By Damian Thompson Religion Last updated: January 2nd, 2011
Nowhere in the BBC’s output is Left-liberal bias more thickly applied than on Radio 4’s Sunday programme. If you didn’t think you could actuallyhear a lip curl, try listening to any of its “reports” that involve Christian conservatives. (The programme’s heavily loaded discussion of Catholic issues during the Pope’s visit was easily the low point of the BBC’s otherwise good coverage.) Radical Islam, on the other hand? Let me refer you to a Spectator Coffee House post by Nick Cohen, who describes this morning’s twisted little number far better than I could:
Alas, whenever you believe that you have nailed British hypocrisy, the BBC comes along and proves that it is worse than you thought. If there were an award for intellectual cowardice, a gold medal for journalistic double standards, this morning’s effort by Radio 4 deserves it.
The BBC began its report (28 minutes in) on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by saying that after the attack “some in the west felt personally threatened by Muslims. They believed that Muslims had nothing but hatred for America and its allies.” Note how at once the BBC avoids discussion of radical Islam, which does indeed have nothing but hatred for the West, for the Jews, for the Hindus and for the free thinkers, atheists, agnostics, liberals, secularist and democrats. Hatred that is complemented by its loathing for those Muslims or ex-Muslins who do not share its fascistic values, and whom it is slaughtering and oppressing wherever it has the power to kill.
Instead of acknowledging radical Islam’s existence, the BBC politely ignores what was in front of its nose and implies that to oppose radical Islam is to incubate a racist hated of all Muslims.
The only fanatic it quotes is Pastor Jones, the Florida preacher who wanted to burn the Koran. He is a nasty piece of work, to be sure, but an insignificant figure whose global notoriety owes everything to media corporations such as the BBC. The fanaticism we should worry about is Christian fanaticism not Islamist fanaticism, the suggestion runs. At the very least there is a moral equivalence between the two. The BBC then mentions the 7/7 bombings, which as I remember them were perpetrated by men with “nothing but hatred for the West”. Instead of finding someone who can talk about the killings with honesty and intelligence, it drags up a vicar so wet you could wring him out. His contribution is to blame the media for “piling on the agony” – as if journalists were the suicide bombers – and to describe the atrocity in tellingly woozy and illiterate language as “something international,” when it was all too clearly “something domestic”.
I am glad to say that in the studio discussion afterwards, Stephen Pollard exploded. “The idea that there is some kind of equivalence of extremism” between a Florida pastor with a tiny congregation and a global clerical fascist movement was “fantasy,” he boomed.
Here is my first prediction for 2011. Radio 4 will not invite Mr Pollard back for a very long time.
How interesting, by the way, that it should be Stephen Pollard, the brilliant editor of the Jewish Chronicle, rather than the Catholic studio guest, Paul Vallely, who pointed out the anti-Christian double standards in Kevin Bouquet’s report.
Update: Stephen has now linked to the programme from his JC.com blog under the headline: “BBC: Radio 4: The threat from Christian extremists is as bad as jihadi terror”.
Retrieved January 2, 2011 from http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100070247/the-bbcs-anti-christian-bias-the-sunday-programme-disgraces-itself-again/
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