1,000 words

David Hicks, the soon-to-be-British Taleban, looks kind of sweet and gullible in the BBC photo, doesn’t he? This page has the usual archive picture we see in Australia (scroll down) (and The Age is a Fairfax paper – Fairfax is the Australian equivalent of an infernal hybrid of The Guardian, The Independent and the NYT, so it would hardly be worried about being too soft on the terrorist). Click through … Continue reading

And still they come

They’re still at it on Sydney: “The fighting then spread to other parts of the city, injuring more than 30 people, including police officers. The violence continued on Monday night, apparently in retaliation, despite calls for calm and ethnic tolerance by Prime Minister John Howard and other senior figures.” Quite wrong – the white on Lebanese attacks had ended by about mid-afternoon on Sunday. By Sunday evening, the violence was … Continue reading

It was all a waste of time

…it appears, as those Kurds who had the temerity to stand up to one of the 20th century’s great mass killers apparently set up a one-party state: “But while Kurdish officials say that democracy has flourished in their semi-autonomous region since splitting off from Saddam Hussein’s central government in 1992, there is only one way considered acceptable to vote here.” Sounds just like more of the same, doesn’t it? However, … Continue reading

Your tax pounds wisely spent

Yes, Dr Who again (Natalie discused it here previously): ‘”It’s Christmas Day, a day of peace,” said chief writer Russell T Davies. “There is absolutely an anti-war message because that’s what I think.” Actress Penelope Wilton plays the Prime Minister in the hour-long show. In one scene she says of the US president: “He is not my boss and he is certainly not turning this into a war.” Decision condemned … Continue reading

A colour that dare not speak its name

Presumably the BBC means “non-descript white” in the sidebar on ancestry here, because the last time I looked the rest of the people listed were also Australians: “Total population: 21 million Australian: 6.7m (38.7%) English: 6.4m (36.5%) Irish: 1.9m (11%) Italian: 800,000 (4.6%) German: 742,000 (4.3%) Chinese: 557,000 (3.2%) Greek: 376,000 (2.2%) Dutch: 269,000 (1.5%) Lebanese: 162,000 (0.9%) Indian: 157,000 Vietnamese: 157,000 (0.9%)” Note that this is an ancestry table, … Continue reading

It’s in the way that you do it

After Natalie’s good analysis of what is wrong with the BBC’s coverage of the Sydney culture wars, I note the “See also” box at the top right of this page links to ‘Australia’s unease with outsiders‘. I note in this inflammatory and pernicious guff the sort of generalisations that would never be employed of “people of Middle-eastern background” (or insert desired trendy PC shibboleth): ‘They want the drawbridge raised – … Continue reading

It’s time for another edition of BBC Blankety-Blank

(see clip): Study this BBC Views Online article, Jail for ‘honour killing’ family, then complete the following sentence: The so-called ‘honour’ killers are ________. Clue: See this Times article, Family jailed for ‘honour killing’, for more details than BBC Views Online’s curiously abridged coverage. Click through to read and contribute comments on this post.

Two beaches.

Case A: thugs attack en masse at a beach in Portugal. The race of the attackers was not mentioned by the BBC, although the prim way that the story says that the municipal authorities believed that “the youngsters came from poorer suburbs of the capital” made me guess that they were not white before Tim Worstall, who lives in Portugal, confirmed it. The fact that they were black was the … Continue reading