Post by Teddy Bear on Jul 24, 2012 0:58:26 GMT
Excellent article by Peter Hitchens about how the BBC appears to have a confused attitude to death by on the one hand openly supporting the anti-death penalty campaign, yet furthering the rise to power of militant and radical Islamists, regardless of how many innocents will suffer as a result.
I would say that I don't think the BBC are 'confused' in relation to death. They are completely impervious to the pain and suffering that their agenda helps bring about. They simply pick which issues directly further their goals according to their limited vision, and which issues make them appear as they are moral and peace desiring.
Being against the death penalty makes them appear as valuing life, regardless of what the families of those victims of murderers might feel, much less society itself. The same as their being proponents of Green issues, despite the real usefulness or value of what is proposed. All this helps keep the left-wing mentality on board, and make themselves feel like 'humanitarians'.
Yet they have no compunctions about furthering the agenda of militant Islam, regardless of how much death and torture will result from their ostrich like stance. Then they use similar immoral politically oriented organisations like the UN to give credence to their slant, instead of exposing the now inherent corruption within this cancerous force.
We see evidence of this hypocrisy day in and day out - it's what the BBC does.
I would say that I don't think the BBC are 'confused' in relation to death. They are completely impervious to the pain and suffering that their agenda helps bring about. They simply pick which issues directly further their goals according to their limited vision, and which issues make them appear as they are moral and peace desiring.
Being against the death penalty makes them appear as valuing life, regardless of what the families of those victims of murderers might feel, much less society itself. The same as their being proponents of Green issues, despite the real usefulness or value of what is proposed. All this helps keep the left-wing mentality on board, and make themselves feel like 'humanitarians'.
Yet they have no compunctions about furthering the agenda of militant Islam, regardless of how much death and torture will result from their ostrich like stance. Then they use similar immoral politically oriented organisations like the UN to give credence to their slant, instead of exposing the now inherent corruption within this cancerous force.
We see evidence of this hypocrisy day in and day out - it's what the BBC does.
Beating the Drum for War, while opposing the gallows – the BBC’s confused attitude to death
Famously, the Jewish athlete Harold Abrahams says in the film ‘Chariots of Fire’ that you can seldom put your finger on a direct expression of anti-Semitism, or Judophobia, as I nowadays term it because, since Hitler gave anti-Semitism a really bad name, nobody will admit to being an anti-Semite (who? me? The very idea?). And that’s Ju-do-pho-bia by the way, nice and simple, easy to say, not Judaeophobia or any other tangled mouthful. I made it up myself, to put on the shelf alongside Homophobia and Islamophobia. I did so partly because so many irrational Israel-haters reject the name of anti-Semite (because they think it means ‘Nazi’ - and they read the Guardian so they can’t be Nazis). But also yes, ever so slightly to annoy the inventors of those terms, who have achieved a lot by wrongly classifying political or moral opinions as pathologies.
The paradox is that the strangely persistent hostility towards Jews in so many parts of the world often does seem to require some sort of medical or at least scientific explanation. See Julius Streicher’s ‘Der Stuermer’, or some of the ‘Blood Libel’ and ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ garbage which still circulates in many Arab countries.
Abrahams said ‘You catch it on the edge of a remark’. It is a very clever summary. If you were able to play it back, and write it down, and pin it., cold and dead, in a display case, it would be hard to see exactly what was wrong with it. But as it flies by the ear and the eye, it’s clear that something is up. And this is often true of bias in broadcasting or journalism. I’ll come back to that, and to the question of Syria, in a moment.
With me, you know where you are. I’m biased, strongly, in favour of some things and against others. My bias is (in my view) rational and supported by facts and logic. It is also clearly stated and very much unconcealed. But it’s a bias. Bias is something I know how to do. You’d no more go to me for an impartial report than you’d put mustard in a cream cake, or anchovies on your cornflakes.
And that is at least partly (there are other reasons) why I’m not financed by a poll tax, or so-called licence fee, collected on pain of imprisonment from the population.
But the BBC is. And its complete inability to remain impartial, while sighing that it really, really is, is exasperating largely because it is based on such a tragic lack of self-knowledge. You can hardly ever get them to listen. A couple of Christmases ago, I had a series of brief impromptu conversations crammed into one day with the outgoing Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson. On the same day, we met on a train, in the foyer of some lecture hall and finally at the sort of liberal elite party, in a London club, too, which Mike Barnes (or is that mikebarnes?) thinks I attend all the time. If only you knew, Mike.
It became quite funny, and I had to persuade him I wasn’t actively stalking him. The good thing was that our exchange had, by the end, become a conversation, and I think I managed to get through to him some of what I have long said.
He insisted that his presenters and commentators were all impartial in action, whatever their private views. I was sure he was wrong. To explain why, I said ‘ I’m sure that the BBC does not employ any presenter who could subject Clive Stafford Smith (the celebrated anti-death penalty campaigner) to an aggressive, hostile interview.’
Mr Thompson scratched his chin and seemed to concede that yes, I had got him there.
Which allows me to digress for a moment and mention BBC Radio 4’s ‘Midweek’ programme, which this week featured Mr Stafford Smith , who is currently plugging a book called ‘Injustice’. Good luck to him. ‘Midweek’ has never yet allowed me to plug any of my books around the table with the jolly, comfortable Libby Purves, but who knows? Maybe next time. If this does happen, I do not expect to be described as Peter Hitchens ‘The great columnist and author’. I’ll be content with name, rank and number. But Clive (whom I first met in an execution chamber in Georgia , USA, and for whom I have some admiration despite disagreeing with his blanket rejection of the death penalty ) was introduced by Libby on Wednesday as, yes, ‘The great defence lawyer and campaigner’. Great?
Well, no bias there, I suppose. And nor was there any bias in the largely admiring interview which followed. (The programme will be available on BBC i-player for a few days yet, so you can see if I’m right). But there was something ,either present or lacking. If I’d been there I would have challenged Clive’s homely reminiscences about ‘Nicky’ Ingram, a nasty and particularly cruel murderer whose guilt was never in serious doubt, yet whose cause Clive championed, and whose execution in the electric chair we both watched, from different parts of the room. But then, I know what Ingram did, and how he told his victim that he liked to torture people before tying him and his wife to a tree and then shooting them both in the head. She survived, which is how we know for certain he was guilty. If Ms Purves knew any of this, she showed no sign of it, or of revulsion at hearing this person referred in friendly terms, as ‘Nicky’.
But isn’t it strange that the BBC, crammed as it with people who regard me as a monster for favouring capital punishment for the guilty, has become a roaring propaganda machine for liberal intervention in Arab countries, which will lead – has already led – to many innocents dying?
Even the BBC has now admitted it got ‘carried away’ over the ‘Arab Spring’, an event viewed here on this weblog with what seems to me to have been prescient doubt. And a few brave reporters are now bringing back news of just what a mess our exultant support of a rabble of fanatical Islamists and gangsters (who later showed their gratitude by wrecking a British war cemetery, devoting special attention to desecrating the graves of Jewish soldiers) has led to in poor Libya.
But do they learn? They do not. Now we are cranking up for intervention in Syria, too, somehow steering round the UN which is prevented by Russia and China from endorsing this. And anyone watching or listening to BBC outlets on Wednesday must surely have been struck by the coverage of the terrorist murder of several leading Syrian government figures in Damascus that morning. I think I am right in saying that the BBC generally disapproves of terrorist murder, and it puts on a long face to report it ( as it should). But on this occasion I sensed no moral disapproval at all. Indeed, I noticed an exultant tone, and something similar in the responses of politicians quoted, who more or less stated that this sort of thing would keep on happening until the Assad ‘regime’ ‘stepped down’. How do they know, by the way? Does this tell us anything about the relations of ‘The West’ with the Syrian Islamist rebels who we are misguidedly supporting, and who some Sunni Arab states are arming? This came a few days after the BBC had excitedly carried unconfirmed reports of a ‘massacre’ in Syria which as far as I know has not been shown to have taken place. It was a battle between rebels and government in which some people died, a wholly different thing.
That word ‘regime’ is also interesting. What makes one government a regime and another a government? It can’t be democratic legitimacy, or they would be all the time talking about the Chinese regime, and we never do. Syria, like dozens of countries, traces its political legitimacy back to the day when it ceased to be a colony (in this case, of France). Its recognition, by the UN and most nations, was not given on condition it was in future governed by Liberal Democrats. It was the recognised inheritor of the French Empire, itself the inheritor by conquest of the Ottoman Empire. That’s as good as it gets in those parts. It was, as is now being quietly forgotten, our welcome ally in the first Gulf War of 1991. I think you get called a regime if the new globalism has set its heart on destabilising you. Increasingly, I worry that if this country ever again got a sovereign independent government, there’d be a nasty outbreak of violent disorder from some quarter or other, and the government’s reasonable efforts to control it would be distorted by the global networks…you know the rest.
But what really disturbed me was the way that BBC Radio 4’s generally thoughtful (if liberal) 10 pm news show ‘The World Tonight’ billed the murder of much of the Syrian leadership as a ‘stunning development’. Well, I suppose you could say this phrase is capable of being a neutral statement, just about ft for use while recording the violent deaths, at the hands of terrorists, of senior officials of a sovereign state. But had I been editor of that programme I would have ruled that its use was capable of being misinterpreted as an expression of partiality, and cut it out. And, as I point out above, I am an expert in being partial. You catch it on the edge of a remark.
Famously, the Jewish athlete Harold Abrahams says in the film ‘Chariots of Fire’ that you can seldom put your finger on a direct expression of anti-Semitism, or Judophobia, as I nowadays term it because, since Hitler gave anti-Semitism a really bad name, nobody will admit to being an anti-Semite (who? me? The very idea?). And that’s Ju-do-pho-bia by the way, nice and simple, easy to say, not Judaeophobia or any other tangled mouthful. I made it up myself, to put on the shelf alongside Homophobia and Islamophobia. I did so partly because so many irrational Israel-haters reject the name of anti-Semite (because they think it means ‘Nazi’ - and they read the Guardian so they can’t be Nazis). But also yes, ever so slightly to annoy the inventors of those terms, who have achieved a lot by wrongly classifying political or moral opinions as pathologies.
The paradox is that the strangely persistent hostility towards Jews in so many parts of the world often does seem to require some sort of medical or at least scientific explanation. See Julius Streicher’s ‘Der Stuermer’, or some of the ‘Blood Libel’ and ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ garbage which still circulates in many Arab countries.
Abrahams said ‘You catch it on the edge of a remark’. It is a very clever summary. If you were able to play it back, and write it down, and pin it., cold and dead, in a display case, it would be hard to see exactly what was wrong with it. But as it flies by the ear and the eye, it’s clear that something is up. And this is often true of bias in broadcasting or journalism. I’ll come back to that, and to the question of Syria, in a moment.
With me, you know where you are. I’m biased, strongly, in favour of some things and against others. My bias is (in my view) rational and supported by facts and logic. It is also clearly stated and very much unconcealed. But it’s a bias. Bias is something I know how to do. You’d no more go to me for an impartial report than you’d put mustard in a cream cake, or anchovies on your cornflakes.
And that is at least partly (there are other reasons) why I’m not financed by a poll tax, or so-called licence fee, collected on pain of imprisonment from the population.
But the BBC is. And its complete inability to remain impartial, while sighing that it really, really is, is exasperating largely because it is based on such a tragic lack of self-knowledge. You can hardly ever get them to listen. A couple of Christmases ago, I had a series of brief impromptu conversations crammed into one day with the outgoing Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson. On the same day, we met on a train, in the foyer of some lecture hall and finally at the sort of liberal elite party, in a London club, too, which Mike Barnes (or is that mikebarnes?) thinks I attend all the time. If only you knew, Mike.
It became quite funny, and I had to persuade him I wasn’t actively stalking him. The good thing was that our exchange had, by the end, become a conversation, and I think I managed to get through to him some of what I have long said.
He insisted that his presenters and commentators were all impartial in action, whatever their private views. I was sure he was wrong. To explain why, I said ‘ I’m sure that the BBC does not employ any presenter who could subject Clive Stafford Smith (the celebrated anti-death penalty campaigner) to an aggressive, hostile interview.’
Mr Thompson scratched his chin and seemed to concede that yes, I had got him there.
Which allows me to digress for a moment and mention BBC Radio 4’s ‘Midweek’ programme, which this week featured Mr Stafford Smith , who is currently plugging a book called ‘Injustice’. Good luck to him. ‘Midweek’ has never yet allowed me to plug any of my books around the table with the jolly, comfortable Libby Purves, but who knows? Maybe next time. If this does happen, I do not expect to be described as Peter Hitchens ‘The great columnist and author’. I’ll be content with name, rank and number. But Clive (whom I first met in an execution chamber in Georgia , USA, and for whom I have some admiration despite disagreeing with his blanket rejection of the death penalty ) was introduced by Libby on Wednesday as, yes, ‘The great defence lawyer and campaigner’. Great?
Well, no bias there, I suppose. And nor was there any bias in the largely admiring interview which followed. (The programme will be available on BBC i-player for a few days yet, so you can see if I’m right). But there was something ,either present or lacking. If I’d been there I would have challenged Clive’s homely reminiscences about ‘Nicky’ Ingram, a nasty and particularly cruel murderer whose guilt was never in serious doubt, yet whose cause Clive championed, and whose execution in the electric chair we both watched, from different parts of the room. But then, I know what Ingram did, and how he told his victim that he liked to torture people before tying him and his wife to a tree and then shooting them both in the head. She survived, which is how we know for certain he was guilty. If Ms Purves knew any of this, she showed no sign of it, or of revulsion at hearing this person referred in friendly terms, as ‘Nicky’.
But isn’t it strange that the BBC, crammed as it with people who regard me as a monster for favouring capital punishment for the guilty, has become a roaring propaganda machine for liberal intervention in Arab countries, which will lead – has already led – to many innocents dying?
Even the BBC has now admitted it got ‘carried away’ over the ‘Arab Spring’, an event viewed here on this weblog with what seems to me to have been prescient doubt. And a few brave reporters are now bringing back news of just what a mess our exultant support of a rabble of fanatical Islamists and gangsters (who later showed their gratitude by wrecking a British war cemetery, devoting special attention to desecrating the graves of Jewish soldiers) has led to in poor Libya.
But do they learn? They do not. Now we are cranking up for intervention in Syria, too, somehow steering round the UN which is prevented by Russia and China from endorsing this. And anyone watching or listening to BBC outlets on Wednesday must surely have been struck by the coverage of the terrorist murder of several leading Syrian government figures in Damascus that morning. I think I am right in saying that the BBC generally disapproves of terrorist murder, and it puts on a long face to report it ( as it should). But on this occasion I sensed no moral disapproval at all. Indeed, I noticed an exultant tone, and something similar in the responses of politicians quoted, who more or less stated that this sort of thing would keep on happening until the Assad ‘regime’ ‘stepped down’. How do they know, by the way? Does this tell us anything about the relations of ‘The West’ with the Syrian Islamist rebels who we are misguidedly supporting, and who some Sunni Arab states are arming? This came a few days after the BBC had excitedly carried unconfirmed reports of a ‘massacre’ in Syria which as far as I know has not been shown to have taken place. It was a battle between rebels and government in which some people died, a wholly different thing.
That word ‘regime’ is also interesting. What makes one government a regime and another a government? It can’t be democratic legitimacy, or they would be all the time talking about the Chinese regime, and we never do. Syria, like dozens of countries, traces its political legitimacy back to the day when it ceased to be a colony (in this case, of France). Its recognition, by the UN and most nations, was not given on condition it was in future governed by Liberal Democrats. It was the recognised inheritor of the French Empire, itself the inheritor by conquest of the Ottoman Empire. That’s as good as it gets in those parts. It was, as is now being quietly forgotten, our welcome ally in the first Gulf War of 1991. I think you get called a regime if the new globalism has set its heart on destabilising you. Increasingly, I worry that if this country ever again got a sovereign independent government, there’d be a nasty outbreak of violent disorder from some quarter or other, and the government’s reasonable efforts to control it would be distorted by the global networks…you know the rest.
But what really disturbed me was the way that BBC Radio 4’s generally thoughtful (if liberal) 10 pm news show ‘The World Tonight’ billed the murder of much of the Syrian leadership as a ‘stunning development’. Well, I suppose you could say this phrase is capable of being a neutral statement, just about ft for use while recording the violent deaths, at the hands of terrorists, of senior officials of a sovereign state. But had I been editor of that programme I would have ruled that its use was capable of being misinterpreted as an expression of partiality, and cut it out. And, as I point out above, I am an expert in being partial. You catch it on the edge of a remark.