Like state-run RTE in Ireland,
the state-run BBC in the UK
spins the news to the soft left on the taxpayers' money.
The anti-neocon BBC polemic
"The Power of Nightmares"
(2004).
See review:
The Power of Bad Television,
Clive Davis, October 21, 2004:
"It is a sign of how fevered political debate has become in Britain's media-land
that such lurid, Michael Moore-ish notions are given a prime-time slot on the channel
that once gave us Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation."
BBC bias
The BBC has a soft
pro-left, pro-Arab, anti-Israel, anti-America and anti-west
bias.
The problem isn't BBC bias per se
- It's the fact that people are forced
to pay for it.
If the BBC was private (like Sky and Fox)
this bias would be fine.
It's the fact that people are forced
to pay for it that so angers people.
Andrew Gilligan is famous for his
sneering, cynical reporting of the Iraq War on BBC in 2003.
His
sneer at the American claim to have taken Baghdad:
"But then the Americans have a history of making these premature announcements."
sums up why people hate the BBC.
As well as their biased news service,
there has been a severe lack of serious
documentaries on BBC analysing the War on Islamism.
Instead of a serious analysis of Islamism, its goals,
its links to hatred preached in mosques and schools, especially in the west,
and its links to Palestinian terror,
we get Chomskyite nonsense like
"The Power of Nightmares".
"The war party",
Panorama, BBC, 18 May 2003
(anti-neocon polemic).
John Humphrys is probably the most prominent face
of the soft left bias of the
BBC.
It would be fun if he was related to me
but he is not.
Not in the last 300 years anyway.
More on John Humphrys:
"Humphrys argued that:
"If we were not prepared to take on a very, very powerful government indeed
there would be no point in the BBC existing - that is ultimately what the BBC is for."
No, Mr Humphrys, it is not. The purpose of public service broadcasting is precisely the opposite:
to provide an analytical, unbiased and serious alternative to the supposed free-for-all of commercial broadcasting.
That it is now ITV and Sky to whom one turns for unbiased coverage
is thanks to John Humphrys and his BBC ilk."
John Bolton v. A sneering John Humphrys, 17 May 2007.
God, Humphrys is annoying.
Snide, sneering, patronising, condescending, obnoxious.
Asking offensive loaded questions based on an unthinking left view of the world.
And yet convinced he is neutral and objective.
As a comment says:
"Notice how touchy left-wingers are getting about being called left-wingers."Another comment
parodies Humphrys' questions:
"Just because they ask questions like -
"Isn't it time you stinking American neocons left
the world which has learned to hate you so much alone?"
doesn't mean one can draw nasty conclusions about political bias."
Al-Qaeda is unhappy with America and other countries getting involved in places like the Middle East.
What a load of leftie propaganda!
Why not say to the children:
Al Qaeda are a group that hates all people who are not Muslim.
They even hate some groups of Muslims, such as the Shia.
Al Qaeda believe that Jews and Christians
are engaged in plots against the Muslim world.
They believe that all non-Muslims
must be destroyed in order
to make the world a better place.
They believe that Muslims should reign supreme on the earth.
They have killed tens of thousands of people.
Many Muslims oppose Al Qaeda.
Most of Al Qaeda's victims so far have been Muslims.
If you can't see my point, consider the following:
Which would be the better explanation by the BBC during the Second World War
of why the Nazis were
attacking the Jews?
This:
The Nazis are
unhappy with the Jews' involvement in the world economy
and the German economy.
or this:
The Nazis are an organisation
that hates all Jews.
They also hate many other groups of people, such as gypsies, gays and Slavs.
The Nazis believe that Jews
are engaged in plots against the world
and against Germany.
They believe that all Jews
must be destroyed in order
to make the world a better place.
They believe that Germans should reign supreme on the earth.
They have killed 20 million people.
7 million Germans have died in the wars the Nazis started.
Despite the BBC's bias against Israel,
BBC journalist
Alan Johnston
was kidnapped by Palestinians in Gaza in 2007.
Before the kidnap,
Johnston was remarkably non-judgemental
about the
jihadi kidnappers of the terror state of Gaza.
But then they kidnapped him in Mar 2007.
Richard Landes
notes that all his supporters, in trying to get him freed, openly admit
he is biased towards the Palestinians.
"So imagine what it might be like to report negatively from this area".
UK Palestinians admit Alan Johnston is biased, 14 May 2007.
They urge his release
because they say:
"at the end of the day, he's one of the people who cares about us and he works for us".
As Charles Johnson replies:
"Why yes, that's exactly right. He does."
Richard Landes:
"No foreign reporter in Israel would allow himself to fawn over the Israeli narrative
the way Alan did over the Palestinian.""If Johnston, a tireless advocate for the Palestinian cause
got kidnapped by a clan of Muslim extremists,
imagine what would happen to a reporter who actually showed skepticism about Palestinian claims,
and wrote articles critical of Palestinians -
say, something on the way they have turned their schools and media into factories of hatred."
The jihadi kidnappers release a video of Alan Johnston
ranting against Israel, America and Britain.
I won't take these
moronic ideas
as Johnston's own beliefs, since he is being held at gunpoint.
What if Israelis had abducted BBC man?, Charles Moore, 3 June 2007
- A thought experiment where Israelis kidnap the BBC man
and force him to spout pro-Zionist propaganda on video.
How different the world's reaction would be.
How less tolerant we would all be.
"The first point is that it would never happen.
There are no Israeli organisations - governmental or freelance - that would contemplate such a thing.
That fact is itself significant."
Moore says, even if Johnston is spouting the jihadis' words:
"the truth is that, although it is under horrible duress, what he says is not all that different from what the BBC says every day through the mouths of reporters who are not kidnapped and threatened, but are merely collecting their wages.
The language is more lurid in the Johnston video, but the narrative is essentially the same as we have heard over the years from Orla Guerin and Jeremy Bowen and virtually the whole pack of them.
It is that everything that is wrong in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world is the result of aggression or "heavy-handedness" ... by America or Israel or Britain.
Alan Johnston, under terrorist orders, spoke of the "absolute despair" of the Palestinians and attributed it to 40 years of Israeli occupation, "supported by the West". That is how it is presented, night after night, by the BBC."
Alan Johnston is freed, July 2007.
Will this make him and the BBC
any more objective (i.e. more anti-Palestinian)?
I doubt it.
No change in Johnston it seems:
Alan Johnston documentary, Oct 2007.
I saw this, and can agree that:
"It was typical of what passes for current affairs on BBC1 these days, mixing slick production values with superficial analysis"
Johnston says:
"Whatever else it was, my Gazan incarceration was not what Iraqi prisoners had been forced to endure at Abu Ghraib jail."
As the blogger above says:
"he could have chosen three far more appropriate examples: Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who are being held captive by Hezbollah, and Gilad Shalit, who remains a prisoner of Johnston's 'liberators', Hamas. All three have been held for over a year, probably not far from where Johnston was confined, and you might think that their fates would have been on his mind in the months he's had to reflect on his own ordeal."
Delighted that he was released: Yes. An admirer of his: No.
The BBC broadcast the most hilarious program called
Don't Panic, I'm Islamic
in June 2005.
(The 2005 program is not to be confused with several other programs called
"Don't Panic, I'm Islamic".)
This ludicrous BBC program
was designed to assure us fear-gripped Islamophobes
that there is no Islamist threat, and it is all lies
cooked up by the media, or the neo-cons, or somebody.
Unfortunately, the program had a few flaws:
First, the program was an endless parade of twisted, paranoid and aggressive
British Muslims.
One of the Muslims supposed to "reassure" us was
a member of the pro-jihad
RESPECT
party!
Another was
Asghar Bukhari
of the extremist
MPAC.
Another was the appalling
Lord Ahmed,
who blames the victim of Islamist violence for the violence.
Another idiot claimed Bin Laden is not evil, and is very "spiritual".
Another said many Muslims admire Bin Laden,
and she more or less believes that America carried out 9/11.
Another,
Shahid Butt,
has a terror conviction.
No Muslim on the program ever said anything like:
"I love the West because of its Enlightenment values of freedom of religion,
free speech
and freedom of sexuality."
Instead it was an endless series of leftist or Islamist complaints about Britain
and western democracies.
What planet do the BBC team live on?
Couldn't they find a single decent, attractive, liberal Muslim to present to us?
Why do they have to confirm all our prejudices with this parade of
unattractive characters?
This deeply stupid program laughed at the supposed media "hysteria" about Islamic terror,
and ridiculed the idea of an attack on Britain.
It read out newspaper reports of plots in funny voices.
However, only weeks after the program aired, on 7 July 2005,
Islamic terrorists bombed London,
killing more people than in any attack since 1945.
Finally (and this is the act of pure leftie genius
that makes this perhaps the worst BBC program ever):
They featured a cheerful, unthreatening, Muslim cockney called
Mohammed Hamid,
and his paintballing pal Muhammad al-Figari.
Later, unfortunately,
it turned out that Mohammed Hamid
(or
"Osama Bin London"
as he liked to call himself)
knew the 21 July bombers!
The bombers
Ramzi Mohammed
and
Osman Hussain
went paintballing with him
days before the attack!
He also knew the bomber
Muktar Said Ibraihim.
This all emerged in Dec 2007 when
Mohammed Hamid and his pal Muhammad al-Figari
went on trial on Islamic terrorism charges!
Mohammed Hamid was charged with
recruiting and grooming the 21 July bombers.
You couldn't make it up.
Mohammed Hamid is found guilty, Feb 2008.
"Mohammed Hamid told young Muslims the 52 deaths in the July 7 attacks on London were "not even breakfast to me" as he urged them to prepare for jihad".
"Hamid exchanged 155 calls and text messages with the four July 21 bombers."
He sent the July 21 bombers
"a text on the night of July 21 and attempted to ring both of them the following day."
Muhammad al-Figari was also found guilty.
A relative of Mohammed Hamid says:
"he hated Britain and told his nephews the whole country should be Islamic
and they should kill non-believers."
Well done, BBC.
Your program now suggests that if you pick random British Muslims,
they will as often as not
turn out to either be terrorists,
know terrorists,
or support terrorists.
To actually feature someone who is a terrorist
is real genius.
Surely, you would think, the first qualification for the program telling us
not to "panic" would be no connection with terror at all.
If I took the BBC's ludicrous program seriously, I would think all or most
British Muslims were terrorists.
But luckily I don't, and I do not.
"Don't panic, it will make it harder to kill you"
might have been a better title in retrospect.
Here are lots of
funny alternate titles for this absurd program, including:
Michael Gove
suggests More4 be renamed
"MichaelMoore4".
Britz
by
Peter Kosminsky
- British Islamist killers of innocents
are motivated by anti-terrorism laws,
or British "oppression" (*),
or the liberation of Iraq, or something
- not by the powerful, global, racist ideology of
Islamism.
Peter Kosminsky
asked following the 7/7 bombs:
"How was it that a group of second-generation British Muslims, born here, raised here, educated in British schools, steeped in British culture, could have become so angry, feel themselves so powerless and disenfranchised, that they would strap explosives to their bodies and set out to kill and maim their fellow British citizens?"
Even in the way he asks the question he shows that
he does not understand the answer.
The 7/7 killers of innocents were driven by hope,
and religion, and bigotry, and hatred, and utopianism,
not by despair.
(*) Muslims are freer in Britain than in any Muslim country on earth.
Only in the West, and in no Muslim country,
can every single Muslim thinker and sect practice, write, debate,
speak and publish in freedom.
(2004).
Mohammed Hamid is found guilty, Feb 2008.
"Mohammed Hamid told young Muslims the 52 deaths in the July 7 attacks on London were "not even breakfast to me" as he urged them to prepare for jihad".
"Hamid exchanged 155 calls and text messages with the four July 21 bombers."
He sent the July 21 bombers
"a text on the night of July 21 and attempted to ring both of them the following day."
Muhammad al-Figari was also found guilty.
Since 1995.
