Via Bishop Hill.…the BBC’s idea of balance in reporting climate change…they are investigating sceptic’s claims about the science….and yet they are all pro-climate change people on the programme…Mark Lynas is an author and environmental campaigner, Mike Hulme is professor of Climate and Culture at Kings College London and Dr Helen Czerski is a broadcaster and ‘bubble physicist’ at UCL.

@SellaTheChemist @theresphysics @MichaelEMann @4589roger @guynewey And actually, it’s v. balanced in sense that there is no “skeptic” voice.

 

But also look at this…Climate propagandist Michael Mann complains...

.@guynewey @BBCNews The @BBC‘s entire framing is ill-premised and misleading:

Note the bit about ‘the well documented pause in the warming of the climate since 1998’….it’s now disappeared from the programme blurb….it is now ‘the well documented slow down of the climate since 1998’…

Amazing what a quick moan on Twitter can do to influence the BBC.

The BBC, as David has mentioned, has made yet another election attack on the Tories with claims of a ‘revelation’…

Election 2015: Conservative benefit cut options leaked

The Conservatives are considering options for scrapping several benefits, Department for Work and Pensions documents seen by the BBC suggest.

The leaked files, commissioned by Tory officials, also suggest a regional benefits cap and taxing disability benefits as ways to help cut £12bn from the welfare budget by 2017/18.

 

 

Strange that that is another very old story that the BBC that has disinterred at a convenient time for Labour…from the Telegraph in January 2014.….

George Osborne pledges £12bn cuts in Government welfare spending after next general election

Chancellor George Osborne announces plans as part of a package of cuts after the 2015 election worth £25 billion in total

‘News’ from the BBC or propaganda?  Then again they tried the same tactic when they attempted to stitch the Tories up with a 5 year old story about HSBC and Lord Green…only to find out that their very own head of the BBC Trust,  Rona Fairhead, was responsible for auditing HSBC’s books and is still employed by them on a mega salary.

The BBC is being strangely quiet about events surrounding the three little Jihadis who skipped off to join Isis.  The BBC has until recently been bombarding us with tales of distraught families and police and security service failures.

What anyone with a questioning mind might have asked is how the parents of these girls remained in the dark about their intentions, or possible intentions, when their close friend, Sharmeena Begum, had already left for Syria in December.

In light of the fact that she was a close friend of the girls and that the parents must have known each other, especially in such a close community in which news would travel very fast, is it really likely that the three girl’s parents had no idea that the friend had left to go to Syria and that therefore their own daughters might be susceptible to whatever ideas led to that friend leaving to join ISIS?  Apparently it is entirely possible they knew nothing….and the BBC reported such blessed ignorance without challenge.

The BBC was more than happy to swallow whatever guff the parents came up with about their own lack of knowledge and how it was all the Police and MI6’s fault.  Yet another example of the BBC looking to absolve the Muslim community of any blame….the BBC’s thinking is that if the parents are found to be at fault it will reflect badly on the whole community and Islam itself…therefore don’t turn over any stones and uncover anything uncomfortable.

Not all people are so deliberately naive….the Telegraph reports that Social Services, again not the parents, had to intervene in yet another case of ‘radicalisation’…

Mr Justice Hayden made the move following an application from social services bosses at the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

He was told that social workers had raised concerns that the girls might flee to areas controlled by the Islamic State

 

The BBC hints at the parent’s part in events..

A number of adults involved in their care have also had their passports seized.

There was evidence to suggest family members in the case had not been “full and frank” with social services, the judge said, and that the girls were becoming “more radicalised”.

Why no mention of Abase Hussen? (see below)  It would seem to be an ideal place in a BBC report to mention his own extremism.

The BBC are themselves being less than ‘full and frank’ with us…it’s not as if it isn’t an important subject…the reasons behind the radicalisation of British Muslims….something which is central to all debate on this subject.

Why for instance do they make no mention of this story from the Mail?….

Father who blamed police for not stopping his daughter joining ISIS, attended 2012 rally led by hate preacher Anjem Choudary and attended by Lee Rigby killer

Sensational footage has emerged showing the father of one of the three schoolgirl ‘jihadi brides’ at the head of an Islamist rally led by hate preacher Anjem Choudary and attended by Michael Adebowale, the killer of soldier Lee Rigby.

The video shows Abase Hussen marching at the front of the demonstrators, behind a banner reading: ‘The followers of Mohammed will conquer America’.

He was filmed chanting ‘Allahu Akbar’ amid dozens of protesters and standing just yards away as the American flag is burned.

Kind of an important revelation that the father of one of the ‘radicalised’ Jihadi Brides was himself a ‘radical’.  The BBC has been trying to downplay the part Islam has to play in the radicalisation of Muslims and by distancing the girls’ radicalisation from their families and their own culture tries to place the blame elsewhere..on internet extremists, MI6 and the Police, or foreign policy….never putting the blame where it belongs.

The BBC’s lack of interest in the father’s extremism is strange when you consider their recent indepth look at Jihadis…

Tracking Britain’s jihadists

Guess they’ll be adding him to the list one day.

The BBC’s ‘tracking’ of Jihadis is yet another attempt to mislead the audience…the BBC presenting the ‘radicalisation’ merely as a result of people in one location who are friends with each other and encourage each other to join up…failing to mention the underlying reasons that make them decide to do that…

So what does the data tell us? For a start, many of those who have gone to Syria or Iraq have done so in clusters.

Take Ifthekar Jaman’s hometown of Portsmouth, for example.

This cluster relied on friendship and geography – but there are also ties developed via social media.

We know that Jaman played a key role in the movement of a cluster of young men from Cardiff and Manchester.

Friendship and online links have both played a role in the decisions of 11 girls and women to travel to the region, such as the four teenagers from east London who went missing in recent months.

….but it’s not some ‘Famous Five’ adventure as the BBC wants to portray this as…the radicalisation has ideological roots based on well known Islamic obligations put upon Muslims by their religion that the BBC doesn’t explore.

The BBC dismisses claims that they are ‘hard-core’ jihadis if they travel to Syria…

Late last year, some security chiefs across the West thought that the numbers going to the region were levelling off because many would-be travellers had now come to understand the true nature of the self-styled Islamic State’s aims and barbarity.

That meant those still determined to go were hardcore jihadist sympathisers – and they were presumed to be a small group.

Whether that analysis still stands is open to question.

 

You know what, I don’t think it is open to question…if you travel to the Middle East to join an organisation whose brutality and fundamentalist ideology is unmissably well known then you have to want to be a part of that….pretty ‘hard-core’ I’d say.

The BBC is playing fast and loose with the facts…giving us ones it wants us to have, hiding less convenient ones and those it can’t hide it tries to bury under equivocations and claims of the facts being ‘open to question’.

The rising employment figures have always been a mystery, and an issue, for the BBC, they have never been able to accept that they must be a sign that something, somewhere is going right in the economy and the BBC has always sought to find something negative to say on the subject trying deliberately to undermine the perceived success of the economy….a central plank of the Tories’ election strategy.

Self-employment has been rising and this has often been portrayed by the BBC as a negative…dismissing the jobs as of low value and low status and therefore not a sign of a recovering economy but a sign of desperation by people forced out of work by government Austerity.

However that’s not usually true…most interviews with self-employed people go against the presenter’s narrative that the self-employed were forced into that line of work and are living in a miserable penury….the self-employed more often than not claim to love their work and are enjoying a good measure of success.

An example came up yesterday after the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the RSA released a study into self-employment.  Not sure why they decided to do this study at this time just before an election in which jobs are an issue …especially as in 2003 the JRF released a study that said pretty much exactly the same things about self-employment.

They do admit that self-employment is in 2015…

  ….a trend that predates the crash: self-employment grew in nearly every year since the turn of the century. The implication is that self-employment has as much to do with long-term structural trends in our economy – new technologies, changing mindsets and shifting demographics – as with a short-term cyclical blip.

 

So not really a result of the economic crash or Coalition austerity policies but an increasing and already present trend…and one encouraged by Labour as noted by the JRF in 2003…

Policies to encourage entry into self-employment are increasingly linked to measures to combat social exclusion.

Listening to the BBC’s ‘Wake Up To Money’ and you get the idea that self-employment is a form of Coalition government imposed torture.  An interview with one business woman, Carla, (21 mins) painted a picture of a person held over a barrel, forced to carry on working even at death’s door…. Adam Parson’s exclaiming ‘Wow! …a pretty extreme example of the pressures to keep working.’  when Carla described how she battled on after having a car crash.

By coincidence I heard the same woman being interviewed later on by Peter Allen (10:41) in an interview that had an altogether different tone and painted an entirely different picture of her life and business….Allen asked her ‘How’s it been?’ [Her self-employed life]  She replied ‘Great!’

Allen asked ‘Has it made life better?’ [Being self-employed] She replied ‘Oh yes….I love what I do…it’s so much fun…the creativity you get to enjoy everyday is amazing!’

Sounds like she is enjoying self-employment despite the obvious pressures.

One good thing about Allen is that he often starts from the standard BBC world view but is happy to adjust his views when presented with facts that disprove it…..as when he was ‘shocked’ to hear that the richest in society actually pay a vast amount of tax…and a rising amount contrary to what we are often led to believe.

The ‘WUTM’ crew in contrast are averse to any change in narrative and plough on regardless of the facts or of what their expert guest commentators reveal when it goes against the doom and gloom line the comic duo of Clark and Parsons relentlessly peddle on the BBC…..such as low inflation apparently being a disaster waiting to happen or people starting to borrow more is a sign of desperation as they run out of money…rather than a sign of confidence in the future economy and rising wages.

Adam Parsons unfortunately doesn’t restrict himself to the death watch on WUTM but frequently pops up on other programmes giving us the benefit of his unique take on the world.

Today’s interviews with ‘Carla’ shows though how different things can be made to look by some in the Media when they have an axe to grind.

Tariq Ramadan…the Muslim voice of reason, reform and renaissance, in the BBC’s, the Guardian’s and the Government’s eyes.

Where is Tariq Ramadan?  There has been a tragic plane crash in whihc 150 people have died and the news has been absolutely dominated by reports about this story.

When Muslim terrorists slaughtered cartoonists, Jews and police officers in Paris Ramadan and his ilk told us that it was ‘terrible’, no, really, but…and there’s always a but….Ramadan wanted to know why we were spending so much time on reporting such a trivial event…after all Muslims were being killed around the world and, he claimed, nobody cared…..

We condemn the violent extremism that is targeting westerners. But it is not only westerners. We are reacting emotionally because 12 people were killed in Paris, but there are hundreds being killed day in, day out in Syria and Iraq, and still we send more bombs. We have to look at the big picture. Lives matter, but it is important to be clear that the lives of Muslims in Muslim majority countries have as much value as our own lives in the west.

 

It seems that when the interests of European Muslims are not at stake, and the furtherance of Islam is not an issue, Ramadan is not concerned about what the Media reports and how much coverage they give to particular events.

If the plane’s pilot had been a Muslim with concerns about ‘Western’ foreign policy you can be certain Ramadan and Co would have mobilised and been filling the airwaves with assurances this had nothing to do with Islam and that more people die in Syria everyday…so what’s the problem with a little bit  of ‘terror’ in Europe?

The killings in Paris were important because they were not the ‘mere’ murder of a handful of people but represented a significant attack on the cultural  values , the whole society, of the West.  Ramadan and his other Muslim apologists who cried their crocodile tears over Charlie Hebdo are engaged in a war, a war of words, intent on undermining the West and imposing Islam.  Those who think Ramadan is a reformer are mistaken.

In Canada Ramadan was one of the founders of the Muslim organisation ‘Muslim Presence’…..it has some interesting views on Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons in 2012….

It is a declaration of war… a war of religion that no free expression in the world may be proud of.
No Charlie
If offending is the expression of your freedom, then admit that violence will be the expression of their freedom! It is a trade of bad practices.
No, do not say ‘but’! Assume [your choices]…

After the ‘Ted Talk’ mentioned in the last post I heard a trail for Thursdays ‘Crossing Continents’ in which we were told that we would hear the story of Gaza’s last remaining piano, the only one to survive ‘the bombing’ and which was being used to help traumatized Palestinian children….so it looked like Israel was in the frame again.

Curiously on looking at the actual blurb for the programme it gives a different slant altogether..

Sunday night and the BBC brought us the ‘TED Radio Hour’ which had some thought provoking thoughts.

Let’s hope someone at the BBC was listening…here’s the concluding remarks (46 mins 20 secs)…

‘The fact is that some of the biggest catastrophes we have seen rarely come from information that is secret or hidden.  It comes from information that is freely available and ‘out there’ but we which are wilfullly blind to because we don’t want to handle, can’t handle,  the conflict that it provokes….but when we dare to break that silence, when we dare to see and we create conflict we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.

Open information is fantastic, open networks are esssential but the truth won’t set us free until we develop the skills, the habits and the talent and the moral courage to use it.

Openness isn’t the end, it’s the beginning.’

 

Today we were told that Islamism has no connection with the beautiful religion of Islam. We saw Nigel Farage and his family hounded because of his views on immigration.  We are not allowed to criticise that other religion called Climate Change.

All taboos or attitudes cheerfully backed by the BBC.

When will the BBC find that ‘moral courage’ to do the right thing and start to openly debate what the Koran really says, what 300,000 immigrants flocking to the UK each year really means, the possibility that in tackling CO2 we may be ‘curing’ the wrong thing?

The BBC has been wilfully blind, it has sought to avoid conflict that would arise when certain truths are spoken, it has sought to silence those who would dare to break that silence.

The BBC and its good intentions may be putting us on the road to Hell.

BBC ‘bias’ hinders immigration crackdown, says report

The BBC’s bias in favour of immigration has been a key block on the Government’s ability to tighten control on Britain’s borders, a report has claimed.

Interesting to hear the BBC constantly refer to the EDL in their reports about Afzal Amin as ‘Far Right’.

Not sure how they come to that definition as the EDL’s sole ‘policy’ is to control extremist Islam….why is that a ‘Far Right’policy?  Their opponents like to suggest this is a cover for underlying racism and anti-Muslim prejudice but that is not for the BBC to judge or to second guess their motivations…and yet they have.

All rather confusing when immediately after the report on Amin the BBC reported that the government was cracking down on Islamic extremism and Sharia courts… Islam being completely compatible with British values and society….Sharia law not being Islamic of course….and Islamic ‘extremism’ not having anything to do with the ‘real’, liberal, moderate Islam’ of BBC lore, it being a perverted desire to practise a pure, unadulterated version of Islam….a ‘conservative’Islam’….not Islam at all really.

Why does the BBC not refer to Theresa May as being of the  ‘Far Right’ when she seems to be proposing the same things that the EDL does?

Why does May refer to good and bad Muslims?…or rather claims the Islamists are not Islamic.

Don’t call me moderate…

The men and women I met told me they found it infuriating that they could be devout in their practice of their religion but they would only be considered “moderate” Muslims – since moderate was often taken to mean not hugely observant.

If they are fully practising Muslims then they should observe all the rules of Islam…..and in doing so are not ‘moderate’ in comparison to the values of a secular, liberal, democfratic society…they are ‘extremists’…the teachings of the Koran being decidedly unliberal.

If Muslims don’t want to be divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims then they have to accept that the Islamists are just as ‘Muslim’ as the non-violent ones are….and yet they lie to themselves being….

….rather insulted when asked if they could shed any light on why anyone from this country would wish to travel to Syria. They disputed the suggestion that their Islam had anything in common with the ideology of the jihadis.

‘Their’ Islam……‘ it quickly became apparent that they held views that many would not consider moderate at all.’

Until people like May, and the BBC, agree on what constitutes an ‘extreme’ value and belief they will never be able to tackle Islamist extremism.   When I say ‘agree’ I mean come to the realisation about what Islam really says and demands of its followers…those who fully observe its teachings as ‘non-moderate’ Muslims.

Even Dan Hodges admits…

We are going to have to start to reassess what we mean by “moderate Islam”.

The BBC is wrong. Many Muslims have sympathy with the Charlie Hebdo killings. Far too many.

 

 

Nicky Campbell this morning ran his phone-in on the news that Nigel Farage and his family were attacked by anti-UKIP protestors who were doing much what the Brown Shirts did in the 1930’s.

Campbell didn’t challenge the constant claims by the protestors that Farage was a prejudiced racist peddling fear…Campbell dodged that preferring instead to suggest merely that many people support Farage and vote for UKIP…which is a different thing altogether….Campbell leaving the thought that Farage and UKIP are racists up in the air.

Campbell was asking if direct action protests were legitimate…curiously he didn’t mention the prominent reports that Ed Miliband’s paymaster, Len McCluskey, has recently stated that he intends to ignore the law of the land if the Tories are elected and will engage in such direct action as necessary to force his will upon the country…views he has expressed before…..

“All concepts of politics, of whatever kind, are about conflict──how to contain it, or abolish it.”

So if we are on a march towards “one nation” and ultimately “one world”, it is a road that leads through struggle and conflict.

We are taught to believe that democracy is the cornerstone of a modern civilised society; but our Lords and Masters want to define democracy, limiting us to an ‘X’ on a Ballot Paper every 5 years.

This is not my definition of democracy.

They tell us strike action, civil disobedience, direct action and protest are all somehow unpatriotic.

Our history tells us they are not.

Whatever the upshot of electoral politics, working-class politics must grow and develop, based on the socialist education Ralph Miliband called for.

In the midst of an unending economic crisis, with what Ralph would have called a discredited ruling class at the helm, it is past time for the working class to step forward with its own vision and alternative.

One of Campbell’s main contributors was Charlie Kimber, National Secretary for the Socialist Workers Party…..it’s aim…

Workers create all the wealth under capitalism. A new society can only be constructed when they collectively seize control of that wealth and plan its production and distribution according to need.

For a party that demands respect for all sorts of people and claims to champion the downtrodden it might have been relevant to ask Kimber about the way the SWP handled rape allegations made against a senior member of the SWP… swept under the carpet by them…so much for respect. Then again Campbell could have asked about the many, many millions killed by Socialism including those under the National Socialist regime in Germany by those hoping to create the perfect Socialist society.

Or Campbell could have challenged Kimber about his allies….

SWP cosying up to Islamic fundamentalists…again

Thankfully Campbell was mostly irrelevant, most callers did his job for him and challenged the protestors, standing their ground and denouncing the protestors and their actions in a reasoned and measured way that completely undermined Kimber and his ilk.

Funny how Farage is allowed to be pilloried for his views but others, like Kimber, seem to get a pass for theirs on the BBC…..and on that… interesting that Theresa May mentions extremist Islamists and the Far Right as people with hateful beliefs in her speech today….again what about the Left?  The ‘leftwing’  UAF is the organisation that starts the violence at EDL marches.

Bishop Hill details the lack of detail in the National Trust’s latest claims about climate change…

Dame Helen Ghosh, the former Whitehall bureaucrat who now runs the National Trust, was on the Today programme this morning explaining why climate change is the biggest threat to the Trust’s work.

Pressed to explain herself, Dame Helen had almost nothing to justify her position, apart from a suggestion that the Trust likes to address the issues of the day. This came across to me as saying “we just jump on any passing bandwagon, it’s good for business”.

 

The BBC reports indepth on Dame Helen’s ponderings and produces an alarming headline…

Climate change ‘biggest threat’ to National Trust land

However, despite the very concerning and alarming claim the BBC fails to actually find any substance to back up the headline, the report having a complete absence of evidence for that claim.

Still a lack of facts never stopped the BBC from making wild claims about the effects of climate change themselves.

Here’s Roger Harrabin, apparently being ‘sceptical’, but not really…

Cyclone Pam: Did climate change cause Vanuatu damage?

Harrabin makes the unproven claim that….

Globally, temperature has risen by 0.8C, mainly due to greenhouse gases. And that is affecting weather around the world.

But attributing individual tropical storms directly to our planes, cars and factories is a different matter.

 

Naturally he means greenhouse gases as made by man.

The BBC has no problem linking climate change to severe weather…Katrina, Haiyan, and now Pam.

Listeners to Radio 4’s Today programme were given an unmistakable but totally bogus message last week: that catastrophic storms such as Typhoon Haiyan are linked to global warming – and are set to increase.

 

 

He then admits….

The world authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, found no evidence of a link between the frequency of tropical storms and climate change.

The effect of climate change on precipitation is poorly understood.

Which is curious really because the BBC has always linked storms to climate change…and made claims that rainfall is directly effected by climate change ala Somerset Levels, Harrabin himself stating that rainfall will be more severe due to climate change.

Harrabin then claims that there is…

….an undisputed link between emissions and rising sea levels, which leaves poor low-lying Vanuatu increasingly vulnerable.

 

Which emissions would those be?  CO2?  No proof that CO2 is the main cause at all. Even if you believe that CO2 is the main cause of climate change the UN tells us that it only causes 50% of warming….so even if we spend billions reducing CO2 you’re still in trouble.

He then links that to this warning….

So when a storm strikes the islands in the year that heads of governments have promised to sign an over-arching deal to protect the climate, the president’s remarks are understandable.

He can’t be sure that the gusts of Pam were propelled by human hands.

But he can be very sure that, as greenhouse gases increase, it is his people who are among the most at risk.

 

So dressing up his report as being sceptical about the science but is in fact continuing down the path of a religious adherence to the ‘orthodxoy’ which is completely unproven…that CO2 is the cause of climate change…the conclusion which drives all government policy in this area at massive cost to everyone…..what if it is the wrong conclusion?  Not only will they have wasted billions upon billions of pounds but will also have utterly failed to find a solution to the problem which therefore continues unabated as they tackle the wrong cause.

Just another ‘pro-climate change’ report from Roger.