FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2011
OK folks, just to let you know that yours truly will be appearing on Sunday Morning Live (BBC network 10am). I will be debating with George Galloway amongst others on the subjects of Capital Punishment and "Palestine."
I would welcome any comments or suggestions that you may have.
My views are as follows; I support the Death Penalty and believe it is the appropriate punishment for those such as child-killers and terrorists.
I believe the recent execution of Troy Davis in the States was overdue.
I care more about the victims than the killers. A large number of ordinary British people share my view and I believe that our political representatives have failed in their duty to represent that view.
As far as a state for Palestine is concerned, you may as well wish for a State for Narnia.
A/They already have a State called Jordan
B/ After we have seen what they when they got Gaza, who in their right mind what offer them MORE Israeli territory?
C/Theatrics at the UN, that bastion of institutionalised Israel-bashing, are a poor substitute for seeking peace.
The truth is that the Palestinians are frauds who cloak their intent to erase Israel in contrived language aimed at getting liberal sentiment on side.
Nightmare
Radio 4 Today has taken pro Palestinian advocacy to new heights.
Their loathing for Israel trumped their love for for Obama, because having dismissed his speech as pandering to the Jewish lobby, they’ve ignored it altogether.
Jeremy Bowen spoke on behalf of Mahmoud Abbas, protesting his innocent self righteousness, which he expects us to take at face value, as he does himself.
We heard an emotive item about a Palestinian student debate, (“Did they pick the most unpopular kid to represent Israel?”) topped off with Sir Jeremy Greenstock, notorious Arabist, making ludicrous statements about Israel provoking surrounding Arab states, including Iran.
Which I suppose is true, as Iran does find Israel’s existence an unacceptable provocation.
Wyre Davies found some understanding Israelis to put the case for the Palestinians.
Later James Naughtie did talk to Daniel Taub, Israel’s new ambassador, putting a barrage of loaded accusations about illegal settlements, and smothering the life out of what might have been an illuminating interview for both Israel-bashers and Israel admirers.
Here are some of the things Sir Jeremy said:
“It’s not the only option, but what they’re pointing to is the unreasonableness of the sham that negotiations under Oslo Madrid, in 1993... it’s brought them absolutely nothing, and the settlements have gone on stealing their land. [...] You’re right. It is a sign of desperation. [...] they just want to continue negotiations in a court that will listen to them and not ignore them”.Naughtie emotes about Obama’s ‘electoral difficulties’.
[...] Israel and America are missing the point. Palestine is not a threat to Israel [...] What is much more of a threat to Israel is setting fireto their relationships in the region. With Turkey, with Egypt. Already terribly bad with Iran, with the rest of the world. With the Arab street, opinion coming out of the new Arab awakening, is much more threatening for Israel than anything that Palestine can say[...]the Palestinians are desperate, they don’t like the sham of the quartet and the Oslo Madrid process, they’re asking to be heard in a different court."I won’t go into the outrageous nightmarish bias that oozed from that interview.
"NAKEDLY CONTEMPTUOUS"
I have a copy of the Peter Oborne's Guilty Men which I picked up at the launch at the CPS last night. Figures such as Michael Howard and even the odd Labour eurosceptic MP were there. ..but conspicuous by their absence were any of this miserable so-called Tory government, who even now are desperately trying to save the euro despite their professed scepticism. That aside, some of what Mr Oborne says about the BBC's coverage of the first day of the euro on January 1, 2002, deserves spelling out in full to add to the previous post:
It was a moment of celebration for the BBC, whose already fragile sense of perspective collapsed. The BBC forgot its duty of impartiality....And it was nakedly contemptuous of its mass British audience. Today presenter Jim Naughtie, in France on January 1, spoke of: "...a sense of occasion, a genuine excitement, a sense of peculiar new notes, a sense of change in the air especially among young people, a sense of breaking away from the past." Naughtie lapsed into mystical language, strikingly similar to the words used in St John to describe one of the central mysteries of Christianity: "The arrival of the currency that the fathers of modern Europe dreamed about are symbols now made flesh". The BBC Charter with its demand for neutrality and professionalism, was broken again and again in those early days of the euro. Guidelines on balanced reporting were repeatedly ignored. Reasonable doubts about the euro were underplayed. Some reporters failed to distinguish between normal New Year revelries and specifically euro-related celebration...The BBC coverage should be seen as apart of a wider and more significant national pattern as many mainstream British institutions were subverted to serve the aspirations of the pro-euro camp.I await with interest reaction from the BBC. Mr Oborne bases his analysis of the euro launch on a detailed research paper. My guess is that, as usual, Patten and his henchmen will simply bluster and ignore it. After all, they are always right. They say so. Update: Mr Oborne appeared with eurofanatic Denis MacShane at the end of Today. I am currently having the sequence transcribed...and will comment when I have looked in detail at exactly what was said. True to form, there was a particularly sneery interruption from the aforementioned Naughtie.
The BBC and the Euro
>> THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2011
Peter Oborne in magisterial voice :
Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age – they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse. Meanwhile, the pro-Europeans find themselves in the same situation as appeasers in 1940, or communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are utterly busted.Oborne and Frances Weaver go on to quote the pro-Euro partisans. Among whom (and this will shock you) ....
Now let's turn to the BBC. In our Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet,Guilty Men, we expose in detail how the BBC betrayed its charter commitment and became a partisan player in a great national debate – all the more insidious because of its pretence at neutrality. For example, in the nine weeks leading to July 21, 2000, when the argument over the euro was at its height, the Today programme featured 121 speakers on the topic. Some 87 were pro-euro compared with 34 who were anti. BBC broadcasters tended to present the pro-euro position itself as centre ground, thus defining even moderately Eurosceptic voices as extreme. But this was not the worst of the unfairness. The Eurosceptics were too rarely given time to state their reasons for favouring sterling. Their position was too often covered through a paradigm of deep, "explosive" splits within the Conservative Party rather than the merits of the policy argument. Again and again the BBC led its news coverage on scare stories that failure to join the euro would lead to economic or industrial disaster. When those reports turned out to be false, it failed to correct them. In fact Britain was enjoying record levels of foreign investment: but when Office for National Statistics figures showed this, the BBC made very little of it. As Rod Liddle, then editor of the Radio 4's Today programme, said: "The whole ethos of the BBC and all the staff was that Eurosceptics were xenophobes." He recalls one meeting with a senior BBC figure over Eurosceptic complaints of bias. "Rod, the thing you have to understand is these people are mad. They are mad."And the fish is rotten from the head :
One urgent lesson concerns the BBC. The corporation's twisted coverage of the EU is a serious problem, because the economic collapse of the eurozone means a new treaty may be needed very soon.(browsing I see that commenters John Horne Tooke and Gerald were first to spot this)The problem is that the BBC cannot be trusted not to become part of a partisan propaganda operation: just look at the membership of the BBC Trust. Both its chairman, Lord Patten, and the vice-chairman, Diane Coyle, took a heavily partisan position in the euro debate.
The facts concerning Lord Patten are well known, but we have unearthed very troubling evidence of bias concerning Ms Coyle as economics writer for the Independent 10 years ago. Take this: "The defenders of sterling are, in the main, a group of elderly men with more stake in their past than in our future. They clothe their gut anti-Europeanism and Little Englandism in the language of rational economic argument."
Of course Ms Coyle is welcome to voice whatever insulting assumptions she wants about the motivations of Eurosceptics – but they call into question her membership of the BBC Trust.
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