Craig's very important piece

Craig posted a significant piece on Saturday and it has quite rightly been picked up by The Conservative Woman. I hope it will be followed up by others as well.

The BBC has expressed an interest in delivering education directly to schools, allowing schoolteachers to concentrate on pastoral care.  Although left-leaning teacher training colleges are churning out graduates that share most of the BBC’s ideological and political views, could the BBC really make a useful contribution to the overall school curriculum? 

By the way, let’s just confirm what “pastoral care” is.

 “Pastoral care is defined as the commitment to, and active demonstration of concern for, the growth and wellbeing of each student, as well as the broader school community.

"Leave academic subjects to us", says the BBC, let’s make teachers provide the parental guidance that seems to have gone awol.

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The BBC thinks it’s qualified to teach children M.E. history, a sensitive subject, and one that is particularly dependent on factual accuracy and rigour. Yet the BBC has proved woefully deficient in this area to date. It habitually allows ‘feelings’ to override ‘facts’ and in any case, it has trimmed and styled most facts appertaining to Middle Eastern history to fit its own fixed hostility to Israel.

This, from Wiki explains when and why Jeremy Bowen was appointed BBC Middle East Editor: 

"He became the BBC's first Middle East Editor when the position was created in June 2005 after the 2004 Balen Report on the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict[11] to provide a broader perspective on wider Middle East issues[12] and to add context to the reporting of events on the ground.

Bowen’s wrist has since been slapped for anti-Israel bias and he has held a personal grudge against Israel since his Arab driver was killed, in part due to Bowen’s reckless decision to film an on-the-spot report from a vulnerable hot-spot. Partiality coupled with superficiality do not a perfect reporter make.  (But it’s good enough for the BBC.)  

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The responses to Craig’s post to date have veered off into two parallel but distinctly separate directions. One branch reflects a rapidly deteriorating trust in the BBC, which, if social media is in any way representative, is widespread.

However, the most directly relevant responses acknowledge that each time the BBC disseminates vague, half-understood and savagely cropped Israel-related material it aggravates pre-existing and equally half-understood anti-Israel and antisemitic animus. If the BBC is let loose on the state school curriculum, biased coverage of the Middle East conflict can only nurture and inflame existing antisemitism. 

Put in the form of the BBC’s favourite question: “How does that make you feel?” the answer has to be ‘Terrified’.

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While palpable distrust of the BBC abounds, many commenters decided to leapfrog over the Middle East, so to speak, and skip straight to Jimmy Savile and BBC bias in general. Although understandable, I find that disappointing - but not as disappointing as the fact that antisemitic voices from ‘the right’ are still apparent on right-wing websites. This effectively hands ammunition to left-wing antisemites who rely on ‘whataboutery’ to deny their own racism.

Clearly, the BBC’s saccharine narrative that ‘all the Palestinians dream of is a state’ is so demonstrably false that the BBC’s chutzpah in promoting it makes the mind boggle. 

The tacitly agreed pretence that Islamic fundamentalism doesn’t feature in the Palestinian psyche is so conspicuous by its omission that I can’t even think of the most apt words to describe it. So I won’t.  The sources of reference for the BBC’s ‘bitesize’ history lessons need to be exposed for what they are. 

The selective array of Palestinian spokespersons and revisionist historians they’ve chosen to narrate their ‘story’ is telling. Collectively they’ve built up a picture so false, yet so beguiling that an insurmountable barrier obstructs every attempt to counter it. A wall of solidarity, if you like, which might also account for the racist rhetoric willingly showcased by the Seumas Milne arm of the press, The Guardian and Independent newspapers.

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The BBC invariably misrepresents complicated situations by adding a little here and subtracting a little there, trimming and tweaking yet always leaving sufficient leeway for the BBC to demand 'benefit of the doubt', should any of it be queried. Their fairy tales are based on the myth that the ‘Palestinian people’ are uniquely indigenous to the region. Jesus of Nazareth and tales from the Christian bible have faded from the collective memory; the Jews are rebranded as interlopers in ‘another people’s land’. Stories concerning the creation of modern-day Israel have been turned on their heads, swallowed whole and regurgitated by fools. 

According to the BBC wars have ‘broken out’ spontaneously and the warring entities have been granted equal billing, like cowboys and Indians, cranes and crows or blacks and whites on a chequered board. 

The religion of Islam has been sanitised but when it hasn’t been completely erased from the narrative, Palestinians are portrayed as ‘devout’; their piety is ‘good’ piety and their zealotry is ‘good’ zealotry while Israeli Jews are portrayed as demonic religious zealots and baby killers. This is a trial in which evidence from only one side is ever given a fair hearing and the BBC is acting for the prosecution.

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Ample evidence of bias has been cited by pro-Israel advocates over the decades but always ignored by the BBC. 

Has the BBC reported anything about Abbas’s ‘pay for slay’ policy? Has the BBC acknowledged any damning news about, say, the lies of the Palestinians’ chief negotiator Saeb Erekat? Gentle probing by Stephen Sackur, maybe?

If you want a typical example of one-sided biased journalism, look at the BBC’s recent ‘explanatory backgrounder’ “Israel annexation: What is the West Bank?” 

It was the subject of a Camera UK article, which deconstructed the piece with its customary forensic rigour. Both Camera UK’s critique and the BBC’s piece were posted on 30th June this year. 

Narrated by the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent Paul Adams, whose presentable veneer is plausible enough to mask the snake-oil-slick he must have ingested, inconvenient material has been slyly edited - added to or subtracted from - to evoke the usual predetermined anti-Israel message. 

Highly emotive language has been deployed; truth has been so steeply tilted that it’s effectively standing on its head. Looking at it again, the selective editing and production still strike me as particularly appalling. The scene is set with a ruthlessly trimmed, ‘bespoke’ version of Middle Eastern ‘history.:

• Since the Middle East war in 1967 it’s been occupied by Israel.
• Before that it was controlled by Jordan.
• Before that by the British,
• and before that it was part of the Ottoman Empire

Is that an example of the BBC’s prospective potted ‘bitesize’ history?

By the way, the 1967 war didn’t just ‘break out’. The BBC leaves out crucial facts that led to that war. The concerted plan by surrounding Arab countries to have another shot at wiping Israel off the map were preceded by a series of provocative acts of aggression and local skirmishes throughout the spring of 1967, eventually culminating in the short, sharp all-out war that was over in six remarkable days; the BBC cannot admit that the six-day war was intended as a rerun of the Arabs’ failed 1948 attempt at the very same thing that the Palestinian leadership is still trying to do -  annihilate Israel - and which is the very real, ongoing and fundamental obstacle to peace.

Using the emotive ‘occupied by Israel’ in contrast to the innocent-sounding “controlled by Jordan” wipes away a whole tranche of historical information, not to mention the complex role of the British nor of the nature of the ‘Ottoman Empire’.

When Paul Adams enunciated: 

“But for centuries it’s been home to Palestinian Arabs, as many as 3m of them today. And it’s long been seen by most people as the heart of a future Palestinian state.

you can see that the BBC has taken massive liberties with the actualité. “For centuries” and “the heart of” -  what emotionally loaded words to pick!

Then there is the imagery. The picture that looks like a sea of ‘invading’ Jews echoes the infamous anti-immigration campaign poster that Nigel Farage was vilified for exploiting, with excoriating accusations of racism. Does the BBC not recognise the irony in that?

And we haven’t even scraped the surface of it yet. If the BBC succeeds in taking over state education Britain’s future looks bleak.

Wither and die!

I don’t think either of us wants the blog to wither and die. In lieu of a considered answer, I give you some knee-jerk responses.

1) Twitter has addled our brains. Short attention span / Attention Deficit is the disorder of the day.

2) Echo chambers make me sad.

3) Teachers (might) testify that force-feeding a well-worn syllabus onto yet another fresh intake is the personification of tedium. Only in this case the exam never comes. The BBC grinds on just the same. After a decade of blogging (ultimately the same old stuff), repetitive tedium injury kicks in. 

4) In the unrequited pursuit of the youth market, the Beeb has forgotten that the young eventually grow up. Stop it BBC! You are not Marks and Spencer. 

5) Monkey Brains was indeed a prolific commenter and sometimes his was the sole response to a post.  Maybe it was simply an aversion to Disqus or my own ‘rebuke’ that drove him away. He deserved his own blog.  

6) I can’t see what is wrong with the layout of Disqus. Maybe the problem is your end?

7) In days of old (when knights were bold and posts were long and thoughtful) it was even busier below the line. Check out archives circa 2016 and earlier.  

8) Personally, I feel we have almost exhausted the BBC’s bias. I’m not satisfied with endless nit-picking over the BBC’s individual transgressions any more (there’s an app for that) and I think - if we’re to continue - we need to broaden the remit. 

9) I’m not a proper Conservative by the way. I dislike the overly dogmatic anti-lockdown rhetoric one finds on TCW, and I did think the btl discussion engendered by Melanie Phillips’s (presumably now out of favour with Kathy Gyngell) attack on Lord Sumption’s anti-lockdown stance raised far more interesting, diverse and debatable points (on both sides) than the echo chamber that is the default of many Conservative-leaning blogs and websites. 

Beware!

Over at The Conservative Woman, David Keighley sounds a note of caution:

It seems that reform of the BBC is firmly on the new government’s agenda. But to what end? The reality is that every attempt at BBC reform – stretching back to the Thatcher era, as I wrote here before the 2015 general election – has failed, and each new Charter has made the Corporation more arrogant and entrenched.

How did THIS happen?

The news that Chris Mason is to the next permanent presenter of Any Questions? has gone down pretty well. 

Understandably so. He's a likable chap. 

Gary Oliver at The Conservative Woman is still surprised though:

[Chris Mason] is a mildly irreverent, self-deprecating and congenial character, as well as being an experienced and highly competent political broadcaster. However . . . Yorkshire-born Mason has a peely-wally complexion and white privilege enabled him to attend a high-performing grammar school followed by Cambridge University. For the past 39 years Mason’s preferred pronouns have been he/his/him and this unapologetic patriarch appears unwilling to join the inordinate number of BBC employees who identify as transgender. The cisgender man is married – but to a woman, for heaven’s sake!  

Yet despite ticking none of the Corporation’s crucial boxes, somehow Chris Mason has landed the prestigious role as host of Any Questions? How on earth did the BBC’s diversity auditors approve the appointment of this white-privileged, heteronormative man?

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Meanwhile Roger Bolton interviewed Chris Mason on Feedback and asked him if he was also going to be presenting Any Answers? - as Jonathan Dimblebly did in his early years - but, alas, he's not.

So, folks, it looks as if we're stuck with 'The Anita Anand Show' for the forseeable future. 

Clapping along?

On the theme of the BBC's coverage of Extinction Rebellion's protests in London today, The Conservative Woman's magnificent Margaret Ashworth has written a brilliant piece today. 

(Margaret's incapable of writing otherwise). 

On the one hand, there's must of the rest of the media also reporting the disruption and the irritation provoked by the protests while, on the other hand, there's the BBC being overwhelmingly happy-clappy about it. 

More last words on John Humphrys

The case for the prosecution continues:  

Humphrys – the BBC’s bias-monger in chief, by David Keighley 

Shameful silence of Humphrys over the Iraq dodgy dossier, by Kathy Gyngell

My Last Words on John Humphrys (well, for today at least)

You may already have read this, but if you haven't...

Kathy at The Conservative Woman has written forcefully about John Humphrys's post-Today criticisms of the BBC. 

Don’t just blame the BBC, Mr Humphrys, blame yourself is the piece's punchy headline. 

She makes the same case some of you, our dear readers, have also made. 

Kathy's case runs as follows:

John Humphrys criticisms ring true but also hollow. He should have spoken out much earlier and not waited till two days after reaching retirement and gaining the gigantic safety net of his MASSIVE BBC pension to speak out about BBC's bias - especially its anti-Brexit bias. 

So much for his integrity!

He saw it. He must have known the utterly damning News-watch stats (especially those about Today). But he stayed in place and didn't speak out. 

So why didn't he use his bully-pulpit on Today to shame the BBC or, if that didn't work, resign in protest over it if he felt it was so wrong? 

Was it because of the tremendously large salary he got? 

And why did he front so many of Today's "daily doses of Project Fear" without openly objecting? 

And won't he now continue to front BBC TV shows (like Mastermind) and still take the biased BBC's shilling, despite everything?

"He was never brave enough to make a stand", Kathy says. "And where in this window into the world of BBC bias was his own mea culpa – his own confession of his failure to take the behemoth on?"

All of this may be harsh, but there's a good deal of truth in it and a lot for John's conscience to chew over.

Yes, as I noted yesterday, it's not entirely true that JH has been silent about such things in the past.

He's burst out twice before (both times in The Radio Times) to the displeasure of his BBC colleagues, publicly saying some of the same things about the BBC's left-liberal, pro-EU mindset.

But, backing up Kathy's case, as MB has remarked, his earlier comments were far more muted than those expressed in his post-Today (would-be-best-selling) book, as laid out by the Daily Mail.

So, a case study then of John Simpson's "institutional BBC timidity", with his friend John as its flesh-and-blood embodiment?

A thought did strike me though, having read recent pieces about him: Did he eff and blind at the BBC behind the scenes on the question of bias and try to get them to mend their ways? I'm guessing that he grumbled loudly, but little more. Whatever, there was no discernible effect as far I can see. 

Still, we are where we are, and he is where he is. 

And his remarks about the BBC contain so many damning quotes that blogs like this - and like-minded newspapers - will be using them for years against the BBC.

So many of his comments vindicate us, and are absolutely damning. 

Also, being an eternal pragmatist, as one commenter at TCW said, I wonder if by relentlessly ratcheting up the unforgiving denunciations of outlying BBC types (like him) for being timid and self-serving if they only start spilling the beans on the BBC after they leave the BBC (which, in fairness to JH, he isn't actually doing - neither leaving the BBC entirely nor denouncing the BBC for the first time), future such would-be BBC whistleblowers, now lying low and fearful inside the BBC and biding their time, might feel it's not remotely worth it after all - and, in fact, positively harmful to their wellbeing - to spill their bean-stuffed guts about the BBC after they fly Auntie's nest.

The BBC's mighty monolith might, as a result, become even less leaky than it already is.

I, personally, want more leaks. Many more leaks and revelations. The more the merrier. Even if they come after the  cowardly BBC person in question has left the BBC with rare flowers, tears made from diamonds, 24-carat-gold EU clocks and Guy Verhofstadt chocolates, a mock Eric Gill statue, and a huge sackful of gripes.

Gimme, gimme, gimme!

And, of course, however unfamiliar it may be to you, there's the other side of this story - 'complaints from both sides' - and that's that John Humphrys has become one of the top two BBC hate figures in recent years in the more fetid echo chambers of pro-EU hardliners, the 'woke' brigades, the nastier climate apocalypse outriders, and the gathering hordes of the far-Left. 

They loathe him, and can't stop foaming at the mouth about him.

And their frothing has surfaced, again and again, on Radio 4's Feedback - which (as regulars will know) I've long felt has been suspiciously helpful to the huge campaign against him. 

For such haters (despite him voting Remain, as he's now admitted), he's long been a sexist, reactionary, right-wing, 'climate-denying', pro-Brexit dinosaur. 

The one thing they've wanted more than anything else has been to get him out, preferably sacked.

The amount of bile that's poured out on Twitter on against him on his every appearance in recent years has been beyond staggering. I know that because, in the interests of this blog, I've frequently watched hashtags connected to Today (may God protect me!) and I've witnessed the scale of the abuse pouring in against him. It's been beyond tidal or torrential, more a daily tsunami of hate, every day he's appeared.

He could have called the police on thousands of people for 'hate crimes' against him, so vituperative have been far too many of the comments against him.

(Naturally, being John Humphrys, he hasn't).

And, yes, it was mainly because they thought he was anti-EU and pro-Brexit (to repeat, despite him voting Remain, as he's now admitted). 

That nice Lord Adonis, you probably won't be surprised to learn, openly rejoiced that he's gone:

I am delighted that John Humphrys is leaving the Today programme. He dragged it down to a radio version of the Daily Mail - it needs big change.

Ah but, aren't such people a small, unrepresentative minority, despite their very loud Twitter mouths?

It's complicated, isn't it? 

Of course, many people don't think it's complicated at all, which complicates things even more. 

Yes, John Humphrys was never prepared to martyr himself over his reservations about BBC bias. His protests were muted, at best. But now he's vindicated us and given us quote after quote that we can use to show, from the bolted horse's mouth, that many of the things we've been saying for years are true. 

The End.

How to lose influence and irritate people

A recap.

ITBB was set up about seven years ago to debate or pinpoint the BBC’s bias, but Craig and I  wrote a proviso into our ‘constitution’ allowing us to deviate and go off-topic if we wanted to.

We have an invisible preemptive, written-in apology for accidentally flouting Jacob Rees-Mogg’s list of grammatical crimes up to and including the Oxford comma and the odd typo.

At that time we thought Biased-BBC (the mothership) was growing away from us; we felt edged out by the sheer volume of material posted by the one-man blitzkrieg that was ‘Alan’, who disappeared as anonymously as he arrived. (His disappearance may not be as complete as all that)

We weren’t trying to duplicate or compete with Biased BBC. We ran in tandem with it, if you like.

Craig has never had a harsh rebuke; a couple of mild ones perhaps, but I’m not afraid of being criticised or disagreed with, (as I have been) and It’s fine. The original aim was to create a lively blog with its own identity. 

It’s gratifying that Craig’s strong and stable observations, characteristically underpinned by statistics and specific examples, have been picked up by The Conservative Woman and are often cross-posted on their lively site. The one where people take notice.

The Biased-BBC blog did have some genuine influence at one time. The old magenta design is still my favourite iteration of that blog. I’m thinking that 2009 - 2012 marked the high point - the pinnacle -  of my blogging life. You can still access historic Biased-BBC content via the current Biased-BBC archive, which goes waaayy back. Sadly, nothing much has changed chez Beeb. If anything the bias is worse; more entrenched and more invisible to the unseeing perpetrators.

However, the zeitgeist has shifted. Amongst huge swathes of the public the BBC is perceived as biased, lefty and shamelessly - hopelessly -  pandering to a youth market that has moved on. It’s not ordinary missing the target - it’s M & S missing the target. Dear Beeb, you’re spitting in the faces of your core customer and chasing after some unattainable target with an ardour that will never be reciprocated. More and more people say they find radio 4 unlistenable. 

This disillusionment with the BBC is so widespread that blogs like this are redundant, or soon will be. We are being self-indulgent here, especially in the light of the fact that we have had very little or no impact on the BBC at all.

I don’t really know who the Biased-BBC site owners were in 2007 (before David Vance’s reign) but they must have been delighted with these contemporaneous articles by the BBC’s Martin Belam.

Here’s what Martin Belam wrote about the Biased-BBC blog in March 2007:

“I’m sure that I qualify genetically as a Beeboid, and so view the site through a prism of my own telly-tax funded bias, but I enjoy reading the Biased BBC blog. And I do mean enjoy. I always used to keep it in my subscribed RSS feeds when I worked at the BBC, and still dip into it from time to time in Austria. 

And there are a few reasons why I still find it an useful and enjoyable place to visit on the internet, not least of which is the fact that the issues being debated on the pages of the site are issues that link me back to home.

That’s nice, ain’t it though?

“It was also at least partly as a result of the Biased BBC comments thread that the notorious From Our Own Correspondent piece where Barbara Plett said she cried about Yasser Arafat has been appended with a note that the piece had been the subject of a complaint that had been upheld by the BBC Governors.

 Excellent result!

“I find though, that there is a real difference between what is written on the blog "proper", and what is posted on the regular open comments thread. Biased BBC usually operates an "Open comments thread" near, or at the top, of the homepage, which is refreshed every few days. These threads can often run into hundreds of inter-twining comments which can be quite difficult to pick through. 

What I find a shame about all this is that I think that the mainstream body of the site, the actual posts written by the editors and named contributors, sometimes raise points that the BBC should be aware of, and seek to address within both the online journalistic and broadcast operations of the corporation.

So, a dig at some of the shakier, more fanciful contributors to the open threads, but an observation that reveals a possible weakness in the current B-BBC ‘running’ open thread format, which has virtually replaced the authored above-the-line articles.

On the other hand, (au contraire!)  the current user-friendly comments field has transformed the open threads, and many interesting nuggets of news and views can be picked up from it. Including a rare sighting of a right-wing (non-lefty) comedian H/T Stewgreen. No, it’s not Jeremy Clarkson, but Will Franken - sounds like a question. (Well will he?) I bet he’s never been asked that before.

The characters featured in 2007 B-BBC have come and gone, as characters will, but the principle stays the same. One of Belam’s blog posts features B-BBC’s take on (man-made) global warming, 

and one is about Israel and Palestine, which I’ll quote from below:

“The coverage of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is probably the most challenging area the BBC faces in balancing news coverage, and I'm certainly not one of those people who believes that the BBC gets it spot on in every report on every output medium. It should also be pointed out that a few minutes on Google will turn up plenty of people arguing that the BBC offers a pro-Israeli slant on the news. However, the general consensus of opinion on the Biased BBC blog is that the BBC is blatantly and repeatedly biased against Israel in their coverage of the situation.

Complaints from both sides? For a tiny moment, I thought he was going to conclude that they must be getting something right.

“An independent study commissioned by the old BBC Board of Governors didn't find that to be the case, in fact it slightly erred on the side that the BBC didn't put across fully the disparity between the two sides, and thus was doing a disservice to the Palestinians. Previous to that, the contents of the 2004 Balen Report are not fully known, thanks to the BBC's attempts to prevent it being released into the public domain, but this is thought to be more critical of the coverage in the other direction. 

Some commentators on the Biased BBC blog are not arguing that the BBC should take a neutral stance on the issue, they believe the corporation should 'grow a backbone' and stand up for what they say is right. And frequently on the site commentators leave references to the "Pretendistinians", which serves to make their own particular bias on the issue quite clear.

That was almost the same as the familiar accusation: “You don’t want balance, you just want your kind of bias” Later in the piece he says:

Biased BBC believes that the BBC is pro-Palestinian despite any evidence to the contrary because, as you've previously identified, they are right-wing loons who believe that Thatcher was a bit soft. Whenever an Israeli spokesman comes on, they're never questioned as to why they claim to be more peaceful than Iran, despite attacking all their neighbours pretty regularly, or why, despite this, they should be allowed nuclear weapons and Iran shouldn't. Obviously, by criticising Israel, I am a dreadful nazi anti-semite, but so be it.

Clearly he does qualify as a bona fide Beeboid if he believes that making a completely context-free assertion that Israel  is guilty of “attacking all their neighbours pretty regularly” is enough to invalidate its claim to be ‘peaceful’ is an example of a reasonable, ‘non-antisemitic’, criticism of Israel, not to mention negatively equating Israel with Iran in a brazen advertisement of his own ignorance. I suppose he got his dis-info from Jeremy Bowen.

Of course, there wasn’t BREXIT in those days. Over the last almost seven years!! here at ITBB we’ve picked up a healthy tally of page-views and a distinct identity of our own. At present we are distinguishable from Biased-BBC by our labour intensive above-the-line offerings, (working day and night) in the hope that one day someone important from the BBC will come along and say “Hello Craig and Sue, you were right all along. How can we change for the better?”   

Dominic Casciani may not belie-e-e-ve it but we do this for nowt, (try not to make too many mistakes, trying to spell names correctly, finding links and images) and we charge £0 per hour, which is below the minimum wage.

Why do we do it? Yes indeed. Why.

Vanity; to stave off dementia; for mental exercise; for your entertainment; waiting for someone important from the BBC will come along and humbly ask ‘how can we change?’

The case against the BBC

A head of steam is building up and critics of the BBC are on the warpath. The Conservative Woman’s David Keighley, an ex-BBC man, has raised enough money to fund a legal challenge. The idea is to sue the BBC for breach of the crucial impartiality obligations within its charter. Lawyers have been hired to build the case. 

  

Robin Aitken, another ex BBC man, has been pursuing a similar agenda for decades. 

Aitken believes the left-wing consensus is so ingrained in the confirmation-bias-prone media bubble that the inhabitants of such an insular environment just don’t see it.

 O wad some Power the giftie gie us /To see oursels as ithers see us!

This video was made in January 2019.  In conversation with Peter Whittle, Robin Aitken articulates the collective mindset within the Beeb. He alludes to a deliberate strategy of social engineering which entails sanitising and normalising ‘Muslimness’, (a condition with a bespoke word of its own).

 “Our view of the world is this. Muslims are always victims, they are victimised and Islamophobia is rife in the country and that’s the story we want to tell. Do we want to tell a story about Muslims behaving badly? Attacking Jews, or attacking women? No, we don’t want to really. We don’t want to tell those stories. That’s why, for instance, it took so long, and it took some brave journalism by The Times newspaper to bring that whole thing about the Pakistani rape-gangs into the open.”

If the aim is to aid social cohesion, it’s a big fail. You can’t hide things from the public forever, and once people realise they’re being manipulated they’ll resist. Only the BBC itself supports its own ham-fisted attempts at social engineering.

If you listened to today’s Sunday Programme you will have heard that the findings of a ‘com res poll’  show that nearly half of the UK believe that Islam is incompatible with British values

(if the specific time-link doesn’t work for you, scroll to 10:20)

The MCB’s Miqdaad Versi thinks that (presumably because Jews argue that they should be allowed to define antisemitism) Muslims should equally be allowed to define Islamophobia. The existing definition, which has been accepted by several organisations but not the Conservative Party, includes the invented terminology ‘expressions of Muslimness’ which, in practice amounts to the introduction of blasphemy law by stealth. So no wonder the Conservative Party is reluctant to accept it. 

Sadly, portentous attempts to equate everything ‘Muslim’ with everything ‘Jewish’ have succeeded in toxifying specific Jewish religious practices that had been rubbing along quite peacefully in British society for years, and with one fell swoop has driven an expedient Israel-bound mini-exodus of British Jews.(£)

 “With the rapid rise in size and political importance of the Muslim community in the UK, there is also a feeling that Israel is being singled out for opprobrium and that the balance has swung decisively against the Zionist cause. For those whose biggest fear is Corbyn, many are waiting to see if Labour wins a general election before deciding whether or not to make aliyah.”

“I think the air has already changed, regardless of Corbyn. Some 730 years since King Edward I expelled the small mercantile Jewish community from England, the Jews are leaving again. This time not through the decree of an absolute tyrant, but as the consequence of a subtler, stealthier tyranny. There seems to be nobody left, over here or in continental Europe, who will fight the Jews’ corner, so electorally insignificant have their numbers become. That it is primarily the left that is driving them out is something they surely could not have foreseen or imagined. But here it is.”

David Keighley’s current criticisms of the BBC principally concern the BBC’s demonstrable anti-Brexit bias, the long-term effect of which, he believes, will prove disastrous for the country. 

However, I think the long-term consequences of the BBC’s pernicious, interminable hostility to Israel and Jews will have equally serious and perhaps even longer-lasting ramifications.

A decades-long history of ‘half-a-story' reporting, a Middle East editor with a built-in grudge, and contrary to the allegations of Miqdaad Versi and others, the BBC’s institutionally pro-Muslim outlook including the ever-presence of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian talking heads on panels and political broadcasts has produced an ill-informed consensus. Public opinion appears to be perfectly content to exchange 250,000  loyal British Jewish citizens for over 4million incompatible or not necessarily loyal British / Pakistani / Middle Eastern/ African Muslims.

The antisemitism in the Labour Party is just the beginning. The leadership’s inability to deal with it is a great shame, but the BBC’s biased reporting makes rectifying the situation impossible.

BBC Watch constantly researches, writes and posts several articles per day in an effort to keep abreast of endless unreported examples of Muslims behaving badly. Shamefully, the BBC still refuses to report almost all of it; at least, not until Israel retaliates. Day after day aggression against Israel is ignored. “The BBC is only interested when Israel fights back” is a saying that is becoming more tired and worn every time it’s uttered. Repetition might make that saying ineffectual, but that doesn’t make it wrong. 

Nor has the antisemitism from the right gone away. For once Yasmin Alibhai Brown had a point when she mentioned that on Sky recently.

That too is tacitly reinforced by the BBC’s failure to fill in crucial gaps in what ought to be general historical knowledge. Right-wing antisemites often cite the infamous bombing of the King David Hotel to reinforce their theory that Israel was founded on terrorism, a stance that conveniently ignores the fact that at the time the King David Hotel was more of an army HQ than a tourist destination and more importantly, it disregards the fact that Britain’s post-war government’s hostile, antisemitic, pro-Arab political policies denied sanctuary to many desperate Holocaust survivors, an important factor in understanding why certain (arguably renegade) Jews fought against the British at that time. You have to seek that information out, and who nowadays can be bothered.

So I think the BBC’s bias against Israel and Zionism will inevitably lead to a major Jewish exodus and a predominantly Muslim Britain.  A great loss to this country. 

If it’s indeed true that this important aspect of the BBC’s bias has taken a back seat in this particular crowd-funded and well-intentioned litigation project, then I’m sorry and disappointed.

‘cos I is classist?

Recently I mentioned Brendan O’Neill’s confusing and (to me) inexplicable denunciation of Tommy Robinson’s “views”. 

“It doesn’t matter what you think of Robinson’s views — like the vast majority of people, I oppose them.”

That’s what he wrote in the Spectator. Yet he’s recently penned this piece in Spiked, titled: We must have the right to blaspheme against Islam.  (note: I don’t know why our sidebar link to Spiked isn’t updating properly) The article has also been endorsed by Kathy Gyngell over at Conservative Woman.

“We must have the right to blaspheme against Islam Student unions agitate for the banning of speakers who criticise Islam too harshly (whom they of course brand ‘Islamophobic’). Charlie Hebdo continues to be shamed by British leftists as a publication that ‘punches down’ because it dares to publish cartoons that mock Muhammad or take the piss out of Islamic beliefs. Even the Metropolitan Police recently decreed that it is ‘Islamophobic’ to describe Islam in any of the following ways: as a ‘static’ belief system, as ‘other’, as ‘irrational’, ‘sexist’ or ‘aggressive’, or as a ‘political ideology’. Apparently anyone who holds these entirely legitimate views of Islam is guilty of an act of ‘phobia’ – which in essence means blasphemy.”

So what’s going on?

It’s just that when critics of Islam take pains to distance themselves from Tommy Robinson’s views it smacks of a class thing. It’s understandable if they don’t agree with his  - shall we call it ‘ham-fisted’ M.O., but to say they disagree with "his views" needs a bit more fleshing out. 

Thread: Questions about the BBC's coverage of the Sri Lanka attacks

Kathy at The Conservative Woman has penned a fine piece describing her experience of listening to the BBC's coverage of the terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka: Terror attack on Christians – BBC looks the other way. "Why such flaky and incomplete reporting of this devastating attack aimed at Christian places of worship and designed to kill Christians? What exactly does the BBC have to be so coy about?"

A thoughful reply to her on Twitter made the case for the BBC's defence, "The BBC has extensively reported the events. It has not ignored Christians. But they have not attributed responsibility to Muslims, not least because there is as yet no proof. Perhaps in such a charged atmosphere that might be responsible?

But is there "as yet no proof"? And does 'acting responsibly' by censoring parts of a story actually risk doing more harm than good?

Thread in the comments below....

Hardline hornets in hats (featuring Kate Hoey and BBC Complaints)

hardline

Regular readers will know that I've had a hornet in my Homburg hat for months about the BBC's use of the word 'hardline'. 

I closely tracked the BBC's use of the word and found it was nearly always used about certain kinds of people.

To recap, the VAST majority of the BBC's recent use of the word 'hardline' - and its beloved sibling 'hardliners' - have been connected to Brexit-supporters, especially those in favour of leaving the EU on WTO terms (i.e. supporters of a 'no-deal', crash-out-and-apocalypse Brexit). 

But 'the others' in my surveys have been equally predictable to anyone who's watched the BBC over the years: Trump's immigration policies, tax-cutters in the US, the right-wing Austrian government (over immigration), the Italian populist government (over immigration) the national-populist Hungarian government (over immigration and everything else), European governments in general that oppose mass immigration, the conservative CSU in Germany (over immigration), a Turkish right-winger not part of Erdogan's party, Hindus in India, France's yellow vests ...plus clerics in Saudi Arabia who oppose women drivers. 

To bring things up to date, and tracking the word's use by BBC folk since the start of February this year on BBC One, BBC Two and the BBC News Channel...

Yes, the term 'hardline' is still mostly used - again and again and again and again and again - in connection with 'Brexiteers', and all the variants thereon.

Seriously, using TV Eyes to monitor 'hardline' brings up masses of BBC reporters/presenters endlessly spouting the term in connection to Brexiteers, the ERG, Conservatives, Eurosceptics, etc. 

I've not found a single counter-example, so pro-EU, hardline Remain types who want to overturn the 2016 referendum remain once again untainted by the loaded term in the BBC's output.

The exceptions this time are, again, mostly familiar - Hindu nationalists (repeatedly) and parties in Italy opposed to mass immigration - but there's also a one-off criticism of anti-China US politicians and (more predictably) Australia's immigration policies.

To sum up, the BBC uses the term 'hardline' almost invariably against right-wingers, opponents of mass immigration, Hindu nationalists, and strong supporters of Brexit.

It's a trend that's so overwhelming that it should speak for itself and dispel any doubts about the BBC's biased use of language here.

Specifically tracking the use of 'hardliners', however - besides the many, many incarnations of 'Tory hardliners' - also brings up something that might seem less predictable at a first glance but has long been a BBC 'thing' - multiple mentions of Iranian 'hardliners' (who the BBC often also label 'conservatives'). That's nothing new though. It's long been a thing hereabouts to complain about the BBC using the term 'conservative' to describe the most hardline Islamists in the Iranian revolutionary regime. 

Given the John Simpson transcript I posted earlier, this latest finding in the Iranian context is particularly intriguing. 

*******

Anyhow, all of this leads back to Kate Hoey MP's potent complaint to the BBC about their perpetual use of 'hardline' in reference to people who think like her (whether left-wing or right-wing or whatever) on the subject of Brexit.

If you've not read it already, please read it.

*******

And that in turns leads on, as knights follow daze, to News-watch's David Keighley and his powerful new article at TCW, ‘Hardline’ Hoey and the BBC at its slippery worst - which is a 'must-read'. (So please read it!)

David crystallises the argument and details Ms Hoey's exchanges with the BBC - and the BBC's (oh-so-familiar) "blinkered", "self-righteous" replies. 

The whole first section of David's piece, however, needs quoting in full as it might be new to you. And even if it isn't new to you it remains, frankly, quite staggering:

ONE of the huge frustrations about the BBC is that they have a defence for every complaint, made up according to their own ever-shifting rules, and adjudicated mainly by their own staff. 

When David Cameron formally announced that he would hold an EU Referendum, Newsnight reported the development with a programme which included 18 Remainers (one who was said to be a businessman but actually was a Liberal Democrat politician) and just one who wanted Leave. 

News-watch complained. The BBC’s response? Months earlier, Newsnight had presented an edition which contained someone who put the case for withdrawal. The programme with blatant 18-1 stacking was thus fine because this was ‘due impartiality’. Of course.

Ah yes, good old BBC 'due impartiality'! - about as flexible as term as you could imagine. 

Two urgent steps

Have you read the latest piece in The Conservative Woman? Two urgent steps Britain must take to defeat the Islamist threat.

I read it this morning. The author is Ghanem Nuseibeh, Chair, Muslims Against Anti Semitism, Founder, Cornerstone Global Associates and former fellow at Kings College London and Harvard University. 

I hadn’t heard of him before, though I think I’ve heard of the organisation called Muslims against antisemitism.  

It sounds good, but I’m always wary of people who equate antisemitism with Islamophobia, as this group seems to because the two things are not directly comparable. Not two cheeks of the same arse if you like. However, “Against Antisemitism”? What’s not to like? 

The thing that first struck me about this piece was the shocking contrast between the virulently anti-Christian rhetoric in statements put out by Al Jazeera in Arabic and the revisionist, whitewashed versions that appear in English translations. Unless you’re an Arabic speaker, you’d never know.  Hence Alistair Burt’s trusting but utterly naive interpretation of Al Jazeera’s response to the Pope’s visit to the Arabian peninsula.

“Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt hailed it as ‘a powerful initiative and a step towards greater cooperation, understanding and tolerance between two of the world’s great religions"

Tweeted Burt. Nuseibeh continues:

It was hoped that the visit would usher in a new era in which the rights of Christians in the Middle East would be protected. For so many years now, the Christians in the Middle East have been subjected to persecution; literally being driven out by the insidious Islamism that has been taking hold of so many societies in the region, making them the most persecuted religious minority in the world. 

(Remember these? 

“Fooled Ya!” they must be gloating, over at Al Jazeera (Arabic)  

"Qara Daghi: Pope's visit to the UAE may be interpreted as a recommendation of tyranny." 

(Above translation courtesy of Google translate.) Anyone who’s familiar with MEMRI will know there is a similar translation issue with the freely expressed, virulently antisemitic and inflammatory statements made in Arabic and constantly aired on Palestinian media. English language “translations” if any, are modified to the extent of being whitewashed to the point of obliteration. But you need to follow PMW to make yourself aware of this, and how many of us bother?

“Such anti-Christian rhetoric not only harms Christians in the Middle East, but also threatens Christians and others in this country. What happens in the name of religion in the Middle East affects what happens in Britain. 

The world’s oldest and largest extremist Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, continues inciting its adherents in the Middle East and Europe. The Manchester Arena bomber was radicalised by the Muslim Brotherhood, according to Haras Rafiq, chief executive of Quilliam, the anti-extremism think tank, as reported in the Guardian”

We don’t know which form of Islam the parents of the three runaway girls belong to, but it’s well-known that:

“Mr Abase himself came under fire after it emerged that he had been part of a flag-burning mob outside the US embassy in London in 2012. 

Also at the rally were hate cleric Anjem Choudary and Michael Adebowale, one of the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby. Mr Abase admitted going to two further rallies, with his impressionable daughter in tow.”

Bearing in mind that Ghanem Nuseibeh is well aware of the potentially civilisational threat from Islamic extremism as well as our government’s unwillingness to tackle it for fear of offending Muslim voters, he makes two suggestions: 

“Islamists have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to outsmart government. They adapt to new circumstances and adopt new technologies to spew their venom. Yet they are also very vulnerable, and defeating them is within reach if the political will exists. The government of this country needs to catch up. There are two immediate and urgent tasks that it needs to undertake. 

The first is a review by the Home Office of the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK. The Government’s review of the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood was conducted by the Foreign Office and directed its attention abroad. Although it touched upon Muslim Brotherhood activities in Britain, the focus was global and therefore diluted the potential of any meaningful action against the Brotherhood in the UK. What is needed urgently now is a comprehensive review of the group’s activities, including preaching in the mosques and madrassahs across the country, with a view to proscribing it as a terrorist group. 

The second urgent task is to block access to anti-Christian and anti-Semitic preaching on the Al Jazeera Arabic website. This includes sermons by people who are either banned from entering Britain or people who have openly supported suicide bombings of the kind seen at the Manchester Arena. “

I need to go back to an earlier post., in which I contend that as an individual Shamima Begum is but a drop in the ocean, compared to the bigger picture. Whether she is allowed back to the UK to face the music, with or without her “unborn” baby is neither here nor there in the long-term. Her return would only be meaningful in a symbolic way. If she does get her way, presumably she’ll be monitored and perhaps imprisoned. It’s even possible she’ll get a book deal and a modelling opportunity. Get on Strictly or Bake-off. Portrait Artist of the Year, maybe. The BBC is already making her into a kind of pin-up. I don’t even care, because what seems far more important is for the government to wise up, tout suite. 

I have no idea whether the Begum family or the Abase family are members of the Muslim Brotherhood, supporters of Hizb-Ut-Tahrir or any other bonkers strain of Islam. The whole lot of it should not be pandered to by the government or the media. They don’t even pander to Christianity for goodness sake. 

Proscribe all extremist organisations. Discourage all manifestations of religious extremism by not glorifying it on the media or anywhere else. Stop trying to normalise burkas and hijabs. Don’t acquiesce to foreign, antithetical, third world cultural practices.  Let us blaspheme, ridicule and criticise Islamic dogma to our hearts’ content, as long as we don’t incite violence. (It is illegal to incite violence) Stop pretending Islam is a faith, therefore untouchable, and not a political, supremacist and racist ideology. And let all our Christmases be white and let all our Muslims be moderate. God bless us all, each and every one.

There y’are. That’s my ten pence worth. 

Over to David...

There's an excellent piece here by News-watch's David Keighley about Question Time under the new chairpersonship of Fiona the Bruce:

Welcome to the Fiona Bruce Remainer Show

David spotted an exchange I missed between Fiona and Isabel Oakeshott about Question Time's question selection. Please give it a read.

Image choice

A BBC tweet:

And a response from TCW's Kathy:

Is 'The Bodyguard' biased?

Spoilers alert (if you've not already seen it)....

As I rarely watch BBC dramas I can't say if this, from Laura Perrins at The Conservative Woman, is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the much-talked-about The Bodyguard but it made me smile and it sounds like typical BBC drama to me. 

It's just that so many people I know have been watching it and said they're finding it gripping. How tonight's episode hits them I'll doubtless hear tomorrow. 

Anyhow, here are Laura's 'live-tweeting' tweets tonight:

• Admit it, every girl wants her own Specialist Protection Officer.
• Indeed, the BBC can stick in as many women as they want as snipers, bomb disposal experts, or boss of The Bodyguard himself, but although this may thrill the feminists, it is not what brings in the viewers. 
• You realise this is just Beauty and the Beast with guns, right? Can Julia tame Budd? That's the only question we want answered. 
• OMG. You realise this the part where Budd runs across the stage and flings himself in front of the bullet coming Julia's way?
• BBC logic on the The Bodyguard. Unpaid internships cause Islamic extremism and terrorism. Genius.
• As I was saying: OMG. This is the part where Budd runs across the stage and flings himself in front of the bullet coming Julia's way?
• David Budd is a really crappy protection officer. I hope he was dynamite in the sack to make up for his awfulness on the job. 
• If the BBC in The Bodyguard are going to make out traumatised war veterans are bigger threat to the UK than Islamic terrorism then they can f*ck right off.

Have any of you been watching it? Does "BBC logic on the The Bodyguard. Unpaid internships cause Islamic extremism and terrorism. Genius" and "If the BBC in The Bodyguard are going to make out traumatised war veterans are bigger threat to the UK than Islamic terrorism then they can gosh darn it right off" sum up tonight's 'message'?

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if this was the case but I have no intention whatsoever of checking it out for myself. There are limits beyond which this blogger will not go - and watching BBC drama is one of them! 😃

"Entirely reasonable analysis"

Following on from an earlier post today quoting the BBC's top editor in the Americas Paul Danahar tweeting:

President Trump,the politician, will brush off his ostracism from the US political establishment, symbolised by his absence from McCain’s funeral. But I suspect for Trump the man, who has always wanted the respect of his peers, his absence & isolation will sting him greatly.

Kathy at The Conservative Woman tweeted:

Is this the very dispassionate BBC America’s bureau chief? Delighted to see no hint of partiality here.  

Opinionated Big Chief Paul of the BBC duly replied:

it’s entirely reasonable analysis from someone who’s been covering the man & his rise in politics for over four years.

 ...ah yes, "entirely reasonable analysis". If he says so himself!

Very BBC.

She's not the messiah. She's (possibly) the new presenter of Question Time.

As ever, there's a fine piece by David Keighley over at The Conservative Woman discussing the BBC's obsession with quotas. 

David suspects that the BBC will go the whole hog and appoint either Mishal Husain or Samira Ahmed to replace David Dimbleby on Question Time - not because they're necessarily worth it but because they'd tick off at least three quota boxes in one fell swoop! Bingo!!!

(Would anyone be surprised if the BBC did that very thing, and did so for that very reason?) 

If so, Mishal's widely-slammed performance during the 2017 general election, pretty much acting as David Dimbleby's understudy, might still scupper her chances. 

So cool, calm and collected Samira it is then...

....(though she never seems very cool, calm and collected when she's tweeting about her pet hate Nigel Farage. I suspect he'll be getting far fewer invites to appear on QT if she gets the presenter's job)...

...and she really wants the job too. She's already tweeted her CV:

David also discusses the BBC head of comedy Shane Allen's comments that Monty Python wouldn't be commissioned by today's BBC because they are "six Oxbridge white blokes" - comments made as the BBC unveiled a series of new comedy programmes fronted by female and ethnic minority comedians.

One absolutely hideously white python, namely Basil Fawlty (who famously owned a Spanish waiter, so was #FBPE and multicultural even back then), doesn't seen overly impressed with the Shanester (as the BBC's master of hilarity surely calls himself):

It must be said that, with the exception of Mrs Brown's Boys (though it's not my personal cup of Mrs Doyle's tea), BBC TV comedy looks to have pretty much passed on. It's no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to fresher media outlets. It's a stiff, bereft of life. It rests in peace. If Shane hadn't nailed it to the BBC quota board, it would be pushing up the daisies. Its metabolic processes are now history. It's off the viewing public's radar. It's kicked the bucket, having last been seen alive in the days of Mrs Bucket. It's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible on multicultural Songs of Praise. 

For my personal view on the Question Time issue, were you wondering, I'd scrap it. 

Sorry Samira.

P.S. If you wondering whether white, late middle-aged Shane Allen went to Oxbridge, well, no, he didn't. (I will admit to hoping that he did so I could make something of it). He went to Edinburgh University. And his track record, over many years before the BBC, sounds extraordinary. Was he really (as his BBC bio suggests) one of the creative minds behind Ali G, Brass Eye and Shooting Stars?