Are there autodidactic lads and lasses out there doing the same today? Are there still teenagers noting down the facts in Kate Adie's introductions?
I ask because today's From Our Own Correspondent included a feature on Georgia [the country not the US state] and began with a few facts from Kate. I imagine a teenager somewhere noting down [1] that Russia has “a land border with 14 countries” and [2] that “eight of these countries were once part of the old Soviet Union” and [3] that one of them is “the central Asian nation” of Georgia [4] “which sits between Russia, Turkey and Azerbaijan”.
If you were wondering the 14 countries with land borders with Russia are: Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, Ukraine, Finland, Belarus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Norway and North Korea.
And the eight of those that were once part of the old Soviet Union are: Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
However, the next bit is where Kate Adie's facts begin going awry. Georgia is not a “central Asian nation”. Central Asia covers the area east of the Caspian Sea to the borders of China and Mongolia. It covers five countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, but not Georgia. Georgia is found in the Caucasus, at the intersection of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
Our fact-hungry youngster would also be somewhat misled by Kate saying that Georgia “sits between Russia, Turkey and Azerbaijan” because there's a bordering country missing from that list. Georgia also has a 136 mile border with Armenia.
So my childhood self, if living and listening now, would need to be as sceptical of the BBC's facts as I am now I'm a lot older. Not everything you hear on the BBC, even from Kate Adie, is wholly accurate.
SUE - Col Richard Kemp’s authoritative views on military matters - notably other than I/P - are occasionally sought by the BBC. He is a staunch supporter of Israel and a huge admirer of the moral integrity of the Israeli Defence Force. His military expertise and intimate knowledge of the IDF is unique.
During an operation in Gaza last week, the Israel Defence Forces attacked a Hamas tunnel complex with 12 squadrons of 160 combat planes striking over 150 targets with hundreds of bunker-busting JDAMs [Joint Direct Attack Munitions] in less than an hour. Although the battle damage assessment is still underway, the raid destroyed perhaps the most critical element of Hamas infrastructure, wiping out vast stocks of munitions and likely killing dozens if not hundreds of fighters. This was a hammer blow to Hamas and may prove to be a turning point in the conflict. It also sent a powerful message to Iran and Hizballah, foretelling the consequences of an assault on Israel with their arsenal of tens of thousands of missiles in southern Lebanon.
The IDF operation was a carefully coordinated combination of intelligence, surveillance, knowledge of enemy tactics, deception, surprise, and precisely targeted, overwhelming force. Of all these, deception and surprise were key. Surprise is a principle of war in the American, British and many other forces, defined in the US Army Field Manual as "striking the enemy at a time or place or in a manner for which he is unprepared." The manual goes on to say: "Deception can aid the probability of achieving surprise". Throughout the history of warfare, surprise achieved through deception has led to many stunning military victories — often against the odds.
The usual crowd is up in arms about this, proclaiming “Assault on press freedom! “ and “No evidence of Hamas’s presence in the media centre’s tower block!”
If one can access viral videos from heaven above, Fred Dibnah must be looking down at the surgical precision of the demolition with awe.
To be honest, I couldn’t care less whether Hamas personnel were there or not.
Propaganda is known to be as dangerous a weapon of war as Mishal Husain’s infamous arsenal of ‘homemade contraptions’. The left-leaning mainstream media also known as The Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda is terrified of angering the ‘already angry’ Muslim community and collectively furious that the IDF exploited their very own left-wing journalistic anti-Israel zeal, knowing that they would be eager to disseminate one particular piece of fake news - namely that the IDF were on stand-by to invade Gaza. This they duly did so effectively that the brave warriors of Hamas scuttled underground to take shelter and hopefully eliminated in one fell swoop. (Echoes of a certain Iranian strategy for ridding the world of Jews).
As Nasrallah famously boasted “if they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
++++++++++++++++
More notable areas of one-sided reporting include the media’s tedious parroting of Hamas’s special death-toll figures, which conflate casualties from their own ‘shortfall’ accidents with the unfortunate ‘collateral damage’ that occurs as a result of Hamas’s ‘human shield ‘practices, which they know they can get away with due to the Western media’s ideological hostility to Israel.
+++++++++++++++++
Why the UK’s media is so mealy-mouthed in their condemnation of Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, Islamism is understandable, but will be viewed - retrospectively - as a betrayal. Short-term gain, maybe, considering ‘demographics’ (the rise in antisemitism, civil unrest, BLM, the Labour Party etc etc) but long-term pain. Looking back, will future generations regret the West’s capitulation to Islam?
When I see an Israel-related article in the “non-left-wing press’ such as the Times or the Spectator, I am usually appalled by the politically correct editorial reins and restraints that abound. Nowadays I feel I have to skip straight to below the line for remedial reassurance that not everyone is taken in by it. Some of the ‘tell it like it is’ contributions are spot on. It still chills one to see the overtly antisemitic contributions from certain regulars amongst it all.
One exception is the Australian version of Sky. They have some Fox News-like pundits on their staff. Although subtlety doesn’t seem to be their strong point, it’s comforting to know that not everyone on this planet is out to crush you. Mind you, in view of America’s terrifying political about-turn, the UN’s and the ICC’s staggeringly unhinged anti-Israel animus, it looks like a gathering storm, all too reminiscent of the 1930s.
CRAIG - Col Kemp is a rare voice of informed reason these days.
Mishal Husain's infamous conflated, comparative body count is back.
His whole piece was geared towards making one main point: that Israel is acting disproportionately (as if he'd ever come to any other conclusion).
Well, that's his view.
In the past you might have expected that prominent BBC journalists would have either (a) kept their opinions to themselves or (b) expressed an opinion that sided with democracy against terrorists and their supporters, but not now. It's op-eds all the way from the BBC's Middle East Editor.
Here, as so often, he does the 'moral equivalence' thing first, then blames Israel.
SUE - For the integrity of this blog we’ve been focussing on the media’s bias rather than opining on the actual issues.
After all, what do I know? All I can do is digest as much available information and analysis as I can stomach and inject a little empirical evidence into it.
An HoL speech from 2009 by Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale (Labour) sticks in my mind. Perhaps because this baroness was a Labour Peer (not a ghastly Tory) it seemed extra significant and worth bearing in mind.
I first visited Gaza in August 1967, when Israel had taken control only a few weeks before. As I have said before in this House, I found Gaza an absolute hellhole. It is not easy to understand, and it is even more difficult to forgive, how prosperous Arab countries allowed their Palestinian brethren to live in such wretched conditions from 1948 to 1967.
[Baroness Ramsay of Cartvale Labour 10:51 am, 6th February 2009].
The implications here are profound. I probably don’t need to spell it out. Suffice it to say that when Israel did occupy Gaza after the six-day war (1967) the inhabitants’ conditions improved dramatically, most notably average life expectancy. However, Israel decided to make a disastrous but well-intentioned concession “for peace’! They evicted the Jewish residents and pulled out of Gaza in 2005 and You Know The Rest. As the well-worn Israel-bashing innuendo goes, “lessons should have been learned.” But they never seem to be.
The ease with which lazy and inaccurate memes are parroted is another pincer-prong with which the anti-Israel movement encircles its enemy. Naz Shah has taken full advantage of it, as Craig set out in part 1.
For Naz and her fan base, Tweeting about Palestinians ‘being kicked out of their homes’ was enough. And adding: Jews ‘celebrating the burning of a place of worship’ as if that needed no further examination. We await a sincere apology for the error and the humble pledge not to do it again. With bated breath.
One of the most egregious and ongoing omissions from Western media as a whole is the non-reporting of the vicious incitement that pours from the Islamic world. No story, no analysis, no curiosity. It has to be more than simple respect for other religions that’s preventing our renowned investigative journalists from ‘investigating’ this phenomenon. For example, the PA’s so-called Pay-For-Slay. This policy must be a drain on the PA’s GDP, and the monies would obviously be far better spent on bomb shelters or health care; surely that issue is worth exploring in one of the BBC’s hard-hitting documentaries (!). Mahmoud Abbas must be so confident of the media’s silence on the matter that he doesn’t even make an effort to keep it secret.
What about the unadulterated par-for-the-course anti-Jew racism entrenched in Palestinian culture? Racism is the most taboo of all ‘isms’ these days, yet there’s a collective silence over the racism that is part and parcel of the Arab psyche. I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but this looks like a conspiracy of silence.
The UN Security Council is having an emergency meeting at the time of writing, I watched some of it on Sky. The Palestinian rep has appropriated all the arguments for the defence from Israel. He has regurgitated a litany of upside-down facts that are almost laughable. How anyone could be taken in by this nonsense I do not know. But no doubt they’ll swallow it.
This is going on in the UK.
UNBELIEVABLE!
"F**k the Jews" "F**k their daughters" "F**k their mothers" "Rape their daughters"
...be doing his best to avoid the Cuomo scandal and other similar ‘stuff em in nursing homes to make hospital stats look good’ scandals in other states...
...even though he'd be reporting on Covid's impact on New York City.
Kate Adie's introduction led to me into thinking this might prove incorrect as she said, in passing, "Could it have been handled better, with the governor Andrew Cuomo coming in for criticism?"
But no, though he did talk about the impact of the disease and the lockdown on the city, Nick Bryant never mentioned Governor Cuomo or the nursing home scandal.
He didn't even allude to them.
The only politician he had a pop at was...guess who?...yes, Donald Trump.
Jeremy Bowen - Considering that I was from one of the countries that was bombing Baghdad and the horrendous slaughter of their families the men outside were polite and decent. I wondered what might have happened to an Iraqi news team if Saddam's men had somehow managed to kill 400 civilians in London or New York. I thought they'd be strung up.
Today we got (a) a piece from Israel on the Covid19 vaccine, full of the usual heavy hints about how badly the Palestinians are being treated; (b) a piece from Ireland on how great the EU has been for the Irish Republic; (c) an angry, self-justifying rant from Jeremy Bowen about an American air raid that killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians during the First Gulf War where Jeremy lashed out at the West and the British tabloids; (d) a piece from India about pangolins; and (e) a piece brimming with enthusiasm for the first mosque to be built in Spain since the 13th Century (right in the heart of Seville), with only a brief mention of the far-right Vox as its lone fly-in-the-ointment.
I could have been reading The Guardian.
The Jeremy Bowen piece was the most outrageously biased. It was angry-sounding too.
The BBC's Middle East Editor keeps on arguing for highly controversial positions. Here he was sounding off again about the virtues of the Iran nuclear deal and how wrong it was that Donald Trump took the US out of it, and telling Joe Biden what he needs to do:
President Biden's big Middle Eastern challenge is to amend some of the damage done when Donald Trump pulled America out of the agreement to restrict Iran's nuclear activities. Iran has always denied that it wants a bomb but since President Trump made his move the Iranians have intensified their enrichment of uranium and are now closer to being able to create a weapon.
He needs to avoid repeating the terrible mistakes of the last 30 years and that starts with restoring the agreement with Iran. It was far from perfect but it stopped a slide towards another Middle East war. Nobody wants one, but it's a possibility if the problem is left to fester.
But this was the passage that really stood out for me:
Many of the bodies were not recognisable, blackened and twisted by the blast and the fire. When I went inside the shelter was still smoking and unbearably hot. I could see the neat broad hole made by the first American missile, almost a clean cut through a couple of metres of concrete and steel. A second one was fired through the hole to explode inside the shelter, its thick walls channelling and concentrating the blast. Not many survived. Considering that I was from one of the countries that was bombing Baghdad and the horrendous slaughter of their families the men outside were polite and decent. I wondered what might have happened to an Iraqi news team if Saddam's men had somehow managed to kill 400 civilians in London or New York. I thought they'd be strung up.
So Jeremy Bowen of the BBC believes that his fellow countrymen, us British, would have "strung up" innocent Iraqi journalists if Iraq had committed a similar act in London?
Obviously, he doesn't think we're as "polite and decent" as those Iraqis.
Doesn't that way of thinking speak volumes about how journalists at the BBC view the people of their own country? They don't seem to reckon much to us, do they?
The final From Our Own Correspondentof 2020 ended with an unusually long item by Nick Bryant, the BBC's perma-tanned and opinionated New York correspondent.
Given its length and placing, it was clearly chosen to represent the BBC 'at its best'.
It strove for effect and I suspect it will be 'award-winning', given its content - and the applause it's already receiving from the usual people.
I will try to summarise it for you, as it absolutely reeked of BBC bias:
Nick's mum "called it" early: 2020 "has become a byword for all that was wrong, the worst year ever".
Nick himself thought that the vast bush fires in Australia and "the enormity of the climate emergency" were going to be the big story of 2020, and the start of a new era [a great reset so to speak]. He said the fires were such a catastrophic event that he felt they "would separate 'the past and the future' into 'the before and after'".
But then along came Covid.
A long passage about how the virus has changed the personal lives of 'people like us' ended with him talking about 'our' "lofty vantage point of privilege" ('us', "the fortunate few") then led to chastising reminders of the plight of the poor and the migrants of New York struggling to put bread on the table and middle class New Yorkers queuing for food parcels.
[It really is quite insufferable when genuinely privileged people like Nick Bryant put on a righteous, condemnatory tone of voice and take the moral high ground and start lecturing listeners - as if he's smugly appointed himself our conscience, and self-absolved himself by doing so].
And then came this resounding, very FOOC statement:
Just as poverty became a propagator of the pandemic, the pandemic became a propagator of poverty.
That's one of those mighty phrases FOOC writers often come out with, but is it true?
Take the first clause: In what way was poverty "the propagator of the pandemic"? Surely, it came out of an increasingly affluent China and was spread by "the fortunate few" travelling around the globe?
As for the second clause: It's certainly true that poverty is being propagated - and is likely to 'propagate' a massive amount more as time passes, especially if lockdown continues, widens and deepens - but by what is the propagation being done by? By the pandemic itself? Or by people imposing severe lockdowns?
Anyhow, then Nick Bryant launched into a series of political points, all reflecting the BBC mindset to the very last dotted i and last crossed t.
He argued that:
(a) The world needs multilateralism not unilateralism.
(b) Nationalism is "myopic".
(c) The United Nations has been "sidelined" by the major powers (a bad thing).
(d) The World Health Organisation has been "ensnared" in politically-motivated criticism (also a bad thing).
Then came a particularly striking passage:
He said that "a strong body of evidence" suggests that countries run by female leaders (Angela Merkel, Jacinda Ardern, etc) handled the crisis "more expertly" (no one every mentions Belgium when that claim is made), and then said this:
By contrast countries governed by presidents and prime ministers who surfed the populist wave with a macho swagger often did poorly.
He openly named "Donald Trump's America, Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil and Boris Johnson's Britain" as his three examples of such "macho" swaggering populist surfers, then sneering:
The virus could not be sloganed away.
It's a way of thinking many share, and many don't. Quite why licence fee payers who fall into the latter camp should have to stump up for his opinions (or prejudices) is an obvious question.
He later returned to the Trump theme, saying that the Trump administration's management of the outbreak...:
...may come to be seen as the most catastrophic domestic policy failure of the past 100 years.
He then claimed that Covid exposed "two duelling realities" in America, "one based in fact, the other in scienceless fiction" [a very binary, black-and-white view of things, don't you think?].
And on it went, though China's Xi being mean to Australia and misinformation being "the scourge of the online world", till Nick ended by talking about his new baby daughter, born amid "anti-racist protests" and the joy this has brought him.
So - award please! - he's now full of "intense and conflicted emotions of dread and fear and joy", of memories for those who have lost their lives of feelings of being "thankful for the magic of new life and grateful for making it to the end".
Congratulations to him on his new daughter. Hope she has a lovely life. I only hope her father doesn't tell her too many scary stories.
It really is extraordinary how the BBC can claim to be impartial when its senior reporters are given free rein to write and broadcast such one-sided, contentious stuff.
The Trump administration took the USA out of President Obama's nuclear deal with Iran.
The US withdrawal was backed by Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states but opposed by the EU, the UK, and the BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen.
Donald Trump had an even bigger impact on policy towards Iran. The Obama administration, along with other permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany, stopped what I believed was a steady slide to war by making an agreement with Iran about its nuclear activities. It wasn't perfect deal - show me one that is - but it was a chance for a new beginning.
HisFOOCpiece was also notable for focusing on what matters to Jeremy Bowen - the Palestinians - while missing out the remarkable peace deals between Israel and Arab countries. And President Trump's dogged reluctance to entangle the US in Middle Eastern wars, unlike all his recent predecessors (also unmentioned), adds an ironic twist to his concluding advice (prayer?) for Joe Biden: "Perhaps the most constructive move Joe Biden can make after his inauguration is to concentrate more on diplomacy, less on drones and the other dogs of war."
BBC Watch has been forensic about it. I'll confine myself to summing it up like this: There are shepherds abiding in the fields and a pregnant Mary-like villager, and they're unhappy, and it's all (Herod's) Israel's fault.
Some Christmas traditions - decking the halls with boughs of holly; singing old carols; eating, drinking and being merry; complaining that Christmas has become too commercialised; watching The Queen and Morecambe and Wise, etc - have been around for many a long year now.
Others are more recent, such as BBC Middle East correspondent Yolande Knell's pre-Christmas piece from Bethlehem where she uses the Christmas story to paint Israel as the modern-day Herod.
One of the BBC's hallowed Christmas Eve traditions is their now yearly piece from Bethlehem about how hard-done-by those poor Palestinian shepherds abiding in the fields (or in concrete buildings) are thanks to those horrible Herod-like Israelis.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Hundreds of Israelis have participated in a mass wedding in Tel Aviv to demand the right to same-sex marriage ahead of the country’s Gay Pride week.
Tuesday’s event involved an unofficial wedding ceremony for 23 gay couples, who walked down the aisle, took vows and danced at a banquet, cheered by friends, family and supporters.
The annual pride parade, set for June 14, draws flocks of foreign visitors to Israel, which flaunts itself as one of the world’s most gay-friendly tourist destinations.
Yet political rights for Israel’s gay community lag behind increasingly widespread cultural acceptance.
Jewish ultra-Orthodox parties, which wield significant influence in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and have a monopoly over matters of religion and state, have rejected legislation that condones homosexuality, which they see as defying Jewish law.
And here's Yolande's BBC report, via the BBC Watch transcript:
Beaming, Nikita stomps on a glass wrapped in foil to cries of muzl tov – congratulations. But this isn’t a traditional Jewish wedding: it’s a symbolic one. Nikita and his long-time partner Roy are in a row of 23 gay couples hugging and kissing. All walked down the aisle and took vows at an open-air mass ceremony in Tel Aviv. But while same-sex marriages are increasingly recognised around the world, here in Israel they’re still not legal. The state doesn’t permit any civil marriages – only religious ones – and there’s no religious gay marriage option. ‘We participated so everyone would see us and know we exist’ Nikita says. ‘We love each other, we want to be married and have a normal life’. Tel Aviv’s gay-friendly reputation – which it recently flaunted while hosting the Eurovision Song Contest – draws many same-sex Israeli couples to live here as well as lots of foreign visitors. Every year its pride parade along the beach has a carnival atmosphere. Young and old, gay and straight join the huge party, many dressed in flamboyant outfits or skimpy swimming costumes.
But in Israel rights for the gay community fall behind rising cultural acceptance in society. In the Right-wing coalition governments of the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Jewish ultra-orthodox parties have had an influential role. They reject any proposed legislation which they see as condoning homosexuality, saying it defies Jewish law.
Hmm.
So here's a summary of the overlap:
"walked down the aisle"
"gay-friendly"
"flaunted"
"foreign visitors"
"fall behind rising cultural acceptance in society"
"reject any proposed legislation which they see as condoning homosexuality, saying it defies Jewish law"
So is the BBC's Yolande Knell a journalist or a churnalist?
That From Our Own Correspondent Stephen Sackur piece on "vain, shameless, dog-whistling" Viktor Orban was immediately followed by Kate Adie saying:
To the other side of the world and another powerful populist leader, and another man who provokes regular hand-wringing among liberal politicians and journalists. Jair Bolsonaro's homophobic and misogynistic comments have helped make him a deeply divisive figure, though he was the clear winner in Brazil's presidential election last year. He's been criticised for remarks about the country's indigenous populations who he suggested are in the way of mining and agriculture.
Was Kate classing herself, Mr Sackur and her other BBC colleagues as "hand-wringing liberal journalists" there? (Or doesn't she do irony?)
At least the piece that followed was by Tim Whewell, who was less interested in point-scoring and more interested in telling a story. He couldn't entirely hide the fact that his indigenous friend's taste for tapirs and jaguars wasn't quite what he wanting to hear.
I know this because I've been to his home village, a short drive from Budapest. Felcsút, population 1,800, has become a potent symbol of the Hungarian Prime Minister's vanity and the shameless merger of his own interests with those of the state.
Exhibit A is the now notorious 'railway to nowhere' built as a pet project on the Prime Minister's orders in 2016. It connects Felcsút with an arboretum, reportedly owned by Mr. Orbán's dad, some three miles to the south. The railway was built with the help of two million euros of EU funds and has, on the busiest of days just a handful of passengers in its faux-antique carriages. Trains don't run at all from October to March. due to an overwhelming lack of public demand.
Puskás Akadémia football stadium
The railway is by no means the most incongruous piece of expensive infrastructure in this rural backwater. 20 yards across the road from Mr Orbán's weekend cottage is an extraordinary timber, steel and copper clad football stadium, home to Puskás Academy - a Hungarian Premier League team founded by Orbán and his close friend Lőrinc Mészáros. Mr Mészáros was a plumber and pipe fitter when he first met the future PM; now he's Hungary's most powerful oligarch.
There is, not surprisingly, an intense loyalty to their home-grown Prime Minister amongst Felcsút's residents. Journalists from far away are viewed with deep suspicion. I was ejected from the village cafe when I tried to ask a pointed question about Mr. Orban's largesse, and a handful of locals refused to emerge from the nearby general store when they saw me loitering outside. Finally an old lady shuffled out, clutching a tray of eggs, to declare that Mr. Orbán was the saviour of the village and the country.
30 years ago Mr. Orbán was a fiery opponent of the dying Soviet empire, a champion of freedom from authoritarian rule who welcomed Hungary's embrace of the European Union. Now he's the continent's leading exponent of what he calls 'illiberal democracy'. Brussels is the enemy, run by a liberal elite intent on diluting the Christian identity of Europe with waves of immigration.
The crisis of 2015, which saw hundreds of thousands of migrants cross into Hungary from Serbia in the hope of making it to Germany, was a political gift for the Orbán government.
Migrants detained in Ásotthalom
In response he built a fortified electrified fence along 125 miles of the country's southern border. He rejected EU efforts to get all member states to take in a share of the refugee influx. He built detention camps on the border which human rights groups say flout international rules on the treatment of migrants. He now blocks UN efforts - and, indeed, mine - to gain access.
All of this has proved tremendously popular with many Hungarians. I walked a stretch of the fortified fence with László Toroczkai, the far-right mayor of the border village of Ásotthalom. "Finally we have security. Now I sleep at night", he said, nodding to his own home 30 yards from the barbed wire.
Mr. Orbán and his Fidesz party machine have done away with many of the institutional checks and balances associated with Europe's more liberal democracies. 500 of the country's media titles are now controlled by a conglomerate run by cronies of the Prime Minister. The Hungarian parliament has made it a crime for NGOs to offer assistance to migrants.
And the Government continues to wage a vitriolic campaign against the Hungarian-born American billionaire financier George Soros, who has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into civil society organisations in his native land. Ironically a youthful Viktor Orbán studied at Oxford thanks to a scholarship funded by Mr. Soros. Now the Prime Minister rails against the Jewish billionaire as a crafty international speculator intent on filling Hungary with immigrants.
It is cynical dog-whistle politics and, to the consternation of many, it works.
'Screaming' poster
In the last few days thousands of posters have gone up across Hungary depicting Mr. Soros and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker side by side. "You have a right to know what they're doing" screams the poster's headline. "Undermining Hungary's security".
With European parliamentary elections looming Mr. Orbán is now coordinating with anti-immigrant political leaders in Italy, Poland and other member states to seize the political momentum and deal a devastating blow to the Brussels status quo.
He may despise the EU in its current form but he has no intention of leaving. His ambition is much bolder. He wants to remake it in his own image.
The BBC has previously downplayed the role that Muslim fighters played in causing the Muslim-Christian slaughter in the country. And they've previously focused on the plight of minority Muslims there rather than the massacres against the Christian majority.
And today's FOOC similarly skirted around the murderous Muslim fanaticism behind the start of the civil, potentially misleading listeners into thinking that Christian militias were the cause of the war rather than being a reaction to Muslim atrocities.
And, again, FOOC focused on the plight of the Muslim community there, despite the major massacres there, includingall therecent ones, being perpetrated by Muslims against Christians.
There's something deeply ingrained in BBC thinking here, and you have to read beyond the BBC to see how perverse it is.
And the second story was related to Brazil's newly elected president Jair Bolsonaro.
My goodness, if you ever doubted that the BBC takes positions on foreign affairs, just listen to the report on FOOC today, including Kate Adie's introduction!
Mr Bolsonaro's not my cup of Brazilian coffee either, but I'm no licence-fee-funded broadcaster.
As a proudly homophobic, far-right president assumes office in Brazil, Simon Maybin meets some of the country’s gay footballers
It was a highly opinionated, emotive piece - the radio equivalent of a fine, right-thinking Guardian column. And yet Simon is a BBC journalist.
Can't the BBC try to strike a little deeper into why such an extreme figure was elected rather than just keep flinging '-ist/-ism' epithets around and siding with the nasty man's electorally-defeated enemies?
Jenny Hill was on this morning's From Our Own Correspondent. She'd been to see her first Wagner opera, Tristan and Isolde, and was using the experience to draw parallels with the present German political situation (as you do).
She found herself having to "suppress a giggle" at the sight of "the two rather portly lead singers", especially as "the rotund figure of Tristan prepared to fling an equally substantial Isolde onto a rather flimsy table".
In the spirit of the age, I was frankly outraged by that. That's fat-shaming, body-shaming, and I was tempted to kick up a Twitterstorm and ruin her life, but thought better of it. (Anyhow, the painfully thin-looking Jenny appears to have weight issues of her own.)
Nonetheless, here she was, still preferring to say "refugees" rather than "migrants" and talking of the "open xenophobia" of AfD, and sounding chirpy about the protests in favour of an "open" Germany and the rise of the Greens.
John Sweeney's piece on today's From Our Own Correspondentwas ostensibly about the murdered Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia but its focus soon shifted to other murdered journalists - from Viktoria Marinova to Jamal Khashoggi. At its conclusion JS pointed the finger of blame firmly at,...yes, Donald Trump:
In the summer of 2016 I visited the home of one of New York's great reporters, Wayne Barrett, who was dying of cancer. In his pomp, working for the Village Voice in the '80s, Wayne used to report on Donald Trump and his links with the mob - the Gambinos, the Genovese, how 'Fat Tony' Salerno had sold the concrete to Trump for his Tower. "What if Trump gets elected?", I asked. Wayne replied", I'm afraid.I'm very afraid".
My old hero was right. The leader of the Free World has demonised journalists time and again, and now, the world over, the butcher's bill is being paid. If you're a troublemaking reporter it's time to be afraid.
The BBC presenter (Kate Adie) and BBC correspondent (Katy Watson) strew around a fair few adjectives about this man, Jair Bolsonaro. According to them he's "controversial", "right-wing", "notorious", "sexist", "homophobic" and "infamous". Plus he argues some things "falsely" and is guilty of "scaremongering".
Maybe it's just me but I couldn't help getting the feeling that they weren't that keen on him.
As for his likely left-wing opponent in the second round, he was described as "left-wing" and...oh, nothing else. So he must be OK then.
Not blogging for a week leaves you stranded like a beached whale. You end up having too much to catch up on, also like a beached whale but one that's rescued and put back to sea and which then has to swim frantically after its pod. And then Time, like Captain Ahab, keeps on chasing you on its wooden leg. [Ed - And how, pray, does Time have a wooden leg?]. And you end up writing long, unfathomable posts like Moby Dick. And then the Norwegians come after you with their Norwegian model of EU non-membership and the Eskimos come furiously demanding you call them Inuits...er, I think I'm taking this extended simile too far.
Anyhow, here are some things I missed or just grabbed today...
1. Springtime for Labour and Jeremy
Mr Marr was in Liverpool this morning for the Labour Party conference and devoted his interview with Jeremy Corbyn to (1) Brexit, (2) Labour antisemitism and (3) the party's new policies.
(Questions on the later felt like a waved-through afterthought though).
A fellow blogger who I like and follow on Twitter - and who most definitely isn't a fan of Andrew Marr - was complimentary today, saying that Andrew was "doing a not half bad job" in "exposing that Corbyn wants to do just as much cherry-picking in any negotiations with the EU as he accuses the Govt of". He also gave "Kudos to Marr for being persistent in his questioning" over Labour antisemitism.
I agree, but I don't think he drew blood on the antisemitism question It was almost as if he was ticking off a checklist written with his production team. Mr Corbyn slithered away.
Meanwhile, it goes without saying that the far-Left were absolutely furious at Andrew Marr for focusing on antisemitism at all. The man is an out-and-out Tory lickspittle who has it in for Jeremy apparently, and they want nothing but questions about Windrush and Tory racism with Theresa May next week. Given all this pressure, it will be interesting to see if Andrew Marr raises those very subjects next week.
Incidentally, the paper review contained 'the new normal' for BBC programmes. No, not the fact that it was an all women guest list, but the fact that a far-left guest was platformed. Sitting next to Camilla Tominey on the sofa was Laura Parker from Momentum. To paraphrase Samira Ahmed, isn't the BBC guilty of 'normalising' far-left extremism?
(I don't actually mind one bit. I'm just highlighting the paradoxical position of the likes of Samira Ahmed here. And Laura was useless.)
Its main subject was the (apparent) demand for a People's Vote among Labour Party activists (i.e. a second people's vote after the first one went the wrong way).
Mark Mardell went canvassing views, almost all in favour of a People's Vote, and then gave a less-than-impressive Labour shadow minister a grilling for (apparently) going back on her previous calls for a People's Vote.
If Nick Robinson is to be believed, this report and those questions were just the BBC doing its job and not adding to the push for a People's Vote.
Well, maybe it is just a harmless fact of BBC reporting that a programme we've spent huge amounts of time proving to have an anti-Brexit bias today led on the People's Vote push, featured mostly pro-People's Vote voices and then made a backsliding Labour MP squirm over her backsliding over the People's Vote question. Or maybe it isn't.
Ah but, there was another strand to this Labour Conference segment today. It questioned Labour's deselection process. Lord Hattersley was on hand to decry the deselection of nice, 'moderate' Labour MPs (i.e those from the pro-EU 'right' of the party).
So here was The World This Weekend leading on calls for a People's Vote within Labour and calls for the Labour leadership to be nice to the (pro-EU) 'right' of the party.
Entirely innocent, as per Nick Robinson? Hmm.
3. What Ed and Bob Said
“It’s half past seven. Still to come in the programme, Anjem Choudary, jailed for supporting Islamic State, will soon be released from prison. Is he still dangerous?"
So asked Ed Stourton on Sunday today, before taking sides over the Trump administration's decision to cut funding for "Palestinian projects".
Though there was an interesting report on the growth of pilgrimages in France by John Laurenson (one of the BBC's most interesting reporters), there was also a classic BBC hit job on Billy Graham's son Franklin.
He appears to be rather pro-Trump, which might not help.
Franklin Graham is visiting Blackpool this week and Sunday has been kicking up a storm over (or, as Nick Robinson would say, 'reporting') the 'controversy' about his visit over the past couple of weeks.
A report last week and a report this week 'gave both sides' whilst being, very obviously, on the anti-Franklin side.
And then came the interview with Mr Graham himself by Sunday's Bob Walker.
This interview is almost in the same league as the one Sue transcribed, albeit there was just one interviewee here. And though you may feel as unsympathetic towards Franklin Graham as I do, I think you'll see (if you listen to it) that Bob was on a mission to make Mr Graham look as bad as possible.
And I suspect that's because Bob is even more unsympathetic towards him than I am. (AKA biased).
It was a deeply passive-aggressive interview: How dare this man say that Islam is a nasty religion? How dare he, as a Christian, believe that homosexual acts are a sin? "Many" say what he says is offensive. It's offensive, isn't it? Go on, Franklin Graham, say something offensive for me here on Sunday! Go on, go on, go on!
I think that sums it up pretty fairly.
4.From Our Own Biased Correspondent
I'm still waiting for a FOOC piece from Israel that dwells on the positives of Israel. This week's piece wasn't what I was after: "In Israel, Tom Bateman is on the hunt for the finest falafel as he hears what Arab and Jewish Israelis think of the controversial new Nation State law", the blurb on the website read. It featured a Jewish Israeli man "asserting" something (in favour of the law) and an Arab Israeli woman "saying" something (against the law), and it wasn't hard to guess which one Tom felt most sympathetic towards. Please think of the falafel.
5. King Arthur v Lord Adonis
I haven't watched it myself but I was fascinated by the social media reaction to Alice Roberts's BBC documentary King Arthur's Britain. Pro-EU types on Twitter were positively gloating that it would infuriate UKIP types ('gammons') and anti-EU types were absolutely appalled at its twisting of history to hammer home a pro-EU, pro-globalisation, pro-mass immigration message. Can I bring myself to watch it and judge for myself?
So far, no.
6. Salzburg
And to end, a Mozart symphony to reflect the big UK/EU event of the week - a Salzburg symphony no less by the 15-year-old Wolfie (no relation to Paul Mason, despite the Austrian famously being a Freemason):
Today's From Our Own Correspondentsaw the BBC's Emma Jane Kirby return to a story she's covered before: the tale of an opposition radio station in Syria (presently based in Istanbul) called Radio Alwan. She seems to be heavily emotionally invested in it.
Guess who the main 'baddie' of the story turned out to be? Clue: He's a president. Well, if you said 'President Assad' you were close but not correct. Here's the real answer:
Like many NGO's in north-west Syria Radio Alwan has fallen victim to the Trump administration's decision last Easter to pull $200 million of funding for Syria's stabilisation projects. That news, Sami recounts quietly, his voice reverberating a little over our Skype line, came completely out of the blue and felt like a strike to the head.
I first began listening to From Our Own Correspondentin my late teens, back in the '80s, and I rarely missed it for years.
I liked the stories, from places familiar and unfamiliar, and I liked the way the BBC's storytellers told their stories, and I also liked learning facts about places, and the history and politics of those places, and FOOC was useful for that.
I wasn't much troubled by questions of bias back then.
Nowadays, however, I'm a much less frequent listener and questions of bias are (as you probably know) somewhat less far from my mind, so I have to ask - if any of you have an opinion on the matter - if you think the programme has changed as much as I think it's changed in recent years? Or is it me that's changed?
Standing back and looking at it as objectively as I can, I can see that it still features BBC journalists who can certainly tell a good story in a stylish fashion. Today's programme included three such people: Lyse Doucet, Nick Thorpe (a master of prose) and Gabriel Gatehouse.
Lyse Doucet's piece concerned the silent Yazidi villages of Iraq. It was powerful stuff, full of compassion, and it made me feel for the Yazidis (though, that said, I've long been sympathetic to them ever since Islamic State being persecuting them and have believed from the very start that they are the sort of refugees we should be protecting and giving refuge to). Its authoritative staccato style of delivery felt very familiar too, following (as it does) in a long FOOC tradition of that kind of delivery. (Perhaps cynically, it brought to mind Chris Morris's On the Hour/The Day Today and its satire of the language and style of war reporting). Maybe, however it was more emotive than FOOC pieces of old and less fact-focused.
Then came the rest of the pieces - a piece about Catholic sexual abuse in Chile which pretty much gave, in passing, a free pass to (liberal favourite) Pope Francis (Linda Pressly); a feminist piece about India (Vivienne Nunis); a piece from Colombia which somehow turned into a piece about indigenous peoples being spot-on about climate change (Nick Thorpe); and a piece from Sweden which equated the trolls of Scandinavian legend with supporters of the Sweden Democrats and racism (Gabriel Gatehouse) - and I just groaned.
It's like being repeatedly hit over the head with a very biased wet haddock.
Has this kind of agenda-pushing always been a part of FOOC or is it a recent thing?
In the green hills above the Tyrrhenian Sea the air hangs heavy and low. In the distance lightning crackles, thunder rumbles and the wind lifts flaps of corrugated iron. The racket brings a false sense of life back to the old abandoned brick kiln. From the look of things the factory went bust a decade ago, maybe more.
Calabria is the poorest province of Italy, poorer than Sicily just across the Strait. It's under the thumb of local mafia known here as the 'Ndrangheta. After the factory was abandoned it was used to dump chemical waste but no-one has been convicted. Perhaps the mafia had a hand in the dumping, perhaps not, but it's the man that some believe bears the ultimate responsibility for another crime in the old brick factory who's making the news. Earlier this month Soumaila Sacko, an African from Mali, came here to loot some corrugated iron to make roof for his home in a nearby shanty town. An Italian opened fire and Sacko was dead. A man has been arrested but denies killing him.
Sacko's murder is fast becoming a cause célèbre because many, especially on the Italian left, blame a politician for creating a new mood of hostility to African migrants. His name is Matteo Salvini and he is the coming man of Italian politics. Dark-haired, deep-voiced, bearded, Salvini is the country's new interior minister - a populist firebrand for the hard right League and, it just so happens, a senator for Calabria.
We went to the unofficial migrant camp where Sacko lived. It's a glum place, huge puddles on the ground. One man told us, "It's not easy. We hear many things from Salvini. Some people say we're going to be sent back. We don't know what to expect." "Does that make you afraid?", I asked him. "Yes it does", he said.
The local mayor is a former Communist. He wrestled with honouring Italy's tradition of hospitality with how his voters feel about the migrant shanty town. He blew hot about Salvini's denial of human rights but seemed well aware that the interior minister has been shooting up in the polls. "Has the shanty town been a recruiting sergeant for Salvini?", I asked. "Yes", he said.
In Villa San Giovanni, the port immediately across the Strait from Messina in Sicily, I met Francesca Porpiglia, a councillor for the League and a devoted follower of Salvini. She took me for a drive around town and told me that groups of young people of colour hung around in bars making other people, especially women, feel unsafe. African migrants, it turned out, are like London buses. There's never one around when you want one. Eventually, after two laps of the town centre, we found three. They seemed to me to be doing no harm. I put it to Francesca that some say that Salvini is a bit of a fascist. She laughed and replied, "No, no. I believe that the concept of right and left as it was understood in the old days doesn't exist any more. It's an obsolete concept". Maybe.
This week Salvini called for a national census of the Roma in Italy adding that the country would "unfortunately" have to keep its Italian Roma. On the migrant crisis he uses language like "Stop the invasion" and "our people come first". You get the drift. He's been photographed with our own Nigel Farage and on the continent he's made friends in all the hard right places, going on a platform with France's Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders from the Netherlands. When Salvini went to Moscow he wore a Vladimir Putin T-shirt. Doesn't everyone? Salvini is against Russian sanctions. He's anti-euro, anti-Brussels and anti Europe's post 1945 settlement.
His success means that he's knocked to the grand old man of the Italian right into the shade. Spare a thought for Silvio Berlusconi. Say what you like about the old cruise ship crooner - he's a slimy crook in bed with the Mafia for example - but Berlusconi liked to be loved. Salvini gives the impression that he likes to be feared.
I love Italy, and in particular I love its easy-going anarchy - the idea that whoever is in power will find it hard to do much. But it's difficult to watch the passionate intensity of the Salvini devotees like Francesca and listen to the familiar pieties of the people who oppose him without feeling...how shall I put this?...uneasy.
Listening to Thursday's From Our Own Correspondent I heard one of their fairly regular reports highlighting aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
(They are much less regular than they used to be though).
Though it probably needs properly quantifying with statistics, I'd say (from consistent but informal monitoring) that a substantial majority of FOOC reports focus on the conflict from the Palestinian angle.
And this was another of those reports.
It featured former Newsnight regular Robin Denselow - now freelance and very much into world music. Here he recounted his experiences at this year's Palestine Music Expo.
There's no doubt whatsoever that this was a report which was destined to please pro-Palestinian listeners far more than it pleased pro-Israeli listeners. There was its repeated talk of Israeli checkpoints and difficulties for the Palestinians for starters. And this would have been made worse for pro-Israeli listeners by Robin's repeated citing of views critical of Israel and his report's lack of pro-Israel voices. One sentence from Robin Denselow about the fears of Israeli settlers was the only 'balance' to what really was a thoroughly one-sided report - though that one sentence is bound to be cited by the BBC in answer to any complaint about bias here. And I suspect the BBC would also say that Robin was reporting from a festival that was promoting Palestinian interests so it was inevitably going to focus on voices unsympathetic to Israel. And they'd doubtless then refer the complainants to the concept of 'due impartiality' and how we shouldn't listen to single reports but listen to and judge the BBC's output in the round. (Not that doing that gets most complainants anywhere either!)
Another area BBC Watch complain about here - Robin Denselow's repeated use of the word 'Palestine', in breach (they say) of the BBC's guidelines which tell BBC reporters not to say 'Palestine' - wouldn't, I think, survive the BBC complaints process either. The BBC would say that every one of Robin Denselow's uses of the forbidden word was OK because (a) one use was because it's part of the music festival's name and (b) it was subsequently used only when indirectly quoting others. Yes, Robin sailed very close to the wind once where it sounded as if he was using the word himself (neat, so to speak), but even that was ambiguous and could also be heard as just him (very) indirectly quoting something a Palestinian said, and it just isn't close enough to the wind to provide cast iron evidence of an editorial breach. (He's an experienced ex-BBC reporter after all. Such people usually know how to try and cover their tracks, bias-wise - if only with fig leafs).
The most startling part of Robin Denselow's FOOC piece, however, was his recounting of an incident he was personally involved in at this year's Palestine Music Expo:
But being seen here with a Palestinian guide was clearly dangerous. A car – apparently driven by an angry settler – narrowly missed our group then did a U-turn and drove back at us again at speed. One record industry executive would almost certainly have been hit if he hadn’t been pulled back.
BBC Watch can't find any substantiating accounts of that incident in either Israeli or Palestinian sources and say "Denselow provided no evidence to support his guess that the car was “driven by an angry settler” but promoted it to BBC audiences regardless." If a complaint was to be made about that, however, I suspect the BBC might say that, using Occam's Razor, "an angry settler" is the likeliest explanation and that Robin Denselow added the get-out-of-jail-free word "apparently". And, given that he was involved in the life-threatening incident it's not something it would be reasonable to expect him to drop from his account.
Still, this kind of FOOC report is typical of FOOC reports from Israel and the Palestinian territories. However carefully-worded (or cunningly-worded even), such reports tend (heavily) to make Israel look bad and the Palestinians look victimised. Positive reports from Israel are rarer than swallows in winter (at the North Pole).
