and it’s an embarrassment for Israel, says the BBC:
…the BBC’s Jill McGivering, in Jerusalem, says the incident is sure to cause some embarrassment for the Israelis.
Huh? Why Israel? Are the Egyptians likely to berate the Israelis for not having a bunch of non-Muslim security goons crawling over one of Islam’s most holy shrines? Are the Egyptians likely to demand that Israel make its control over Jerusalem more strongly felt?
It’s an embarrassment all right. But not for the Israelis.
Hello? Even the NY Times credits Bush with success. To admit that Bush has had success on any level (whether hunting down Saddam, a strengthening economy or scaring Col Gaddafi into cooperation) must be harder for the Beeb to swallow than cod liver oil. Hardliners in Beebland must shudder to read Bush-loathing Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank own up to Bush success.
It has been a week of sweet vindication for those who promulgated what they call the Bush Doctrine. Beginning with the capture of Saddam Hussein a week ago and ending Friday with an agreement by Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi to surrender his unconventional weapons, one after another international problem has eased.
So what does the BBC’s ‘expert’ , George Joffe, have to say about these developments? Gaddafi got what he wanted all along and Bush is just fending off his “many domestic critics”. Take your medicine, George.
Thanks to Power Line for NY Times and WaPo links.
. Hazhir Teimourian has serious worries about BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson’s recent book, ‘The Wars Against Saddam: Taking The Hard Road To Baghdad’, which the Kurdish commentator on Middle Eastern affairs reviewed for the Literary Review (offline at the moment) this month.
Having blamed Simpson’s account for giving Saddam an easy ride, and accused him of blaming the UK and US far too much over deaths caused by UN sanctions, Teimourian points out the preponderance of Shia victims, and states ominously, ‘That was not a mistake’. He says that during the time of sanctions the mortality rate among children in the Kurdish-controlled North of Iraq (also subject to sanctions) actually fell and that
‘Simpson’s explanation that they (UN sanctions) stopped the importation of water-sanitation equipment is simply not true’
He doesn’t stop there. His most interesting comments are about Simpson’s attitude towards Saddam’s regime:
‘In several places, Simpson irritates by expressing gratitude to top Ba’thists who helped obtain visas for the BBC. By describing them as ‘cultured’ or ‘gentle’ (was Goering acceptable, then, because he hoarded paintings?), he invites us to believe that they bore no responsibility for any of the bestial acts committed by their security forces that Simpson himself describes so well elsewhere in the book.
One such man- and Simpson, incredibly, tried to bring him to Britain as an asylum-seeker after the war- is Saddam’s last foreign minister, Naji Sabri. After telling us how much he likes Sabri, he tells us that Sabri once saved his career as a junior civil servant by denouncing his own brother as a traitor. In return for this service, on top of saving his job, Sabri was exempted from taking part in the firing squad. His poor father was not. Sabri went on to serve Saddam so faithfully that he was eventually made a minister.’
Teimourian begins the conclusion to his review by saying:
‘These shortcomings are serious failures of judgement.’
No doubt these ‘serious failures of judgement’ have helped fuel the BBC bias in their coverage of the Iraq conflict and explain why so many journalists (Guerin, Frei, Hawley, Omar, Gilligan and many others) would express anti-US/UK opinion, and even drop apologetic hints for Saddam, without fearing the reaction of their managers.
BBC News Online journalists have been banned from referring to Saddam Hussein as a former dictator. Instead, they must call him “the deposed former President of Iraq”.
With 501 instances of Chile’s former dictator, Augusto Pinochet, being referred to as exactly that on the BBC’s website, one cannot help but wonder why such a double standard has come to pass at the BBC. What makes one former dictator more deserving of respect than another?
As the song says, the trouble with the truth is that it always begs for more truth. Exactly why a news organisation should wish to prevent the truth from being spoken by its journalists is, in this case, a total mystery.
If you’re outside of Britain, just be thankful that you’re not forced under penalty of law to finance this deeply troubled organisation’s efforts to dodge reality.
does the BBC respond to criticism? With censorship, of course. True, in this case it’s self censorship, but they can scarcely ask for more from the public than acceptance of a compulsory license fee (kind of an act of censorship by itself)- so they just have to put up with criticism and find ways of deflecting it.
Their new policy, apparently, is not to let anyone “whose main profile or income comes from the BBC” write newspaper columns about politics. This is verboten, as I say, unless you can prove your ‘main profile or income’ doesn’t come from the BBC. In other words, it’s a gag on non-senior journalists- who will be much more firmly under the thumb with this selectivity on the part of the Beeb- plus some high-profile, senior ones who will magically, imperceptibly almost, come to have greater ‘responsibilities’ and need better remuneration than their current settlement allows. Slander, me? Nooo. ‘Creativity’ in job description could well become the key, that’s all.
Of course, the great ‘El Dorado’ of BBC journalism will be to prove that your image and income transcends the BBC’s patronage- something, say, Kirsty Wark might be able to claim in Scotland, or Peter Snow on the subject of elections, or Michael Fish, on the political effects of the weather (heh). So, in conclusion, one might say that the answer to criticism is not to come clean but to complexify to bamboozle the oiks who criticise you. Sounds like a BBC policy to me.
The DT is equally sceptical.
There are some funny things happening on Blogger.
The BBC states it will not publish comments of an offensive or inflammatory nature on its websites. I am fairly sure that an email calling, let us say, for the execution for treason of George Galloway would never appear, even though plenty of people have opined that he should be strung up. However this post from Black Triangle gives an insight into what does and does not immediately strike the BBC as offensive.
There are also some wise words on stealth editing.
UPDATE: Looks like me and Jackie D were posting simultaneously. Great minds think alike, and all that. I’ll leave this post up as evidence that we abjure stealth editing on this blog. (Except for misplaced apostrophes, spelling mistakes and jokes we only think of later.)
Anthony Cox — who will forever be remembered as the author of that WMD 404 page — notes an interesting exchange with the BBC on his blog.
After BBC News published a call for President Bush’s assassination, Cox wrote to them to ask for it to be removed. In a very curt, two sentence reply, BBC News claimed they never published the call for Bush’s death — because, as it happened, the comment had been deleted. The BBC eventually admitted that they had indeed published the call for President Bush’s murder, and apologised to Cox for having done so, and for getting it wrong when they claimed they hadn’t.
How did such a statement make it onto the BBC’s pages in the first place, though? That’s anyone’s guess.
. Hazhir Teimourian is a writer and journalist, and he reviewed BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson’s latest book ‘The Wars Against Saddam: Taking The Hard Road To Baghdad’ for the Literary Review this month (unfortunately offline at the moment). Teimourian’s review is headed ‘The BBC Tribe At War’. The headline caught my attention, and what he had to say held it completely.
Teimourian is of Kurdish origin, but has lived in Britain and been associated with the BBC for over thirty years. He is an accepted expert on Middle Eastern conflict. Nevertheless, he approaches Simpson’s book warily because he believes that Simpson, and the BBC World Service,
‘loses no opportunity to denigrate Britain’.
While praising the ways that in parts of the book Simpson captures events he has been a part of, he accuses him in one place of mounting ‘a tribal defence of the BBC in Baghdad’.
The title of Simpson’s latest book is, he argues,
bound to light up the heart of every Arab nationalist and Muslim zealot, implying that all of Saddam’s wars were imposed on him by the wicked West.
Teimourian also criticises the failure of Simpson’s book to hold to account the Ba’thist hierarchy- including Saddam- for its desolation of Iraq. Simpson, he says,
‘lets Saddam off almost completely’ over the deaths of children during the era of sanctions, and ‘this book will be used all over the world as the considered opinion of the BBC’s World Affairs Editor to ‘prove’ the inhumanity of his country’ (the UK) .
This is the same John Simpson who recently joined conspiracy theorist and BBC World presenter Nick Gowing in his indictment of US forces, accusing them of the ‘ultimate form of censorship’ in killing journalists in Iraq. If the World Affairs Editor of the BBC expresses his views in this way (and there is plenty more ‘rich’ material from Teimourian’s review of Simpson’s new book to be continued…), who can be surprised that the BBC coverage is as it is.
It’s puzzling why the BBC’s coverage of the Iraqi foreign minister slamming the UN has omitted the harshest words he had for the supranational organisation. In case you missed it, the New York Times — unlike the BBC — did find it fit to print:
“Settling scores with the United States-led coalition should not be at the cost of helping to bring stability to the Iraqi people,” Mr. Zebari said in language unusually scolding for an occupant of the guest seat at the end of the curving Security Council table.
“Squabbling over political differences takes a back seat to the daily struggle for security, jobs, basic freedoms and all the rights the U.N. is chartered to uphold,” he said.
Taking a harsh view of the inability of quarreling members of the Security Council to endorse military action in Iraq, Mr. Zebari said, “One year ago, the Security Council was divided between those who wanted to appease Saddam Hussein and those who wanted to hold him accountable.
“The United Nations as an organization failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years, and today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure.”
Now, exactly why would the BBC find these quotes irrelevant and not worth reporting?
