Category Archives: oil

The BBC Continues To Lie About History And Censor Calls For Ethnic Cleansing

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Apologies for the lengthy title, but there are two issues here which need to be covered, and I’m combining them into one post. First, the BBC’s continued attempts to lie and rewrite history.

Q&A: Palestinian statehood bid at the UN

Most people here will know exactly what’s coming, and I know this has been covered here many times before, but it’s even more important to call the BBC out on it now because of the looming UN fight over creating a State of Palestine. For the benefit of those who don’t know the BBC’s bias about the “West Bank”, here’s the map they use to explain history to the public:


Notice on the left, the BBC is claiming that there was such a thing as the West Bank (i.e. Palestinian) Territory before the 1967 war. They’ve just erased a chunk of Jordan from history. As we all know, that was part of Jordan at the time, a country at war with Israel. Why else would Israel have invaded? This map indoctrinates the public with PLO propaganda, that Israel invaded sovereign Palestinian territory. Your license fee is being used to promote false history and anti-Israel propaganda.

Reality, on the other hand, is not Israeli propaganda. This map of Jordan – from a non-partisan source – and environs showing the borders during part of the 1967 war in question is fact, not fiction:


Notice the clear border lines of Jordan encompass the area about which the BBC is lying. Yes, I am accusing BBC News Online of telling a lie. I don’t care what some Beeboids personally believe about nasty old Israel’s land grab or the plight of the poor Palestinians or anything else. This is historical fact, and the BBC is lying about it. How can there be an honest Q&A about the topic when one of the answers is a lie? Until they remove that first map and replace it with an honest one, my accusation will stand.

Needless to say, this propaganda demonizes Israel in the minds of the public. Most people are seriously uninformed about the facts of Israel and 1967 and the “Palestinian Territories”. When one tries to explain the facts to get past the emotions, one is then accused of spouting Israeli propaganda. This is how the BBC’s editorial policy and style guide is blatantly biased, causing them to demonize Israel at every opportunity, although the BBC disputes this.

It’s impossible to have a civil discussion, national or otherwise, about the situation when the national broadcaster promotes propaganda for one side and demonizes the other. This then promotes anti-Jewish sentiment, but that’s a topic for another time.

Now for the BBC Censorship angle. Last week, Maen Rashid Areikat, the Palestinian ambassador to the US, said that there should be no Jews in a State of Palestine:

“Well, I personally still believe that as a first step we need to be totally separated, and we can contemplate these issues in the future,” he said when asked by The Daily Caller if he could imagine a Jew being elected mayor of the Palestinian city of Ramallah in a future independent Palestinian state. “But after the experience of 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it will be in the best interests of the two peoples to be separated first.”

Actually, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about their desire for a Judenfrei Palestine. He said the same thing a year ago. Not only that, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said the same thing last year, and went further:

Almost no notice was taken of another pre talks decision that the PA chairman revealed, as he announced clearly that if a Palestinian Authority state is created in Judea and Samaria, no Israeli citizen will be allowed to set foot inside.The PA chairman also stated that he would block any Jewish soldiers from serving with an international force stationed on PA-controlled land.

“I will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land,” Abbas declared.

Judenfrei, Judenrein. And the BBC has steadfastly censored all of this. Justin Webb didn’t bring it up to the feckless Lord Levy on Today, it doesn’t feature in any BBC News Online report about Israel or the Palestinians, and it hasn’t been mentioned anywhere else on the BBC. If someone can show me one single example of it, I’ll post it here, shocked but grateful.

Without the truth and all the facts, it’s impossible to have a rational debate and reasonable understanding of the situation. Yet the BBC actively prevents that, promoting propaganda for one side, rewrites history, and censors the Palestinians’ desire for ethnic cleansing.

ADDENDUM: Here’s Katty Kay interviewing US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, in which Katty states uncategorically that only Bibi Netanyahu is the problem, and Amb. Rice corrects here. No surprise that this is Katty’s belief as she recently tweeted to her followers that this New York Magazine article – which blames Netanyahu and uncritical, “steadfast” support for Israel in the US Congress as the only obstacles to peace – is “All you need to know about the frosty relationship between Barack and Bibi.”

Why, it’s almost as if there’s a groupthink on this issue extending across the spectrum of the BBC.

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The BBC’s Censoring of News on the Gulf Oil Spill – Part 2

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Last month, I wrote a post about how the BBC censored news of the US Government editing an independent report so that it showed scientists backing the offshore drilling ban. It turned out that the President who was supposed to be superior to George Bush in that He would now put science before ideology has in fact put ideology – in this case, Watermelon-style anti-oil ideology – above science. Yet the BBC has remained silent about it.

Now that the US Government is extending the offshore drilling ban, the BBC put up a news brief about it. The ban was supposedly going to be for six months, as a response to the big oil spill in the Gulf. When the President put the ban into place, we were told that this was vital so we could learn from the disaster. We were further told that we must wait until the Government experts learned more about the dangers of offshore drilling before any more could begin. Now it seems that the ban will remain in place until 2017. Why?

When the ban was postponed, the BBC’s news brief helpfully linked directly to the US Government’s own explanation of how the “revised strategy” will still help the US meet its energy requirements while placing further regulation and restrictions on the oil industry. Naturally, the BBC tells us that the oil companies are upset, as are the President’s Republican enemies. This is dog bites man stuff, unremarkable and unenlightening. All we get from this is the White House talking point that offshore drilling is still being considered by the Government, but nothing is going to happen without further restrictions put into place for everyone’s safety, and for the safety of the environment.

On top of this, BBC man in Washington, Paul Adams, has done a “From Our Own Correspondent” piece about how the oil spill disaster may have permanently damaged the oyster beds of Louisiana, destroying the livelihoods of poor fishermen still reeling from the devastation of Katrina. It’s all very depressing, with no hope in sight. Adams does mention that the damage seems to have been done when the coastal area was flooded with fresh water as a bulwark against the incoming oil. There is no blame placed on the strategy, only on BP for causing the spill. Whether or not the fresh water strategy was necessary, or if it was done wrong or at the wrong time is left unexamined. Oddly, the BBC has missed a chance to blame Republican Governor Bobby Jindal for it, as the New York Times did back in July.

I suppose some may think I’d be glad that the BBC chose to censor news which makes an opponent of the President look bad, as this provides a small step towards balancing out the fact that they censored all news of the President’s mishandling of the cleanup effort and collusion with BP to block media access to key areas.

But I’m not glad, because I don’t like it when the BBC censors things which get in the way of the story they’re trying to tell.

The reason why who is responsible for the fresh water damage gets in the way here is that it would distract from focusing on the hardship suffered by fishermen due to the oil spill. If we got bogged down in placing blame on someone other than nasty old Big Oil, we’d lose the Narrative. Not only that, but the Narrative would be further damaged by leaving the door open to wondering if the oysters would have been better off if Jindal hadn’t ordered the flooding, maybe the disaster wasn’t as bad as we were made to believe and maybe the ban on offshore drilling is unnecessary. We can’t have that, so Adams carefully makes sure our focus remains where it belongs.

But if the first setback was an act of God, the second was an act of industry – an industry that is much bigger and more commercially important to Louisiana than Nick’s delicious oysters, an industry that sits off this fragile, mysterious landscape of channels and marshes, and produces the stuff that Americans really cannot get enough off.

I like the Freudian typo there: “the stuff that Americans cannot get enough off”. Agenda slipping into view momentarily.

So we’ve established that the ban is necessary, look at the all the damage it does, we need to regroup and rethink and re-regulate if we’re going to allow any new developments. Thank Gaia for The Obamessiah, He’s going to do it properly and carefully, and only nasty Big Oil and Republicans object.

Here’s what the BBC doesn’t want you to know about the ban:

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is well known for his anti-Big Oil leanings. It’s becoming increasingly clear that he and the President never meant to lift the ban at all, and were merely maneuvering into position for a more permanent ban. He promised that offshore drilling would end and that more would start up now that risks have been “significantly reduced”, but now – what a shock! – the ban will continue for seven years. All thanks to the President putting ideology before science. Wasn’t that supposed to be a big problem of George Bush? The masses don’t need to know about it. It’s no surprise that Salazar was favored by anti-oil activists even back in 2009.

But it’s worse than that. While Paul Adams is wringing his hands over a few oystermen in Louisiana, the BBC is censoring news that the drilling ban itself is actually beginning to cause economic damage.

Less than a year ago, struggling states and coastal towns saw crude exploration off the Gulf Coast and Atlantic seaboard as economic salvation.

Yet the backlash from the BP oil spill — most recently the Obama administration’s decision this week not to open up some of that area to new drilling — has residents wondering if the industry will ever thrive again in U.S. waters.

Some fear an exodus of oil rigs in search of friendlier waters overseas. And with each passing day, folks that rely on deepwater drilling say the damage is multiplying, creating a ripple affect from blue-collar Main Street to beachside drives. They warn it will only get worse.

“Deepwater was the future,” said Lori Davis, owner of Rig-Chem, a Houma, La., business that sells chemicals to oil companies. If there’s less new exploratory drilling, everyone from industry suppliers to doctor’s offices who treat oil field workers will have less business.

Davis has already cut a consultant, reduced a profit-sharing plan for workers and left a recent job vacancy unfilled. “Today, we have to rethink that because we have an administration that’s clueless, with no interest in supporting oil and gas,” she said.

Sure, the Government previously stated that predicted job losses during the initial six month ban weren’t so bad (well, they would do), but that was when everyone thought it was only temporary. What about now that it’s more or less permanent? Well, oil prices are already up because of it, hitting a two-year high. That doesn’t help those struggling businessmen at all, nor does it help anyone else except nasty old Big Oil.

Unfortunately, the BBC doesn’t feel like examining any of this. All they care about is supporting the President’s ideology-based ban, and ignoring details which interfere with the Narrative.

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The BBC’s Censoring of News on the Gulf Oil Spill

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I’m sure everyone remembers the BBC’s tireless, seemingly non-stop coverage of the Gulf Oil Spill a few months ago. It was declared the greatest natural disaster in the history of the US, with unfathomably dire environmental consequences. We all saw the footage of the soiled pelicans and turtles, and worried about shrimp and scallops. The occasional tear was also shed for what this disaster would do to the local economy, specifically the Louisiana coast and New Orleans, which had previously been devastated by George Bush’s failure to…er…by Hurricane Katrina.

As time went on, the various failures of the Obamessiah Administration kept cropping up in the news. The Administration’s inept handling of the clean-up effort, including being even less competent than Bush when it came to getting around the Jones Act and allowing foreign countries to send in ships to help out, started gaining attention. Then there was the fact that He ignored a pre-approved, pre-existing plan to burn off some of it, and then waited too long to react in general. Even we noticed here that He took nine days to even make a real public appearance about it, forcing himself to cut short yet another vacation. The BBC never said a word.

In fact, it got so bad that the people of Louisiana thought the President handling things worse than Bush did with Katrina. Meanwhile, the BBC was telling you about some silly anti-British sentiment because the President kept saying “British Petroleum” and one or two locals said something in anger in front of a BBC camera.

Naturally, once the media started carping about the President’s handling of the problem (even JournoListas were unhappy), Mark Mardell was there to support Him. At first, of course, Mardell declared that the real reason that people were upset was because the President wasn’t acting dramatically enough for the stupid proles. Then, when He gave a more ponderous performance, Mardell eagerly lapped it up:

It was a measured, sober speech of quiet power, the speech of a president projecting absolute command, if not empathy. But the last quotation says much: a strong, very American invocation of the country’s might and optimism, its ability to muster its strength and overcome.

It was intended to rally a people who were rather feeling he’d not gripped this crisis.

A less sycophantic view would be that it was an empty series of platitudes, with more fluff than substance. But not to a believer like Mardell. Soon enough, word got out that the Obamessiah Administration was colluding with BP to block media access to certain areas of the clean-up. Nobody was sure why, although the most obvious reason was to make sure nobody found out just how screwed up the whole situation was. The BBC, of course, censored that news, as they did for just about any problems the Administration was having. The only thing the BBC audience was allowed to know was that the President wasn’t making enough great speeches to please the unwashed masses, but He sure was taking responsibility and would make BP pay.

At one point, the President appointed a commission to study the spill, to find out what went wrong and recommend a course of action. Unsurprisingly, it was full of environmentals and policy wonks, with nearly all of them already having set opinions against the oil industry. Some of the commissioners were expressing their opinions on the matter – all anti-oil – even before the proceedings began. It was rigged from the start, but instead the BBC dutifully reported the White House talking points about it.

In between vacations and photo-op luncheons, the President found time to place a six-month moratorium on off-shore drilling. At the time, this was hailed by Greenpeace and the BBC as a much-needed action, necessary until we learned more about the dangers of off-shore drilling, put more safety measures in place, etc. The message was that off-shore drilling is bad, m’kay, and the President did the right thing for the environment and to save us all.

This ban cost thousands of jobs, and killed plenty of business and tax revenue for the region the President was supposed to be saving and protecting. As it was supposedly based on science and real danger, nobody objected too much, and the Gulf Coast, already devastated by Bush…er…Katrina, would suffer further hardship.

However, it turns out that this ban was done for ideological reasons and not based on science or technical expertise. In fact, we’ve since learned that the spill wasn’t all that bad. Even though it was visually very sexy, it seems that the damage was exaggerated. The media played a large role in this, including the BBC, and one has to wonder if this is in part due to the Obamessiah Administration’s collusion in blocking media access to key areas.

And what a shock: an independent investigation has found that the White House altered part of an Interior Department’s report to make it appear that a group of scientists and engineers approved of the drilling ban:

“The White House edit of the original DOI draft executive summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer-reviewed by the experts,” the IG report states, without judgment on whether the change was an intentional attempt to mislead the public.

So the ban, which cost thousands of jobs, and harmed the already precarious economy of the Gulf Coast region, was done for purely ideological reasons, and not based on science. Justin Webb told us that this President would bring science back and wouldn’t deny it based on ideology. Turns out this, just like so many of Webb’s other pronouncements on the President back when he was the BBC’s North America editor, simply isn’t true. Utter silence from the BBC, as usual.

The BBC aided and abetted the White House Narrative, in part by censoring key information. This was all done for purely ideological reasons, and not based on science or the facts.

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MORE OIL FOR BLOOD.

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The news that Iraq plans to significantly increase it’s oil production in the next year or so is being hailed by the BBC this evening as conclusive evidence that THIS is what motivated the US invasion. If only! The BBC are real truthers on this – incapable or unwilling of understanding that removing the Saddamite thugocracy was virtuous in itself! It is such an insult to all those brave servicemen and women – US and UK – who have made the ultimate sacrifice trying to give Iraqis a shot at democracy to put it all down to a lust for cheap oil. But since when did the BBC care about our military….

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JEDDAH NIGHTS.

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Did you read the BBC’s fawning coverage of Mr Broon’s visit to Jeddah as he seeks to use his super powers to persuade OPEC to bring about “New Deal” for us all? It’s pathetic to watch the BBC twist in the wind trying to prop up the utterly useless Brown when the rest of us can see just how discredited and economically culpable the Great Leader is on this issue. Listen, if Brown was in ANY WAY serious about helping those who are suffering from vast oil increases here in the UK, he could reduce or better still remove the Vat element he slaps on it. But that won’t happen since the vast public sector behemoth he has built since 1997 would shrivel up, starved of funds. So instead he jets across to Saudi (Juat think of all those carbon emissions!) to beg the Arabs for something they have no intention of giving. How fortunate for him that the BBC sees fit to portray this begging mission up as the act of a Statesman. Still, His Master’s Voice and all that…

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Who ate all the pies?

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More nonsense reporting from the BBC. A generous portion of the BBC’s bias lies in giving credence to outlandish leftist notions- such as that the cause of food shortages is obesity.

Why exactly the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is calculating the costs of John Prescott’s sad “condition” is one of many unanswered questions from this report.

Let’s just consider some real news shall we? How about Alistair Darling’s attack on EU grain tariffs, which actually do keep food prices high? I couldn’t find a BBC story on it or the backlash. Or how about the story mentioned in this report of how the UK Treasury is dealing with its debt problems by raking in from the high fuel prices which make food so expensive?

How about a bit more on the impact of biofuels on food production? Some number crunching there would be more than welcome.

The war on fatties is pure diversion from the machinations of politicians. The BBC is entirely complicit in these. Politics, statism, and the manipulation of the populace is the BBC’s stock in trade.

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