BBC Bias Part 948

John Humphrys displays his liberal conscience on the latest Abu Ghraib photos.

"I've seen them ... they're actually waving, grinning ... quite shocking stuff to see ... ".

Fair enough. It's just that I've never heard him emoting about Iraqi children abusing dismembered Americans or Palestinians waving body parts around and using human heads as press conference props.

Instead the BBC report says without comment that 'many ordinary Iraqis want revenge' for the photos. Presumably revenge to be exacted on any Brit or American - exactly the attitude which Humphrys would condemn if expressed by an ordinary Brit.

But like so many other things, revenge is for 'them' and not for 'us'.



And I do love the BBC use of quotes on the Falluja mutilations. The headline is

"Horrific" Iraq deaths shock US

and in the report we get

White House spokesman Scott McClellan blamed "terrorists" and supporters of ousted Iraq leader Saddam Hussein for the attacks in Falluja.

After all, one man's "terrorist" ....

Bishop Bashing Latest ...

Following the defeat of the attempt to install Canon Elton John as Bishop of Reading by a small but determined sect calling themselves "Christians", those progressives attempting to get the Church Of England's historic struggle against homophobia back on track have appointed him Dean of St Albans, an appointment in the gift of one T. Blair.

In an attempt to pre-empt the groundswell of opinion which forced the Reading decision to be reversed, he will be confirmed in his post three months earlier than expected. Opposition is certainly not lacking, and one church is already witholding its diocesan funding in protest. They could do worse than to send the money to the Church in Africa.

Not a bad site, gay.com. They also have reports on the treatment of Tatchell & Co. on the Palestine march, and the really big story - that Julia Volkova of Tatu is pregnant.

State Educashun

Watching my son play cricket last night, chatting to another parent. He gave up a well-paid but stressful job in sales to teach physics at a comprehensive with a poor reputation, and after one year was approached by the only decent State comprehensive for thirty miles around - he starts there in September. "A-level physics now" he said, "is about the level I did at O-level" (he's forty). We talked about discipline and I asked him how he coped. "Never shout - you're just providing entertainment for them."

I missed this Private Eye piece, a fortnights diary written by a comprehensive maths teacher, but I read the anguished mailbag it produced from teachers.

I think I'll ask my children to read it on the weekend - they attend a not-very-good comprehensive in the same town. My eldest's maths teacher was sacked last year when a pupil struck him in the face, drawing blood. Instead of reporting him, the teacher knocked the boy down, then picked him up off the floor and hit him again. His replacement was a woman with a heavy South African accent, who had trouble with keeping order - some of the boys mocked the way she spoke, which was difficult to understand. He has had six maths teachers in three years at comprehensive.

At this year's pre-SATs test the school told me my son's maths attainment level was still level 5, which it was in his last year of primary school. We took him to an excellent private maths tutor who said he was the fourth child from that maths set he'd been asked to coach.

The school has been awarded Specialist School status in Maths and Computing.


"We teachers often control the behaviour of the class with the work that we set. Easy work that creates no insecurity will result in reasonable behaviour. Difficult work that creates self-doubt will be meet with aggression. This constantly leads to the dilemma: do we set hard work that will stretch them but also lead to poor behaviour and so cost learning time? Or do we set easy work and get reasonable behaviour - and more teaching time - in return?

I kept them quiet by giving them work that did not make them feel insecure (ie easy work) and by not challenging them about their work rate. I should have been able to stop them after 15 minutes, explain harder work and push them to think. I didn’t because of the issues of controlling them that this would have created. There are times when we mistake activity and silence for learning."

New Blogger In Town ...

Well, sort of (three posts this year) ... one Richard Thompson, musician, late of this parish. Strange how many old folkies (Donovan and Robin Williamson come to mind) end up in California, while the metal musicians (Ozzy, Robert Plant) seem to end up in what's left of the English countryside. Another of life's little ironies I suppose.

She's At It Again ...

AL Kennedy in the Guardian.

"Last night Mr Blair - contacted by cell phone - also had nothing but praise for the troops who have reduced his state dining room to a glowing shell filled with the stench of burning flesh. "I can only send my heartfelt support to the coalition forces. I think I speak for all of us here when I say that we welcome their cluster bombs, their re-branded napalm and their intermittent tracer fire."

Haven't the Guardian realised yet that they are paying over and again for what is essentially the same article ?

I must get one of her books out of the library. She can't be as bad a writer as she appears, surely.

(The library, declining as it is, is sure to have some. An organisation staffed by nice, middle-class, vaguely feminist women tends to stock a lot of books by vaguely feminist women. I like to measure the 'Waugh/Weldon ratio' in a library - the number of Evelyn Waugh books on the shelves against the number of Fay Weldons. Usually a 1/5 ratio. But try, say, asking for Thomas Moore's poetry, of which there's not one copy in the whole of Gloucestershire's libraries, including the Reference sections.)

Liberal Self-Censorship - is the tide on the turn ?

I reported a while back on the case of Mohammed Dica - a Somali asylum seeker convicted of deliberately infecting his lovers with HIV (he's since appealed), and how every UK news source described his asylum status save for two - the Guardian and BBC.

In the similar case of Feston Konzani things seem to be changing somewhat. The Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, Mirror, Scotsman, Sun, Ananova, Scotland on Sunday and Tyne Tees TV all describe Konzani as an asylum seeker.

So do five out of the ten BBC stories. It must be difficult - to reconcile the BBCs ancient mission to report news and its more modern mission to produce the perfectly tolerant society, even at the price of - shall we say suppressio veri ? Five out of ten ain't bad - someone at the BBC is showing positively Solomonic news judgement.

George Bush Dies .....

.. and goes to hell. "I'm short of space", says Satan, "I'll have to let someone go who wasn't quite as bad as you. Tell you what, I'll give you a choice - I'll show you a few people and you can decide whose place you'll take".

Satan opens a door. In it is a deep pool and former President Richard Nixon, doomed to endlessly dive in, climb out, and dive in again.

"Who else is there ?" says GWB, "I don't want to do that all day long". Another door and inside is Tony Blair, breaking rocks non-stop.

"My shoulder might not stand that - anyone else ?". Another door, and inside is Bill Clinton, lying on a couch, with Monica Lewinsky attending to him in her inimitable fashion.


"I can handle that" says George.

"OK" says Satan. "Monica, you're free to go !"




Thanks to Timmyhawk for the joke. Get that template sorted, Timmy !

GOTCHA !


Name : Piers Morgan
Redeeming Features : None whatsoever
Appearance : large amount of egg on face. Appears to have been recently pelted with ordure.
Charge : Deliberately endangering British lives to further the Mirror's political agenda and/or to raise circulation. Damaging the national interest for the same reasons. Killing Bambi. Anything else I can think of.
Pleaded : Not guilty
Verdict : Guilty
Sentence : To be determined. Perhaps when the first deaths occur he can break the news to the widows.




Of course the real price will not be paid by this wealthy, privileged individual, but by some other poor mother's son or sons. There are people alive now who are going to die because of what he has done.
Former QLR Colonel David Black got it about right :
It's time that the ego of one editor was measured against the life of a soldier.

Blogger and Google Translate

What windows they open up on the world. Admittedly somewhat bleary and obscured windows, but I think the translation adds a pleasant element of 'ambiguamente'. The general drift is at least clear.

"Still half lost I looked at around and vi my next wife to the car under the willow and in the distance hindered the vision of its feição, but it perceived that it already had passed for it and he approaches it. I gave attention to its lamúrios and invited it to seat it in varanda of the house where we were. Its firm intention was to follow for the city and looked a transport, said that its father was violent, that he always surrava it that was inebriated and that, as he was drunk, certainly would go to apanhar. I tried to calm it and to convince it that having a bad family he was very worse of the one than not to have family, I tried to clarify that a boy of 8 years would not have possibilities in the city and that could expôr it enormous risks in the hands of pilantras of plantão. Nothing it functioned therefore perceived that all that one my speech was to say that I wanted that it I came back toward house where more early or later he would come back to the routine of the beatings."

Those Daily Mirror Photos - The Truth

Piers Morgan 'fesses up in this UK Commentators exclusive.

UPDATE - Inspired by this story. I love the way that cracking a joke is somehow more offensive than printing fake snaps which will get British soldiers killed - and probably civilians too. Ain't it nice to occupy the moral high ground ?

Beautiful Theories, Ruined Lives

Gender is a social construct, as any radical feminist (or the World Bank) will tell you. [irony]When Daisy plays with dolls and Jack kicks a football they are reflecting the overt and covert expectations of their parents and the wider society. With different parental and societal expectations, Jack might have a bed covered with fluffy toys while Daisy plays Unreal Tournament for hours with her girlfriends[/irony].

So when a baby boy (one of identical twins) had his penis badly damaged in a failed circumcision operation, his distraught parents were relieved to find a doctor who believed the theories. With a little more cosmetic surgery the baby could be brought up as a girl.

"This dramatic case," Time magazine reported "provides strong support for a major contention of women's liberationists: that conventional patterns on masculine and feminine behaviour can be altered."

That baby killed himself last week aged 38.

You can read more about the disastrous consequences of the decision and the lunatic hippy doctor who destroyed a family in this distressing Guardian item - the first thing with Gary Younge's name on that I've ever been able to recommend unreservedly.

Self Hating White Liberalism - It's Infectious

Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, talking on R4, condemns the latest execution video, calls on Muslim leaders to condemn it, and makes a couple of revealing asides on relationships between Muslims and 'the West' (I don't think he includes British Muslims here) - "and there are the Crusades, which are a problem". And on the Abu Ghraib revelations, "it is deeply shameful and indicts us all (my italics) in the West".

Now Lord Carey is by no means a stereotypical SHWL. His comments about Islam a month or two back earned him bad press from Guardianistas and Muslim spokesmen (not many spokespersons yet) alike. He is the kind of Christian who still reads the Bible, worries about human sin and frailty rather than Third World debt, and is not overly happy with homosexual bishops. So his comments reveal just how deeply the SHWL world view is part of educated English culture.

There's no doubt that our European partners (and a few Brits) did some bad things in the Crusades. From the sack of Jerusalem in 1099 (including the killing of the Jewish population, who sheltered in the synagogue only to be burned alive) to the attack on Byzantium, it could be said in President Clinton's words that "mistakes were made".

But there are one or two outstanding issues the other way. The Med was once a Christian lake. Turkey, Egypt and the whole of North Africa were Christian but were overrun militarily by Islam. These peoples weren't converted as were the Saxons and Danes. It was 'convert or die' for most (though not all) of them. Where now are the Galatian Christians to whom St Paul wrote ? Where are today's African saints ? Anatolia is full of ruined churches. Saint Sophia in Constantinople is now a museum (thanks, Fisky) in Istanbul. And of course the site of Solomon's Temple is now the Dome of the Rock.

This is not to say that I believe these issues should inform policy today. Fourteen hundred years is a long time. But apparently Lord Carey, like many others, believes that long memories are for 'them' and not for 'us'.

"It is deeply shameful and indicts us all in the West". Think about that. Does Saddam's regime, the latest horror decapitation video, or Osama Bin Laden indict all Muslims ? I thought stereotyping was one of the most feral creatures in the anti-racist bestiary.

But when 'Westerners' (a code name for white people - you could hardly call us Christians any more) do bad things - we are all indicted. One or several Muslims do bad things - they are not typical. Indictment is for 'us' and not for 'them'.

Labour - Preparing The Ground For What ?

I despair of this Government. I'm starting to get a John Major impression, that the policies get more and more short term and less and less thought out. The decision to liberalise drinking hours while simultaneously worrying about violent assaults being one example. But there are many more. Remember Prescott's pledge about the number of cars on the road ?

One particularly depressing story was the news that Labour want to introduce votes by text, in an effort to get more young voters involved. Not because the higher the turnout the better the democracy, but because "If the proportion of young voters increased, experts believe it would benefit Labour. One opinion poll earlier this year showed a majority of three to one in favour of Labour against the Tories."

Going for the Pop Idol vote in this way may have unintended consequences. What happens when a politically radical teen idol emerges ?

If Labour get their wish, half of all eighteen year olds will soon be in higher education. While this may (or may not) be a good thing, they will to some extent be insulated from the real world and therefore more attracted to a utopian, radical programme. Just think back to your student days. This effect would be greater still if we had votes at sixteen. And I'm sure that's just what some young Labour policy wonks would love.

But you may find your young texters are attracted to a different kind of radicalism and utopianism.

I wrote some months back "I see no sign at all of any (similar) youth movement on the Right. When the coolest kids in school self-identify as nationalists, when their bands are in the charts and girls wear 'My Boyfriend Is An Englishman' shirts - that'll be where the kind of fascism the Left disapproves of begins.

So if you want to prevent fascism, stop creating the objective conditions for it."

I hadn't read this article then.

"The most startling revelation of the report, entitled 539 voters' views: a voting behaviour study in three northern towns, is that, in the areas studied, the younger one is the more likely one is to vote BNP. Around one in three of 18-25 year-olds said that they voted for the BNP. 46 per cent said they had voted for the BNP on a previous occasion. While the Labour Party had strong support among older age groups, hardly anyone in the 18-25 category voted Labour. In this age group, large numbers of young men have been attracted to the BNP's message - making it the only party whose support is predominantly male.

The report suggests that other parties are failing to engage with this group of young men."

539 voters is not a large sample. But this is not necessarily a comforting message. When the girls come on board - that could be the pivotal moment. We shall see in a month. They are ringing their mobiles. But soon they will be wringing their hands.

Blogger ...

I'm not sure how keen I am on the new Primary School Edition.

Fisky, Fisky

When will Harry, Norm and Co. link to Way Of The Intercepting Fisk ? This blog's getting better all the time. Try this. He's got plenty more like that.

UPDATE - Sorry - Norm does link to this blog. Come on Harry !

Interesting Spectator Shock

I suppose the law of averages had to kick in at some stage - this week's Speccie has some readable articles (registration required).

Lloyd Evans wonders what happened to the peace movement, who seem to be all mouth and no trousers. Bruce Anderson suggests that the seeds of last week's depressing photos from Abu Ghraib were sown when women were allowed in the military (whereas the Guardian's Larry Elliott suggests that Brit girls are all too good at fighting - in the local High Street), and Rachel Johnson bemoans the Stepfordisation of women. Even Julian Manyon's depressing report from Iraq is thought-provoking - the thought in question being 'What the hell do the U.S. and Britain do now' ?

And Peter Hitchens is at his best on what happens in countries when the big story is over, and the reporters have gone elsewhere. I shall be interested to see his Mandela documentary.


"Why is it that such reverence is accorded to this flawed human being, who has spent so much of his time as a figleaf for the far-from-saintly African National Congress? I think it is partly because reformist politics has replaced Christian faith as the main expression of moral feeling in this country. But then why revere Mr Mandela rather than some domestic figure? Precisely because he is distant and not actually very well known to us. Our own home-produced political heroes and heroines never keep their haloes for long. We find out too much about them and are personally affected by their failures and mistakes. And we know that in most cases they have failed because we too have failed. Real change is difficult and costly and requires personal moral effort on our part. Most of us vote against it if we get the chance. The task of halting and reversing our political, industrial, moral, cultural and educational decline is huge, daunting and unappealing.

But abroad is different. We do not need to know the inconvenient details. On the contrary, it is better not to know them. The overthrow of the loathed government is all that is required. We will not be there after it falls. "


And finally ... Peter Briffa has sympathy for the subject of this Guardian agony column, entitled "My husband spends all his free time on his computer and won't tell me why. What should I do ?".

He's obviously a blogger, isn't he ? Responses are mostly negative, but Sarah from Argyll and Bute (can you be from both of those places ? One or the other, surely) has words of comfort.

"Our computer is now as much a part of family life as the TV - we tell each other what we have done on it, and using it is often a communal experience, with two or three people in front of the screen."

Well, yes. I think I know what you mean.

The Voice Of Moderation

In this US blog, the Modern Crusader. From its strapline, "Our long term goals are the sacking of Mecca, the defiling and final destruction of the Kaaba idol, and the creation of a Zionist State with Mecca as its capital.", to its report on the alleged mistreatment of prisoners by the Brits ("The Proper Way To Treat Muslims"), this blog is a rare delight.

Reports on Vichy France, links to the Saint Baruch Goldstein, and a thoughtful section on whether Syria or Iran should be invaded next - there's just too much to take in. See it for yourself.

And Now For Something Completely Different


Last Wednesday's Prime Ministers Questions - the VengaBoys Mix. Right mouse-click then 'Save Target As ' to download.

1.3 megabytes MP3, mixed by Laban Tall using Goldwave.

Next project - 'We Shall Overcome' - Joan Baez featuring Tupac Shakur.

"Militants" - Killing Little Girls

People who the BBC style "militants" shot dead a pregnant mother and her four daughters, aged between 2 and 11, in Gaza yesterday. The shootings were carried out at point blank range.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan, people who the Guardian style 'militants' poisoned three schoolgirls because they attend school. The BBC quotes Afghan president Hamid Karzai's description of the perpetrators as terrorists, but puts the phrase in scare quotes. After all, one man's 'terrorist' ...

If only Ian Huntley had claimed to be drawing attention to the plight of Iraqi chldren !

Big Ron II

Weekly Worker springs to the defence of the great man.

"Atkinson favours the ‘kick up the backside’ style of management over the touchy-feely, therapeutic-driven approach.". You could say that.

And now that anti-racism is establishment doctrine, it is 'bourgeois anti-racism'.

"Indeed, as the opprobrium heaped so massively upon Atkinson’s head manifestly shows, the footballing establishment is essentially no different from the police force, the home office or the NHS bureaucracy - that is, institutionally and ideologically anti-racist. Frankly, how could it be anything else?

Just to glimpse at the long list of Kick It Out’s sponsors should tell you a lot - the League Managers Association, the Association of Premier League and Football League Match Officials, the Football Safety Officers Association, the Local Government Association, the Metropolitan Police ... It is no accident either that the chair of Kick It Out is no other than Lord Herman Ouseley, the former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality. There is no doubt that Kick It Out is essentially an establishment organisation, and hence promotes the establishment’s bourgeois anti-racism."

Bourgeois anti-racism, eh ? Now the Establishment have hold of it, it's not ours any more. Isn't this the mentality that makes a man sell his Smiths albums when they start becoming popular ?

In the 1930s the Left had a concept of 'bourgeois democracy'. Otherwise known as democracy. When French conservatives wanted to rearm France, the Communist Party leader Pierre Thorez declared 'We will not tolerate the working class being drawn into a so-called war to defend bourgeois democracy'. Good sense of priorities, ne c'est pas ?

And finally ....

some CPGB members are distressed by the Respect Coalition and the CPGBs support for it. Welcome please to the CPGB Red Platform ! All together now : Splitters !