Thursday, May 24, 2007

BBC - sensitive to the feelings of terrorists

The BBC's Editorial guidelines on the use of the word "terrorism" state:

We must report acts of terror quickly, accurately, fully and responsibly. Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgements. The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.

We should not adopt other people's language as our own. It is also usually inappropriate to use words like "liberate", "court martial" or "execute" in the absence of a clear judicial process. We should convey to our audience the full consequences of the act by describing what happened. We should use words which specifically describe the perpetrator such as "bomber", "attacker", "gunman", "kidnapper", "insurgent, and "militant". Our responsibility is to remain objective and report in ways that enable our audiences to make their own assessments about who is doing what to whom.

Sorry, but I call "bullshit". A dictionary definition of terrorism reads as follows

ter·ror·ism (tĕr'ə-rĭz'əm)
The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.
The BBC may like us to believe that the use of the word "terrorist" is a "barrier to understanding", but in fact it accurately describes a distinct criminal action.

The BBC would prefer to use words like "bomber", "attacker", "gunman", "kidnapper", "insurgent", and "militant" however, far from clarifying the motivation of the perpetrator and the nature of his crime, these words are - at best - vague. At worse they are willfully misleading.

Bomber, attacker, gunman & kidnapper may describe the action, but do not provide a political or ideological context that necessary to understand the nature of the crime.

Bombers, attackers, gunmen & kidnappers could easily refer to people motivated by non-political factors. "Millitant" just describes people who are pissed off.

Of course the public is usually bright enough to know that a guy named Abu Fanatic suicide bombing a market place in tel Aviv isn't doing it to extort money from the market stall holders, but when the BBC uses the word "bomber", they do so to avoid offending people who see the random murder of unsuspecting civilians as "an act of resistance".

They might argue that "terrorist" is an emotionally loaded term. It isn't. An emotive term would be "deranged, murderous culty". The word "terrorist" simply describes a civilian who murders others for ideological or political aims.

Would the BBC be as sensitive to the opinions of child molesters? Would the BBC say that the use of the word "Pedophile" is a barrier to understanding? Would they describe them as "differently sexualised" or say that a person has a "child-centric" sexuality? I hope not.

Just as I hope they stop pandering to the sensitivities of people who see the random murder of civilians going about their business as "resistance".

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Stripped and humiliated in Tehran

Why is an Iranian woman stripped to her bra on a street in Tehran? Because a female religious enforcer thought she wasn't wearing her hijab correctly

meanwhile, drowned out by the sound of crickets, the feint sounds of Western feminist outrage might be audible (or not...)

Sunday, May 13, 2007

1.5 million Turks march against Islamism

Turks rally against pro-Islamic leaders - Yahoo! News

Now if we could only have a few thousand marching in the UK against Islamism...

hat tip (LGF)

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Q & A with Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens ansers questions related to his article "Londonistan Calling"

Is this man the greatest living Englishman?

A London police official went on television after the July 7 bombings to say that the words "Islam" and "terrorism" do not go together. Is he misunderstanding the threat?
The reply to this fatuous remark was published in an Arab magazine. It said that it is not true that all Muslims are terrorists, but it is true that almost all terrorists are Muslims. We have to face this problem. Blair is quite firmly convinced that by making concessions on almost every front to Islamist demands, this will reduce the terrorist population. He thinks it's amenable to reason, in other words, and to reform. And I like his mind, in a way. But I doubt it very much. When the soft Blair-ites say the problem is not Islam, or the problem is not religion, I have to say very firmly, "To the contrary. It is an absolutely identical fit between the two."

Between terror and Islam?
Yes.


full article

Londonistan Calling: Hitchens returns to Finsbury Park

From Vanity Fair "Londonistan Calling"

Christopher Hitchens lays it out as it is....

For the British mainstream, multiculturalism has been the official civic religion for so long that any criticism of any minority group has become the equivalent of profanity. And Islamic extremists have long understood that they need only suggest a racial bias—or a hint of the newly invented and meaningless term "Islamophobia"—in order to make the British cough and shuffle with embarrassment....

Anyway, you can't be multicultural and preach murderous loathing of Jews, Britain's oldest and most successful (and most consistently anti-racist) minority. And you can't be multicultural and preach equally homicidal hatred of India, Britain's most important ally and friend after the United States. My colleague Henry Porter sat me down in his West London home and made me watch a documentary that he thought had received far too little attention when shown on Britain's Channel 4. It is entitled Undercover Mosque, and it shows film shot in quite mainstream Islamic centers in Birmingham and London (you can now find it easily on the Internet). And there it all is: foaming, bearded preachers calling for crucifixion of unbelievers, for homosexuals to be thrown off mountaintops, for disobedient and "deficient" women to be beaten into submission, and for Jewish and Indian property and life to be destroyed. "You have to bomb the Indian businesses, and as for the Jews, you kill them physically," as one sermonizer, calling himself Sheikh al-Faisal, so prettily puts it. This stuff is being inculcated in small children—who are also informed that the age of consent should be nine years old, in honor of the prophet Muhammad's youngest spouse. Again, these were not tin-roof storefront mosques but well-appointed and well-attended places of worship, often the beneficiaries of Saudi Arabian largesse. It's not just the mosques, either. In West London there is a school named for Prince Charles's friend King Fahd, with 650 pupils, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia. According to Colin Cook, a British convert to Islam (initially inspired by the former crooner Cat Stevens) who taught there for 19 years, teaching materials said that Jews "engage in witchcraft and sorcery and obey Satan," and incited pupils to list the defects of worthless heresies such as Judaism and Christianity.

What this shows is the utter futility of the soft-centered explanations of the 7/7 bombings and other outrages. It was argued for a while that the 7/7 perpetrators were victims of unemployment and poverty, until their remains were identified and it became clear that most of them came from educated and reasonably well-off backgrounds. The excuses then abruptly switched, and we were asked to believe that it was Tony Blair's policy in Iraq and Afghanistan that motivated the killers. Suppose the latter to be true. It would still be the case that they belong to a movement that hates Jews and Indians and all kuffar, or "unbelievers": a fanatical sect that believes itself entitled to use deadly violence at any time. The roots of violence, that is to say, are in the preaching of it, and the sanctification of it.

read the full (and wonderful) article

Misogynist Islamofascism in action

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Seeing through the "progressive" bullsh*t

Daily Kos diarist Eyal Rosenberg says goodbye to the leftist site and the perverse, ersatz morality that idolizes Palestinian "victimhood", execrates Israel and ignores Islamic terrorism.

hat tip: LGF

Monday, May 07, 2007

Evil in its purest form.

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Islamist punch-ups in Australia

Al Qaeda slams Hamas for going soft

from Ynet via Judeoscope: "A video made by al-Qaeda leader Yahya al-Libi, who is in Afghanistan, was released at the end of April. Ynetnews has obtained the full recording, one of a number of growing scathing verbal attacks on Hamas by al-Qaeda.

'I am sending this message to the people of Palestine, whose blood is being shed by the Jewish occupiers,' al-Libi said.

'Hamas has abandoned jihad for politics. It has betrayed its youths. Its main activity is politics. Since its decision to go down the path of politics, Hamas has begun to descend on a downhill slope. They betrayed the dreams of their young fighters and they stabbed them in the back,' al-Libi added."

Blowing the lid off the truther cult

9/11: Challenging 'Loose Change': "The whole thing started out as a fictional screenplay"

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

DISGUSTING: Virgin Atlantic to show 911 Conspiracy Propaganda

Iranian TV reviews Star Wars

and slams Luke Skywalker as a George Bush apologist ...or something. Who knows? Watch for yourself.

click here to launch