Eretz Israel is our unforgettable historic homeland...The Jews who will it shall achieve their State...And whatever we attempt there for our own benefit will redound mightily and beneficially to the good of all mankind.(Theodor Herzl, DerJudenstaat, 1896)
We offer peace and amity to all the neighbouring states and their peoples, and invite them to cooperate with the independent Jewish nation for the common good of all. The State of Israel is ready to contribute its full share to the peaceful progress and development of the Middle East.(From Proclamation of the State of Israel, 5 Iyar 5708; 14 May 1948) With a liberal democratic political system operating under the rule of law, a flourishing market economy producing technological innovation to the benefit of the wider world, and a population as educated and cultured as anywhere in Europe or North America, Israel is a normal Western country with a right to be treated as such in the community of nations.... For the global jihad, Israel may be the first objective. But it will not be the last.(Friends of Israel Initiative)
Showing posts with label BBC Leftwing Bias. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC Leftwing Bias. Show all posts
An excellent discussion here, centrally featuring former BBC journalist Robin Aitken, about the BBC's "cultural smear" of "mainstream opinion" that now infects not only news and current affairs but ensures anachronistic politically correct propaganda to infect historical drama.
Mr Aitken notes, inter alia, the BBC's obvious anti-Brexit stance and extraordinary one-sided BBC hostility to Donald Trump
This drift reflects the cultural elites' "contempt" of sections of British society and the complete takeover of the BBC by people who are "culturally liberal".
It also reflects the BBC mindset of "the journalist as pundit", interpreting the news in a way designed to influence the opinions of the viewing and listening public.
It is a world in which "diversity" of all sorts is lauded and adopted, but in which the only diversity disallowed is political.
Like retired newsreader Peter Sissons splendidly before him (in 2011, to be precise), BBC broadcaster John Humphrys, whose final presentation of the Today program on Radio 4 was last Thursday, has (in his serialised memoirs in the Daily Mail) slammed the leftwing bias of his longtime employer, likening Corporation bigwigs to "out-of-touch Kremlin commissars".
Although he denies that a leftwing conspiracy exists, he recalls the sombre disbelieving mood at the BBC when Brexiteers won the 2016 Referendum, and he asserts that the BBC is takes care not to offend "fashionable pressure groups – usually from the liberal Left, the spiritual home of most bosses and staff".
Humphrys' choice of final Today program interviewees has had Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign chief getting his sporran in a twist:
And some of his camp followers too:
Now, regarding this, at Labour's party conference in Brighton, Chief Mick states:
To this kind of reception from some of his followers:
And this kind of further comment from himself:
An aside by the estimable British international politics academic Dr James Vaughan:
Also at the conference, a vile piece of defamation headed "A Racist Endeavour":
'Thousands of Labour members were handed a shocking pamphlet openly
comparing Israel to Adolf Hitler's Nazis ahead of a debate on Palestine ...
An article on the front page of
the booklet by Hampstead and Kilburn Labour Party official
Moshe Machover stated it was a "well established fact" that "Israel is a
racist state."
The same piece - which calls for the
"de-Zionisation of Israel" - then makes a clear attempt to link Israel
with Nazism by selectively quoting from academic sources.
.... Mr Machover writes that some of the "harshest
condemnation of Israel's racism" were "recognised experts on the history
of fascism and Nazism."
He then writes of what he calls
a "shocking comparison with Nazism" made by Hebrew University Professor
Zeev Sternhell of statements made in Israel's Knesset by two right-wing
politicians.
Continuing this theme, Mr Machover, who successfully
fought expulsion for Labour over his links to the Communist Party of
Great Britain, refers to a 2017 article by Professor Daniel Blatman, who
wrote that the "deputy speaker Bezalel Smotrich's admirations for the
biblical genocidaireJoshua bin Nun leads him to adopt the values that resemble those of the German SS."
Tel
Aviv-born Mr Machover has a previous history of using academic quotes,
particularly from Israel, to support his extreme anti-Zionist position.
He
concludes by writing: "Uprooting colonialist racism requires a change
of regime, decolonisation - which in the case of Israel means
de-Zionisation."
Labour delegates debated a motion on Palestine during Tuesday afternoon's session at conference.
During
the debate, one member of the pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice For Labour group
was loudly cheered as she claimed she was speaking for Jews who had
never experienced antisemitism.
Vanessa Stilwell, of Dulwich and West Norwood CLP, said Jeremy Corbyn was "the most anti-racist leader this party has ever had".
Referring
to the situation in Gaza, the Labour activist stumbled as she attempted
to detail allegations of Israeli attacks in Gaza.
Ms Stilwell is
the wife of Glyn Secker - the Labour activist suspended over his 'Jews
in the gutter' speech at a Palestine demo, which was exposed by the J[ewish] C[hronicle]
in May.
But despite a few cries of 'Free Palestine' from the
stage, the debate was largely overshadowed by the continuing divisions
over the party's position on Brexit.
In her keynote speech, Emily
Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, accused Israeli PM Benjamin
Netanyahu of trying to create an "apartheid state" in Israel.
She
also referred to the crisis in Gaza - but appeared to make a deliberate
effort to stop too much focus on Israel/Palestine in a more general
speech about Labour internationalism.'
Let's leave tireless Corbynista-watcher Gillian Lazarus with the last word on this odious muck:
But on the Labour Jew-baiting David Collier's latest article is a must-read.
This half-hour video's not brand new, but it's new enough. I must confess I've been too busy finishing some date-due writing projects to look at the whole of it, but I reckon it's probably pretty insightful as a window on the BBC's left liberal bias.
So explains Hungary's foreign minister in this interview with the BBC's hectoring Emily Maitlis, who, reflecting the arrogant leftism and islamophilia of that broadcaster, treats him as if he's less a studio guest than a prisoner in the dock.
Ah, the crafty BBC. If they can't get their leftist propaganda across by one route, they'll get it across by another.
"We did this," the BBC's fictional lady doctor says (in an
indictment of Western policy) during the year's first episode of Silent
Witness. "Make beasts."
Propaganda to soften up the public regarding mass Muslim immigration, from the drama
department of the BBC
The
plot focuses on the plight of "desperate people". But the traumatised
"Syrian refugee girl" is hardly representative of the
testosterone-fuelled so-called"asylum seekers" in the "camps" across
the Channel waiting to be smuggled into Britain.
Another propaganda piece, courtesy of Al Beeb's Travel page recently, entitled "What can Albania teach us about trust?":
".... Little known to most, Albania was one of a few European countries to emerge with a larger Jewish population by the end of WWII than at the start, saving nearly all of its original Jews while offering refuge to more than 2,000 others from surrounding countries. Despite pressure from Italian fascists and occupying Nazi soldiers, Albanians refused to yield their guests, as doing so would not only result in great shame but would bind the master of the house to “clean the blood”, meaning to take vengeance.
More recently, Albania has again found itself offering besa, this time to those travelling from the Middle East. Hundreds of Iranian exiles are currently residing within the country after having been relocated from Camp Liberty in Iraq. Albanian prime minister Edi Rama has also expressed an intent to aid Syrian refugees, provided a collaborative agreement is reached with other European nations, saying that Albania will not ignore its duty.
Despite all these heroic instances, unassuming Albania remains unrecognized for its great services to the huddled masses of the world. The truth remains that this Balkan nation is small and poor, and as such, it hardly receives international attention for its exploits. Yet, at a time when refugees are being turned away at borders all over the world, it seems that there is a lot to learn from Albania’s penchant for hospitality...." [Emphasis added]
An earlier attempt at this propaganda went slightly awry, leaving the propagandists with egg on their face:
"EDITOR'S NOTE: A previous version of this story stated that hundreds of Iranian refugees were residing in Albania. We've updated the text to explain that these Iranian refugees had been relocated from Camp Liberty in Iraq. We’ve also clarified that the refugees from Kosovo were mostly ethnic Albanians."
And then, of course, there's the direct approach at propaganda, brazenly thumbing the nose at Al Beeb's obligations to be objective required of it by its Charter and its Producers' Guidelines.
On a recent Newsnight the BBC's John Sweeney displayed a shamefully naked piece of bias in his piece about Geert Wilders, whose policies he attacks and whom he belittles and vilifies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6z0XZMvdD8):
To quote Al Beeb:
"Populist parties are growing in strength across Europe - emboldened by both Brexit and Trump. There's Marine Le Pen and the National Front in France of course. But there's a critical election before that: next month, in Holland. Geert Wilders - who leads the anti Muslim Freedom Party is hoping to top the ballot. He wants to take them out of the EU, and to 'de-islamise the Netherlands' with a ban on immigration from Muslim countries. In 2016 he was convicted of inciting discrimination. The Dutch coalition system means it's unlikely Wilders will be crowned Prime Minister. But he could end up leading the largest party which would chill European centrists and boost other populist movements throughout the continent. We sent John Sweeney in pursuit."
Towards the beginning Sweeney waits for an opportunity to "have a natter" with Wilders, and when he gets the chance to buttonhole him he tells him "Some people say you're a bit of a fascist". "Well, don't talk to those people" is the reply.
Wilders later grants an interview to the sneering BBC man, who says with regard to the Dutchman's concerns regarding mass Muslim immigration into Europe (it's not Muslim individuals he's against but rather the ideology of Islam which is "incompatible" with Western freedoms, he explains): "Aren't we going back to 1939?" It's less a question than a reflection of Sweeney's own views.
"People are equal. Ideologies, values ... religions are not equal" observes Wilders, who speaks at some length about "cultural relativism".
Sweeney's mind is already made up, and avoiding the role and contribution of The Elephant in the Room he concludes the program, funereal tones to the fore:
"There is no doubt that this man is changing what was once the most liberal country in Europe into something quite different."
Not an iota as different as what these charmers have in mind:
The London Times of 25 July 1994 carried an article by the BBC's world affairs editor John Simpson entitled "When reporters act on their consciences". Unfortunately, I don't have a copy in front of me now, but from memory the springboard for the article was a recent broadcast in which BBC television reporter (later newsreader) George Alagiah abandoned objectivity to advocate for a particular cause, so outraged was he at what he was seeing around him.
Simpson evidently understood and approved, and foreshadowed more instances of the kind.
Nowadays, of course, the intrusion of BBC reporters' own sympathies and prejudices into their reportage has become, if not commonplace, then certainly a matter for concern, as indeed is the case regarding certain broadcasters on the ABC, Australia's answer to the BBC, its Middle East correspondent Sophie McNeill having before her controversial appointment made no secret of the fact that she considers herself an activist as well as a journalist.
The following 12-minute video dates to 2014. It features Jake Lynch, the BDS-happy associate professor who heads the so-called Peace and Conflict Centre at the University of Sydney. In his discussion of his background as a BBC presenter he refers to how "peace journalism" informed his broadcasts, how he steered interviews in order to incorporate it, how the BBC effectively allowed him to take the line he chose, and how useful a tool it is in shaping audience responses to international conflicts.
The video provides an insight into former anti-Apartheid (the real apartheid, in South Africa) activist Lynch's anti-Israel bias and is an indicator of the BBC's leftist bias, and lack of concern for the objectivity incumbent upon it by its Charter and Producers' Guidelines. (The academic Boycott of Israel, incidentally, raises its ugly head at 9:23).
Yesterday, in the wake of yet another Islamic atrocity (the Nice tragedy), conservative Australian columnist Andrew Bolt wrote an article in the Herald-Sun which caught the fancy of an Australian television personality named Sonia Kruger (see my previous post).
Note how the BBC has chosen to report this Aussie incident, giving emphasis to Ms Kruger's critics and deriders of her "as a mother" remark in explaining how Islamic terror worries her. Some examples from the report:
(Who's Pickering? Oh, some comedian or other.)
Hanson-Young is a Greens senator of whom the ABC is inordinately fond, as indicated by the vast amounts of airtime its new bulletins give her to deride the nation's "turn back the boats" policy and other issues connected with asylum:
Among the critics of Ms Kruger highlighted by the BBC, a discordant voice:
I should have thought that being a mother, and therefore having a stake in the future of this country and what kind of place it will be for her child[ren] makes a mother a very qualified person indeed.
But the opportunity to mock (and demonise) was, after all, the only reason the Corporation, awash with Islamophile leftists, reported the story in the first place, wasn't it?
I'm correct, aren't I, Jon Donnison (here spoon-feeding the not-to-be-trusted viewing public with a propaganda-laden tweet of his own)?:
In the same vein, the Facebook page of QandA, the ABC's equivalent to the BBC's Question Time (yesterday's show here), is full of leftist partisanship, and its studio audience similarly stacked.
As always, the terrible twosome are in a three-way relationship, the Guardian being their partner in bias. But at least the Guardian can claim entitlement to vent its propaganda: the ABC and the BBC cannot, since they are public broadcasters financed by the taxpayer. And obligated by their charters to be objective.
I've been catching up with the most recent posts on one of the websites I most admire, the rhetorically-titled Is the BBC Biased?, and note the number of times the authors have had reason to draw our attention to the outrageous leftist propaganda that the BBC, despite its obligations to be objective, in reporting, is pushing regarding the current migration crisis facing Europe.
No wonder this video (featuring exasperated Britons, fearful and furious at what now seems like a Third World invasion of their Continent and existential threat to its way of life) berating the egregious BBC radio host Stephen Nolan, has gone viral; all Nolan could do in response was to insult them, thus underlining what one of them calls the "guilt trip" foisted on the public by such types as he:
Typifying the biased agenda foisted onto the public by the British national broadcaster are the reports by funereal-toned Fergal Keane that feature on the BBC's website, in which contempt for European civilisation and the Europeans who wish to preserve it is not far from the surface. It's the same leftist mindset that regards everything the British Empire ever achieved as inherently evil.
A mindset that believes that the "victims" of "imperialism" are entitled to grab whatever they can:
This week, in a typically sharp and robust piece, Australian conservative columnist Andrew Bolt complained that the ABC's Paul Barry has twisted and traduced what Bolt wrote here:
"I argued that the tragic picture of drowned toddler Aylan Kurdi did not show what most of the media claimed - a refugee fleeing death in Syria.
The picture was more complicated, I said. The boy’s family had actually lived in Turkey in safety for three years, and a key part of the father’s decision to go to Europe was to have his teeth fixed.
Paul Barry of [the ABC's] Media Watch is angry with this dissent, and last night tried to dismiss it in ways I think are deeply misleading"
But it's not only Paul Barry who has taken pot shots at Bolt. It would appear that the woman dubbed "La Trioli" has made a (subtle) dig at Bolt too.
Although ABC reporters and presenters are obligated, like their BBC counterparts, to be objective, this obligation is honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Virginia Trioli, the very handsomely paid co-host of ABC News Breakfast and ABC News 24, has a weekly column in a publication called The Weekly Review, which is delivered free to mailboxes.
I don't know whether Ms Trioli's column is similarly gratis but I do know that she's free with her views, as befits a column titled "Mouthing Off". In the current issue of the giveaway paper she "seeks understanding" for "asylum seekers" (yes, for the ABC all of the seething mass of Third World humanity desperate to enter the West are, it seems, genuine "asylum seekers") by those who dismiss them as "economoc migrants".
The half-Italian Ms Trioli writes, inter alia:
"The story - and the distortions of that story - of the father of little Aylan Kurdi is instructive....
The journey of the contemporary asylum seeker is challenging to us because it does not take a straight line from, say, napalmed village in Vietnam to refugee boats to the Australian shore. This route travels through countries of equally little hope - economically, socially - in search of a future. It's similar to the journey my grandfather made before the outbreak of World War II. First to America, then to Australia and then calling for his little family and first son to take a boat and join him...."
As for the oft-made analogy between the plight of European Jewry in the 1930s and the situation of today's migratory Muslims, blogger Edgar Davidson has a graphic comment:
