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| St. Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham |
Returning to a topic we looked at last month...
David has contacted me with an update (for which many thanks). Following his complaint to the BBC, BBC Bitesize have now updated their page to remove their grotesquely wrong claim that the Church banned dissection.
Incidentally, it turns out that the Bitesize page I was looking at was an archive version. The live page had exactly the same statements. So, yes, British pupils were still being fed this false claim by the BBC right up until a few days ago.
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| Click to enlarge to compare versions |
It's excellent that the BBC corrected this mistake following David's complaint (after some fifteen or so years) but - as you'll see if you read the latest version - the overall bias of the page remains, including the closing 'cultural cringe' towards Islam.
I saw someone somewhere quoting the defence of enslaving women for carnal purposes under Islam on the BBC website. It was an outrageous defence of the practice - one the BBC would never (rightly) sanction in relation to slavery in the States or Caribbean.
ReplyDeleteWas it this "balanced" passage from BBC Bitesize?
Deletehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/slavery_1.shtml
"The nature of concubinage
Writers disagree over the nature of concubinage and the harem:
Some argue that it was seriously wrong in that:
- it was just slavery
- it breached human rights
- it exploited women
- women could be bought and sold, or given as gifts
it involved compulsory non-consensual sex - which would nowadays be called 'rape'
- it reinforced male power in the culture
Others say that it was relatively benign, because:
- it gave female slaves a relatively easy existence
- it gave female slaves a chance to rise socially
- it gave female slaves a chance to gain power
- it gave female slaves a chance to gain their freedom
A balanced view might be to say that sexual slavery in this context was a very bad thing, but that it was possible for some of the more fortunate victims to gain benefits that provided some degree of compensation."
A balanced view...! Relatively benign!!! How contemptible. Some say, others say...how doubly contemptible. The BBC senior management who allow, indeed encourage, this sort of immoral relativistic brainwashing are worthless scum. No mention of the age of the concubines, I see.
DeleteThe page is full of justification, excuses and condemnation made meaningless by being so light. We have the "poignant paradox" that so many slaves were freed the slave population had to be replenished. The need for replenishment had a lot to do with the practice of full castration of black male slaves (not just the balls). That disgusting practice meant of course that the slaves could not procreate themselves.Why is there no mention of that? Surely they could have justified that practice as well, given their sterling efforts throughout. If only Swift were alive today to put the BBC up against his satirical mirror and show them their likeness.
The bias in that piece is still shocking, even after the correction. What logic is there in blaming the church for encouraging prayer and belief in authority and a punishing God, while stating that Muslims, who have a five-times-a-day devotedly prayerful religion, which also believes in submission to an all-powerful authority and the will of a punishment and reward type of God, had more skilled doctors? Is there any actual evidence for that claim, beyond the BBC's biased say so?
ReplyDeleteMonkey Brains, In addition to the specific sexual slavery of women (I posted about it and the so-called balanced view in another thread), a lot of that long article is about slavery in general in Islam. Your comment about slavery in the US etc is on the nail: as well as the general tenor of the article throughout favouring the Islamic kind, there's a section comparing them, with 14 bullet points, out of which 11 say in terms how and why Islamic is better and Atlantic is worse. In the other 3, it states numbers, gender and race but doesn't state in terms whether it is better or worse that Islam took twice as many women as men, or that they took them from lots of races, rather than just Africans.
ReplyDelete