These days everyone seems to have noticed that the BBC is biased.
And at last it does seem to have started listening to reason. For example I heard the words ‘Islamist’ and ‘terrorism’ uttered together in a news bulletin.
Admittedly it has taken several acts of terror to bring this about, though the perpetrators themselves articulated in no uncertain terms that their atrocities were carried out in the name of Islam.
That, and several high profile articles in the press protesting at the BBC’s increasingly incongruous policy of banning the T word. Someone on high must have come to their senses.
However the more unbiased the BBC becomes, the more credible will be the oft heard claim that “we get complaints from both sides” and accordingly the conclusion that “we must be getting it about right” would start making sense.
At such a time logical, reasoned and legitimate complaints about the BBC’s inexcusable pro-Islam / anti-Zionist and left-wing biases would be redundant.
Then, perhaps the BBC would no longer need to equate the hate-filled antisemitic rants they get when, say, someone smells the blood of Mark Regev, with genuine complaints about bias in the disingenuous manner it currently does in order to even up the tally.
So spotting Peter Oborne’s strange article in the Telegraph complaining about John Humphrys’s biased interview on Today this morning (scroll to 1:33) with Mark Regev, I’d be the first to agree. But from a different side of the fence.
Yes it does seem that Humph referred to a ‘nuclear weapons programme’ in his intro, and we all know that Iran insists that it has no such thing. Not officially. But that Intro was read out by Humph in the manner of a script, so perhaps it was someone else’s error.
So although it might have been a slip of the tongue to call it a nuclear weapons programme, It certainly is a nuclear programme, and very likely one with the ulterior motive that Oborne and appeasers of the Iranian regime seek to overlook. Even the BBC’s QA on the topic is unequivocal about that.
His second point concerned Mark Regev, a person who Israel-bashers pretend is a bullying apologist for the despicable Zionist state. In this interview I thought Regev sounded tired and weary. The bully was Humph.
Oborne thinks Humphrys should have challenged Regev’s allegations that the IAEA is being denied access to Iran’s nuclear facilities, which Oborne thinks is untrue, apart from one small matter
“(True, Iran has not granted the IAEA access to the Parchin military site,)”
but that’s okay with Oborne because Iran’s refusal isn’t “breaking any agreement” “since it isn’t a nuclear site declared to the IAEA.”
But the real thing that gets Oborne’s goat is the fact that Regev mentioned that Iran violated Security Council resolution 487. “A bit rich”, says Oborne, “pot calls kettle black”. He is of course alluding to what he calls Israel’s “world record in violating Security Council resolutions.”
It was unwise of Regev to bring that up because he must have known his opponents would always come out with that when there’s little time to refute it in all its complexity. It’s cheap, tiresomely out of context, but too predictable an elephant trap for Regev to have allowed himself to fall into; a blunder that made me think he sounded tired and weary.
Oborne forgot to mention Humphrys’s even cheaper, even more out of context pot-kettle-black cliche. The one that goes “Israel has nukes, so why shouldn’t Iran?” That’s like saying “the warders at Broadmoor have keys, so why shouldn’t the inmates?”
Anyway Oborne’s got a book out. It’s called “A Dangerous Delusion.” Good title, for an autobiography, and one I’d be the first to agree with.
