The right wing bias of BBC Question Time tonight staggers belief, even for the BBC. One Francoist, two Tories, the still more right wing Chukka Umunna, all “balanced” by Akala, who thankfully has more brains, and certainly more compassion, than the rest put together.
Esther McVey, Tory. Champion of the rape clause, minister implementing benefit cuts and promoting privatised benefits assessments, lobbyist against regulating gambling machines. One of the very nastiest of Tories.
Chloe Westley Another Tory. Here representing the tiny far right fringe group the “Taxpayers Alliance”. Proponent of fierce benefit cuts. Studying the rampantly Islamophobic counter-terrorism course at St Andrews University. Her twitter handle is “LowTaxChloe” which is all you need to know.
Alejandro Agag Another Tory, invited by the BBC as a “businessman”. Former MEP for the Francoist Spanish Popular Party – the current government in Spain which is busy jailing as many political prisoners in Catalonia as they can get their hands on, and is happy sending in paramilitary thugs to club old Catalan ladies waiting to vote.
Chuka Umunna Full time taxpayer-funded right wing campaigner against Jeremy Corbyn.
Akala Very decent guy. Performing this year at our Doune the Rabbit Hole festival for which you should pull your finger out and get buying tickets now.
Why is the BBC permitted, day after day after day, to pump out programming which actively promotes a political programme far to the right of where the British population actually stand? With the continual over-representation of nutty right wing groups like the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Henry Jackson Society, while left wing groups of much larger membership such as Stop the War are completely ignored. Why low tax campaigners but no invitation ever to groups like Black Triangle who represent claimants interests? Not to mention the routine ignoring of the SNP, parliament’s third largest party.
I strongly urge you not to pay your TV license to fund this barrage of right wing propaganda. I and thousands of others in Scotland have refused to pay since 2014, and other than lots of silly threatening letters nothing has happened. Just stop paying for this nonsense.
So Israel’s most successful football team Beitar Jerusalem, has changed its name to Beitar Trump, in honour of Donald Trump and his decision (or should I say the poweful US lobby groups of a certain persuasion telling him to do so) to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.
What planet are you on to think the BBC are in any way right wing? Laughable.
Anyway stop paying your licence fee and kill the BBC. We don’t want propaganda whichever side of the political spectrum it may come from.
I really can’t understand Trump allowing (or whatever powerful US donors/lobbyist groups) this opening of the US embassy today of all days, when Nakba Day is tomorrow.
Surely they, (Netanyahu and Trump) realise that almost maximum unrest will occur today, and the Palestinian people will tomorrow, feel even aggrieved.
Of course they realise it – that’s the entire game. Trump knows this gets the religious crazies in the US good and excited, and they’ll grant him even more support (despite his manifest lacking of any semblance of supposed Christian values). This brings forward the Rapture as far as these Christianist lunatics are concerned, so what could possibly be better?
I sense that we are in the presence of a superior person, this glenn_nl. One who has soared past such pedestrian things like “supposed Christian values.” There are “religious crazies” to the left of him and “Christian lunatics” to the right of him but yet he provides us his insights.
Live on both news channels.
In Jerusalem, Kushner is retailing his family history – his grandparents were Holocaust survivors from Belarus, and how he keeps a photo of them in his office in the White House to remind him.. I did not know he had a job in the Trump ‘administration’! If so, what is it? Escort for the lanky Ivanka with her bright blonde dyed hair.. (I have a photo of her in 1998 with dark brown hair)
Netanyahu – ‘We have no better friends in the world than the US and they stand with us’. He is listing all the US attendees. Thousands of them in a marquee. He is like the Cock of the North. Won’t stop crowing. When he is not speaking Hebrew, his English accent is quite American.
‘After graduating from MIT with Bachelor of Science (SB) and Master of Science (SM) degrees, Netanyahu was recruited as an economic consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. Netanyahu returned to Israel in 1978 to found the Yonatan Netanyahu Anti-Terror Institute, named after his brother Yonatan Netanyahu, who died leading Operation Entebbe. Netanyahu served as the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988.’
The broadcast is quite surreal as the screen is split and showing the Gaza protesters.
Here’s the silly man doing the chicken dance. It has been his week.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5726285/Netanyahu-celebrates-Israels-Eurovision-win-performing-CHICKEN-DANCE.html
Sharp Ears, let us not forget also that Netanyahoo himself was a terrorist – blowing up hotels etc in the name of Israel
That was Begin, the self-styled “godfather of modern terrorism”. Until Lockerbie, his attack on the King David hotel was the bloodiest terrorist outrage ever. He went on to pick up the Nobel Peace prize.
There is an answer to your Kushner question but it is indistinguishable from satire.
His metaphysical role is playing Fredo Corleone in Trump’s am dram stage play of The Godfather.
Says Netanyaho: “We have no better friends in the world than the US and they stand with us”
Sure, he’s always the fellow with a cap in his hand. The US fills it.
As soon as that stops, he’s a frightened rabbit.
As violence spreads to Bethlehem, over the US embassy, the British government are giving the Syrian Observatory on Human Rights around £200,000 pounds to buy camera and communications equipment.
Could the funds be used to open a second White Helmets styled propaganda front?
https://www.rt.com/uk/426655-hitchens-white-helmets-syria/
The Syrian Observatory on Human Rights has been called into question so to speak, as it’s address has been said to have been traced to a shopkeeper in the UK! It appears to be a front for right wing propaganda group & is channelling money to other vested interests who are not acting in the best interests of the Syrian people.
It is well known US allies want a gas pipeline to be laid from Kuwait through Syria to Turkey. Syria has said no, hence western allies are looking for excuses to unseat the Syrian Government.
We should learn from the consequences of allowing USA bombing & asset stripping Iraq. What did it achieve? It destabilised Iraq but It made President Bush’s “war cabinet” & his crony Tony Blair incredibly rich. Trump will look to do the same in Syria. Leaving a hiatus a vacuum to be filled with what ??? more jihadis!
Jonathan Cook from Nazareth
Western Leaders Betrayed Palestinians 70 Years Ago; there is no sign that’s about to change
Israel has been crafting a dishonest counter-narrative ever since the Nakba, one that historians scouring the archives have exploded
by Jonathan Cook / May 14th, 2018
On Tuesday, Palestinians will commemorate the anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe, their mass expulsion and dispossession 70 years ago as the new state of Israel was built on the ruins of their homeland. As a result, most Palestinians were turned into refugees, denied by Israel the right to return to their homes.
Israel is braced nervously for many tens of thousands to turn out in the occupied territories this week to protest against decades of its refusal to make amends or end its oppressive rule.
The move on Monday of the US embassy to Jerusalem, a city under belligerent occupation, has only inflamed Palestinian grievances – and a sense that the West is still conspiring in their dispossession.
The expected focus of the protests is Gaza, where unarmed Palestinians have been massing every Friday since late March at the perimeter fence that encages two million of them.
/..
https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/05/western-leaders-betrayed-palestinians-70-years-ago-there-is-no-sign-thats-about-to-change/
Sky are saying 41 have been killed. The Israelis have also been bombing Gaza.
15:20 Israel’s military says it has carried out five airstrikes in Gaza after militants exchanged fire with soldiers.
https://news.sky.com/story/live-protest-deaths-as-us-embassy-opens-in-jerusalem-11372197
The cruelty.
I can’t help thinking of Sharpeville when 69 Africans we’re slaughtered by the South African police. The whole world was appalled and it was the start of the boycott and isolation of the apartheid state. Will the same happen to Israel – of course it won’t. Where are the Conservative and Labour friends of Israel and the new head of the BoD (who was on Today complaining about anti-semitism.) Where is the UK government. Not a peep from any of them.
Could not agree more Clive p. People like me, youths of the sixties, were out there protesting in the days when the Guardian was running stories against apartheid. Even Harold Wilson, who nobody could accuse of being left wing, opposed apartheid. He feared he was being spied on by the SA secret services. He was of course. Lockerbie came more than a decade after his fears.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/harold-wilson-feared-he-was-being-spied-on-by-south-african-regime-over-apartheid-opposition-10391281.html
How things have changed? Today all our prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher onwards have supported apartheid. Thatcher even supported the evil dictator, Pinochet. It’s been downhill for justice ever since.
Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook · 41 minutes ago
US and Israeli dignitaries back-slapping at Jerusalem embassy opening as Israeli snipers massacre unarmed Palestinians in Gaza. Could there be a starker visual reminder that Israel is a legacy of the west’s disastrous colonial interference in the ME?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DdKa9HmXkAAIHZU.jpg
___
The BBC are still saying ‘clashes’.
viz Gaza border clashes
Posted at 15:48 Dozens die as US opens Jerusalem embassy
Palestinians run for cover from tear gas during clashes with Israeli security forces near the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, east of Jabalia on May 14, 2018, as Palestinians protest over the inauguration of the US embassy following its controversial move to Jerusalem
At least 41 Palestinians die in clashes with Israel, as the US makes its controversial embassy move.’
YCNMIU.
Give the Palestinians the most up to date weapons to defend themselves.
This slaughter with IMPUNITY has to stop.
Fight back for Christ’s sake!!!
Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
Fight back!!!
Received another threatening letter from T.V. License mob to-day.
Even being eligible for a FREE License I still would not buy a T.V.
Send it back, with a letter outlining your charges for administering their further correspondence..
£75 per letter is reasonable, given what corporates charge even with their economies of scale.
Say that any further letters from them shall indicate their agreement to this contract.
You can sue them in the small claims court should they try to dodge their debt. They always do.
That’s the old common law way of doing it
Which don’t seem to apply no more.
We’re all Palestinians now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x79TjCCZlgY
Anyway, Erdogan is in England, to meet with all the ladies and the gents.
I hope he’ll be meeting with some Palestinians to assure them that Turkey and her new friends in the East shall be doing something about that, at last.
If Eurasia’s to get going it needs to sort out a lot of, shall we say, legacy problems from the previous management.
GAZA: STOP THE MASSACRE – Emergency Protest in London, tomorrow May 15th.
See:
http://normanfinkelstein.com/2018/05/14/gaza-stop-the-massacre-emergency-protest-in-london/
Also of interest:
FINKELSTEIN ON GAZA. HIS MOST IMPORTANT SPEECH EVER. DON’T MISS IT!
See:
http://normanfinkelstein.com/2018/05/05/finkelstein-on-gaza-his-most-important-speech-ever-dont-miss-it/
A time to cry – A lament over Jerusalem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH0u77qzMcs
Very shocked to see Rim Banna had died so young, just a few months ago.
You need your poets and singers to get you through the day and daily horror of it all.
And humour:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3x8-odxKkE
‘ANTI-US ALLIANCE OF IRAQI SHIA CLERIC MUQTADA AL-SADR IS ABOUT TO WIN PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION’:
https://southfront.org/anti-us-alliance-of-iraqi-shia-cleric-muqtada-al-sadr-is-about-to-win-parliamentary-election/
This looks like a good development; perhaps now they will try to turf the Yanks and their cronies out of Iraq.
One Iraqi soldier, I believe he was an NCO or officer, said he and other Iraqi troops watched a line of US Chinooks head towards IS lines. The other troops cheered, but he said ‘it’s strange that the IS never shoot at the US aircraft and helicopters, just at the Iraqi ones.
At least two British planes were shot down by Iraqi defense forces while they were air-dropping arms to IS, as was at least one US helicopter (it was two or three years ago; I could supply the links if required).
I thought he was the one the Americans wanted to win, anti-iran, recently buddying up to the saudis?
@ Xavi May 14, 2018 at 17:55
I hadn’t heard he was anti-Iran or cosying up to the Saudis. We’ll have to wait and see.
More eulogies for Tessa Jowell today in the HoC. May followed on from Bercow. He really is oleaginous. She apologized for having to leave early due to the imminent arrival of the Panama President at No 10. Philip has some papers relating to offshore investments in Panana to present. Only joking!
Anyway I hope the members did not mention Berlusconi, mortgages, her husband’s dodgy dealings, and especially not Jowell’s membership of the LFoI today of all days.
Name of donor: Labour Friends of Israel
Address of donor: BM LFI, London WC1N 3XX
Amount of donation (or estimate of the probable value): £1,400
Destination of visit: Israel and the Palestinian territories. Some hospitality provided by the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Date of visit: 30 November to 4 December 2014
Purpose of visit: Fact-finding visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories; meeting with Israeli and Palestinian politicians and community representatives
_______
https://www.theyworkforyou.com/regmem/?p=10326
Downing Street I see.
Erdogan will see it. He arrived today.
Delete that above one Mod please.
Rageh Omaar is presenting the news on ITV. Little different emphases from the BBC on Israel/Palestine today. They do have a reporter in Gaza City, Emma Murphy. She is predicting even more killing and injury tomorrow.
Omaar worked for the BBC during the Iraq War.
Explaining why he eventually left the BBC, Omaar suggested that he wanted to operate independently and to take on assignments for people he wished to collaborate with. He also suggested that the BBC working environment was somewhat exclusivist on a class basis, and that he was guilty of this as well to some degree as a consequence of his public school upbringing.
Additionally, Omaar has expressed regret about the way in which he covered the invasion of Iraq during his time as a BBC correspondent. He suggested that he and his colleagues did pieces on Sadam Hussein, his regime and weapons inspectors, giving little coverage to the Iraqi people. Interviewed in John Pilger’s documentary The War You Don’t See (2010), Omaar also lamented that “one didn’t press the most uncomfortable buttons hard enough” and called the coverage “a giant echo chamber”‘
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rageh_Omaar
This guy is absolutely brilliant.
Questions Israelis about the rationale behind their beliefs.
He’s kinda like doing the Socrates gig.
And I think for many of them they so respect rationalism and answer so honestly in that form that they kinda undermine their belief system in a way.
They’re just like us.
They want to be human. Most of them.
But they’re forced to take sides between evil and even more evil. In their circumstances
Rather than the much easier Good/Bad gig we had going on in Christendom, which managed things so well.
https://www.youtube.com/user/coreygilshuster/videos
I just started a petition – help me get it started? Shared with facebook friends and twitter followers but I need some shares that go further afield. I’ve also put a link to a website with some interesting ideas about what reforms to the UN could look like.
The UN security council (and particularly the veto power of its superpower members) is an outdated mechanism that grossly misrepresents the moral aspirations of the other 188 nation states. The in‐ability to deal with key humanitarian issues such as the Rohingya crisis and the war in Syria are only two recent examples. World peace and security are being threatened by this in‐balance toward military‐industrial power over people power. We call on the UN to re‐define its purpose in the 21st century by reforming the security council.
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/petition/The_United_Nations_Reform_the_UN_security_council/?cDKHaib
http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/2017/05/18/how-to-reform-the-un-security-council/