Whilst not bothering to give us a full, rounded and informative analysis of Trump’s troubles with the intelligence agencies the BBC does have time for this trash…
Ask the British to name the most important inventions of all time and you can rely on them agreeing on one answer in particular.
Taking its place in the top ten alongside such essentials as the wheel, the clock and penicillin is … the teabag.
Little wonder, perhaps, in a nation so addicted to the cuppa that we are said to brew 60billion a year.
And…it’s…all…thanks…to…Islam.
Muhammed invented the teabag as his troops couldn’t stomach any more milk and camel urine [I mean the Jews had milk and honey!!!! bastards…aaahhh…that’s where it all went wrong]. Tea was the answer but loose tea was so messy, sand got into it, the troops tried stuffing it up their noses like snuff and it was just so inconvenient to carry loose tea around with him on his Arabian stallion [another Muslim invention] in the desert winds as he invaded, conquered and colonised so much of the Middle East. Much easier to just fling a bag into a pot of water and away you go…he invented the travel mug as well….no spillage as you pillage, no slops as you chops…off heads.
Bring a thermos [jeez…did they invent that as well??!!] with lemon, camel’s urine, and your own tea bag. Then have the Yazidi sex slave fill it with hot water to make your own special “sunnah” beverage!
Is there nothing ‘Islam’ didn’t invent? Redbull? It gives you wings.
The BBC has long presented the case for the prosecution against Trump declaring him a Russian agent who has tried to force the ex-FBI director to stop his investigations in to Trump’s Russia links…thus ‘obstructing justice’…impeach him!!!!
The BBC declared that the dodgy dossier on Trump was pretty much the genuine article ‘verified’ by the security services…no.
The BBC claimed that Trump wanted to stop the Russia investigation because it would lift the pressure off him…interpreted by the BBC as a sign that he was guilty. No.
The BBC gave the impression Trump himself was under investigation. No.
The BBC also told us he was possibly suffering from dementia….in a firewalled deniable article written by their US correspondent Paul Wood in the Spectator. No
My sources say the President often fails to attend his daily intelligence briefing; when he does, his attention span is disastrously short; he’ll read only documents a page or two long which ‘must have pictures’. Some believe Twitter’s time stamps even show him tweeting during these briefings.
Trump’s critics paint a picture of the President as rambling, confused, irritable and prone to tantrums: the madness of King Donald.
Some of those critics have an explanation for this: not porphyria — the ‘blue urine’ disease that afflicted George III — but dementia.
From the same journo, Paul Wood, who produced this early biased assessment…
So did the FBI brief the President and Trump on the dodgy dossier because it was credible and ‘verified’? Not at all, the complete opposite in fact…and they did so because muck-raking journalists would publish regardless of fact in an attempt to compromise Trump….
The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.
Was Trump under investigation? No.
I discussed with the FBI’s leadership team whether I should be prepared to assure President-Elect Trump that we were not investigating him personally. That was true; we did not have an open counter-intelligence case on him. We agreed I should do so if circumstances warranted. During our one-on-one meeting at Trump Tower, based on President-Elect Trump’s reaction to the briefing and without him directly asking the question, I offered that assurance.
Did Trump try to stop the investigation into General Flynn? No. He hoped Comey could let it go…but that’s a different order of things to ordering or requesting Comey to do so…it’s a hope that the investigation would come to nothing…and Comey’s account seems conveniently convenient…no witnesses, he only told people in the FBI of what was said and did not tell his ultimate boss, the Attorney General, whom he normally reports to…so again no independent witness. Note Comey sets the scene by building a case that Trump was trying to manipulate him….complete speculation and subjective conclusions…
My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship. That concerned me greatly, given the FBI’s traditionally independent status in the executive branch.
Note that Trump in fact asked for an investigation into the dodgy dossier…
The President returned to the salacious material I had briefed him about on January 6, and, as he had done previously, expressed his disgust for the allegations and strongly denied them. He said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn’t happen. I replied that he should give that careful thought because it might create a narrative that we were investigating him personally, which we weren’t, and because it was very difficult to prove a negative.
On Flynn we are told…
The President began by saying, “I want to talk about Mike Flynn.” Flynn had resigned the previous day. The President began by saying Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong in speaking with the Russians, but he had to let him go because he had misled the Vice President. He added that he had other concerns about Flynn, which he did not then specify.
The President then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, “He is a good guy and has been through a lot.” He repeated that Flynn hadn’t done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President. He then said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” I replied only that “he is a good guy.” (In fact, I had a positive experience dealing with Mike Flynn when he was a colleague as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the beginning of my term at FBI.) I did not say I would “let this go.”
Remember this was written up after the event with no other corroborating evidence [unless Trump taped it] and can be read subjectively depending on how you want to read it. It is not conclusive by any means that Trump was intent on ordering Comey to stop the investigation even by suggestion.
Comey has his own interpretation…
I had understood the President to be requesting that we drop any investigation of Flynn in connection with false statements about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in December….Shortly afterwards, I spoke with Attorney General Sessions in person to pass along the President’s concerns about leaks. …I did not mention that the President broached the FBI’s potential investigation of General Flynn.
Did Trump cheer the sacking of Comey because it meant the end of the investigation [it didn’t and Trump never said it would] and that it lifted the pressure off him due to that?…the BBC intepreting this as meaning he was guilty, or his team were guilty, and now wouldn’t face investigation. That’s a completely false interpretation as countered by the Whitehouse when first made…they saying that Trump was referring to his ability to conduct national affairs being marred by Comey’s behaviour not the investigation itself [not something the BBC bothered to report]….
“By grandstanding and politicizing the investigation into Russia’s actions, James Comey created unnecessary pressure on our ability to engage and negotiate with Russia,” Spicer told The Times. “The investigation would have always continued, and obviously, the termination of Comey would not have ended it. Once again, the real story is that our national security has been undermined by the leaking of private and highly classified conversations.”
Another government official who spoke to The Times said Trump was using a “negotiating tactic” with Lavrov when he explained the “pressure” he faced.
The Times wrote: “The idea, the official suggested, was to create a sense of obligation with Russian officials and to coax concessions out of Mr. Lavrov — on Syria, Ukraine, and other issues — by saying that Russian meddling in last year’s election had created enormous political problems for Mr. Trump.”
Comey reveals…
On the morning of March 30, the President called me at the FBI. He described the Russia investigation as “a cloud” that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia. He asked what we could do to “lift the cloud.” I responded that we were investigating the matter as quickly as we could, and that there would be great benefit, if we didn’t find anything, to our having done the work well. He agreed, but then re-emphasized the problems this was causing him.
Is Trump looking to close down investigations? We already know he wanted the dodgy dossier investigated and now Comey admits Trump was happy for his team to be investigated…..obstructing justice?…
The President went on to say that if there were some “satellite” associates of his who did something wrong, it would be good to find that out, but that he hadn’t done anything wrong and hoped I would find a way to get it out that we weren’t investigating him.
Far from being the Sword of Damocles this has turned out to be not even a pointy stick, just mud-slinging……if the Democrats, and the BBC, can make a case out if this I’d be surprised.
The BBC’s reporting has been entirely one-sided and highly partisan against Trump declaring him guilty without any evidence whatsoever.
We’ve looked at the BBC’s Newsnight ‘Kingmaker’ programme that paints a portrait of Corbyn as a principled and honourable man, a man who has never given support to terrorists, a man who has not sat back as anti-Semitism ran riot under his reign, a man whose economic policies are not fantastical nonsense that would bankrupt us, a man who has supported anti-terrorism legislation with enthusiasm, a man who doesn’t have a deeply held attachment to Marxism, a man who doesn’t surround himself with people who do support terrorism, are anti-Semitic, who do have intentions to wreck the economy and destabilise society and who are so ideologically driven that implementing their political dogmas comes before everything else regardless of the effect on ‘the people’ [as with Labour’s secret mass immigration policy]….and of course are completely incompetent and unfit to run a whelk stall let alone a government.
We may have been premature in our judgement, despite that being an obviously extremely partisan film that was solely designed to cheerlead for Corbyn, Newsnight have made a film about May…surely it will heap equal amounts of lavish praise upon her, lauding her achievements, extolling her character and eulogizing her abilities to get things done, looking to a future when she carries all before her in the Brexit negotiations.
Well, the BBC’s chosen conduit to communicate the accolades and plaudits was the gutter journo Matthew Parris, the wettest of the wettest of Tories, a highly disgruntled Remainer who has been whining relentlessly in the Spectator and the Times about the nasty, racist, stupid little englanders who voted for Brexit…he suggests such stupid people can’t be trusted to vote the right way and so shouldn’t be able to vote. This film was all about Brexit…and stabbing May, the ‘hard Brexit’ administrator, in the back.
Perhaps the choice of film-maker was just a thoughtless and lazy one…Parris is in the Media and was a Tory…so ispso facto must be perfectly suited for the job. Or maybe the BBC knew exactly what his views were and how he would approach this…with an axe to grind…a hatchet job. And a hatchet job it was….a deliberate and unpleasant character assassination…..just look at who the main contributor was…Remain moaner Nick Clegg.
Parris says he has no idea what May stands for…but he was helpfully told by Clegg that she may be overwhelmed by what she has to do…she wouldn’t make decisions on the spot because she poured over the details…she had to test ideas and suggestions….and that’s a bad thing.
We are told that she has a major weakness…she has no interest in wider politics, no understanding of, or interest in, business and the economy. She has no organising vision for society, she has no firm destinations…hence she u-turns all the time.
She was compared to Thatcher…who at one stage was said to be cruel to the common man.
Is she intelligent? asks Parris…..we hear she’s not obviously brilliant…organised, capable but not brilliant…damning with faint praise….a manager with no vision, no all encompassing passion and drive to impose a brilliant dream upon the world. I’m assuming Hitler is one of Parris’ heroes.
Parris gives her a few nods…naturally, he being the self-flagellating Tory that he is, praising her for coming up with the phrase ‘the nasty party’ amongst other things but it is rapidly back to the hatchet work as he questions her ability to work in a team and carry out negotiations that apparently need a charming and warm personality.
No, no she can’t negotiate, she doesn’t do charm, doesn’t do compromise, she doesn’t do a deal because she likes you…she does it on the merit of the offered deal…and that’s a bad thing, a weakness we are told. Cameron was a warm and sociable guy…open to negotiation and compromise…hence he got f**k all when he went to the EU to renegotiate pre-Brexit. Maggie on the other handbag….No, No, NO!
Parris then told us he wanted to know her weaknesses…as if he hadn’t already spun a few tales on those lines already.
What, he asks, would bring her down? What? She’s up for election and Parris, a supposed supporter, is already suggesting she is for the chop!
She has an inability to build a coalition inside the party, she doesn’t listen to a wide variety of voices, she has a lack of ability to form a ‘gang’, a team….em…what politician controls his party…Corbyn? LOLOLOL….Blair? Brown? Miliband? Cameron? Clegg? Clegg who?
Why is Parris already seeking to bring her down, to present her as someone who will fail not just in her own government but in the Brexit negotiations as well?
Parris suggests he still doesn’t know her [and yet he can cheerfully paint this grim picture of her] and he suggests either she knows exactly what she is doing, and thus carries on without bothering to ask anyone else what they think, or else she ‘hasn’t a clue’.
Again damning with faint praise before damning.
I imagine this was a highly selective film…choice of presenter, the choice of those interviewed, the choice of who to put in the film and the highly selective choice of what they said…all choices made to reinforce Parris’ one narrative that May is too common, too middle-class, too middlebrow, too much the manager, not enough the ‘brilliant’, swashbuckling risk-taking buccaneer of Parris’ dreams who will fail at it all.
Hang on….so May is weak because she is intransigent, doesn’t listen and has an unshakeable belief in her own views which means she just won’t negotiate…. and conversely she is weak because she listens to peoples’ concerns and rejigs her policies to meet those concerns? Drivel, as usual, from Parris who also tells us she is not a go-getting adventuress out to win the world preferring the safe harbours of the known knowns. Hmmm…isn’t that in fact a good description of Parris and his Remain chums who fear the outside world and want to stay in the stifling embrace of the EU for supposed protection…or stagnation and a strait-jacket, whereas May and the Brexiteers head off into the brave new world to seek our fortunes?
Two highly partisan and political films from the impartial BBC…one praising Corbyn to the skies, one a complete assassination job on May on the eve of the election.
As said the BBC is throwing caution to the wind and gambling on a Corbyn surprise win…but knowing the Tories won’t dare tackle the BBC other than to make a few complaints that are easily brushed aside as usual.
The BBC usually raises the case of ‘Pizzagate’ in the US to expose what it considers the dangers of fake news, naturally it is ‘right-wing’ fake news that concerns the BBC…the same BBC that has helped manufacture the incredibly dangerous myth that white police officers in the US are routinely shooting black men due to racism…this led to the murder of many police officers by blacks seeking ‘revenge’….the BBC is without doubt partly responsible for those deaths.
I imagine a similar concern for the absolute truth is the reason why the BBC has censored reports that a woman was attacked and stabbed by three Asian girls reported to have been making Islamic comments and shouting ‘Allah’ as they stabbed the woman.
From the BBC….no mention at all of the Asian identity or the alleged link to ‘Islam’…they mention counter-terrorism but only to say ‘terror’ has been discounted….any idea why such an issue would have arisen?….
A nursery worker was dragged to the ground and stabbed by three women as they chanted ‘Allah will get you’.
Parents of children in the area received emails stating that schools were on ‘lockdown’ after the attack at about 9.30am.
The nursery boss described the attackers as ‘Asian girls’ and said they ran off when a man came to rescue and took her into work.
She added: ‘When she got to work we couldn’t believe it and called the police straight away. It’s terrible, I’m absolutely horrified. You don’t expect something like this to happen on your doorstep.’
Another colleague, who did not want to be named, said the victim had ‘three Asian girls behind her chanting the Koran and “Allah”‘.
‘She’s okay, considering. Obviously it’s a shock, she’s in shock. She was in tears and she had a cut right up her arm.
‘Her stomach was hurting, she had marks all over her, her hair was pulled out.’
We don’t know the full facts but the BBC should still be reporting the allegations…you can be sure they would do so if it had been an allegation that a non-Muslim had attacked a Muslim…it would definitely be a probable hate crime from the start.
Elections matter because they determine all our futures based on the decisions made by millions of people in the privacy of the polling booth.
Kuenssberg’s movable feast of a conclusion about who will win the election plumps reluctantly for the Tories but get how she speaks about Corbyn…the excited tone, enthusiastic about Corbyn breaking the mould of the dull, staid old politics….as always with the BBC, hoping ‘the young’ will have believed all those tall tales of them being victims of Tory austerity and Brexit and thus vote for Corbyn….
Just as when he won the leadership of the Labour Party, his candidacy, and his promises have excited voters for whom the standard political offer of recent years has come up woefully short. For Labour candidates who see this election and its expected result as an opportunity to end his control of the party that enthusiasm is a genie that may be extremely hard to wrangle back into the bottle.
Remember that, as with Mr Corbyn’s election to the Labour leadership first time round, and the European referendum, we are living through times where traditional political rules are certainly frayed. And if young people defy expectation and turn out to vote in unprecedented numbers any result is possible.
One cabinet minister told me today that if the Tories don’t win, the polls are “bonkers” and voters on the doorsteps have been “deceitful” when reporting, whether enthusiastically or grudgingly, that they will put their cross in their box.
Yet perhaps either way, the events of this campaign will be felt across the spectrum for years to come.
Astonishing when you consider how they treat Trump for his sins of wanting to control immigration and Islamic terrorism….here we have a man who has been a die-hard-Marxist all his life, a terrorist supporter, a supporter of Muslim extremists at a time when we are under attack by them, a man whose reign as Party leader has seen a rapid rise in anti-Semitism as well as political hate campaigns against his opponents, not just within the Party but in the Media as well [including Kuenssberg herself]…and the BBC cheerleads for him. Astounding…but not surprising.
We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race, having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together.
The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through: we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.
A map marked with crude chinagraph-pencil in the second decade of the 20th Century shows the ambition – and folly – of the 100-year old British-French plan that helped create the modern-day Middle East. Courtesy of the BBC
Really?
‘None of the most notorious post-Ottoman borders were drawn by Sykes and Picot…even the ones they did sketch out were jettisoned after the war.’
Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor and master story-teller. Who would have thought that this somewhat short tempered, tubby, egotistical Napoleon of TV and Radio could produce such sublime, experimental and artistic narratives to inform and entertain us? Who knew that he was capable of such avant-garde productions, new and original thinking, cutting edge experimental techniques and ideas that probed the world and over-turned stale truths in the search for a genuine understanding of the underlying facts that shaped the Middle East? Who knew?
Nothing is written…that can’t be rewritten… the Bowen mantra.
The BBC narrative on events in the Middle East has always been that Britain, and actions Britain has taken over the last century, has been to blame for events today….this narrative takes on more urgency for the BBC as the refugees flee the Middle East and head for Europe…the BBC needs to pin the blame for the war in Syria on Britain in order to induce guilt about the plight of the refugees and make them our responsibility…after all we ‘carved up the Middle East’ in a secret agreement with the French, didn’t we? We’ve looked at this several times on this site, here for example, and the BBC’s remarkable ability to ignore the actual facts and make up their own account of history to suit their own agenda.
Nothing has changed of course, Bowen is still the puffed up, pompous, self-regarding and economical with the truth story-teller that we know and disdain…so wrapped up in himself and his own self-importance that he has produced a new series on the BBC about the ME…which you may think as being about the Middle East but is in fact about Me, Jeremy Bowen…
Over these 25 programmes, Jeremy reflects on the present and the past of the Middle East, after reporting from the region for more than a quarter of a century. He combines first-hand accounts from the front line with an in-depth look into the region’s history. In that time, the past has always been present, providing motivation and political ammunition . Bowen has made headlines himself and he has paid a personal price, coming under fire and losing a colleague in the course of reporting – on the worst day, he says, in his life.
If the first programme is anything to go by then it will be an incredibly dishonest, misleading and dangerous account of history, Bowen taking us on a journey fraught with historical clichés and false narratives that are so often his stock in trade. This is history ala Stalin. This is history rewritten to manufacture a narrative, to spread a message, to spin a great big shining lie…..that Britain is to blame for everything that is happening in the Middle East. This is dangerous stuff from the BBC feeding as it does directly into the Muslim grievance industry, the victim mentality, which provides a conveyor belt of willing recruits to radical and violent Muslim groups who are eager and committed to take on the West not only in the Middle East but in Europe and America as well…..aiming to Islamise both.
Bowen’s history is a flagrant distortion of real events as he bends and twists the facts to make a deadly trap for the less alert, the less aware, the less critical. Bowen approaches this from only one perspective and even then doesn’t get that right…naturally it is from the ‘Arab’, or Muslim, perspective to whom all the events are a catastrophe…no doubt a word chosen carefully by Bowen knowing full well that the Palestinians use the word to describe what they call their own ‘Holocaust’…ie Israel.
The whole thrust of Bowen’s narrative is that it was the ‘duplicitous British that did not keep their word whilst the Arabs did.‘ Hence all that is happening in the Middle East today is the result of British scheming in World War One…always surprising how the BBC can focus in on exactly one point in time and say...’that’s the one and only cause of this disaster’.…no thought that the invention of Islam and the subsequent conquest and colonisation of so much of the Middle East and North Africa is the real root of the problems today or at least a major contributory factor?
But no, it was the Great Powers who are the problem and especially, as he tells us, ‘two Grandees [Sykes/Picot] who created, and some say cursed, the Middle East today when they carved up the Ottoman Empire’ [again..no thought that the Ottoman Empire might have been the problem…as the Arabs wanted to escape from it and so joined the British war effort?]…and of course the other problem was the Zionists and the British promise to them which was completely at odds with Arab wishes…a deadly contradiction we are told…er…see top of post….‘The Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.’
However, Bowen tells us that the Balfour Treaty was apparently a ‘milestone on the road to catastrophe for Palestinians.’ Guess we now know exactly where Bowen is coming from….the Palestinian side of the argument.
That narrative, of the West attacking countries because they are ‘Muslim’ or of Islam under attack is the widespread narrative that Muslims in this country, not just the ‘extremists’ or ISIS followers, but the majority in the community, believe in and this creates the underlying atmospherics, an anger and feelings of hate for the West, that leads to radicalisation and then for some, joining ISIS or carrying out a terror attack in the UK. The majority may not believe in violence but they certainly believe the narrative, believe Muslims should be angry and should ‘protest’ in some shape or form.
This is the narrative that the BBC pushes, as illustrated perfectly by Bowen. It is ultimately the terrorist narrative, one that feeds the anger and the Islamist cause. It is also an entirely false narrative that you would expect a professional journalist, the BBC’s expert on the Middle East, to know is false and to counter given the importance of that narrative to the Islamist cause and its deadly consequences…but instead what we have is a man determined to support, nurture and spread that dangerous narrative giving untold help and encouragement to what are terrorists.
The BBC prefers to lay the blame for the rise of massive unrest in the Middle East, the disaster that is Syria, the rise of ISIS, on the doorstep of the Americans and Blair after Iraq 2003….which is odd really…as the BBC told us this:
“We had a clean revolution [In Tunisia]. The former president turned out to be a coward. He just ran away. Not like the others – like the poor Libyans, or in Syria – but it lit the fuse to all the other revolutions” Wassim Herissi, radio DJ
The downfall of Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali inspired pro-democracy activists across the Arab world.
I mean…Bowen should know the truth….he wrote the book on it….‘The People want the fall of the regime‘..not ‘The British Empire wants the fall of the regime’ then?….remember that time when the BBC were cheerleading the Arab Spring [and the subversive, anti-regime nature of the internet and social media…now hated and blamed for Trump and Brexit]….
What is going on in the Middle East and now across the world as Muslims build communities within other countries is that the 1400 year old religion of Islam is having a renaissance, a back to the fundamentals rebirth…it has had several of these over the centuries but this latest incarnation is one that grew out of the deserts of Arabia in the 18th century not the 20th….
‘This alliance formed in the 18th century provided the ideological impetus to Saudi expansion and remains the basis of Saudi Arabian dynastic rule today.’
It grew from the union of the Sauds and the Wahhabis which intended to create a strict Muslim state, hence they joned forces with the Allies to defeat the Turks and the Ottoman Empire…this was a willing union, one negotiated at length and one in which Sykes-Picot ultimately had little to do with [The Arabs knew of Sykes-Picot before the Soviets ‘exposed’ the deal…they were negotiating around its terms before then as revealed by Lawrence of Arabia in his letters…if only Bowen had read them]…the layout of the Middle East was in the end the result of long negotiations post-war involving all sides including Turkey…Turkey which insisted the Kurdish areas were to be part of Iraq so that no Kurdish state would be created. The local leaders welcomed the British to maintain an ‘interest’ in their countries, helping to keep order and build infrastructure, knowing that the agreement was the Brits would leave in several years time. This was not an ‘occupation’ nor a tyrannical imposition by a colonialist master of borders ‘crudely drawn with chinagraph pencils’ that ‘carved up the Middle East’.
In March 1921, Lawrence travelled to Cairo with Churchill, to create a new settlement. With the Arabs they created a new order. Feisal, recently banished from Syria, received the throne of Iraq and British troops were removed.
Feisal’s brother, Abdullah, received the throne of Transjordan. Lawrence was convinced this settlement gave the Arabs all Britain had ever promised.
Finally, his long war was over. ‘
Lawrence himself said in letters to trusted friends…..
‘The settlement which Winston (mainly because my advocacy supplied him with all the technical advice and arguments necessary) put through in 1921 and 1922 was, I think, the best possible settlement which Great Britain, alone, could achieve at the time.’
‘As I get further and further away from things the more completely do I feel that our efforts during the war have justified themselves and are proving happier and better than I’d ever hoped.’
The Sunday Telegraph had a book review of ‘Baghdad’ by Justin Marozzi…it tells a much more rounded tale of the history of the Middle East….
Baghdad, long portrayed as the centre of the Muslim ‘golden age of science’ had, of course, a much more chequered history, most of it soaked in blood…and much of that ‘science’ being inherited by the Muslim conquerors fom the previous civilisations and kept alive by Christian and Jewish scientists and scholars….‘much of this was in spite of Islam, not because of it.’
What it also says, which is of interest here, is that after WWI the British took over and ‘busily set about improving things, from sanitation, bridge building and road repairs to irrigation, constitutions and government’….also stopping cruelty to animals and abolishing slavery that was still rampant there.
History is not what the BBC so often likes to portray. Which brings us onto Mardell’s Britain ‘greedy for oil’ comment with which he pins the blame for the Middle East’s troubles on.
Oil played little part in the thinking. The only known oil was in Iran at the time. Iraq was suspected to have oil…only found in 1927, and the Brits, so greedy for oil, gave Iraq independence in 1932.
The Arabian peninsular was also known to have areas where oil was seeping from the ground and yet was not added to the Imperial ‘want list’, being allowed to form its own government.
Another book, this time in the Sunday Times, reveals the BBC’s anti-British narrative…..here’s what the Times said about that ‘infamous carving up of the Middle East’ narrative favoured by terrorists and the BBC….
ISIS proclaimed itself as the Islamic State caliphate with two propaganda videos, one of which was entitled ‘The End of Sykes-Picot’.….a gunman in the video said ‘This is the so-called border of Sykes-Picot. We don’t recognise it, and we will never recognise it……Inshallah we break other borders also but we start with this one Inshallah.’
The Sykes-Picot agreement is thus an integral part of ISIS’s philosophy of hatred and resentment…..‘feeding people’s own narratives of themselves as playthings of outsiders.’
However, ISIS’s Sykes-Picot narrative is a myth, as the historian Sean McMeekein has persuasively argued in his book, The Ottoman Endgame.
ISIS’s propaganda ‘bears little resemblance to the history on which it is ostensibly based. The partition of the Ottoman empire was not settled bilaterally by Britain and France in 1916 but rather at a multinational conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1923’. Neither Sykes nor Picot played a significant role at Lausanne where the dominant figure was Kemal Attaturk, the Turkish nationalist leader.
‘Even in 1916,’ McMeekin points out, ‘Sykes and Picot played second and third fiddle to Russian foreign minister Sergei Sazonov who was the real driving force.’
‘None of the most notorious post-Ottoman borders were drawn by Sykes and Picot…even the ones they did sketch out were jettisoned after the war.’
In short, the ISIS myth about the Sykes-Picot agreement might animate its followers profoundly, but historically it is simply bunk.
Simply bunk….the ISIS/BBC/Bowen narrative, simply bunk. Dangerous bunk but bunk.
The BBC encouraging and feeding the Jihadist line….more recruits…terror in Syria, terror on the streets of Britain.
Hilariously the BBC told us that…
The creation of the Middle East editor’s job in 2005 had “significantly improved the BBC’s coverage of the ‘Arab world’.”
Here you go, a new Open Thread as we approach Election Day! Detail the bias here!
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Rob in Cheshire April 25, 2024 at 1:59 pm on Midweek 24th April 2024If Packham's claim is untrue, Toby should sue the moron.
Rob in Cheshire April 25, 2024 at 1:55 pm on Midweek 24th April 2024No St George flags to be seen, so the Met won't be interested.
Rob in Cheshire April 25, 2024 at 1:53 pm on Midweek 24th April 2024I am sure the oaf Hutton supports the Net Zero scam, which has just closed down our steel industry.
Rob in Cheshire April 25, 2024 at 1:49 pm on Midweek 24th April 2024They look like cadets to me, we should cut them some slack. I am pleased to see young people choose...
harry142857 April 25, 2024 at 1:22 pm on Midweek 24th April 2024Also from Guido. Kia the car company have invented a car that can do a U turn on a voice...
Up2snuff April 25, 2024 at 1:04 pm on Midweek 24th April 2024pug, re early election: the wisdom of John Curtice, psephologist extraordinaire, is that the Conservatives tend to do better with...
pugnazious April 25, 2024 at 12:52 pm on Midweek 24th April 2024https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1782013988542243238 From Guido.... 'Daily Sceptic editor Toby Young has just submitted a complaint to...
pugnazious April 25, 2024 at 12:41 pm on Midweek 24th April 2024Curious how the BBC is not reporting on Ofsted but campaigning against it and weaponising Ruth Perry's suicide in a...
pugnazious April 25, 2024 at 11:58 am on Midweek 24th April 2024'Nadine Dorries criticised for sharing edited image of Sunak wielding knife' 'Ministers have criticised Nadine Dorries for sharing a doctore...
Fedup2 April 25, 2024 at 11:45 am on Midweek 24th April 2024Not bbc But with the democrat legal mafia in the US - what will happen when president trump is required...
