Linguistic Limitations

Apart from Jeremy Bowen’s pro Palestinian position, his grievance against Israelis, his reliance on Palestinian stringers because of his inability to speak either Hebrew or Arabic, and his lisp, one thing that annoys me about the BBC’s M.E. editor is the difficulty he has with his own language. This morning he chats with Sarah Montague about Obama’s forthcoming speech aimed at embracing the Muslim world. Struggling for a while with … Continue reading

Passive Killing

Thanks to Pounce for drawing my attention to this example of BBC bias. Six killed in gun battle! Home-owner killed! Politically motivated arrests! Police raid! Allegations of torture! Zionist Agents! All of this and more, but wait – Who has done these evil things? Israel is not in the headline. Why not? Because this time Israel is not the culprit. There doesn’t seem to be culprit at all.In fact no-one … Continue reading

Caving In. Part 2.

On the subject of caving in to pro-Palestinian pressure, something unusual appeared in the Independent yesterday. A letter from film director Gary Sinyor, recipient of the award for Best British Film from the EIFF 1992 for his film “Leon the Pig Farmer” (Do read it all) He explains eloquently why Ken Loach was wrong to threaten the Edinburgh International Film Festival, forcing them to hand back the £300 sponsorship money … Continue reading

Brussels Broadcasting Corporation

The BBC probably thought they were doing their bit for balance by inviting Helen Szamuely of the Eurosceptical blog EU Referendum onto a discussion with Zainab Badawi. On the other hand, they might have considered that UK feelings about the EU are not at all warm, and that two pro-EU bloggers out of three was a touch imbalanced. There was Nosemonkey, a “critically pro-EU and centrist” blogger, Shiraz Socialist, a … Continue reading

£30,000 Question

There seems to be some confusion as to whether £30,000, an apology, or just an offer of an apology is on the table, but it does appear that the Muslim Council of Britain has demanded one or all of these from the BBC, and that the BBC has acquiesced.Certain remarks were made by Charles Moore when he was a panellist on Question Time that the MCB consider a slur. His … Continue reading

A FEW CHANGES…

Just to say that in an effort to improve site loading speed, I have removed my Twitter and also the video bar. I feel these have not worked and some have misunderstood why I placed my Twitter here. I have tried to bring more interactivity, greater responsiveness – including the weekly liveblog – but accept that these haven’t worked as I wanted. We are also planning to restore haloscan comments … Continue reading