and did not come from the heart of the movement itself. There is a wide overlap between conservative Christians and supporters of the movement, but that’s all it is. Beck’s big rally in Washington, DC was for the former, not the latter. And let’s not forget Sarah Palin. The Beeboids sure haven’t. I’m sure the screener of her new reality show is already making the rounds, and they’re having a great laugh while at the same time being slightly afraid.

With this whole Social Conservative Christianist Narrative in mind, how does the BBC explain the fact that now several Tea Party organizers have written an open letter to the Republican Party leaders in Congress, telling them to lay off the social conservative issues and focus on stopping the taxing and spending?

I’m reproducing the full letter below. Read it, and decide for yourselves whether or not this matches the BBC Narrative across their spectrum of broadcasting, or what I’ve been saying for the last 18 months.

On behalf of limited government conservatives everywhere we write to urge you and your colleagues in Washington to put forward a legislative agenda in the next Congress that reflects the principles of the Tea Party movement.

Poll after poll confirms that the Tea Party’s laser focus on issues of economic freedom and limited government resonated with the American people on Election Day. The Tea Party movement galvanized around a desire to return to constitutional government and against excessive spending, taxation and government intrusion into the lives of the American people.
The Tea Party movement is a non-partisan movement, focused on issues of economic freedom and limited government, and a movement that will be as vigilant with a Republican-controlled Congress as we were with a Democratic-controlled Congress.

This election was not a mandate for the Republican Party, nor was it a mandate to act on any social issue, nor should it be interpreted as a political blank check.
Already, there are Washington insiders and special interest groups that hope to co-opt the Tea Party’s message and use it to push their own agenda – particularly as it relates to social issues. We are disappointed but not surprised by this development. We recognize the importance of values but believe strongly that those values should be taught by families and our houses of worship and not legislated from Washington, D.C.

We urge you to stay focused on the issues that got you and your colleagues elected and to resist the urge to run down any social issue rabbit holes in order to appease the special interests.

The Tea Party movement is not going away and we intend to continue to hold Washington accountable.

Here’s a link to a PDF file of the letter, with all signatories.

After more than a year of careful observation, the BBC has figured out that the Tea Party movement has mostly been busy trying to transform the Republican Party (Scott Brown in MA was an anomaly to them, a sign of nothing to come, apparently). But their bias makes them think it’s for an entirely different reason. Why, it’s almost as if they had a story they wanted to tell and went out there and told it, in spite of everything they learned from the very people about whom they were supposed to report.

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JUST SPREADING THE WORD…

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As if things weren’t bad enough….

“The public will be able to gain online access to masterclasses delivered by some of the BBC‘s best-known journalists, including John Simpson and John Humphrys, under plans to be announced later today.

BBC executives plan to let licence-fee payers use the corporation’s internal training website, which includes thousands of hours of material, as part of a range of partnership agreements. Rival news organisations and broadcasters will also be able to use the material.

The BBC claims the website is the most comprehensive of its type in the world. Other journalists who contribute material include the BBC business editor, Robert Peston, and the security correspondent, Frank Gardner.”

Oh no!

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