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But the BBC has been lying for decades — 24 Comments

1. Trump has talked about suing the Beeb for $1 billion for libel. Libel laws in the UK are quite strict, and if he sued, he just might win. If he bankrupted the Beeb he’d be doing Brits a huge favor.

2. This is another occasion to refer readers to Antonio Gramsci.

3. This is why we put up with mean tweets.

4. “Apparently, Shah was born a Jain but converted to Islam when he married a Muslim. But you know what? I’m actually not blaming Shah, because the anti-Semitic rot at the BBC long long predated his tenure. It had a very native British provenance at the BBC.”

   In the 1948 War for Independence the Israeli’s faced a Trans Jordanian military headed by Pasha (Sir) John Bagot Glubb – a British General.

5. No reaction until Trump threatened a lawsuit: Like they say, money talks.

   I found it interesting that the Telegraph information came from an internal BBC report, which indicates that while the upper echelon of BBC supports the fake news the BBC presents, there are some at the BBC who do not like it.

   I read somewhere that at least once a week the BBC is caught in a lie on Israel. But until now, no heads have rolled in consequence.

   Lawsuit against the Brits for libeling an American? Been there, done that. In the 1930s, MGM successfully sued Graham Greene in the UK for some salacious suggestions he wrote about Shirley Temple in a review in the magazine Night and Day–where Greene was literary editor. Greene and Night and Day lost the lawsuit, which effectively ended the magazine he helped edit. Night and Day had to pay MGM 3,000 Lbs, and Greene, 500 Lbs. To pay off his share of the lawsuit award, Green engaged in a flurry of writing: The Power and the Glory, The Confidential Agent, and The Lawless Roads. So, some good came out of the lawsuit for Greene. DuckDuckGo: Graham Greene Shirley Temple lawsuit (I would estimate 500 Lbs. in the 1930s to be equivalent to roughly $30,000 today.)

6. Here is another Telegraph article on the subject, this time going into a great deal of detail on what was in the report on the BBC’s extreme bias. It’s the sort of thing we’ve been discussing here about the MSM (mostly our own, but also in other Western countries) for many years. But for those who saw the Telegraph article and weren’t already familiar with such things, it must have been shocking and shameful to see.

7. I consider these defamation suits to be the proper way to deal with mis, dis, and malinformation on media.

   Stay honest, or lose money.

   @ Gringo > “The Telegraph information came from an internal BBC report, which indicates that while the upper echelon of BBC supports the fake news the BBC presents, there are some at the BBC who do not like it.”

   And yet, these reports always seem to surface long after tremendous amounts of damage are done. I wonder if England has “safe channels” for whistleblowing, although the ones we allegedly have in the US don’t always work the way they are supposed to.

   If you blow the whistle to someone IN on the conspiracy, you only make problems for yourself.
   Glad it’s coming out now, at least.

8. Another angle, courtesy of “The Times of Israel”:

   “From tears for Arafat to Death to the IDF’: How BBC’s Israel coverage has gone from bad to worse”—
   https://www.timesofisrael.com/from-tears-for-arafat-to-death-to-the-idf-how-bbcs-israel-coverage-has-gone-from-bad-to-worse/

   Just another extended “incident” of malicious media misinformers intentionally spinningslandering and smearing—slyly lying about—Israel and Jews to a worldwide audience.

   AKA “POLICY” (in spite of supposedly OFFICIAL “guidelines” and “guard-rails”).

   That’s right! The media’s serial liars and criminals are, once again telling us—do they EVER stop?—earnestly, insistently, stentoriously, with all the moral weight at their GLOBAL command…that it’s ACTUALLY Israel (and, while we’re at it, DJT) who are the serial liars and criminals—oh, and unrepentant, merciless GENOCIDAL KILLERS / MURDERERS / RACISTS / RAPISTS…

   “Well now, what can a poor boy do? ‘Cept…[hold ‘em ALL in SHEER, TOTAL, UNADULTERATED contempt]…”? (…And believe the very opposite of what they’re trying to portray POUND into my head?)

9. Related, from Wretchard (on—HILARIOUS—Britain’s trademark, PRECIOUS high-handed “morality / civility / honesty…AKA, alas, PERFIDY)…

   “When You Can’t Take the High Hand.”—
   https://instapundit.com/756149/

   Also to savour:
   https://instapundit.com/756175/
   https://instapundit.com/756169/

   + Bonus
   OK, now let’s do aircraft carriers and stealth fighters…etc…

   “Crazy footage shows China’s Hongqi bridge collapsing months after opening”—
   https://nypost.com/2025/11/11/world-news/chinas-hongqi-bridge-collapses-in-river-months-after-reopening-video/
   H/T Instapundit.

10. I’ve wondered for years, over how vigorously the BBC upper management echelons protect their own, and people whom they perceive as friends. The accusations of sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile, and financial impropriety at Kid’s Company (a very popular charity run by Camilla Batmangelidah) – all soft-pedaled because top managers at the BBC either didn’t want to hear accusations against a popular performer, or against someone whom they had close friendly relations with.
    The nasty anti-Israeli slant to news and the virulent Jew-hate is just the flip side.

11. Heh, Barry, now do Haaretz (and we can leave ToI for later).

12. Heh? But sorry, I don’t “do” Haaretz (at least I try hard not to)….
    Truth is, I don’t generally “do” ToI either…though one must admit they try—alas a bit too hard—to offer, salad-bar style, something for everyone.
    Smorgasbord journalism?

    Just one of those things that fall under the “Life’s Too Short” File.
    (Besides, there’s enough odoriferous “journalism” out there as it is….)

13. Although the MSM seems to be spotlighting the Trump misquote (which was no accident; it is impossible to do something like that and not realize its impact, if you have some functioning brain cells)

    They believe in the their dark little hearts that the edit exposes the true Trump. They believe it is, as was said about Rathergate, “Fake, but accurate.”

14. Hey Sarge, absolutely.

    But while one might say that Jimmy Savile, Inc. was very much an outrageous, long-lasting “in-house” scandal (or, if one prefers, protection racket), one shouldn’t wish to forget the multi-dimensional, cross-government-department Rotheringham “series” of criminal coverups, organized and led—ironically, or perhaps not—by Britain’s current predatory (depredatory?) PM, such as he is.

    And might one ask whether in cutting his teeth on that sordid episode of cynically—if earnestly, sedulously and…morally (in accordance with his system of values and goals)—exploiting and destroying individual young women, the rule of law, generally, and overall trust within British society, he was actively preparing himself for a similar performance—though on a far more prestigious stage—if and when he were to become the leader of the nation he has so eagerly, if patiently, been seeking—and planning—to undermine?

    All this with the connivance and collusion of the BBC? (Though in its “defense” the BBC was not the only media organ so compromized).

    How does one say “All the news that’s fit to print” on the “sceptred isle”?

15. I happened to be in Malaysia on business during the beginning of the US-Iraq war. Naturally, I was very interested in how things were going, but the only news sources I could get were something called CNN-Asia (which was hopeless), and the BBC. I figured the BBC was reliable, so that was what I watched.
    After a few days, a BBC reporter had a story in which he stated that the US claimed to have captured the Baghdad airport. He went on to say that was obviously a lie, because there was absolutely no way they could have reached the airport so quickly. Of course, the story was completely true. As I watched more reports from the BBC, it became obvious that they had a strong anti-American bias, and it was directly coloring their reporting. I lost all respect for the BBC, and have not gotten it back.

16. Yes, as Neo and FOAF observe, Trump is popular not because we always like or agree with everything he does. For example, he’s a supporter of the ghastly Kelo decision. He’s erratic. Sometimes he spouts off in moments when silence would be better. The 50 year mortgage is a ghastly bad terrible no good idea that should be stomped into the dirt.

    But he does a lot of good, too, stuff previouus GOP preisdents just refused to do. The good mostly far outweighs the bad.

17. That the BBC is trying to pass that off as a mistake is clearly nonsense. The bits and bobs they patched together are separated in time by nearly an hour. In the US because Trump is a public figure you’d need to prove malice as well as inaccuracy. My understanding is British Law is far more lenient in that aspect of slander/libel. Of course you’ll need it to go through the English/British judges who seem on average to make our Justice Ketanji-Brown look like a John Bircher so I would not hold out high hope for victory.

18. @John Galt III:In the 1948 War for Independence the Israeli’s faced a Trans Jordanian military headed by Pasha (Sir) John Bagot Glubb – a British General.

    How is this any more relevant than that the Confederacy’s Secretary of War was Jewish, and that a Cherokee was the last Confederate general to surrender?

    Glubb also fought the Nazis and Vichy French in WWII. Certainly possible he himself was an antisemite, but not seeing how anything in his career can be evidence that the British are disposed to antisemitism any more that Jewish and Cherokee Confederates are evidence that Jews and Cherokee are disposed to be anti-black or anti-Union.

19. @John Galt III

    It’s even worse than that. “Glubb Pasha” was essentially military commander of the conventional forces of the Arab League (which admittedly was a minority of the troops, since it was basically just the Transjordanian regulars in the Arab Legion) during the partially successful siege of Jerusalem, which saw the League fail to overrun all of Jerusalem but did see them take East Jerusalem, where they promptly engaged in a campaign of obliteration, razing the Old City of East Jerusalem, killing thousands in genocidal massacres, and ending the oldest continuous Jewish population center on Earth while making Eastern Jerusalem “Judenfrei” for about 20 years. To what little credit I will give he was baffled and vexed by both the strength of Israeli resistance and the problems of urban fighting, and was under orders from the Hashemites and struggling with exerting control over the irregulars that were mostly loyal to al-Husseini and who were virulent. But this only goes so far, and Glubb and his staff would almost certainly have been hanged for what they did if they were held to the same standards as we had done Axis VIPs.

    As far as British anti-Zionism, I will make modest defense in that Lehi and the Stern Gang were truly unhinged and murderously terroristic, and they had declared war on the British as far back as 1944 after years of terrorist bombings and killings, while Haganah and the Jewish Authorities later intervened in the war after it became clear the British would not lift the White Paper. I think many of us on the Zionist Right tend to downplay or underestimate how nasty and ugly a lot of the early birth of Israel was. But that only goes so far, especially given how the Jews had many legitimate complaints about what had happened, especially given British appeasement and even enabling of genocidal terrorism from the likes of the Al-Husseinis.

20. @Niketas Choniates

    How is this any more relevant than that the Confederacy’s Secretary of War was Jewish, and that a Cherokee was the last Confederate general to surrender?

    Stand Waite’s Cherokee identity is quite important, since he was a part of a pro-slavery group of “early self removals” who were one of the early joiners of the Confederacy and who waged brutal war both against their opponents within the Cherokee and traditional tribal enemies, including a horrifying act of genocide that nearly succeeded in exterminating iirc four subtribes of the Creeks and Seminole over the winter of 1861-1862, which has been immortalized as the Trail of Blood on Ice campaign.

    Benjamin’s Jewish identity is significantly less important and more useful as an interesting trivia bit, though still somewhat important as both a historic milestone and in how he used every connection he had -including those in the Jewish community – to advance his career, his politics, and ultimately that of the Confederacy. But he was apparently somewhat more tribalistic than devout, and even got into trouble for it.

    But in either case, the Confederate cause was utterly crushed in 1865 and while plenty would give lip service and symbolic fealty to it, there was no hope of returning to the slave system after 1865. In contrast the desire to remove the Jews from the Levant is very much alive, and Glubb’s actions helping to exterminate Jews in East Jerusalem and the outlying areas was both a disgusting atrocity in its own right but is also something that is used to try and justify the permanent exclusion of those regions from Israel.

    As far as I can tell Glubb himself was not a huge influence on British anti-Zionism and Jew Hatred; he was more downstream of it with major problems emerging earlier among the Foreign Service in London. But he certainly carried out plenty of crimes on behalf of his patrons in both London and Amman.

    Glubb also fought the Nazis and Vichy French in WWII.

    As well as his future allies in the 1947-9 campaign, the Arab Committee mostly Husseini Clan loyalist paramilitaries that had helped the Nazis and engages in mass murder against Jews, Christians, and opposing Muslims.

    Certainly possible he himself was an antisemite, but not seeing how anything in his career can be evidence that the British are disposed to antisemitism any more that Jewish and Cherokee Confederates are evidence that Jews and Cherokee are disposed to be anti-black or anti-Union.

    The Arab League conducted a campaign of extermination against the region’s Jews in 1947-9, culminating in the destruction of the Old City of East Jerusalem, killing dozens of thousands, mostly out of combat as civilians in a textbook act of genocide that destroyed the oldest continuous Jewish community on Earth, and were only stopped from doing that more widely by the fact that they could not push further to take West Jerusalem. We see similar dynamics on other fronts like the Sinai.

    But what is important in Jerusalem and the outlying areas is Glubb was commander of the Arab Legion with a host of British officers seconded to it. He commanded and helped oversee their role in the cleansing. And apparently there was nothing in his moral compass or that of his sponsors in London that prevented him. To be fair this was after years of bitter guerrilla fighting with Jewish guerrillas and often outright terrorists (but then what is one to say about the Jihadi terrorists that had been a more persistent and bitter opponent who he was fighting alongside?) and I can understand many British coming to thoroughly disdain many Jews. But that’s only defensible up to a certain point.

    I don’t think Glubb was a great mover in British Jew Hatred, he was too downstream. And whether or not be personally was a Jew Hater is basically irrelevant in my opinion. What matters is that he was more than willing to cooperate in a campaign of genocide and systemic destruction even after the bitter city fighting was over, alongside hardened Nazi collaborators responsible for things like Hebron and the Baghdad Farhud. But at least as damning was the stance and policies of his superiors, especially in the Attlee Cabinet and the Foreign Service, but also elsewhere.

    But as far as I can tell he saw no particular differences between fighting the soldiers of the Vichy French, the Nazis, the Imperial Germans of a previous war, various desert bandits, or even the Jewish paramilitaries, and helping to underwrite and carry out the murder of thousands of Jewish noncombatants and the systematic destruction of their homes even after a given sector of East Jerusalem was secured.

    Let it not be said that Germans are the only ones that can “Follow Orders”.

21. the BBC hates its countrymen, almost as relentlessly as any American network, sans Fox and Newsmax, as for ITV and Panorama, they are even worse,
    the Journals new portal is nearly as terrible as the Times and the Post,

    I suppose the former is in part due to the great slaughterhouse of the Great War, and to a lesser extent the next one, that wiped out two generations of the best of their fighting men,

    the next generation as typified by much of their entertainment on stage screen and film didn’t appreciate the sacrifice, we can take Dennis Potter the band Pink Floyd, as exemplars in this regard, certainly a series like Dr Who held to the old values, and look what it has degenerated into in the last decade

    there is a simila pattern in American entertainment say after 1967, when CBS purged their more conventional offerings,

22. that BBC reporter of that era Andrew (somesuch) did move on to the Telegraph, this was the Torygraph after it was stolen from Conrad Black, in the stateside version of lawfare, directed by Pat Fitzgerald, Comey’s lawyer btw, in the current matter, of course nearly all of Fitz’s work was characterized by ethical shortcuts, and legal malpractice at worst, the latter paper is a little better than the once prestigious Times, but not by any concerted effort, in recent years the enabled the reign of terror of herr Starmer, world controller for Airship One,

    they have as much contempt for Farage and Matt Goodwin, as those on this end of the pond have for Trump and Charlie Kirk, they hide it a little better in some respects, but not others,

    those of heterodox viewpoints are really not welcomed there, of course they found the Iron Lady intolerably chauvinist and reactionary, like the predecessors at the BBC, there is no redemption of Hail Brittania in their book but Perfidious Albion, the bounced
    Oxford Union chair, would loudly assent on that point

    yes Times of Israel even the Jerusalem Post, has more than a touch of oikophobia,

23. the irony is most American networks, CNN and MSNBC went along with this charade, even Fox tried to make J6 something more than a spirited gathering,
    with ominous music, and they collaborated with the Dems to create the conditions for this phantom regime, Newsmax was perhaps the least accomodating but they bent the knee to the lawfare hammer,

    there is still a disturbing large audience for this delusion as the quarter term elections proved not only in New York and New Jersey which were conventional circumstances but in Virginia, where there were some genuine reforms that will be set back immeasurably, and even some contests in GA, unspecified even in Mississippi, some listen to the Eloi Klaxons that drive them back to the bunker,
    some seemingly were asleep like possums with the consequences to their personal safety and liberty on the line,

    perhaps the assasination of Charlie Kirk really cause enough of a shock, that the electorate that should have been mobilized, were not, but the possum political class, seem to think there is some accomodation to those who dance out their aggression, those that want affordability and trade it for liberty, will find they get neither,
    ironically the former group seems most incensed about heterodox populists, who don’t share a common viewpoint on any issue, but commonalities on some,

24. They do it with a fabulous accent!

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