Who gave the order to stand down at Benghazi? 130

In our post The secret of Benghazi we listed questions that need to be asked and answered about the murderous attack on the American mission, but there was one question we omitted, perhaps the most important of all. Robert Klein Engler supplied it in a comment which we think needs to be put on our front page. It entails other, related, questions:

Many who have looked into the Incident at Benghazi are disappointed in the congressional investigation so far. The most important question that needs to be asked and answered is, “Who gave the order to ‘stand down’ at Benghazi?” Once that question is answered, the rest of what went on there will fall into place. “According to a Fox News report by Jennifer Griffin, former Navy Seals Ty Woods and Glen Doherty…were ordered to stand down three times following calls during the attack. The first two times occurred soon after they heard initial shots fired…and (they) requested permission to go to the consulate to help out…(Forbes).” The Examiner.com claims “…former House speaker Newt Gingrich…was informed by a U. S. senator that at least two media networks have recently been given…evidence about the Sept. 11 Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans… The networks obtained e-mail evidence from…the office of National Security Advisor James Jones…ordering a counterterrorism team to cancel a rescue mission at the U. S. consulate and CIA annex in Libya. According to Gingrich…they were told explicitly by the White House ‘stand down and do nothing. This is not a terrorist action.'” If this is true, why haven’t those e-mails been made public or asked for by those investigating the Incident at Benghazi? A newspaper like the Chicago Tribune or the Washington Post has resources they can use to seek out an answer and obtain those e-mails. What if there were a robbery at your local bank? Would a reporter investigate the robbery by first flying off to New York and interviewing a senior bank manager, only to discover an adulterous relationship and then spend time reporting that? It would be better to interview the bank tellers, customers and witnesses to the robbery at the local branch first. Why hasn’t something similar been done about the Incident at Benghazi? The FBI was at Benghazi, but for only three hours. How many witnesses did they interview? What did they find out? The man who led the attack on our “mission” at Benghazi is reported giving interviews on Arabic TV! Why has no US reporter contacted him and asked him what happened? The Incident at Benghazi should not disappear off the front page of our newspapers until the stand down question is answered. We are asking the media and our elected representative for help. Tell us the truth. Who gave the order to stand down at Benghazi? If for no other reason, answer the question to set the minds of our men and women in the military service at ease. They want to be assured someone has their back.

We suspect the answer to “who gave the order?” is “the President”. And we suspect that that is why the press is not investigating the Incident at Benghazi. Most journalists now see their job as protecting the President, helping him to achieve his far-left pro-Islam agenda; not reporting to us the events we need to know about, happening now in America and the rest of the world.  

*

And here is part of a highly pertinent comment on the above by our reader Liz. The question “who gave the order to ‘stand down’?” gives rise immediately to the question “why?” It had to be either given or allowed to be given by Obama.

The question should not only be who gave the order to stand down, but WHY did Obama allow it? Because no matter who gave the order, or even what the reason was, it is not a good enough reason to let four Americans die. And the responsibility for that is still Obama’s.

Liz thinks the fact that the order was given is cause to impeach the president, and we agree with her.

No Jews, no news from the heart of darkness 241

We seldom quote the leftist anti-Semitic Guardian/Observer, but today we make an exception for extracts from a horrifying account, by Ian Birrell, of the little-reported savage war in the Congo. His completely irrelevant opening sentences tell you (or at any rate tell us) it is by a lefty anti-Semite – his bitter implication being “no Jews, no news” (but whose fault is that if not the likes of him?), but read on:

Once again, the apparently insoluble struggle between Israel and Palestine has flared up before flickering into uneasy standoff. As usual, world leaders issued fierce warnings, diplomats flew in and the media flooded the region to cover the mayhem as both sides spewed out the empty cliches of conflict. After eight days of fighting, nearly 160 people lay dead.

Meanwhile, 2,300 miles further south, events took a sharp turn for the worse in another interminable regional war. This one also involves survivors of genocide ruthlessly focused on securing their future at any cost. But the resulting conflict is far bloodier, far more brutal, far more devastating, far more destructive – yet it gains scarcely a glance from the rest of the world.

[It is taking place in] the Democratic Republic of the Congo – scene of massacres, of mass rape, of children forced to fight, of families fleeing in fear again and again, so many sordid events that rarely make the headlines. …

A rebel army of 1,500 men waltzed into Goma, a city of one million people, on Tuesday. In doing so, they humiliated not just the useless Congolese government but also the hapless blue helmets of the biggest United Nations peacekeeping mission, costing nearly £1bn a year.

Where on earth have UN peacekeeping forces been effective? Notoriously they themselves raped and murdered civilians in the Congo, as the Guardian itself reported in 2010.

There are so many peacekeepers and development agencies in Goma it has become a boom town, home to some of the most expensive housing in Africa. Yet again, all these people proved impotent. 

The leaders of this insurgent force, the M23, have declared their aim to march across this vast country to capture the capital, Kinshasa. Since it is backed by Rwanda and Uganda, which used proxy armies to do this once before in 1997, such threats cannot be dismissed. Joseph Kabila, the Congolese president, who, through fear of a coup, corruption and incompetence, castrated his own military, is reported to have responded by asking Angola to send troops to save him.

It is all a dismal echo of  the Great African War, which officially ended in 2003 but dribbled on for another five years. This began when Rwanda and Uganda invaded in 1998, saw 11 countries from Angola to Zimbabwe involved and left more than five million dead and millions more displaced. There were war crimes on all sides as armies brutalised those unfortunate people living above the fabulous seams of minerals that fuelled the fighting.

It is hard to fathom the real aims of M23, formed earlier this year by mutinous Congolese Tutsi army officers. It could be they hope the Kabila government will implode or it may be they wish to create an independent state in the east of the country. One thing is clear: the international community needs to take tough and urgent action to stop a festering sore from poisoning a huge chunk of Africa once again.

Ah yes. The West – read “chiefly the US”  – which Guardian journalists despise on principle, must intervene to stop Third World savages (whose culture, don’t forget, is quite as good as ours, if not better) are doing what they habitually do.

The west bears some responsibility for the latest act in the Congolese tragedy. Not just because the ethnic divisions that cause such fear were inflamed during dark years of Belgian misrule.

Albeit the Belgians – who did indeed govern their colonies cruelly – left the Congo more than fifty years ago, two generations back.

Nor simply because we gobble up those minerals that fund the warlords.

See how wicked we Westerners are? We buy their minerals, which lay unprofitably in their soil for millennia before any Belgian ventured into the heart  of their darkness.

But because at the heart of the horror in a country the size of western Europe is the tiny nation of Rwanda, darling of western donors seeking to assuage their guilt over inaction during its own genocide.

And we’re wrong, wrong, wrong, if we feel guilt for not intervening in the Rwanda massacre in 1994? Damned if we do, damned if we don’t.

Britain and America in particular have lionised a regime guilty of ghastly internal repression and gruesome foreign adventurism, with catastrophic consequences for millions of Congolese. Admirers of Paul Kagame, the despotic Rwandan president, praise his country’s economic development, ignoring that it is part-financed by trade in minerals plundered and pillaged from a ravaged neighbour. As far back as 2001, a Congolese rebel leader admitted such theft was Rwandan state policy.

Meanwhile, the west ignored repeated war crimes committed by this regime. The first invasion, originally to drive out Hutu genocidaires who fled over the Congo border and were allowed to regroup by aid organisations, led to an estimated 300,000 deaths of innocent refugees. One expert called this a genocide of attrition. The second invasion sparked even worse carnage. … Rwandan troops and their allies slaughtered children, women and elderly people, often with the crudest weapons such as knives, ropes and stones.

Yet western leaders hailed Kagame as the modern face of Africa and pumped vast aid into his arms.

Here’s a particular on which we at TAC agree with the writer. (We agree with him in general of course that what is happening in the Congo is pitiful and atrocious.) We are against all foreign aid (but we bet he isn’t!).

Britain is the biggest bilateral donor; we directly funded agencies of repression, then led moves for Rwanda to join the Commonwealth. The links between our two countries are alarmingly close … Tony Blair advises Kagame on “governance”, even while swanning around seeking peace in the Middle East. …

“Swanning around”? Implication of contempt. So again we can agree. Tony Blair and his mission are both superfluous to any requirement.

After weeks of prevarication, Britain has finally admitted evidence of Rwandan support for M23 was “credible”. Now we must make up for supporting this monstrous regime by cutting all aid, imposing tough sanctions and seeking war crimes proceedings against Kagame and his senior officials. The UN needs to review its peacekeeping mandate in Congo. Rwanda is set to join the UN Security Council in January, even as fears grow it may end up with a pliable client state carved out in eastern Congo.

Rwanda carving out a client state? How the world turns!

Rwanda is far from the only villain in this drama. Uganda, another western ally, is also linked again to the latest unrest, the president’s own brother accused of backing the M23. But Rwanda is the cause of much of the trouble. The truth is that six times as many people have died already in the Congolese wars as died in the Rwandan genocide. Time to say never again – or does the blood of Congo not count?

The art of evasion 30

Matthew Lee of AP persistently and impressively presses the State Department’s leading obfuscator, Victoria Nuland – demonstrating her skill at making things “very clear” while preserving them in total opacity – to give a straight answer.

Posted under Islam, Israel, jihad, media, middle east, Muslims, Palestinians, Turkey, United States, War by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, November 20, 2012

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Happy Candy Crowley – the meditative immoderate moderator 273

Last night, on Tuesday October 16, 2012, a woman named Candy Crowley “moderated” the debate between the two candidates for the presidency in the forthcoming elections, Mitt Romney (Republican) and Barack Obama (Democrat).

According to her Wiki entry, Candy Crowley practices Transcendental Meditation.

What is Transcendental Meditation? It’s inventor, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, explains:

That’s not someone satirizing the guru, it really is the man himself. Yes, it sounds silly to us too. We prefer to think – but let those meditate who will. What we gather is that if it works as it is intended to, “TM”  makes its practitioners happy.

Like all Far Eastern religions, its object is to affect the state of feeling of the devotee, and is not intended to be a guide to moral behavior. Its teachers do not claim that it can make you perceptive or just. No false descriptions. “Makes you happy” is all that’s promised, all that’s written on the bottle so to speak.

But a capacity to be just is surely more necessary in a moderator of a debate than his or her personal happiness. We don’t say it was for her happiness that the Commission on Presidential Debates chose Candy Crowley to moderate the presidential debate, but if they thought she was capable of being just, of presiding over a debate without taking sides, without giving more time to one side than the other, without endorsing the points either side made, they were mistaken.

Matthew Vadum writes at Front Page:

In an outrage destined for the history books, the moderator of last night’s hotly contested presidential debate uttered an untruth …

A lie. So call it a lie.

… about President Obama’s deadly bungling in Libya after Obama overtly asked her on live television to support his dishonest version of it.

His lie.

It was truly unprecedented and could only have happened in the Age of Obama.

During the town hall-format debate with an audience of undecided voters, Crowley provided an assist to Obama to help him perpetuate his administration’s ongoing cover-up about the murder of four Americans –including the U.S. ambassador — at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, this past Sept. 11. Reports indicate that Ambassador Chris Stevens and other officials were provided inadequate security in a particularly hostile part of Libya. …

GOP candidate Mitt Romney stated –correctly— that “it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.” Romney’s supporters have been saying for weeks that Obama didn’t want to label the assault on the U.S. mission a terrorist attack because to do so would be an admission that the administration’s foreign policy was in flames.

After Romney’s statement, Obama interjected, “Get the transcript,” like an eager contestant asking for a lifeline on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

At that cue, Crowley cut off Romney, claiming that Obama had in fact called the attack an “act of terror” around the time it took place. Buoyed by Crowley’s compliance, Obama boasted, “Can you say that a little louder, Candy?”

“He did call it an act of terror,” she said of the president. “It did as well take — it did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea [of] there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You [Romney] are correct about that.” …

She had the transcript. She interpreted it in Obama’s favor. It was obviously arranged beforehand that she would do this. It is a scandal in itself.  

Crowley … happens to be wrong.

In the White House’s Rose Garden on Sept. 12, Obama … [made] a general statement that “no acts of terror would shake the resolve of this great nation.” Obama said what happened in Benghazi was “a terrible act” and promised that “justice will be done.” At no time [on that day] did he say the events in Benghazi were instigated by terrorists.

Over the following two weeks, the Obama administration continued to resist calling the events in Benghazi a terrorist attack. On five different Sunday morning TV talk shows, Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, said the attack in that Libyan city stemmed from violent protests related to a “heinous and offensive” video.

On Sept. 25, Obama again refused to label the attack an act of terrorism during a softball appearance on TV’s “The View,” saying that an investigation was still ongoing. He said the same thing later the same day during an address at the United Nations, blaming the violence in Libya on the video and making the much-ridiculed assertion that “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

After the debate, an unapologetic Crowley jovially admitted on CNN that Romney was correct but blamed her victim, the former Massachusetts governor, for the sin of linguistic imprecision.

Well, you know, again, I’d heard the president’s speech at the time. I sort of re-read a lot of stuff about Libya because I knew we’d probably get a Libya question, so I kind of wanted to be up on it. So we knew that the president had, had said, you know, these acts of terrors [sic] won’t stand or whatever the whole quote was and I think actually, you know, because, right after that I did turn around and say but you are totally correct, that they spent two weeks telling us that this was about a tape and that there was a, you know, this riot right outside the Benghazi consulate, which there wasn’t. So he was right in the main but I just think he picked the wrong word.

No, Candy, Romney didn’t pick the wrong word. The Commission on Presidential Debates picked the wrong moderator.

But the damage, which may or may not be long-lasting, is now done and the debate is finished. Just another day in the mainstream media.

Former New Hampshire governor and Romney surrogate John Sununu excoriated Crowley on the Fox News Channel. “Candy Crowley had no business doing a real-time, if you will, fact check, because she was wrong,” he said. Crowley aided President Obama who “was absolutely deliberate in his dishonesty on this issue of whether it was terrorism.”

The Obama administration’s failure to provide security in Benghazi, an act that led to the death of four Americans, is “unconscionable,” Sununu said.

Commentator Charles Krauthammer skewered Obama for being “completely at sea,” and not even trying to answer the question about consulate security. Obama acted offended at suggestions he would mislead the American people, Krauthammer said, even though he put his U.N. ambassador on television to lie to the public about what transpired in Benghazi.

Romney missed “a huge opening” to pound Obama over consulate security, Krauthammer opined. Of course if there was a genuine opportunity Romney missed, it’s because he was too busy defending himself after Crowley effectively called him a liar.

There is to be one more presidential debate. We hope and anticipate that Romney will use the opportunity to expose the huge scandal of Obama’s pro-Islam policy and stress that what it led to – the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three of his staff – is an extreme affront to the United States and a national tragedy.

It is so a great a scandal that it alone should unseat Obama, even if all his other policies had not already proved him (as they have) to be the worst president in American history.

Let him go and be happy. He can use some of his China-invested pension to buy lessons in Transcendental Meditation.

What freedom of speech? 15

YouTube has been praised for refusing to remove the video, titled “Innocence of Muslims”, which has been blamed for the latest explosion of Islamic rage against America, and even for the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.

Well, now YouTube has removed it.

The reason they give:

This video has been removed as a violation of YouTube’s policy against spam, scams, and commercially deceptive content.

Sorry about that.

But it’s more than likely that they have given in to pressure from the Obama administration.

Were they threatened by Muslims? Or only by the government? If so, with what?

Now we are all under threat.

Goodbye, First Amendment? Goodbye, Freedom?

Posted under Commentary, Islam, jihad, media, Muslims, News, Terrorism, tyranny, United States by Jillian Becker on Saturday, September 22, 2012

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A terrorist’s manifesto 97

The manifesto of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist (see our posts Nemesis comes to Norway, and Nemesis comes to Europe immediately below), can be found here.

It is a long pdf document titled A European Declaration of Independence. The author’s name – an obvious Anglicization of his own name – is given as Andrew Berwick; the place and date of posting online, London 2011.

It is clearly and for the most part correctly written. One would suppose he must have had help from someone whose first language is English, but he says, “It should be noted that English is my secondary language and due to certain security precautions I was unable to have the documents professionally edited and proof read. Needless to say, there is a potential for improving it literarily.” Chunks of it, with small variations, are copied from the writings of the Unabomber.

In most of the first two sections, reasonable arguments are set out chiefly against the Islamization of Europe, multiculturalism, Marxism, political correctness, leftist indoctrination in the universities, feminism, and what he calls “Enviro-Communism”. In support of his views he quotes or refers to many of the writers and authorities we respect, such as Bernard Lewis, Bat Ye’Or, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom, Bruce Bawer, Daniel Pipes, Diana West, Melanie Phillips, Theodore Dalrymple. He deplores as we do the influence that revolutionaries like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs, and Marxist theorists such as Herbert Marcuse and his fellow members of the “Frankfurt School”, have had on the politics of the West over the last half century or so. The values Western leaders have failed, he says, to uphold are individual freedom, freedom of speech, democracy. Histories of Islam’s earlier advances into Europe, quotations from the Koran and accounts of Islamic belief are carefully referenced.

The reasonable arguments are interrupted now and then by flights of romantic fancy inspired by the poetry of Ted Hughes, Nordic legend, and the superman ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche. These foreshadow what becomes, in the third section, full-fledged fantasy. It is here that obsession shows itself. He revives in his imagination the crusading Order of the Knights Templar (destroyed by King Philip the Beautiful and brought to a fiery end in 1314, when the last officers of the order, including the Grand Master Jacques de Molay, were burnt at the stake as heretics on an island in the Seine). He declares himself to be a “Knight Justiciar”. He writes as if a considerable number of others, predominantly northern Europeans, share the fantasy with him; a company that will mount a violent crusade against the powers who have betrayed the ideals and achievements of Christian Europe. The crusade will become a civil war – a global civil war: “not  between capitalists and socialists, but between nationalists and internationalists”; and between Islam and the non-Islamic world.

He condemns Nazism, but is prepared to fight alongside neo-Nazi groups. Criminal organizations would also be co-opted. The manifesto becomes a handbook for terrorists. He specifies the buildings that should be bombed, including government buildings and mosques. He lists the chemicals needed for making bombs, advises how to acquire them (eg. by having a farm and buying fertilizer in large quantities as if for the land), and describes in detail how to make them.

He expresses regret that women must be killed as well as men, but insists that in pursuit of such a high task as the Knights have set themselves, soft feelings cannot be indulged.

He sees the role in which he is casting himself as heroic. He encourages others to become hero-martyrs like him:

You will forever be celebrated by your people as a martyr for your country, protecting your culture and fighting for your kin and for Christendom.

You will be remembered as a conservative revolutionary pioneer, one of the brave European Crusader heroes who said; enough is enough, it is time to take back our countries before our multiculturalist traitor elites actually manages to finalize their agenda and sell us all into Muslim slavery.

Your sacrifice will be a great source of inspiration for generations of Europeans to come.

You will become a role model for hundreds, perhaps thousands of new emerging martyrs fighting the good fight, our fight.

And when we seize political and military power in Europe within a few decades, it will be pioneers and historical pioneers like you who will be celebrated with reverence.

Revolutionary patriots like the Justiciar Knights will then be celebrated as destroyers of Marxism and the slayer of tyrants; the fearless and selfless protectors of Europe, The Perfect Knights.

For there is no greater glory than dying selflessly while pro-actively protecting your people from persecution and gradual demographical annihilation.

We are destined to win in the end, as our people, all Europeans, are gradually waking up from their slumber and realising the deceitfulness and suicidal nature of multiculturalist doctrine.

We do not only have the people on our side, we have the truth on our side, we have time on our side, we have the will of our ancestors and the will of God on our side.

The Left will almost certainly claim that Breivik’s atrocious acts of terrorism are what opposition to Islamization and multiculturalism et cetera lead to. They will probably use his manifesto as proof of a “vast right-wing conspiracy”.

The Obama administration likes to pretend that white middle class Americans are the most likely terrorists.

But the fact is that for the last 45 years, acts of terrorism carried out by leftists and Muslims vastly outnumber those carried out in the name of any cause of the “right”. And terrorism as a method has not been often or strongly condemned by the leftist intelligentsia.

It will be now. As of course it should be.

We’ll have more to say about Breivik, his manifesto, and the right and wrong  lessons to be learnt from his actions.

No responsibility to report 1

Just how phony the claim is (put out by Obama and his henchwomen*) that the Libyan engagement is all about the “responsibility to protect” civilians, is demonstrated by this report published two days ago on July 18, 2011, by Asia News – and nowhere in the West:

Benghazi-based rebels took Brega over night. The town, which is 740 km east of Tripoli, is the country’s main oil hub. The National Transitional Council (NTC) called the fall of the city its greatest victory since the war against Gaddafi began. However, doubts remain about rebel intentions. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused them of retaliatory violence against pro-Gaddafi regime civilians. … HRW said rebels looted and torched homes in towns that had fallen under NTC control. In villages south of Tripoli, Gaddafi loyalists were beaten, their houses set on fire.

We have little respect for Human Rights Watch having observed their frequent incapacity or reluctance to tell the truth, but in this case their accusation is backed up by another source:

Tiziana Gamannossi, an Italian businesswoman in Tripoli, told AsiaNews that the rebels’ push is causing fear in the civilian population. …

In her view, NATO is funding and arming violent groups that lack any training or code of honour. …

For Gamannossi, a war that was launched to defend civilians is absurd. The latter watch powerless as their cities and country are torn down amid the silence of western media.

“These days, hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated against NATO in Tripoli, Zliten, Ajaylat and Sabha, demanding an end to the air strikes. No newspaper has given such news much importance, calling the protests ‘ demonstrations funded by the regime’.”

Last week the 30-member contact group on Libya, including the United States, China and Russia, “formally recognised the NTC as the sole representative of the Libyan people. This will give the council access to about US$200 billion in Libyan government assets held in foreign banks to fund the rebel advance.”

What makes this contact group expect that the people leading the National Transitional Council will be any better for Libyans, or for other states to deal with, than Gaddafi has been?

The answer is, absolutely nothing. They may even be worse.

 

* Samantha Power, Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs, National Security Council;  Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the UN;  Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State.  See our post A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011.

 

It’s Osama for you, Auntie 130

The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, “the Beeb”, or “Auntie”, has been coasting on its Second World War reputation for telling the truth for some sixty-six subsequent years, during which it has deserved that reputation less and less, and now not at all.

It is supported by a license fee that every household has to pay to watch any television or listen to any radio, even if the owner of the TV or radio set only tunes in to independent broadcasters who support themselves on fees for advertisements. Yet the BBC does not think it is answerable to the public. It hardly ever admits to any fault, however long and loudly it may be accused of it. It is criticized constantly, continually, for persistent bias towards the left and Islam.

Its managers seem without exception to be self-righteous, morally corrupt, smug and shameless. To prove that it is not anti-Israel, the organization commissioned an internal enquiry, with public money of course; but  when the report came in, it refused to publish it, presumably because its findings were not what it wanted them to be.

Now a new scandal has arisen, courtesy of Wikileaks, connecting the Blatantly Biased Corporation to AL-QAEDA. No one should be surprised.

Here’s the story, told by Un:dhimmi:

The BBC could be part of a ‘propaganda media network’ for al-Qaeda, according to U.S. files published by Wikileaks.

A phone number of someone at the BBC was found in phone books and programmed into the mobile phones of a number of militants seized by the Americans. The number is believed to be based at Bush House, the headquarters of the BBC World Service.

The assessment on one of the detainees at the Guantanamo camp, dated 21 April 2007, said: ‘The London, United Kingdom, phone number 0044 207 *** **** was discovered in numerous seized phone books and phones associated with extremist-linked individuals.

‘The number is associated with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).’

The U.S. assessment file said forces had uncovered many ‘extremist links’ to the BBC number – indicating that extremists could have made contacts with employees at the broadcaster who were sympathetic to extremists or had information on ‘ACM’ (anti-Coalition militia) activities. …

The BBC number listed on the file is now dead, but the revelation could further dent the broadcaster’ reputation for impartiality. It has for years faced claims it is biased towards the left. But this is the first time the BBC has been linked to Islamic extremism.

Or the first time there’s been evidence of such a link.

In September 2006, BBC chairman Michael Grade held an ‘impartiality summit’ to assess whether there was a left-wing bias. A leaked account of the meeting showed that executives admitted they would broadcast an interview with Osama Bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda. They said they would give him a platform to explain his views, if he approached them.

And how many of those executives are Muslims? We know the BBC is stuffed with them.

So what is the BBC’s excuse for the revelation of the phone number? It’s mighty smooooth:

A spokesman for the BBC said: … “The service [as the BBC calls itself] has interviewed representatives of organisations from all sides involved in the Afghan conflict so it would not be surprising that a number believed to relate to the BBC Pashto service was in circulation.’

Un:dhimmi goes on to comment:

The BBC enjoys a solid, but wholly unjustified international reputation for impartiality. In spite of this (and its own propaganda), the British state broadcaster is caught out by the observant time after time; slanting reports, omitting material facts and downplaying the opinions of those holding views which differ from those of its middle class, liberal, multiculturalist and metropolitan caucus. …

One of the standout areas of BBC bias is its promotion of Islam. At times, it seems as if it is selling the Muslim faith to Britons – seeking constantly to feature examples of benign, integrated and, well – middle class and metropolitan – Muslims as if to say ‘Look – these Muslims are just like you (if ‘you’ are a middle class, affluent professional with multicultural, liberal-to-left views and live in London) – and Islam really is a religion of peace!’.

Meanwhile, parts of the country of the kind not inhabited by the kind of affluent liberals who are so overrepresented at Broadcasting House, are coming to resemble Islamabad – mosque-fringed, self-segregating ghettoes, some of which are home to major organised crime, terrorism and benefit fraud. But you’d never know this from al-Beeb’s output.

The BBC will survive this scandal with its usual snooty disdain of any criticism levelled against it.

Far from being a “service”, it is a destructive propaganda machine. Any decent government – which Britain hasn’t had since the day Margaret Thatcher left the Prime Minister’s office – would now get rid of it.

Speaking out for the dead 228

Daniel Greenfield, aka Sultan Knish, writes a passionate though entirely rational essay evoking memories of 9/11, and condemning the psychological sadism of Imam Rauf’s plan – defended by the unprincipled mainstream media – to build a mosque at Ground Zero.

The essay deserves to be read in full. Here is part of it:

Just the Facts, Imam. Here 3,000 Americans were murdered. For working in offices or visiting them. For being members of the NYPD or the PAPD or the FDNY. For putting on a uniform or a suit. For living their lives. And then the walls and floors and furniture around them burned. The papers in their hands burned. Their bodies burned. The ashes drifted down narrow streets. Streets where George Washington and his men once passed to visit Fraunces Tavern and toward Broadway where the Iranian hostages rode back in a ticker tape parade on their return.

Now the money that nourished their killers, will help erect a mosque. A temple of death by the ashes of the dead. And the media is outraged that we won’t allow it. That we won’t stand for it. The same media that stood and grinned while Muslims burned synagogues, churches and temples. That tells us that the Muslim terrorists who try to kill us are not really Muslims. Just going through a midlife crisis, picked up some PTSD from some bad coffee or was just having a bad day. Because we are not equal. On their farm, some animals are more equal than others. Some have the right to kill, others only have the right to be killed. Some have the right to build houses of worship, others have the right to build and to burn what others labor to build. Some have the right to be offensive, others only the right to be silent.

The dead of 9/11 are silent now. Or rather they have been silenced. As countless millions have before them were silenced. With flame and sword. In mass graves and at spearpoint. Tortured and mutilated. Torn apart with bombs. The dead cannot speak out against their murderers, but we can. The dead cannot protest, but we can. It is our duty to stand up and speak out. This is our place. Our land and our city. These are the streets where they tried to kill us. These are the streets where they will try again. To speak out is to defy those who would kill us and claim our cities as their own. Who would build monuments to their own victory over the ashes of our dead.

First they bomb. Now they occupy. We have lived through the bombing. And now we rise to defy the occupation.

Power speaking truth 9

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey says what needs to be said, in the straight way it needs to be said, to progressive journalist Tom Moran who writes for The Star Ledger.

If only there could be just such a governor for every state in the Union!

How about Chris Christie for President?

Posted under media, United States by Jillian Becker on Wednesday, September 29, 2010

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