The Agreement accompanying the BBC's Charter requires us to produce comprehensive, authoritative and impartial coverage of news and current affairs in the UK and throughout the world to support fair and informed debate. It specifies that we should do all we can to treat controversial subjects with due accuracy and impartiality in our news services and other programmes dealing with matters of public policy or of political or industrial controversy. It also states that the BBC is forbidden from expressing an opinion on current affairs or matters of public policy other than broadcasting.Can anyone read the above passage and honestly say that BBC news coverage fulfils these stated objectives? I would contend that it does not. By way of example, I draw your attention to its systematic abuse of language; an abuse used to tap into the British public’s conditioned reflexes of loathing that come to the fore when the terms ‘far-right’ or ‘racist’ are deployed. The BBC uses these terms in an attempt to destroy the credibility of its chosen targets, and to elicit a sense of contempt for people and organisations thus labelled in the minds of its readers, listeners and viewers.
I first became aware of this BBC tactic some eight years ago when it was illustrated with crystal clarity by its reporting of the then popular Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn. Given that Fortuyn was a professor of sociology, an outspoken advocate of Dutch liberal values, a hitherto member of the Dutch Labour Party and openly homosexual, how might you choose to define his politics? Liberal? Certainly. Left of centre? On some issues, undeniably. Far-right? ‘Far-right’? Since when have liberal centrist politicians who choose not to describe themselves as ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ been classified as ‘far-right’? Well, according to the BBC, the Guardian and the majority of other mainstream media outlets, this was the appropriate label for Fortuyn. Thus labelled and demonised, Fortuyn was to die at the hands of a leftist assassin.
What ‘sin’ had this man committed to be afforded the pariah label of ‘far-right’? What egregious act had he undertaken? What sacred value had he violated? The answer is simple: he had transgressed a taboo that none in the contemporary Western world may violate without becoming an object of officially sanctioned universal hate: he had spoken the truth. This is the truth that has subsequently been spoken by Geert Wilders; by Thilo Sarrazin and by the Sweden Democrats, and whenever this truth has been spoken, the BBC has been there ready to stigmatise, distort and dehumanise. Its aim: to destroy both messenger and message; hence its ready recourse to the terms 'far-right', 'populist', 'intolerant' and 'irrational'.
The truth is this: multiculturalism is a failure; mass immigration has a negative impact on receiving societies; Islam and Western values are fundamentally incompatible. Doctrinaire Muslims are permanently ill at ease in Western societies and are spurred by their ideology to undermine their host’s social structures and norms with a view to replacing them with an Islamic alternative using whichever means, peaceful or otherwise, that they find expedient at a given time. Anyone acknowledging these facts will be described by the BBC, the Guardian and the entire political and media establishments of the Western world as ‘far-right’. It would seem that to apply rational objective standards is to be ‘far-right’. I stand ‘guilty’ as charged.
Fortuyn’s melancholy ghost stall haunts the BBC (or is it just that BBC journalists are too lazy to avoid recycling tried and tested stock phrases?). Following Fortuyn’s assassination in 2002 the BBC website stated:
Fortuyn's anti-Muslim views, calls for an end to all immigration and pledges to come down hard on crime struck a chord with voters despite the country's celebrated reputation for liberalism and religious tolerance.Compare the above to today’s reporting of the Sweden Democrats electoral success:
The party appears to have tapped into voter dissatisfaction over immigration, says our correspondent, with the result undermining the image of Sweden as a tolerant and open-minded country.Note how the BBC implies that any attempt by the Dutch or Swedish electorates to defend their national integrity or identity is thereby defined as innately illiberal, intolerant and narrow-minded. In what way is seeking to defend your own country against Islamisation any of these things? The attitudes, values and practise of doctrinaire Muslims on the other hand are all of these: illiberal, intolerant and narrow-minded. As this clearly illustrates, you don’t need to be Spock to realise that the BBC is essentially illogical.
