Turkey Voting For Christmas

 

 

Interesting take on the world from the BBC.

It has been telling us recently that Turkey is in a dilemma concerning ISIS.  On the one hand it doesn’t want a terrorist state on its borders, on the other it doesn’t want to see the Kurds becoming more established and powerful.

So Turkey has plumped to support ISIS…probably not too hard a decision for the Islamist Erdogan who no doubt fancies resurrecting the Ottoman Empire.

But it was that suggestion that Turkey didn’t want a terrorist state on its borders that caught my ear.

Such a stance might also reflect the opinion of Israel as it faces the reality of what a terrorist state on its borders looks like….one run by Hamas, an organisation that has been declared a terrorist organisation by the EU and the USA….and yet supported by the likes of BBC journalists such as Jon Donnison. (Here he is still pumping out pro-Muslim propaganda and anti-Western or Jewish material)

However you won’t hear the BBC framing Israel’s ‘dilemma’ in those terms….Hamas are of course ‘militants’ or ‘resisters’ in the BBC’s Newspeak lexicon.

 

 

 

Peston’s Megalomania

10347175_645431642241701_5850309446829886397_n

 

 

Robert Peston wants to take over the world…the BBC has spent years railing against the ‘world’s policeman’ role taken on by the West but all change now, apparently it is a vital part of a healthy and wealthy world….and it gives the BBC another stick to beat ‘The West’ with as, for example,  Ebola is declared all the fault of ‘The West’ by the BBC…

The West’s failure to pre-empt Ebola

In a globalised world, neither money nor viruses [or Islamist terrorists…ed] are great respecters of national borders. They both tend to move with the movement of humans, and they are both hard to detect when humans want to hide them or don’t know they are carrying them.

That is why effective global governance – institutions that make decisions in the interests of the world, not competing nations – are so increasingly important for our health and wealth (by the way, don’t pipe up about the environment and global warming being another example – yes of course that’s right).

This seems to be a BBC approved theme as I heard a Beeboid utter similar sentiments during the week….

‘Isn’t it awful that the West didn’t apply resources to defeat Ebola decades ago!!?’

 

The BBC has  a bit of a cheek on two counts when taking that line…firstly as mentioned it opposed any move by America and Britain to conduct a liberal interventionist set of policies…and secondly the BBC utterly refused to tackle the question of immigration and any threats that might pose to the resident population, either socially, culturally, economically, politically or in realtion to health.

Farage has been denounced for his belief that immigrants with lethal diseases should not be allowed into the country and now we find that TB in Britain is rising so fast that we will soon have more TB sufferers than the USA.…and immigration is the cause of that as TB was essentially eradicated from Britain….as the Sunday Times reported today…and ironically ‘we’ seem to be exporting it back to Pakistan.

 

The Mail actually takes Farage’s side in the HIV debate….

Immigrants, HIV and the true cost to the NHS: Should the ‘International Health Service’ be treating patients who come here with the killer disease

Whatever the arguments, the fact is that care is very costly and takes a long time.
Also, once here, it is hard to remove any migrant or asylum seeker with HIV or any other life-threatening ailment.
This is because of the way in which the NHS generously operates and because failed asylum seekers from countries with poor healthcare systems can claim that returning home would condemn them to a ‘certain death’.
They often go to court to fight any decision to repatriate them, on the grounds it would breach their human rights.
Britain has proud record of giving sanctuary to refugees – whatever problems they may bring with them.
Yet the question remains: should Britain – and our now International Health Service – be responsible for the expensive, life-long treatment of illnesses of countless migrants from every part of the world?

 

The BBC has the nerve to report this, Labour ‘shares’ immigration concerns, insists Harman, without one mention of Labour’s mendacious role in flooding the country with millions of immigrants swamping schools , hospitals, prisons and housing services.

The BBC reports that Harman says ‘Labour must talk more about immigration and demonstrate that it was not just listening but “shared” people’s concerns about its impact on jobs, pay and public services.’

The problem is that when Andrew Neather’s revelations came out about Labour’s lies and what was essentially a form of ethnic cleansing the BBC utterly ignored what would have been a political bombshell that could have destroyed Labour.  Neather admitted the policy was a deliberate attempt to literally change the face of Britain and it was to be done regardless of the cost in jobs and social cohesion in the UK.

 

Now Peston witters on about global government and Ebola but the BBC is happy to hide the dangerous health concerns that immigration raises in order to keep the borders open and the poeple in ignorance…and it turns out, in danger.

Even today there is no mention of the TB report on the BBC…and when, if, it eventually does report you can guarantee any link to immigration will be ‘managed’ out of the story.

The BBC blames the West for the rise of Ebola…perhaps it should have a look in the mirror and see who is partly responsible for the rise of TB on our own doorstep.

 

 

 

 

 

The Left Stuff….’strangling our ability to talk to ourselves and to the world’.

Douglas Carswell in his victory speech in Clacton denounced the ‘cosy consensus, corporate politics’ that believes the only place to be is in the ‘centre’ of the political spectrum and which creates what is in effect a ‘one party state’ where the electorate don’t get a real choice and their views on subjects such as immigration or Europe could be safely ignored because a politician would know that no other party would introduce effective policies that would deal with these issues as the electorate would like…therefore he could safely ignore the electorate whilst perhaps, to keep the mob placated and quiescent, making a few suitably pro-active anti-immigration comments with no intention to implement them….and able to do this because the most powerful and influential part of the news media, the BBC, will not challenge those non-policies on immigration and rigorouly explore the issues…..it always tells us of the benefits but consistently fails to mention the severe downsides of immigration.

Part of the problem has been that the dominant Liberal Media has driven the agenda and almost forced the Tories to move leftward as Cameron decided that he had to ‘decontaminate’ the ‘nasty party’ so that the BBC et al would give it some favourable coverage…turns out he was badly wrong as Clacton proves.

The BBC has been all too ready to impose its world view upon us and force everyone else to dance to its tune.  Part of the problem with the BBC is that it is made up of people who come mostly from the same backgrounds, who have almost identical views on the world and whether by design or not, shape the BBC’s output to fit with that mindset.

Nick Cohen thinks that is harmful and that the ‘Arts’ gene pool is too limited….not enough from the ‘shallow end’.

The privileged few are tightening their grip on the arts

In writing this piece, I do not mean to disparage the young, privately educated journalists I see around me, the sprigs of the Fox and Irons families, the commissioning editors of the BBC and the staff of the National Theatre and Royal Opera House. They are all nice people. But there’s the rub. They are too fucking nice for Britain’s good. Their niceness is a noose that is strangling our ability to talk to ourselves and to the world.

 

In other words all we get is the usual ‘group think’ which only talks to itself about itself and their own issues, or of other issues, but purely from their own point of view.

You can see the effect it has had on politics with Cameron attempting to turn the Conservatives into a BBC approved centrist party delivering all things to all men…and ending up delivering nothing but a liberal approved consensus  politics…a position ironically so much derided by the same BBC commenators who say they want conviction politics but who also deride the ‘nasty’ Tories and their right wing policies…now better known as UKIP….this is after all the BBC who now holds Russell Brand up as the next political Messiah with his anti-politics message.  The BBC’s corralling of politicians into the centre ground has been the defining factor in turning politics into a non-contact sport where everyone basically has the same ideas without ideology, conviction or principle.

Janet Daley explains the problem with that consensus politics propped up and defended by the BBC as part of its progressive project, its Charter ordained imperative to ‘sustain citizenship and civil society’ (Though just who decides what that Society should look like seems to be left to the BBC…which is the problem):

There is to be no arguing or debating with its assumptions because those who oppose it are simply beneath contempt: fascists, reactionaries, bigots, provincial know-nothings. And this derisive dismissal cuts right across party lines. Compare Gordon Brown’s description of the Labour-voter who dared to express her anxiety about immigration as just a “bigoted woman”, with the sentiment expressed recently by a Tory commentator that the Clacton voters who could not accept the party’s modernising agenda should be ignored until they die off. This is a degree of open, undisguised contempt for the electorate that is unlike anything I have seen in my lifetime.

I thought the basic principle of democracy was that leaders were elected who would embody the will of the people, not that the people had to comply with the will of the leaders or be rejected as unworthy.

 

That contempt for the People is only possible where the dominant state broadcaster controls the message…..essentially if something isn’t on the BBC it can be safely ignored by politicians.

 

Here is Roger Scruton’s take on what has happened to politics and the Conservative Party:
[In the Progressive Liberla’s world] no freedom is absolute, and all must be qualified for the common good. Until subject to a rule of law, freedom is merely “the dust and powder of individuality”. But a rule of law requires a shared allegiance, by which people entrust their collective destiny to sovereign institutions that can speak and decide in their name. This shared allegiance is not, as Rousseau and others argued, a contract among the living. It is a partnership between the living, the unborn and the dead – a continuous trust that no generation can pillage for its own advantage.
Our situation today mirrors that faced by Burke. Now, as then, abstract ideas and utopian schemes threaten to displace practical wisdom from the political process. Instead of the common law of England we have the abstract idea of human rights, slapped upon us by European courts whose judges care nothing for our unique social fabric. Instead of our inherited freedoms we have laws forbidding “hate speech” and discrimination that can be used to control what we say and what we do in ever more intrusive ways. The primary institutions of civil society – marriage and the family – have no clear endorsement from our new political class. Most importantly, our parliament has, without consulting the people, handed over sovereignty to Europe, thereby losing control of our borders and our collective assets, the welfare state included.

[The conservative party] seems unaware that in the hearts of conservative voters, social continuity and national identity take precedence over all other issues. Only now, when wave after wave of immigrants seek the benefit of our hard-won assets and freedoms, do the people fully grasp what loss of sovereignty means. And still the party hesitates to reverse the policies that brought us to this pass, while the old guard of Europeanists defend those policies in economic terms, seemingly unaware that the question is not about economics at all.

 

However, thinking is an unusual and precarious exercise for Conservatives.
This is not because they are more stupid than their socialist or liberal rivals, although John Stuart Mill famously declared them to be so. It is because they believe that good government is not grounded in abstract ideas but in concrete situations, and that concrete situations are hard to grasp. Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls. But applying them raises the question: to what or to whom? Which group of people is to be made more equal, and who is to be made more free?
Those are not questions to be answered in the abstract. They are questions of identity: who we are, and why we are entitled to use that very pronoun – “we” – to describe us.
governments are elected by a specific people in a specific place, and must meet the people’s needs – including the most important of their needs, which is the need to be bound to their neighbours in a relation of trust. If we cease to maintain a “specific people in a specific place”, then all political principles will be pointless, since there will be no community with an interest in obeying them. That is why, in all the post-war political debates in our country, Conservatives have emphasised the defence of the realm, the maintenance of national borders, and the unity of the nation. It is why they are now entering a period of self-doubt, as the nation disintegrates into its historically established segments, while European regulations dissolve our boundaries.
Abstract ideals, Conservatives argue, are inevitably disruptive, since they undermine the slow, steady work of real politics, which is a work of negotiation and compromise between people whose interests will never coincide.
Seeing politics in that way, however, Conservatives are exposed to the complaint that they have no positive vision, and nothing to offer us, save the status quo – with all its injustices and inequalities, and all its entrenched corruption. It is precisely in facing this charge that the real thinking must be done. In How to Be a Conservative, I offer a response to this ongoing complaint, and in doing so distance Conservatism from what its leftist critics call “neoliberalism”. Conservatism, I argue, is not a matter of defending global capitalism at all costs, or securing the privileges of the few against the many. It is a matter of defending civil society, maintaining autonomous institutions, and defending the citizen against the abuse of power. Its underlying motive is not greed or the lust for power but simply attachment to a way of life.
If we look at the big issues facing us today – the EU, mass immigration, the union, Islamic extremism, the environment – we will surely see that the Conservative view rightly identifies what is now at stake: namely the survival of our way of life.

Conservatives are not very good at articulating the point, and left-liberal censorship intimidates those who attempt to do so. But it is a fault in the socialist and liberal ideas that they can be so easily articulated – a proof that they avoid the real, hard philosophical task, which is that of seeing civil society as it is, and recognising that it is easier to destroy good things in the name of an ideal than to maintain them as a reality.

 

 

 

Carswell Vs Orwell

 

UKIP romped home in Clacton and put the frighteners on Labour in Heywood and Middleton.

The BBC are not happy.

The Today programme dragged in Matthew Parris (08:53), a man they know has a visceral, almost psychotic, hatred of UKIP and anyone who wants to limit immigration.  The BBC no doubt expected some bile and were not disappointed as Parris pronounced UKIP’s, and right wing Tories’, immigration and Europe policies as nutty and the Party as bigoted and racist.

Parris admits he doesn’t have to be respectful to voters in Clacton…and indeed he isn’t…showing complete contempt for them saying ‘This part of Britain is simply wrong about immigration and Europe.’

Parris’ prescription for how UKIP should proceed in future if it wants to win more seats…..

‘Stop looking like a bigoted, nasty, rightwing party.  Carswell’s already beginning to feel uncomfortable.’

 

The BBC immediately took up that line about Carswell feeling uncomfortable with UKIP’s immigration policies, almost instantly repeating it on 5Live using Carswell’s victory speech as evidence…….the Guardian also uses the same interpretation….

In a clear sign that he will use his position as Ukip’s first elected MP to ensure that it acts as a tolerant agent of change, Carswell said his party must have a broad appeal.

“To my new party I offer these thoughts. Humility when we win, modesty when we are proved right. If we speak with passion let it always be tempered by compassion.

“We must be a party for all Britain and all Britons, first and second generation as much as every other. Our strength must lie in our breadth. If we stay true to that there is nothing we cannot achieve.”

 

I would suggest that he isn’t saying he is uncomfortable with UKIP’s immigration policies, that is a disingenuous and deliberately misleading reading of his words by the BBC et al who are subtly trying to put the boot into UKIP’s policies….after all he’s just joined the Party and has long argued for immigration control.

The BBC also came up with a couple of other interesting thoughts….UKIP voters are all white, old and working class….well as UKIP took 60% and 39% of the votes in the two by-elections  that would have to have been a remarkably unique turn out.

Guess that is just the BBC wishing to dismiss UKIP’s support as ignorant, racist and out of touch people who haven’t caught up with the modern world.

The second ‘interesting thought’ (12:10) was that Carswell’s victory wasn’t in fact a vote for UKIP but for a very popular local MP, Douglas Carswell.

That is undermined by a simple look at Heywood and Middleton where UKIP almost stole the election from Labour and their voting perecentage increased by 60%.

That might suggest it is the policies that people are voting for and not just the person…never mind that in 2010 UKIP didn’t put up a candidate in Clacton and  supported Carswell….presumably because he had views that aligned well with theirs.  A vote for him was a vote for UKIP’s policies in essence…the BBC is yet again trying to spin against UKIP.

A very Orwellian rewriting of events by the BBC.

I look forward to the Now Show tomorrow…..three weeks in a row when they trash Miliband?  UKIP is always trashed regardless.

 

 

 

HEYWOOD AND MIDDLETON…

Well then, it’s been a big 24 hours for UKIP. Clacton was EVEN more of an impressive win than “the pundits” were suggesting and then there was UKIP coming within just over 600 votes of unseating Labour in Heywood and Middleton. As regards the latter, I notice the BBC parrot the Labour spin that they “increased their share of the vote”. Yes, but they also LOST 9000 voters from last time round and a safe Labour seat is now a very tight marginal. The BBC, like much of the rest of the media, have worked on the assumption that UKIP can only win in Conservative heartlands. Last evening proved just how fatally wrong that assumption could be next May. The BBC’s hero, Miliband, is now every bit exposed by UKIP as Cameron is, and it will be fascinating to see how they handle this issue between now and next May.

*Does the BBC think that most immigrants are Noble Prize winners & scientists?

I received this thoughtful piece from a Biased BBC reader and wanted to share.

“On Monday (7th of October) the BBC informed us – or at least James Gallagher did – that “Nobel Prize winner John O’Keefe” has a big problem with the the government’s rules on immigration. More precisely, O’Keefe “has warned the UK government [that its] polices on immigration” are “risking Britain’s scientific standing”. 

The BBC – or at least James Gallagher did – then backed up its pro-immigration position with a kind of positive ad hominem. It told us that “Prof O’Keefe, 74, was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine on Monday”. And then came the politics. The BBC quotes O’Keefe as stating: “The immigration rules are a very, very large obstacle.”

Now I’m willing to accept that much of what John O’Keefe says may be true or accurate. However, this piece isn’t about O’Keefe’s position on immigration. It’s about the BBC using O’Keefe’s position (or words) on immigration to advance or support its own position on immigration. (That’s why I won’t be commenting on O’Keefe’s no doubt controversial position on animal experimentation.)

You can take the under-text of this piece to be the following: 

Limiting immigration is a bad thing because a Noble Prize winner says that it is. 

Or alternatively: 

Why aren’t we allowing all these fantastic neuroscientists and other highly-qualified people into the UK (along with all those other super immigrants)?

As everyone knows, for every neuroscientist or scientist allowed into the UK there will be tens of thousands of unqualified people who are also allowed in (many of those end up on benefits).

Besides which, I doubt that highly-qualified people do find it (that) difficult to enter the UK. For a start, there’s no evidence in the BBC piece as to why it’s so difficult. In fact it’s all very vague. John 0’Keefe himself is quoted (twice) as saying: “The immigration rules are a very, very large obstacle.”

He continues by saying:

“I am very, very acutely aware of what you have to do if you want to bring people into Britain and to get through immigration, I’m not saying it’s impossible, but we should be thinking hard about making Britain a more welcoming place.”

Again, John O’Keefe says that he’s “very acutely aware of what you have to do if you want to bring people into Britain and to get through immigration”. Now is he talking about neuroscientists, scientists and other qualified people here or immigrants generally? 

It becomes clear that O’Keefe ( as well as the BBC) must surely be talking about immigration generally (not the situation with highly-qualified immigrants) when you take on board what the Home Office says in response to these complaints. It states:

“Whilst the government has not shied away from taking tough action on abuse, the number of genuinely skilled people coming to the UK to fill skilled vacancies is on the rise.”

And that’s why I think this is yet another example of the BBC rather surreptitiously publishing another piece in favour of immigration. 

Considering the fact that 5,466,000 – over five million – immigrants entered the UK between 1997 and 2007 alone (as well as the fact that O’Keefe says that “we should be thinking hard about making Britain a more welcoming place”), I can only conclude that O’Keefe and the BBC are in favour of yet more mass immigration. In other words, over five million immigrants have been allowed into the UK in the last decade and O’Keefe and the BBC are still deeply unsatisfied.

The BBC itself – rather than O’Keefe – shows us its bias (or the fact that it’s really talking about immigration generally) when it states the following: 

“Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged to reduce net migration to less than 100,000 a year by 2015, while Home Secretary Theresa May has spoken about reducing it to tens of thousands.”

Now there’s not much in the above quote which is specifically about Noble Prize winners, neuroscientists and other highly-qualified scientists, is there? That’s because, underneath the fluff, this piece is really about the government’s recent statements on immigration (which surely can’t be believed anyway). 

Actually, this BBC article is really about the BBC’s own position on immigration.

*The BBC’s Prose-style*

It’s the easiest thing in the world to display political or ideological bias without explicit editorialising or comment. You certainly don’t need to indulge in political rhetoric and polemics. Left-wing academics galore, for example, restrain themselves all the time (“academic standards” and all that). And just like such left-wing academics, the BBC also refrains from explicit political bias, rhetoric and polemics because that’s what’s expected of it . 

Despite saying that, the BBC is often at its most extreme and biased when it comes to the subject of immigration. And it shows that bias in many and various subtle ways.

In this particular case, instead of an article with the title, say, ‘Why we should allow more immigrants into the UK’ or ‘Why immigration is a good thing’ (or ‘We are international community’), the BBC offers us this title instead: ‘Nobel Prize winner John O’Keefe concerned over immigration policy’. 

I have yet to see an entire BBC News piece about either a single individual’s problems with immigration or the problems with immigration in the abstract. Though – and here comes that BBC subtlety again – people’s problems with immigration are sometimes covered. Of course they are. The problem is that they’re rarely – or never – the central point in any BBC pieces. (Except in extreme and exceptional cases such as the infamous Gordon Brown Bigotgate case.)

Sure, there’s no explicit pro-immigration pontificating in this BBC News piece. The BBC rarely does that. Instead the bias is displayed in the very fact that the BBC has chosen to cover this very minor story in the first place: a story which it thinks is worth turning into news. After all, no other newspaper has featured this particular case. 

As I said, the BBC doesn’t go in for extreme or blatant editorialising/commentary on its website BBC News…. The BBC’s a “public service broadcaster” funded by the taxpayers of the UK – remember? So the BBC publishes articles like this instead. It also fills BBC audiences (such as Question Time) with ethnic minorities, Leftist lawyers and other professionals who support unlimited immigration. It quotes the ideologically-correct people more extensively than it does “bigots”. 

The way the BBC once described its position on anthropogenic global warming can be applied – pretty much untouched – to the case of immigration. For example, the BBC once said (in 2009) the following:

“…. given the weight of scientific opinion [on climate change], the challenge for us to strike the right balance between mainstream science and sceptics since to give them equal weight would imply that the argument is evenly balanced.”

That can be paraphrased into the following:

Given the weight of expert opinion on immigration, the challenge for us to strike the right balance between experts on immigration and immigration sceptics (or those against immigration) since to give them equal weight would imply that the argument is evenly balanced.

In response to the first quote, Christopher Booker said:

“In other words, in the name of reporting impartially, [the BBC] saw no need to report impartially.” 

The obvious point to make about the latter paraphrase is the majority of British people are indeed “sceptical” about the benefits of immigration – and they’re certainly sceptical about mass immigration. That is the case regardless of what the “experts” think. 

*Conclusion*

This isn’t about stopping neuroscientists, Noble Prize winners and other qualified/skilled people from entering the UK and even from becoming citizens. It’s about British governments – with the tacit support of the BBC – attempting to “alter the social and political make-up” of the UK; as well as the concomitant attempt to “rub the face of the Right [or the white working class?] in diversity” (at least under New Labour). So how do I know all that? I know all that because some of the people who were responsible for these things have explicitly admitted as much – if only after they left government! Continue reading

THURSDAY OPEN THREAD…

Sorry for the delay in this – been away on business straightaway after being away on holiday! Phew.  Anyway, a few things to update you on. The site has been moved to a faster server so it should not take so long to load. Second, were you as touched as I was at seeing the BBC portray Moazzam Begg as the hero of Iraq? New open thread open for business..

England’s Pietersenloo

 

Can’t help thinking the BBC sides with Pietersen in relation to his claims about the England team.

Adrian Chiles said he loved Pietersen’s book and then gave him an easy interview…later admitting he probably was too much influenced by his excitement for the book.

George Riley told us he didn’t care about the facts just the effect the revelations had on England’s reputation…but surely that would rest upon whether Pietersen’s facts were facts…and not I’m really interested in Riley’s opinion..surely he’s there to give us those facts rather than his own personal concerns about events.

Then we had another BBC sports reporter whose name I missed, saying he backed Pietersen and it was all the ECB’s fault.

Not sure on what basis he came to that conclusion.

If you’d listened to 5Live’s coverage of this story you’d be fairly badly informed about events….which as 5Live is the ‘sports’ channel for the BBC you might think that wasn’t a gold medal performance.

For instance the BBC on 5Live kept highlighting certain claims by Pietersen but didn’t reveal any contrasting information that might paint Pieteersen as a hypocrite or plain wrong….even though the ECB’s leaked document was mentioned 5Live didn’t quote anything of relevance from it and it wasn’t until I read it in the newspaper that I got a fuller picture and a different perspective on Pietersen’s claims.

Pietersen criticised Swann and Trott for going home early but he himself was reported to be looking to duck out of a match…

“Prior to the Perth Test, an England team physiotherapist approached AF to inform AF that KP had told him that KP was looking to do anything to go home after the Perth Test if England lost the match to go 3‐0 down. KP allegedly told the physio that if England lost the match, his knee was “going to be really playing up”.

 

Pietersen claims senior players bullied junior ones by shouting at them if they dropped a catch and yet he himself did something similar….

After playing a terrible shot to get out in one of his innings in the Fourth Test, KP returned to the England dressing room and in front of the younger England players, shouted “you lot are useless”.

 

Pietersen claims Andy Flower had it in for him…perhaps because Pietersen had it in for Flower…trying to get him sacked….

AF told KP at the end of the meeting that he was amazed that after 7 years of working together and AF bending over backwards for KP, that KP would talk to AF like that and be so incredibly disloyal as to try to get rid of AF like that behind AF’s back. KP then left AF’s hotel room.”

 

Pietersen said that one England player, Matt Prior, wasn’t good enough…the fact that England hadn’t taken up his contract proved it….

“I don’t think I could have been that wrong because he doesn’t have a central contract any more. England are finished with him.”

Well England haven’t taken up Pietersen’s contract…so that must prove he wasn’t good enough in many respects…scoring runs is not the sole criteria to be judged in a team game…England are finished with Pietersen.

 

When Piers Morgan (Clarkson punched him…hurray) slagged off England Pietersen laughed and told them to get a thicker skin….which perhaps is an irony considering Pietersen’s own diaphanously thin skin….

“It riled the team and management that KP allowed Piers Morgan to belittle AC [Alastair Cook] and the team on social media. When asked by some of his team mates to get Piers Morgan to stop tweeting about the team, KP laughed at the players and told them to get a thicker skin.”

 

Pietersen’s book is a hatchet job designed to attack the England team, put Pietersen back in the limelight where he ‘belongs’, to paint himself as a victim and make him lots of money….no coincidence that another player said Pietersen would play for any country that offered enough money, so expecting any loyalty from him might be somewhat foolish.  Pietersen said of Matt Prior….“He’s back-stabbing, he’s horrendous, he’s bad for the environment.”  That surely is more descriptive of Pietersen himself than anyone else…which is why he was given the boot….regardless of his batting prowess.

You might be expected to be able to rely on the BBC to report in a more even fashion and to point out the hypocrisy and fallacies in Pietersen’s claims rather than seemingly to side with him and support his view of events which the facts don’t seem to fully back up.

However the BBC’s Jonathan Agnew does give us a far more nuanced look than I have heard from the rest of the 5Live team saying Pietersen’s book was ‘a stream of unhappiness, suspicion and accusations. ‘

Just a shame the rest of 5Live seem to be in awe of Pietersen.

 

 

 

Intensive Interrogation…Yes Or No?

 

 

The BBC has treated us to a lot of Islamist propaganda recently, a lot of it from CageUK.

Allowing such people onto the airwaves is a good thing.  It allows us to hear their arguments and understand what are the reasons for the various actions taken by such people and then lets us assess the rights and wrongs of the situation.

Or it would be a good thing if the BBC did its job and actually engaged them in debate and challenged their views.  All too often however the BBC does not do that, frequently presenting them as charity workers, community leaders,  religious scholars and academics.  They are then allowed to get away with presenting their views without any robust challenge giving them credibility and authority they don’t deserve and twisting the narrative to their own agenda.

Yesterday we had yet another Cage mouthpiece, Moazzam Begg, on the Today programme  (08:10)

Sarah Montague was interviewing him and surprisingly gave him a hard time repeatedly asking him if he supported ISIS….which he refused to answer directly…indirectly he admitted he did support ISIS by saying we should negotiate with the Taliban, Al Qaeda and ISIS…thereby indicating he believed these were legitimate organisations with aims and a status that we should recognise and accept.

Begg was claiming that he could have got Alan Henning released but that the government refused his help….therefore it is the government’s fault that he was killed.  Begg being an Islamist propagandist you can discount that completely…and indeed Montague did seem suitably sceptical about his claims.

Montague did, as said, seem to conduct a reasonably tough interview that revealed Begg in his true light…Begg it has to be said does not give a good interview.  Perhaps he should stay off the airwaves and stick to writing where he might seem less oily perhaps.

The problem is, as always with the BBC, when it comes to the news bulletins that then pick and choose which part of an interview they will highlight.

The bulletins chose to report  Begg’s claims straight, and R4 made them the headline news…unfortunately the context and whole feel of the interview was lost and Begg’s slippery dissembling and evasiveness, which would have revealed the true nature of his claims, went missing, meaning any listener would have been misled as to the real truth of those claims…..all highly relevant if you believe  that the government and society marginalises and ignores Muslims….as the BBC tells us is so…and yet does little to improve Muslim’s understanding of the truth.

Begg also claimed he knew who was holding the hostages….personally I don’t think an interview on the Today programme is sufficient here if he is telling the truth and yet refuses to reveal who those people are.  The best place for Begg might be lying on his back with his head in a bucket of water.

 

That aside, war with the Islamists isn’t being fought merely in the deserts of the Middle East, it’s on the airwaves and in the newspapers here at home.

The Islamists are still winning…they have shaped the narrative….this morning I heard Peter Allen telling us that Muslims are radicalised because they are disenfranchised, angry and marginalised….and yet we know that’s not true…..only yesterday a Muslim was arrested who had been offered a place at King’s College London to study medicine...and how many times have we been told Muslims love being British?

Until the BBC understands what the underlying basis of the radicalisation is we won’t get a proper debate on the problem and the solution.

They could start with the fact that all Muslim terrorists are Muslim and an examination of the Koran and its commands.

Don’t hold your breath, unless you have your head in a bucket of water that is.