The BBC and how it treats Islam and Christianity. A B-BBC reader informs;
“The BBC continues its assault on Christianity and the Bible ( ‘a monstrous book that does more evil than good’ Melvyn Bragg suggests many people think).
Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou has been given a primetime BBC Two series, ‘The Bible’s Buried Secrets’, in which she makes a number of startling suggestions. The good doctor works at Exeter University which is heavily funded by Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood.
She states that: “I’m an atheist ….as an academic, I think you leave faith at the door.” “Don’t forget that the biblical writers are male and it’s a very male-dominated world. Women were second-class citizens, seen as property.”
When have we ever heard such criticisms being made of the Koran which even now propagates the very same attitudes towards women…..but the BBC tells us: ‘Islam also teaches that men and women are equal in the sight of Allah. They are individually accountable for their actions, and will be judged equally by Allah. However, although men and women are equal, they are not the same. They have different purposes. It is part of Allah’s design and purpose for men and women to have different physical characteristics; likewise it is the duty of a man to provide for the financial needs of his family, and for a woman to look after the home and family.’
Whereas Christianity gets a rougher treatment: ‘No one can follow these teachings perfectly, and there will be occasions when Christians are guilty of prejudice and discrimination.Many people think that the Christian Church is sexist. It does not treat men and women equally.The teaching of St Paul is often quoted to support the way some churches today treat women.
From the extracts below, it would seem that he believed that the role of women was different to that of men, and secondary to it….although Christianity teaches that everyone should be equal and should be treated the same, this doesn’t always happen….Archbishop Sentamu has done a lot to raise awareness of racism in British society and in the Anglican church.’The same BBC that tells us that under Catholicism Europe was descending into madness and devotion to God was becoming an obsession that ended in a bloodbath….their fervour for contact with God led to darkness, even savagery, religion and violence intertwined.but Islam is a religion of Peace….’Islam is a religion of peace in which fighting and war are seen only as a last resorts….One aim of Holy War may be to create a democracy where people are free to live their lives without beliefs and politics being imposed on them. There must be no hatred or vengeance in the fighting.’whereas the Christians and Jews are happier to go to war:The Sixth Commandment (from the Ten Commandments, given to Moses) says, ‘You shall not murder,’ but there are occasions when the Jewish people are told by God to attack people who oppose them.Christian involvement in war…In the past there have been many occasions when Christians have fought wars and when Christian countries have fought each other including:the Crusadesthe First and Second World Warswars in Vietnam, Korea, the Falklands/Malvinos, South Africa, and Northern IrelandJesus’ anger
There are two occasions in the gospels when Jesus is obviously angry. One of these is in the Temple in Jerusalem: ‘It is written,’ he said to them. ‘My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers.’Matthew 21:12-13Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, ‘May you never bear fruit again!’ Immediately the tree withered.’Matthew 21:18-19Such an angry man…no wonder Christians are so violent.
The BBC’s religious output is overseen by Muslim Aaqil Ahmed, head of religion and ethics.
‘The Religion of Peace’
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
As Ibn Warraq points out in his Foreward to to Andrew Bostom’s book (editor): ‘The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims’ (2005):
“But long before the transformatiom of Europe into Eurabia, many intellectuals had continued to treat Islam as a taboo subject for many reasons, including:Political correctness leading to Islamic correctness;
The fear of playing into the hands of racists or reactionaries to the detriment of the West’s Muslim minorities;Commercial or economic motives;Feelings of post-colonial guilt (where the entire planet’s problems are attributed to the west’s wicked ways and intentions);Plain physical fear;and the intellectual terrorism of writers such as Edward Said.”
http://www.andrewbostom.org/loj//content/view/61/44/
I would say that the critique of ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq applies to what I can only call: Islam Not BBC (INBBC).
Wow. Both religions have tenets regarding the inequality of women, yet one is excused and justified (equal treatment in the afterlife, so all is well), while the other is criticized.
Are there any direct quotes that link the BBC messages above? The Melvyn Bragg and Stavrakopoulou ones are attributed but there are some that say things like “the BBC tells us”.
I do agree that this does seem to be the BBC’s opinions on the two religions but I don’t see any direct quotes.
The quotes are from the BBC GCSE revison notes.
Let’s face it, if your boss at the BBC asks you to write anything about Islam it is only common sense to put on your rose tinted glasses.
I’m not saying one false word would get you the full Salman Rushdie treatment but why bother to find out just what would happen?
Good post.
I watched Stavrakopoulou last night and couldn’t believe the bizarre things she was saying. She suggested that the Hebrew Bible was making grand claims about King David’s “Empire”, when it actually does nothing of the sort. Any sane person would read the two Books of Samuel and realise that what’s being recounted in its pages is a simple, if not romanticised, story about a Bronze Age king (I write as one with a Degree in Biblical Studies).
She then seemed to contest that the authors of the texts concerning the House of David only wrote the books only so as to justify the state of Israel, created in the 20th century – (well, she really questioned their motivation in such a way that it looked like that;s what she was saying)!
The maddening anti-Christian and anti-Jewish sentiments were just sickening… Apparently, Christians or Jews who lead archaeological digs do so “with a trowel in one hand and a bible in the other” – no mention of what Muslims or atheists use (maybe she genuinely believes that these two groups have no agendas)!
Also, she suggested at one point that Jerusalem had undergone several incarnations (true), and then seemed to list them chronologically. In doing so she said that there were “Arab, then Christian” settlers. In fact, the first Christians in Jerusalem (not of Jewish descent, that is) were Arabs – 650 years before the Muslim religion was invented (and forced upon them). She also seemed convinced that all Palestinians are Muslim – and obviously was at pains to point out how oppressed they are (by the Jewish state). But, she said nothing of the 30% of Palestinaians who have been Christian for 2000 years, and who have been persecuted by the Muslim community – which has resulted in a mass Christian exodus from the Holy Land.
By the way, where did the other quotes in the above post come from, I’d really like to know.
Islam the Religion of Peace don’t make me laugh!
How long do you think it will be before somebody pissed off with the Pro-Islamic agenda goes loopy and decided to go shooting at the bBC. The irony really would be if the idiot doing the shooting belongs to the …religion of Peace.
This truly is insane, but given DV’s recent output it’s hardly surprising:
“The BBC continues its assault on Christianity and the Bible (‘a monstrous book that does more evil than good’ Melvyn Bragg suggests many people think).”
Listen to this “quote” [cough] for yourself here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zmc6f
Then onto Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou. Quoted as saying:
“I’m an atheist ….as an academic, I think you leave faith at the door.”
What she actually said was:
“I’m an atheist with a huge respect for religion, not just ancient religions but modern religions too,”
Then, sometime later:
“As a biblical scholar, I see what I do as an academic discipline, a branch of history like any other. And, as an academic, I think you leave faith at the door.”
Then for no apparent reason this is compared to what “BBC tells us”. Taken (uncredited) from the BBC GCSE Bitesize pages, where apparently it says:
“No one can follow these teachings perfectly, and there will be occasions when Christians are guilty of prejudice and discrimination.”
Except, what it actually says is:
“No one can follow these teachings perfectly, and there will be occasions when Christians, like those of other faiths, are guilty of prejudice and discrimination.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/rs/prejudice/christianityrev2.shtml
I could could go on, but then the final lovely smear:
“The BBC’s religious output is overseen by Muslim Aaqil Ahmed, head of religion and ethics.”
Excet that the “GCSE Bitesize” pages were published in 2006 and Aaqil Ahmed started his job in 2010.
Sorry Dez, you can delude yourself for as long as you want, apart from your faith in the BBC, there’s no redemption for you as far as I can see if that is your best bitesize effort.
Oh no dezdimoanas back !!
So Dezzy did say what has been posted or not ?
and how the hell can some one can claim to be a atheist and respect every religion going ??as that would mean she also respects Satanists and jedi and all those lovely cults that commit mass suicide and that makes her look a bit stupid ! but to be fair she did kick Israel and we know how the ministry loves that ! also lob in a bit of mud raking about the main western religions skip Islam as yer new boss Muslim Aaqil Ahmed 2010-here after will not be happy if you mention the war! and hey presto we have a winner !
Dez, (weirdly when I type your name into my iPad it spellchecks to fez. How appropriate.
Do you not think ‘ i’m an atheist….’ actually insinuated an edit otherwise why put …
They were her words just edited. If you don’t agree with edits then you can’t support auntie because they usually slash the crap out of peoples quotes to build their own story.
Where does it state that Mr Ahmed was in charge when the bite size propaganda was written? In fact it would be very naive to assume BBC anti Christian bias is only a new phenomenon , mr Ahmed is just one way of cementing it.
Many observers not just those here present resent the sneering way the beeb treats Christianity and Judaism and the’ light touch’ that they give the ROP.
As one example I have noticed hundreds of jokes against paedophile priests as if the church of Rome invented paedophilia and yet no jokes about muslim suicide bombers. No jokes about routine obscene genital mutilation of young teenage girls in some Muslim countries. No jokes about intolerance to Christianity widespread in majority Muslim countries. No tits like Stewart Lee get given my money to try and tear my religion apart while pulling his punches ref Islam.
You can forensically pick holes but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s a duck.
@ Paddy .. And no jokes about the disregard for children by letting homosexuals adopt and foster in complete disregard of the evidence that paedophilia amongst homosexuals is hugely higher than among heteros. No, instead, Christians are banned from adopting/fostering because they dont think homosexuality is normal.
Oh – ¡Happy St Paddy’s Day!
>>Then onto Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou. Quoted as saying:
“I’m an atheist ….as an academic, I think you leave faith at the door.”
What she actually said was:
“I’m an atheist with a huge respect for religion, not just ancient religions but modern religions too,”
Then, sometime later:
“As a biblical scholar, I see what I do as an academic discipline, a branch of history like any other. And, as an academic, I think you leave faith at the door.”<<
Yes Dez/Scott, we know she didn’t say “…”. One would need to be an illiterate moron not to appreciate that.
In a recent thread you said you dont know what British and Christian values are. Thank you for sharing your expertise with us in this thread.
Aaqil began his career at the BBC in 1992 working primarily for BBC Birmingham on programmes such as Panorama, Network East and Bollywood Or Bust.
Dez, Aaqil is a Beeboid through and through.
Despite our obvious disagreements on the BBC I will say that if you are correct about this selective editing in the article then it is to be condemned. Certainly the case against the BBC is not helped by such tactics. We need careful, painstaking and conscientuous expositions.
That said that the BBC appointed this woman to the position, of all possible candidates, is rather telling.
And her comment that academics, like historians, can leave faith at the door is nonsense. No one can formulate ideas of man and his history without having some, if implicit, metaphysical,theological, philosophical and moral values, beliefs and perspectives. This woman certainly seems to have them as can be seen by her talk about genders and sexism.
The bBC appears to live in an alternative universe where they cannot see how pathetic they have become in defending Islamic mores as humane while deriding everybody else as only evil. For example here is a story from yesterday from London:
Harrow woman convicted of keeping Tanzanian as slave
Reading that article while the bBC does try to inform you what they can about the story they leave out salient parts such as Mrs Khan (who it appears they go out of their way in which to ensure they don’t mention her name) isn’t actually from Harrow but is in fact a Pakistani national. That she is the parent to two mentality handicapped children due to the Paksitani (and Islamic) penchant for keeping it in the family.
That actually Muslims see nothing wrong in slavery and that it is inshrined in their unholy Koran. (As an ex muslim I have earned the right to refer to the disgusting Koran as a book of hate, so if any liberal wankers wish to complain about me saying so, ask yourself this: What does the unholky koran say about apostates?)
However instead of reporting and linking in how treating people as slaves in the Uk is common practice for Paksitani muslims the bBC keeps mum.
Disgusting
Dez, the Exeter academic should sit down with her BBC interlocutors and show her respect in a prime time series on the derivation of the Koran, perhaps comparing the claim of angelic dictation with that of Joseph Smith of the Church of Latter Day Saints.
She won’t ‘cos the deconstruction of the Biblical tradition is fun. A parlour game for atheist academics.
Islam, a world religion with universalist claims based on the unmediated demands of a monotheist God-figure who communicated at a point in history and claims to SUPERCEDE and ADOPT the Jewish and Christian line of revelation, is a worthy object of her study.
Perhaps the findings will find a ready market among the broadcasters in the 50 Islamic countries gagging to be impressed by her incisive atheist insights.
‘A monstrous book that does more evil than good.’ Was Melvyn Braggadaccio reviewing his own execrable ‘A Time to Dance’? Or was it his considered opinion of Vidal Sassoon’s seminal, ‘Upkeep of the Male Barnet in Later Life’? Just what does go on underneath his luxuriant busby? I hear the whirr of lots of little cultural Marxist wheels. And while we’re at it, why doesn’t he get a grip of his son, Billy? The ‘Beast of Barking’. The rabid multiculturalist that resides, in splendid isolation, by the Dorset seaside.
I can just see it now bomber jacket, dr martins, a nice earl grey with a Vienna slice and a red wedge. Classic urban revolutionary showing solidarity with the poor and oppressed urban masses by buggering off to the land of miss marple.
Dear BBC,
Here is a fascinating idea for your religion producers to get going with.
In 1972, during the restoration of the Great Mosque of Sana’a, in Yemen, laborers working in a loft between the structure’s inner and outer roofs stumbled across a remarkable gravesite, although they did not realize it at the time.
It contained nothing more, in fact, than an unappealing mash of old parchment and paper documents—damaged books and individual pages of Arabic text, fused together by centuries of rain and dampness.
In 1979 a visiting German scholar took an interest. He persuaded the German government to organize and fund a restoration project.
Soon after the project began, it became clear that the hoard was a fabulous example of what is sometimes referred to as a “paper grave”—in this case the resting place for, among other things, tens of thousands of fragments from close to a thousand different parchment codices of the Koran,
Some of the parchment pages in the Yemeni hoard seemed to date back to the seventh and eighth centuries A.D., or Islam’s first two centuries—they were fragments, in other words, of perhaps the oldest Korans in existence. What’s more, some of these fragments revealed small but intriguing aberrations from the standard Koranic text. Such aberrations, though not surprising to textual historians, are troublingly at odds with the orthodox Muslim belief that the Koran as it has reached us today is quite simply the perfect, timeless, and unchanging Word of God.
The mainly secular effort to reinterpret the Koran—in part based on textual evidence such as that provided by the Yemeni fragments—is disturbing and offensive to many Muslims, just as attempts to reinterpret the Bible and the life of Jesus are disturbing and offensive to many conservative Christians. Nevertheless, there are scholars, Muslims among them, who feel that such an effort, which amounts essentially to placing the Koran in history, will provide fuel for an Islamic revival of sorts—a reappropriation of tradition, a going forward by looking back. Thus far confined to scholarly argument, this sort of thinking can be nonetheless very powerful and—as the histories of the Renaissance and the Reformation demonstrate—can lead to major social change. The Koran, after all, is currently the world’s most ideologically influential text.
BBC, what are you waiting for?
So, this nice Francesca Stavrakopoulou is based at Exeter University, eh? Oh yes, here she is: http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/theology/staff/stavrakopoulou/
Now, this Exeter University. Is it the one getting £75,000,000 in funding from isalic States? Oh yes, here it is:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/mar/14/gaddafi-regime-university-links-under-scrutiny
Well, who’d have thought it, eh?
‘isalic’ – blimey, that should be Islamic
On the plus side, at least we can pass on the good news to Roger Harrabin and pals: after all those years of ranting about secret denialist conspiracies, we’ve found finally a real case of oil money being used to fund the production of bogus studies.
This is the typical sucker punch style program that has been on Channel 4. Have a title ‘Bible’s Buried Secrets’ that only people of faith will be interested in. Then once you get them to watch promote some Da Vinci Code type nonsense. And who was behind these programs at Channel 4, Aaqil Ahmed the same guy that commisioned this program.
You can see that the MBBC want to delegitimise Israels claims to the land. No David, no Solomon, no state of Israel. And if Yahweh had a wife this will confirm the Muslim belief that the Jews corrupted their scriptures and the Muslims were the firsts true Monotheists who preached the original religion of Islam.
Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou should get a prize, Dhimmi of the year.
And I would like to see the BBC commision a documentary with Ms Stavrakopoulou, investigating weither Abraham and Ishmael built the Kaba at Mecca. I think this is a very important question. But with Aaqil Ahmed at the purse strings, I don’t think this will happen too soon.
And now the news from the Religion of Peace.
“Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not.”
I was almost physically sick watching the first of those videos. It’s absolutely frightening and shocking. At least in the second one there was Mr. Said putting the case for the truth against that shrill sow and her evil lies.
Dez, why do you and your BBC chums support scum like this? Unless you condemn it wholeheartedly, you have put yourself on the side of evil and make yourself out to be a monster. I know you will read this, I just want you to admit whether you are evil or are willing to condemn these teachings.
Dez, if you choose not to reply then I know you support the idea of another holocaust against the Jews.
The second video was fascinating- Nasty Jews betraying Hitler and tricking him into military mistakes. Who’d have thought it?
The second one had Livingstone’s mate Quarwadi (however you spell it) distinguishing himself.
But no need to worry, Labour’s mayoral candidate knows the translation is false, it was translated by Israelis.
Would be great the get 5 Arab translators to separately give the ‘correct’ translations.
My betting is you’ll get about 2-3 translations at best saying what Quarwadi was saying, and 2-3 translations each one having him saying something completely different to the other. Would be an interesting experiment, and then present the evidence to Labour’s Mayoral Candidate and see what he has to say.
Interesting BBC related discussion on CiFWatch a couple of days ago. The comment by ‘Max’ addresses the topic of this thread.
For my own curiosity. Could someone upload The Bible’s Buried Secrets to Youtube?
An impressive post. I have done a little blog in which I refer to it:
http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/03/delegitimising-israel-by-delegitimising.html
Excellent blog Daphne, thanks for sharing.
Muslims dint like Ahtiests. They may just tolerate Christians or Jews, and at a pass, leave homosexuals alive for a while, but Athiests, that is those why deny the very existence of allah, are for the chop.
Should you be underway in an Islamic land and should you find yourself on the Arab Street (off the beaten track). Don’t let it be understood that you are an ‘atheist’.
Rule 1. Never, never talk about religion.
You’ld be safer announcing that you are a paedophile on the BBC.
I kid you not.