Here’s something to wait up for….
‘Influence By Degree’ on BBC World Service next Tuesday (6th) at various times:
‘Is academic freedom at risk? Is academic integrity under threat? Across the developed world, government funding for universities is drying up. That means universities are having to seek finance elsewhere.
One such model can be found in USA. US universities have been raising money from their alumni for years. Princeton University is the master at this. With only 7500 students it has a staggering endowment of over $17billion. And well over half of Princeton’s alumni donate to their old college.
Rob Broomby has been to Princeton to talk to alumni and to observe how freshmen (first year undergraduates) are absorbed into the Princeton culture, and hears concerns about how donations are changing academic priorities.’
Fair enough question….only just how far will the BBC look….is it just academic freedom at risk or are there bigger, cultural, social and political issues at stake? Is it only the BBC’s favourite target, ‘Big Business’, that gets shaken down here?
…or….Will the BBC also investigate the flood of ‘Islamic’ money buying up universities, buying influence and the ability to spread its own brand of propaganda and, as Hitchens might say ‘poisoning’ young minds and Society…and if so does the BBC consider that influence harmful?
The BBC seems to have, er, ‘borrowed’ the title from this in 2009….‘A Degree Of Influence’
Hopefully they will also be looking at what it said:
‘Donors and foreign governments from around the world have in recent years
taken a huge interest in funding UK university studies.
A Degree of Influence: The funding of strategically important subjects in UK universities highlights the foreign money that is being injected into those subjects that are designated of ‘strategic importance’ by the UK government, and the ways in which the cash is being converted into influence at universities on a range of levels.
The largest donations are those funding Islamic and Arabic studies in the UK.
At a time when Islam is receiving an unprecedented amount of public attention,
it is more vital than ever before for universities to engage in free and open
research, all the while retaining their reputation as impartial, objective centres
of academic excellence. Yet the evidence uncovered by this report suggests
that universities are placing their objectivity at risk by accepting huge financial
donations without putting in place safeguards to ensure that they retain their
neutrality.‘
There are of course other ‘donors’ who might be of concern such as China but only one ideology so far is reinforcing its message with extreme violence.
The BBC only presents an image of Islam that Islam itself wants to portray itself as having…but is the real image more like the one portrayed below as probably the majority of non-Muslims believe?
The BBC needs to open up the debate to include the uncomfortable and inconvenient truths about this ideology and how it is being propagated in the West, as well as pushing a dangerously and deliberately fraudulent and misleading version of the truth.
Christopher Hitchens, as posted before, reminds us what the BBC hides from us:
‘Now let’s not dance around, not all monotheisms are exactly the same at the moment. They’re all based on the same illusion, they’re all plagiarisms of each other, but there is one in particular that at the moment is proposing a serious menace not just to freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but to quite a lot of other freedoms too. And this is the religion that exhibits the horrible trio of self-hatred, self-righteousness and self-pity.
I am talking about militant Islam.
Globally it’s a gigantic power.
It controls an enormous amount of oil wealth, several large countries and states with an enormous fortune, it’s pumping the ideology of Wahhabism and Salafism around the world, poisoning societies where it goes, ruining the minds of children, stultifying the young and its madrassas, training people in violence, making a culture death and suicide and murder. That’s what it does globally, it’s quite strong.
In our society it poses as a cringing minority, who’s faith you might offend, which deserves all the protection that a small and vulnerable group might need.
Look anywhere you like in the world for the warrant for slavery, for the subjection of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for anti-Semitism, for all of this, you look no further than a famous book that’s on every pulpit in this city, and in every synagogue and in every mosque.
And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force of the main source of hatred is also the main caller for censorship.
And this from him also:
‘Tolerance is one of the first and most awkward questions raised by any examination of Islamism. We are wrong to talk as if the only subject was that of terrorism. As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything “offensive” to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter …‘
I don’t think anyone can argue with what Hitchens said….which makes it all the more odd that when something is so obvious the BBC, which goes out of its way to discredit organisations like the EDL or even UKIP and the Daily Mail….should sit back and not just say nothing but actually go out and actively promote Islam as a form of culture that can sit happily alongside any other in a Western Society.
Clearly it can’t……..and that debate needs to be had.
Let’s hope the BBC do include a close look at the Saudis et al pouring money into universities…..and then look at the madrassas and mosques and ‘educational’, cultural and social institutions the Saudis are funding and setting up in the West as well.
The BBC set would complain bitterly about a McDonald’s or a Tesco Express arriving in their neighbourhood but extend the hand of welcome to religious extremists who build a mosque or a Muslim school….if it were US ‘Evangelical’ Christians you can guarantee the welcome would be entirely different.
As stated below ‘disclosure is your friend’ and may help to assure those who have concerns or even prejudices about Islam……
‘From a Western point of view, it does little to remove the fear of the unknown among regulators and politicians, and it feeds the antagonism of those who may already have pre-existing prejudices towards foreigners, in general, and Arabs, in particular.
In contrast, domestically, the lack of transparency has attracted relatively little attention. Though this is starting to change, with the partial exception of Kuwait, there has not been much sustained pressure for the SWFs to open their books and provide the body politic with a better understanding of what is being done with their money. This leads to suspicions that it is not being properly accounted for. In both the domestic and the international cases, greater transparency would be welcome and would likely undermine many of the suspicions of the cynical.
As the lawyers say, “Disclosure is your friend.”
Perhaps the BBC checked out this website as part of their research….‘Saudi Arabia spent one hundred billion dollars to spread Wahhabism in the West, the most anti-Semitic version of Islam (the Soviet Union during the Cold War invested much less for its propaganda.) Currently there are 17 federally funded centers on American campuses devoted to Middle Eastern studies: All of these support pro-Islamist and anti-Israel ideas ‘
Undoubtedly the BBC will be keen to unearth the truth and rigorously investigate such assertions.
