False dawn
>> TUESDAY, APRIL 19, 2011
I switch on the radio. “They’re firing from mosques and hospitals” a voice is saying indignantly, “Fighting in a most underhand way. They’re taking off their uniforms and wearing civilian clothing and using women and children as shields” “At Last!” I’m thinking. “The BBC has finally recognised exactly how Hamas operates, and understands what Israel faces whenever it tries to defend itself. “ But of course I was mistaken. It was not Hamas he was getting so worked up about. It was Gaddafi’s troops in Libya. But you knew that.
Reflections on the Theme of Time Management. or: Me Me Me.
>> MONDAY, APRIL 18, 2011
I’ve been writing on this website for a couple of years or more and it don’t seem a day too much, but there aint a broadcasting corporation livin’ in the land as I wouldn’t “swop” for a bit of honest reporting. However for all my efforts, and those of David Vance and the others, nothing changes at the BBC. In fact, things have taken a turn for the worse now that the chair of the BBC Trust happens to be a known pro Palestinian advocate. The situation seems to be this. The BBC, and therefore the liberal unintelligentsia, have given special status to Islam by conferring a unique religious diplomatic immunity upon it. By qualifying as a religion, Islam as a whole is awarded sanctity which exempts it from being criticised. This applies in varying degrees to other religions and holy things. For example, in order to give vent to one’s antisemitic urges, one must stick to Israel-themed criticism. You’re not supposed to admit that this has anything to do with your distaste for Jews. Christianity is an open target, and Catholic misdemeanours have made it acceptable to condemn the entire religion, whereas similar unmentionable Islamic practises are given a free pass or regarded as unrepresentative. However, desecrating something holy is still thought not nice, particularly setting fire to it. So if Nazi ideology were elevated to the status of a religion with Herr Hitler as its prophet peace be upon him, it would immediately be distasteful to point out the racist, supremacist and murderous proclivities therein, and Mein Kampf would be a holy book, the fire-resistant immutable word of God speaking through the prophet. Can you imagine, post WWll - “It’s their culture, innit” ”Only an extremist minority” “Not inherent to the ideology” and it would then have to be “ because of the Jews” rather than “because of Israel” Being an atheist, I don’t see why anything should be given a free pass, or absolved from accountability, yet, perhaps inexplicably for some, I still have values which encompass what is loosely called right and wrong, and I don’t ask for God’s backing to justify them. The BBC is a crazy mixed up place. In a good way, viz: On one hand it is all patriotic, with the most unlikely celebrities performing Royal Wedding-themed antics, and talking about ‘the big day’ as if the ordinary viewer regards it as such, and on the other, it’s giving air space to staunch republicans. I like that in principle, although I am more than indifferent about the topic. Or should that be less than indifferent. (Meaning I couldn’t care less) like when people mistakenly say something can never be underestimated when they mean overestimated. But crazy mixed up in a bad way is when they eulogise about the uprisings in the Arab World without a care or a thought about the rise of Islam, and what this will mean for Israel, and the Jews and others who are trying to live there. If you look back at my incontinent output, just click on the anti Israel tag in the label cloud, you’ll see that I’ve covered a myriad of variations on the theme, and not made one iota of an impression on the BBC. Call me an idiot and knock me down with Louise Bagshawe, but how’s that for a waste of time?
“An Israeli teenager wounded when a Palestinian rocket hit a bus has died of his injuries. Daniel Viflic, 16, was on a school bus in southern Israel on 7 April when it was hit by an anti-tank missile fired from the Gaza Strip. The driver was slightly hurt in the attack, which happened just after the other children had been dropped off. Nineteen Palestinians died in the ensuing wave of Israeli air strikes and Palestinian counter-attacks. It was the most serious violence since Israel's conflict with Hamas in Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009. About 1,400 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, and 13 Israelis, including 10 soldiers, were killed.”This hideous example shows that the BBC cannot report the death of a boy at the hands of terrorists without adding gratuitous references to previous unverified and disputed death-toll statistics; and by various weasely words, making light of the attack itself.
Ken Cons The World
A Website called “We Are For Israel” is shocked that the BBC refers to the late Vittorio Arrigoni as a peace campaigner. H/T Daphne Anson. This may seem like a trivial matter. For one thing, he was, in a way, a peace campaigner, that is if you define peace as a Middle East without Jews. The BBC may or may not be aware of Mr Arrigoni’s reputation, but to take even the slightest interest in his murder at the hands of Ultra Islamist Salafist terrorists is to know that he was not popular in the pro Israel blogosphere. Any news outlet that pretends it hasn’t noticed that the interweb has been ablaze with obituaries detailing the exact nature of his ‘peace campaigning’must be blind. However, when you take into consideration that Ken O’Keefe, the deranged cartoon baddie who became a spokesman for flotillas was repeatedly invited to disgorge his bile on the BBC, well what can you expect? He was even given a whole Hardtalk. I’m all in favour of giving ridiculous people a platform on Hardtalk - I’m sure Sarah Montague deserves every minute of it - (joke) But giving Ken, or Kenneth as he is respectfully entitled here, the credibility of appearing on what is meant to be a serious vehicle for debate beggars belief. The whole point is that the BBC has lowered our expectations to such an extent that we have to assume that they have abandoned reason, and we must learn to live with it. So we have every right to complain when the BBC describes this person as a peace campaigner, but we know that nobody at the BBC will see that there’s anything for us to make a fuss about.
Monday morning and a new OPEN thread for y'all! Off you go....bias, surely not?ENDA ON AN AUSTERITY BENDA?
Anyone catch the odd interview here with Irish PM Enda Kenny on BBC "Today" this morning? The line being taken by Evan Davies was that Ireland should follow Iceland and choose to default on its massive debt. Enda, being a good little European, insisted that Ireland was 100% committed to "colleagues" in the EU. Wonder why the BBC were wanting him to suggest he might follow Iceland? - one way to get him to admit unswerving to the EU? Give it a listen if you get a moment...
JUST ANOTHER BIASED MONDAY....
Well, Universal Shami was never going to see anything POSITIVE about the policing of the "Trade Unionists against Reality" demonstration in London a few weeks ago and so it is natural the BBC afford her a soapbox to spout her predictable bile against the Met. Since when did Shami represent anything beyond a little liberal clique and why does she be given such massive prominence? Why was there no other group holding different views represented? And why did the Met allow her access to be able to watch the policing of our Capital?
Wishful Thinking
>> SUNDAY, APRIL 17, 2011
As a member of the Select Committee for Culture, Media and Sport, I imagine Louise Bagshawe bumps into Jeremy Hunt quite a lot. I was wondering, since she has taken an interest in the BBC’s bias against Israel, whether she had drawn Mr. Hunt’s attention to Melanie Phillips’s open letter about the very same subject! According to the Jewish Chronicle, the BBC has backed down over their lack of coverage of the murder of the Fogel family. As it happens, the BBC’s report concerning the arrest of the perpetrators belatedly describes the crime in the detail it neglected to include at the time. If the Jewish Chronicle is merely going by Helen Boaden’s mealy-mouthed statement, I’d say the term ‘backing down’ is wishful thinking. Louise Bagshawe was not satisfied, I was not satisfied, and no doubt the thousands of people who wrote messages of support to Ms Bagshawe were not satisfied. So BBC, please could you come clean and admit your "lack of evenhandedness" as your genetic proclivities urge you to do.
IGNORING UKIP...
Daniel Hannan, the Conservative MEP, has an interesting point here. It's election time again, and what's the betting that BBC will routinely bracket UKIP with BNP in their sustained efforts to cast Britain's second most popular party(* see below)as racist, no-hope, nasty-smelling extremists? It is, after all, a familiar ploy. In the same vein, there's some further pretty damning research about BBC EU/withdrawal bias here, on the Global Britain website. It's a formal complaint that's been made this week to the BBC about its EU coverage, based on the monitoring of half the editions of Today programme over the past six years, a pretty mammoth task. Global Britain is a cross-party think-tank run by the former UKIP leader Lord Pearson of Rannoch (an ex-Tory), and the Labour peer Lord Stoddart of Swindon. The complaint is well worth a read in full if you can spare the time, but among the key findings are:
-There were only 17 questions about withdrawal put to withdrawal advocates in 857 surveyed editions of Today between 2005 and 2010, an average of one every 50 programmes; - Explanation of withdrawal-related policies amounted to only 5,300 words (approximately 37 minutes of airtime, or 6 minutes for each year that was surveyed), strung across 89 separate, mostly fragmentary responses, an average of 59 words (about 23 seconds) per response. This was four ten thousandths of the time available to Today editors.Today, of course, is the BBC's self-declared flagship news and current affairs programme, and it would be expected that it would give reasonable coverage to those advocating withdrawal from the EU; such a view was, after all, supported by more than 16% of voters at the last European elections and around 1m voters in the general election of 2010. The reality is that the BBC does not give a stuff about withdrawal as an issue, disgracefully under-reports it (or worse, of course, omits it altogether) - and when spokesmen do appear, they are never asked about the issues involved, but told that they are "BNP in blazers" - and thus deliberately bracketed with racism. What also emerges from the complaint is that the Wilson report into the BBC EU coverage found disgraceful bias six years ago. The BBC promised to improve; but in reality, it gleefully stuck two large fingers up and carried on as usual. And as Daniel Hannan notes today, nothing has changed. Nothing. * in the Barnsley by-election
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