Living in a Bubble: The BBC's very own Mideast foreign policy

[sundevil777 94]

Recently, I read a post claiming how the BBC is a good example of non-biased news reporting. I could take it no more...

From Naomi Ragen's newsletter. It is long, but worth at least a scan:

Friends,

Below is an excellent article that debunks the BBC's make-believe news
reporting, and proves what we all know: The BBC is a spokesman for terrorist
chic.

Thanks to Tom Gross, we can all now easily prove this.

Naomi

"One particularly cosmetic exercise was a 30-minute BBC profile of Arafat
which described him as a "hero," and "an icon," and spoke of him as having
"performer's flare," and "charisma and style" and "personal courage" and
being "the stuff of legends." Adjectives applied to him included "clever,"
"respectable," and "triumphant". He was also inaccurately referred to as
"President." "


http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/gross200406181018.asp


Living in a Bubble: The BBC's very own Mideast foreign policy

By Tom Gross

National Review Online

June 18, 2004

The BBC: Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, from Saudi Arabia, who opened London
's biggest mosque last Friday, is a respected leader who works for
"community cohesion" and "building communities."

Not mentioned on the BBC: Some of the views of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman
al-Sudais. In his own words: In the name of Allah, the Jews must be
"annihilated." They are "the scum of the human race, the rats of the world.
the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs."

The BBC's Charter and its Producers Guidelines state: "Due impartiality lies
at the heart of the BBC. All programs and services should be open minded,
fair and show a respect for truth. [BBC reports should] contain
comprehensive, authoritative and impartial coverage of news and current
affairs in the United Kingdom and throughout the world."

The BBC makes many good programs when it comes to drama, comedy, sport and
science. But its enormous news division - by far the world's biggest - is
another story. Using lavish public funding (courtesy of the British
taxpayer) and an unprecedented worldwide news reach (its radio service
alone, broadcasting in 43 languages, attracts over 150 million listeners
daily), it is - in blatant breach of its own charter - virtually conducting
its own anti-American and anti-Israeli foreign policy. Anyone who doesn't
agree with its policies (Tony Blair, for example) finds themselves at the
mercy of BBC news coverage.

In January, criticisms made of the BBC in a report by an official commission
set up by the UK government ("the Hutton enquiry") in regard to its Iraq war
coverage, were so scathing that both the chairman of the Board of Governors
of the BBC and its Director-General had little choice but to resign. Since
then, the BBC has - for a while at least - been a little more adroit at
disguising its prejudices. Instead much of its slant now lies in omission
rather than in active distortion.

"B" MOVIE ACTOR

Last week, for example, almost every other news organization in the world
(including those in the former Communist states) began their obituaries of
Ronald Reagan by saying that many (including Mikhail Gorbachev) credit
Reagan with helping to bring about the end of the Cold War. But the BBC
online obituary ("World Edition," Sunday, 6 June, 2004, titled "Reagan's
mixed White House legacy," and running to almost 1000 words - that's a full
four pages if you print it out from the BBC website) didn't even mention the
Cold War, let alone Reagan's calls to "tear down" the Berlin Wall.

Instead the BBC reminded us that Reagan was "a B movie actor," and stated
that as president his "foreign policy was criticised for being in disarray"
Accompanying photos were not of Reagan meeting Gorbachev, but of Oliver
North, and of the invasion of Grenada ("a clumsy sham," according to the BBC
text).

Even during his funeral last Friday, BBC World Service Radio began its
bulletin by first referring to Reagan as a film actor before mentioning that
he was president.

When I went for an interview for a job at BBC news at the end of the 1980s,
the BBC interviewers (comprising several senior news producers) literally
scoffed at me when I suggested, in a mild way, that perhaps the BBC might
devote a little more coverage to the eastern bloc.

But then the Cold War plays a very small part in the worldview of the BBC.
They seldom showed signs of caring much about hundreds of millions of people
living under communist dictatorship then, and they are still very reluctant
to acknowledge that it happened, let alone their own failings in reporting
it.

I mention this because it helps explain the bubble they live in today with
regard to the Middle East and Arab world. A bubble which has led them to
seek to undermine, even delegitimize Israel, the region's sole democracy,
while at the same time bending over backwards to excuse extremist Islamic
clerics, and the worst of the Arab dictators.

The BBC doesn't seem to care that - as Jonathan Kay of Canada's National
Post put it - if Robert Mugabe walked into an Arab League summit he would be
the most democratically legitimate leader in the room. The BBC's attitude
appears to be that: Arabs don't deserve to have their human rights situation
mentioned. As far as their reporting is concerned, women, gays, and others
don't deserve rights in Moslem countries.

PREACHING HATE FROM MECCA

Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais (referred to in the introduction to this
article, and whose surname has also been transliterated by MEMRI and others
as Al-Sudayyis [1]) is not just any imam, and his hate-filled sermons are
not just delivered in some peripheral setting. He is the preacher at the
Grand Al-Haraam mosque - the most important mosque in Mecca, the very heart
of Islam.

"Read history," implored al-Sudais to his massed ranks of followers in
another of his sermons, on February 1, 2004, "and you will understand that
the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are
evil offspring, infidels . calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers,
prophecy-deniers... the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned
into apes and pigs... These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness,
cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption..."

Al-Sudais has repeated these words, or close variations of them, at several
other sermons in recent years. It is because of these and other calls for
violence against Christians, Hindus, and Americans, that the Canadian
government last month denied al-Sudais a visa to enter Canada.

But none of this seems to have penetrated the BBC bubble. In its reports
last weekend on TV, radio and online, on Sheikh al-Sudais's visit to
Britain, in which he lead 15,000 worshippers at prayer at the opening of the
enormous new six-story Islamic center in east London, the BBC mentioned none
of this.

BBC Online for example, last Saturday
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3796631.stm), gave the impression that
al-Sudais was nothing but a benign, kindly cleric promoting (to quote the
BBC) "community cohesion" between Muslims and their neighbors.

"The centre was opened as Friday prayers took place, led by one of Islam's
most renowned Imams, and celebrations will continue throughout the weekend,"
said the BBC. "Worshippers had come to hear Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais,
Imam of the Ka'ba, Islam's holiest mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. With many
unable to enter the new centre, some worshippers took to praying on a street
behind the mosque using prayer mats and even newspapers." We are told that
the center "will bolster London's reputation as a vibrant and diverse
international city" and has a "spirit of modesty."

At the side of the BBC webpage, a video clip was flagged with the caption:
"The BBC's Mark Easton: 'Events like today offer grounds for optimism'."

It would be hard to imagine the BBC completely omitting diatribes such as
al-Sudais' had they been made by a Christian leader - or had a prominent
Israeli rabbi said anything similar about Moslems.

IS SOMETHING HAPPENING IN SUDAN?

The BBC efforts not to "offend" Arabs extremists even extend to their
reports on ethnic cleansing and genocide. On both the occasions in the last
week when I heard BBC World Service Radio refer to the ongoing genocide and
ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the BBC took scrupulous care to avoid saying who
the perpetrators were (they are Arab militias) and who the victims are
(hundreds of thousands of Black Sudanese Africans - Moslems, Christians and
Animists). The BBC didn't make any mention whatever of the long history of
mass slavery in Sudan, carried out by Arabs with non-Arabs as their victims;
nor of the scorched earth policies, and systematic rape being carried out
there by Arabs.

Yet in one of these very same news bulletins, the BBC mentioned that
"settlers" in Gaza were "Jewish" and the land they were settling is
"Palestinian". I don't think I have ever heard the BBC refer to settlers in
Gaza without mentioning their ethnicity or religion - which is, of course,
relevant to the story (though many would dispute the historical and legal
accuracy of referring to the territory as Palestinian). But the BBC doesn't
appear to think ethnicity is relevant when it comes to real killing or
ethnic based cleansing.

That is apart from situations elsewhere, in which non-Arabs are
perpetrators. In one of the very same bulletins in which the BBC failed to
mention the ethnic make up of perpetrator and victim in Sudan, it made sure
to let us know that "Bosnian Serbs have admitted for the first time their
role in the massacre of Bosnian Moslems a decade ago."

In another report last week, a BBC correspondent casually referred to "a
fanatical rebel group" in Uganda. This contrasts with the term "Palestinian
resistance group" that BBC reporters often use to describe Hamas, a group
the BBC clearly doesn't find fanatical at all.

SO HAMAS ARE NOT GUILTY?

But then Hamas (along with Yasser Arafat, one of the most vicious murderers
of Jews since Hitler) appear to enjoy a certain degree of sympathy at the
BBC, which throughout the past four years of Israeli-Palestinian violence
has constantly tried to obscure the true nature of the group by using
misleading language.

There are innumerable examples of this; they occur almost daily.

"Over the years, Hamas has been blamed for scores of suicide attacks on
Israel," says the BBC, thereby trying to suggest to listeners and viewers
that Hamas has perhaps been wrongly accused of such attacks (even though
Hamas itself has proudly and repeatedly claimed responsibility for them in
mass celebratory rallies in Gaza, Jenin and elsewhere.)

Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire indiscriminately in the heart of the
northern Israeli town of Afula, killing two young Israeli civilians and
wounding over 50 others. They themselves were then shot dead by Israeli
policemen. The headline on the BBC website read: "Four Die in Israel
Shooting Rampage," suggesting that four innocent people had died, possibly
at the hands of the Israelis.

Again, when suicide bombers killed 26 Israeli civilians in attacks on
Jerusalem and Haifa, the word "terror" was used by the BBC only when
describing Israel's retaliatory (and largely non-lethal) attacks on
Palestinian military targets. (By contrast, the BBC didn't hesitate to use
the word "terrorism" last week, when one of its own correspondents, Frank
Gardner, was shot and badly wounded by an al-Qaeda gunman in Saudi Arabia.)

Some of the foreign BBC staff are quite open about their sympathies for
Hamas. The senior BBC Arabic Service correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Fayad
Abu Shamala, told a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001 (attended by the then Hamas
leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin) that journalists and media organizations in
Gaza, including the BBC, are "waging the campaign [of resistance/terror
against Israel] shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people."

The best the BBC could do in response to requests from Israel that they
distance themselves from these remarks at the time, was to issue a statement
saying, "Fayad's remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have
always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC."

Indeed, today, three years later, the BBC is continuing to use Abu Shamala
as much as ever. He was, for example, one of the BBC reporters in Gaza last
month, who contributed to the BBC's highly slanted reporting (on both the
BBC English and Arabic services) of Israel's operation to root out Hamas
bomb-makers in Rafah in the southern Gaza.

A MINUTE'S SILENCE FOR SHEIKH YASSIN

Back in London, BBC staff are careful to promote sympathy for Hamas and
other Palestinian terror groups in more subtle ways. Dr Jenny Tonge, a
Liberal Democrat Member of the British Parliament, declared in January that
she would consider becoming a suicide bomber if she were Palestinian (and
subsequently led a minute's silence in March - in the House of Commons no
less - for the deceased Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, who issued orders for
dozens of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians). Since then, Dr Tonge's
invitations to appear on BBC have noticeably increased.

She was sacked by the Liberal Democrat party leader as parliamentary
spokesman for children's issues for these remarks, but this hasn't bothered
the BBC, who now invite her on both radio and TV to discuss the Middle East.

In one case, in February, BBC Radio 4's Flagship morning news program
"Today" actually sent her off to "Palestine" (at the BBC's expense), after
which they broadcast her "diary," in which she further defamed Israel and
reiterated her sympathy for suicide bombing. She has also repeated her
support for suicide bombers on air on the BBC on other occasions.

Similarly, there is the case of Oxford university literature lecturer Tom
Paulin - who among other things has compared Jewish settlers to Nazis, has
said they should be "shot dead," compared the Israeli army to Hitler's SS,
and said he could "understand how suicide bombers feel." He continues to be
invited as a regular guest commentator by the BBC; indeed, he is one of the
two or three most frequent contributors to their most widely screened
program on the arts.

DON'T MENTION LIMB AMPTUTATION

Those who dare criticize Arab extremism are dealt with somewhat differently
by the BBC.

For example, Robert Kilroy-Silk - who does not appear on BBC news but hosted
a daytime chat show - was immediately taken off air after he had the
temerity to write in a non-BBC newspaper article in January that Arabs were
"suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors." He swiftly apologized
and the newspaper in question acknowledged that he had written "Arab
governments" and this was inadvertently changed to "Arabs" as a result of an
editing error. But Kilroy-Silk was rapidly sacked by the BBC nevertheless.

However, Kilroy-Silk's remarks - as many Arab moderates who welcomed them,
such as the Egyptian human rights campaigner Ibrahim Nawar, have pointed
out - were not technically inaccurate. Limb amputation and repression of
women are enshrined in Saudi law, and suicide bombing of Israelis and
Americans strongly encouraged by some in government circles. Paulin's
comments, on the other hand, were untrue, blatantly biased and incendiary.

And they were comments which may have had consequences. Just a few days
later, after they were approvingly reported across the Arab world, several
Israeli settlers were murdered, including five-year-old Danielle Shefi,
slain as she screamed in her bedroom, leaving behind her Mickey Mouse sheets
soaked in blood. (I am not seeking to suggest that there is a direct link
between Paulin's comments and Shefi's murder; but collectively the BBC's
attitude of appeasement towards terrorism is likely to produce consequences
in terms of killing and suffering.)

Kilroy-Silk - whose article appeared just a few days before Dr Tonge's
suicide bomb remarks - apologized. He said he "greatly regretted the offence
caused" by his remarks. But this wasn't enough to satisfy the BBC. Paulin
and Tonge have offered no such apology; but then the BBC gave no indication
they would expect one.

When Harvard University later withdrew an invitation for Paulin to lecture,
the BBC seemed to think it was all a bit of a joke. BBC news online
commented: "[Paulin's] knockabout style has ruffled feathers in the US,
where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive."

"THE STUFF OF LEGENDS"

The BBC rarely misses an opportunity to denigrate Israel or its prime
minister. One program even staged a mock "war crimes" trial for Ariel
Sharon. (The BBC verdict - that Sharon has a case to answer - was never in
doubt).

Yasser Arafat, though, receives a very different treatment. One particularly
cosmetic exercise was a 30-minute BBC profile of Arafat which described him
as a "hero," and "an icon," and spoke of him as having "performer's flare,"
and "charisma and style" and "personal courage" and being "the stuff of
legends." Adjectives applied to him included "clever," "respectable," and
"triumphant". He was also inaccurately referred to as "President." [2]

This was broadcast on 5 July 2002 - just two weeks after President Bush had
called for a change in Palestinian leadership following revelations about
Arafat's links with suicide terror attacks. But then the BBC knew that they
would get this kind of approach when they asked the notoriously anti-Israeli
journalist, Suzanne Goldenberg (formerly Jerusalem correspondent for the
London Guardian, now the Guardian's Washington correspondent) to make the
program.

A particularly blatant example of bias, perhaps, but not an isolated one.
The BBC rarely mention Arafat's dictatorial rule, his endemic corruption, or
the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade - the terror group he set up after launching the
current Intifada, a group which, in recent months, has outstripped Hamas in
the number of terror attacks perpetrated against Israeli civilians. As for
Hamas, Sheikh Yassin was recently described by one of BBC radio's Gaza
correspondents, Zubeida Malik, as "polite, charming and witty, a deeply
religious man."

DID SOMEONE SAY DOUBLE STANDARDS?

The BBC's double standards are clear to almost everyone except, it seems, to
the BBC itself and its sympathizers in the press. A BBC spokeswoman for
example, told the Guardian (May 23, 2002) after the BBC was accused by
British Jews of being a prime force in inciting renewed anti-Semitism in the
UK, that "The BBC's reporting about the Middle East is scrupulously fair,
accurate and balanced."

The official BBC line has not changed since then, even after the scathing
criticism of the Hutton report. Such are the level of arrogance and the
spirit of denial that permeate the BBC newsroom. Indeed, recent denials of
political bias have been stronger than ever. Of course, the BBC would be in
danger of losing its enormous public funding if they were admitted.

For a short while after the Hutton report was published in January, the BBC
were a little more careful in their attacks on Israel. But recently they
have returned to old ways, with at least four anti-Israeli TV documentaries
airing in recent weeks. That makes a total of 20 major documentaries the BBC
have made on Israel since 2001 (all but one attacking Israel.) That is three
times more than the number of documentaries the BBC has made on any other
single country, with the exception of Britain.

Meanwhile, to my knowledge, the BBC has made no documentaries about human
rights abuses in the Arab world; or about Palestinian schoolbooks; or about
the Palestinian Authority's incitement of the Palestinian population; or
about the Palestinian Authority's funding of terrorism allegedly with the
use of European Union aid funds.

The problem is not that every individual correspondent is biased. Whereas
some, such as Orla Guerin, make almost no attempt at balance, others, such
as James Reynolds in Jerusalem, do make a genuine effort to be fair. The
problem is that the culture that permeates the BBC, a habit of thought that
has become engrained throughout the network, allows only one worldview, in
which the US and Israel are vilified well beyond any reasoned or justified
criticism of anything these states have actually done.

Hiring practices reinforce this. Recently, Ibrahim Helal, editor in chief of
the much-criticized al Jazeera TV network was hired by the BBC World Service
Trust. The job the BBC wanted him for? To advise on balance in Middle East
coverage, and head "media training projects," i.e. to train BBC (and perhaps
other journalists) into "understanding the Middle East better."

OCCUPIED WEST BANK OF THE SAHARA?

This culture makes it all but impossible for anyone who thinks differently
to gain or hold a job at BBC news. Who at the BBC can name the leader of the
Polisario Front, fighting for independence against a 25-year Arab occupation
of the Western Sahara (a territory bigger than Britain)? Who at the BBC has
done a report about all the Arab settlers that the Moroccan government has
been bussing into the area to take the land of the indigenous Saharawi
people, since Morocco annexed it 25 years ago?

This article has been limited to BBC news programming. But even elsewhere
there is anti-Israel (and some would argue anti-Jewish) sentiment. Each
summer, for example, BBC Radio 3, a station largely devoted to classical
music, carries a broadcast of "The Proms." The Proms are a British
institution, a jovial annual event at the end of the British summer during
which classical favorites and (on the Proms' final night) tunes such as
"Rule Britannia" and "Land of Hope and Glory" are sung by the audience with
great fanfare and light-hearted flag-waving at the Royal Albert Hall in
London. Yet on the evenings of August 13 and August 20, 2002, the BBC Radio
3 producers decided to fill the time during the interval in their live
broadcast (there are no commercials on the BBC) with a recitation of poems
that compared Israeli actions to those of the Nazis and asked Holocaust
survivors why they had "not learnt their lesson."

A GLOBAL PROBLEM

The BBC's Middle East problem is not just a British problem but an
international one. The BBC pours forth its worldview not just in English but
in almost every language of the Middle East: Pashto, Persian, Arabic,
Turkish. Needless to say it declines to broadcast in Hebrew, even though it
does broadcast in the languages of other small nations: Slovene and Slovak,
Macedonian and Albanian, Azeri and Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz, and so on. (It
doesn't broadcast in Kurdish either; but then the BBC doesn't concern itself
with Kurdish rights or aspirations since they are persecuted by
Moslem-majority states like Syria and Iran. We didn't hear much on the BBC,
for example, when dozens of Syrian Kurds were killed and injured by
President Assad's regime two months ago.)

Throughout the world the BBC enjoys exceptional influence. An article last
month in the liberal Israeli daily Ha'aretz, for example, quotes a leading
Lithuanian campaigner against anti-Semitism as saying that inflammatory and
biased international BBC news coverage against Israel was helping to revive
anti-Semitism in Lithuania against those few Jews remaining who were not
murdered in the Holocaust.

The English-language version of the BBC seems to be just the tip of the
iceberg. My friend Kamran al-Karadaghi, an urbane, moderate and thoughtful
Iraqi, who was for a decade the political editor of the Arabic-language
newspaper al-Hayat in London, and who until last week served as head of
Radio Free Iraq, tells me that the BBC Arabic language service is not just
far worse than the English language BBC. It is "even worse," he says, than
al Jazeera, in the vitriol it pours out against America and Israel.

Footnotes --

[1] For more on these and other quotes, see
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=archives&Area=sr&ID=SR01102 and
Steven Stalinsky's NRO article last month (Kingdom Comes to North America.
Top Saudi cleric to visit Canada.)
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/stalinsky200405130846.asp (after which
the Canadian government rescinded al-Sudais' visa request).



[2] For many other examples contrasting BBC coverage of Sharon and Arafat,
see the well-compiled reports by London lawyer Trevor Asserson at
www.bbcwatch.com



Tom Gross is a former Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday
Telegraph and the New York Daily News. Among his previous pieces for NRO are
"All The News That's Fit to Print? The New York Times and Israel"
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross031403.asp and
"Jeningrad. What the British media said"
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross051302.asp

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People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[falxori 0]

we feel this way for a long time.
at first it makes you angry, then you learn to live with it.

its the little things that bugs me (misleading headlines, not using the term "terrorists", etc)

good post
O

"Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

[kmcguffee 0]

Great post. This is very evident when traveling overseas where the BBC is one of the few channels you can get. CNN International isn't far behind the BBC in this regard.

"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." Ben Franklin

[crozby 0]

This is a bullshit article written by a pro-Israeli reporter with an axe to grind.

Maybe someone who thinks otherwise could take a quick look on the BBC News site at the reports of the Rafah demolition and enlighten us with all the inaccuracies and arab-bias they contain?

[kmcguffee 0]

Here is a college study on liberal media bias. It's real.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~atabarro/MediaBias.doc

"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." Ben Franklin

[miked10270 0]

(Leaping to the defence of the BBC)

If you pick out individual articles from ANY news channel you'll see bias. the idea is to inform and educate and to show the differing views. In that way an INFORMED person will be able to form an opinion!

In EVERY conflict one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter.

Let's take the Kurds as an example. By kurds I mean both "The plucky freedom fighters who helped us in Northern Iraq" AND "The Islamic Militant Terrorists who bomb a NATO ally (Turkey)".

I have the overriding impression of a Kurdish Seperatist standing astride the Turkey / Iraq border. His left side is a good guy and his right side is a terrorist!

As for Israel. Until around 1948 it was a British protectorate called... Wait for it... PALESTINE. It had a mixed population of both Jews and Moslems coexisting peacefully. After WWII it was "decided" by the Allies that the Jews should have their own homeland. "Let's give them Palestine" and the non-Jewish (read Moslem) Palestinians were literally evicted to make way for non-Palestinian Jews.

Try to imagine that YOU and 90% of the population of YOUR town have been made to leave your homes and businesses with only what you can carry and live in tents 400 miles away because YOUR homes, YOUR businesses and YOUR community has been given to, say some Russians, by, say some Germans. Pi$$ed off? Bet you are! Fight to get your lives and property back? Bet you would. Congratulations. You are now a terrorist - or are you fighting to regain what was yours? Redress an injustice?

A "freedom fighter"?

Wouldn't it have made more sense to give the post WWII Jews somewhere like, say, Austria?

Anyway. As far as the hypothetical Russians and their friends the hypothetical Germans are concerned, YOU ARE A TERRORIST. For wanting to get back what was stolen from you. So they try to kill you.


This is akin to a pickpocket being entitled to stab you if you try to get your wallet back!

So are the Palestinians Terrorists? Or are the Jews and the Allied governments thieves?

Mike.

Taking the piss out of the FrenchAmericans since before it was fashionable.

Prenait la pisse hors du FrançaisCanadiens méridionaux puisqu'avant lui à la mode.

[crozby 0]

Er... the BBC is the British Broadcasting Corporation. It is not a US entity and is not even mentioned in the document you linked to.

In the UK we have media bias - some newspapers are pro-Blair and others aren't.

However, great effort is made to ensure that the BBC is not biased and in the vast majority of cases it is seen as impartial.

[Trent 0]

Quote

However, great effort is made to ensure that the BBC is not biased and in the vast majority of cases it is seen as impartial.

A lot of people used to think that the New York Times and CNN were impartial. What does that have to do with what they are now?

Oh, hello again!

[falxori 0]

Quote

As for Israel. Until around 1948 it was a British protectorate called... Wait for it... PALESTINE.

yes it was and it was used long before the british were here, but the refference "palestinians" was also used to describe the jewish people living in the land called "palestine". the point you're trying to make is void.

Quote

After WWII it was "decided" by the Allies that the Jews should have their own homeland. "Let's give them Palestine" and the non-Jewish (read Moslem) Palestinians were literally evicted to make way for non-Palestinian Jews.

go open a history book.
the U.N decision was to divide the land and have two states.
guess who accepted it and who declined?
after a long war in which more than 5 armies attacked, they have lost.

refugees? sure there were, just as there were hundreds of thousands arab jews (from iraq, iran, morroco, etc) that were deported from their home and found refuge in israel.

you know what the difference is? they were taken care of. unlike the arab refugees who were kept in camps by the neighouring arab countries.

Quote

This is akin to a pickpocket being entitled to stab you if you try to get your wallet back!

give me a break...

"Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

[damion75 0]

Quote

it was used long before the british were here, but the refference "palestinians" was also used to describe the jewish people living in the land called "palestine". the point you're trying to make is void.

Couldnt let this one lie. The point is that pre-1940s there was not a large Jewish population there and the local Arabs did not feel threatened. Now there is, and they have been displaced. How many arab politicians are there standing up for their people's rights in the Knesset? Hmmm. But it DID used to be their country.

Quote

go open a history book... after a long war in which more than 5 armies attacked, they have lost.

So might is right? You took the land by force of arms. This is the way things have been done for several thousand years across the world - just don't come crying to the world when the people you beat get pissed off with you...

To get this thread back on track, no the BBC is not perfect and unbiased. With so many sides to EVERY story how can they be? But they are better than most. Actually they are permanently slightly anti-government all the time, no matter who the government is because that is where their funding comes from and they do not want to appear as a result to be government stooges, Pravda style.

***************

Not one shred of evidence supports the theory that life is serious - look at the platypus.

[falxori 0]

Quote

But it DID used to be their country.

thats exactly the point , it DIDN'T.
there was no palestinian state on before israel was founded.
this land was occupied by many foreign powers (including british), how far back do you want to go in order to decide whos land it is?

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So might is right? You took the land by force of arms. This is the way things have been done for several thousand years across the world - just don't come crying to the world when the people you beat get pissed off with you...

yes, you're right we had to DEFEND our country by force.

and as for the BBC, if the definition of the act is based on who are the victims...

O

"Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

[damion75 0]

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yes, you're right we had to DEFEND our country by force.

And so you did, and on a personal level I am extremely impressed, almost awed, by the way you guys managed that both times, but especially in '73. Strength to your arm.

I am a sufficiently a pragmatist to accept that might is still often right, but sufficiently an idealist to wish that we could resolve this some other way.

As for how far back should we go to determine who owns what... ask the Cypriots!!

***************

Not one shred of evidence supports the theory that life is serious - look at the platypus.

[falxori 0]

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but sufficiently an idealist to wish that we could resolve this some other way.

i wish we could and i hope we still can. it would have saved a lot of lives.
too bad its easier said than done...

so wer'e agreed, BBC sux

O

"Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

[miked10270 0]

As I've already said, You'se shouldn't have been given Palestine. You'se should have been given Austria!

Of course it still wouldn't have been plain sailing. Defending yourselves against the Swiss with their chocolates and cunning knives, the Italians reversing their tanks over your borders, the Czechs attacking you with... Err...

But on the plus side, you could have been annexing Plzen with it's breweries instead of The Golan Heights .

Yeah... Now I think about it the injustice wasn't only against the Palestinians for giving you'se Palestine, the injustice was also against you'se for giving you'se Palestine - a country not exactly famous for it's production of Strudel, Wine, Kirch...

Mike.

Taking the piss out of the FrenchAmericans since before it was fashionable.

Prenait la pisse hors du FrançaisCanadiens méridionaux puisqu'avant lui à la mode.

[kmcguffee 0]

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Er... the BBC is the British Broadcasting Corporation. It is not a US entity and is not even mentioned in the document you linked to.

Er....no shit. The link I posted was a study done on liberal media bias using US news agencies for the study. The general point is that the majority of media is left of center.

"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do." Ben Franklin