Watchdog of the Week: Murray Freedman Beats the BBC

It is possible to get the BBC to apologise for a piece of bias  I've had a couple of successes in the past. Today, Honest Reporting has news of another victory over the BBC's anti Israel agenda.

http://honestreporting.com/watchdog-of-the-week-murray-freedman-beats-the-bbc/

Just what are Old Spice saying?

Two very odd Old Spice adverts...

Concentration Camp Gaza

A group of Jew-hating South Africans visited the Gaza Strip last week, and besides the regular anti-Israel and anti-Semitic tropes, were lamenting the amount of food they were eating there.

If we stay here for another week will all return obese!! Haha:) #SAingaza #gaza
— AayeshA (@AayeshaJ) December 31, 2013

 

More here

The survivors of Palestinian terrorism deserve recognition too

'In 2003, Shifri Shapira was injured in a terrorist attack and lost her sight. After 5 years of depression, she decided she wasn’t going to let blindness stop her, and she returned to the hobbies she had before she was injured, and even more (“I went back to cooking, and I started painting and sculpting”). In the next episode of Master Chef she will prove to the judges that where there’s a will there’s a way. “I’m not a poor unfortunate, I don’t want to be thought of like that.”

Shifri Shapira will never forget Wednesday March 5, 2003. In one moment her life changed, when a suicide terrorist blew up the bus that was next to her car. In the attack, 17 were killed, and Shifri and scores of others were injured.

“Suddenly you have nothing”

“Before the attack I was very busy, I didn’t have a single free moment. I have a Ph.D. in Political Science and Criminology,” says Shifri, with an admirable calmness, “and suddenly you have nothing. I didn’t want to carry on living when they told me I had been blinded.”

“Five years ago I woke up and said, ‘I have children, I have a wonderful husband (44 years now) and I want to live’,” says Shifri emotionally. “I returned to my love, to cooking.”'

http://www.israellycool.com/2014/01/05/blind-taste-test/

Real life in the apartheid state of Israel

http://www.israellycool.com/2014/01/07/photo-of-the-day-near-jerusalem-central-bus-station/

An odd double standard

Imagine walking into a German restaurant in London and finding a portrait of Adolf Hitler on the wall; very, very unlikely.

Imagine walking into a Russian Restaurant in London and finding a portrait of Josef Stalin on the wall; equally unlikely.

However walk into London's Baozi Inn in Newport Street, part of London's Chinatown, and there's a picture of Chairman Mao on the wall.


Hitler's Nazi regime is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of around 12 million people, Stalin's Soviet Russia for the deaths of around 9 million people but Mao's Communist regime in China for the deaths of around 45-50 million people. Why is this mass murderer's image not as repellent as Adolf Hitler's?


Baozi Inn is a great Szechuan restaurant but their choice of interior decor is extremely suspect. Time Out in all it's right-on glory says that at Baozi Inn 'kitsch Communist Revolution decor meets northern Chinese street food tidied up for London'. Well if you consider commemorating probably the biggest mass mrderer in world history is 'kitsch' then I think your moral compass is well out of kilter.

Dear oh dear Ed Balls - did he predict a double dip recession?

Why so many people are scared of the truth

Fighting man made climate change or redistributing wealth?

"The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War...one must say clearly that de facto we distribute the world's wealth by climate policy.... One has to rid oneself of the illusion that international climate politics have anything to do with environmental concerns."

Otto Edenhofer, IPCC Working Group III co-chair, Nov. 14, 2010.

“If the phenomenon only appears after heavy data manipulation, perhaps manipulation of the data is the only phenomenon.” — Maurizio Morabito

“If the phenomenon only appears after heavy data manipulation, perhaps manipulation of the data is the only phenomenon.” — Maurizio Morabito

John Fortune R.I.P.

John Fortune was a satirical genius, here's one of his duets with John Bird as they explain the workings of the 'Markets' especially with regard to the 2008 crisis and the subprime market.



John Fortune will be missed...

How many people were killed by Saddam Hussein's regime?

How many people were killed by Saddam Hussein's regime? This is a question that it is hard to answer, there are many answers none of which are 100% accurate (how could they be?) but there are ranges that are agreed upon.

Wikipedia reports that:

According to The New York Times, "he [Saddam] murdered as many as a million of his people, many with poison gas. He tortured, maimed and imprisoned countless more. His unprovoked invasion of Iran is estimated to have left another million people dead. His seizure of Kuwait threw the Middle East into crisis. More insidious, arguably, was the psychological damage he inflicted on his own land. Hussein created a nation of informants — friends on friends, circles within circles — making an entire population complicit in his rule". Other estimates as to the number of Iraqis killed by Saddam's regime vary from roughly a quarter to half a million, including 50,000 to 182,000 Kurds and 25,000 to 280,000 killed during the repression of the 1991 rebellion.Estimates for the number of dead in the Iran-Iraq war range upwards from 300,000.

About.com  reports 'Top 5 Crimes of Saddam Hussein', which include:

...it is estimated that up to 182,000 were killed during the Anfal campaign. Many people consider the Anfal campaign an attempt at genocide. 

... As early as April 1987, the Iraqis used chemical weapons to remove Kurds from their villages in northern Iraq during the Anfal campaign. It is estimated that chemical weapons were used on approximately 40 Kurdish villages, with the largest of these attacks occurring on March 16, 1988 against the Kurdish town of Halabja.

Beginning in the morning on March 16, 1988 and continuing all night, the Iraqis rained down volley after volley of bombs filled with a deadly mixture of mustard gas and nerve agents on Halabja. Immediate effects of the chemicals included blindness, vomiting, blisters, convulsions, and asphyxiation. Approximately 5,000 women, men, and children died within days of the attacks. Long-term effects included permanent blindness, cancer, and birth defects. An estimated 10,000 lived, but live daily with the disfigurement and sicknesses from the chemical weapons.

...
At the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, southern Shiites and northern Kurds rebelled against Hussein's regime. In retaliation, Iraq brutally suppressed the uprising, killing thousands of Shiites in southern Iraq.

As supposed punishment for supporting the Shiite rebellion in 1991, Saddam Hussein's regime killed thousands of Marsh Arabs, bulldozed their villages, and systematically ruined their way of life.

Stanford University  reports:

Along with other human rights organizations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam's needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam's reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam's 8,000-odd days in power"

The Iraq Foundation  reports:

DOING the arithmetic is an imprecise venture. The largest number of deaths attributable to Mr. Hussein's regime resulted from the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988, which was launched by Mr. Hussein. Iraq says its own toll was 500,000, and Iran's reckoning ranges upward of 300,000. Then there are the casualties in the wake of Iraq's 1990 occupation of Kuwait. Iraq's official toll from American bombing in that war is 100,000 — surely a gross exaggeration — but nobody contests that thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians were killed in the American campaign to oust Mr. Hussein's forces from Kuwait. In addition, 1,000 Kuwaitis died during the fighting and occupation in their country.

Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have "disappeared" into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000. As long as Mr. Hussein remains in power, figures like these will be uncheckable, but the huge toll is palpable nonetheless.

Scaruffi has a handy table listing The worst genocides of the 20th and 21st Centuries:
Saddam Hussein appears at number 13 on the list after Mao's Communist regime in China (49-78 million), Hitler's Nazi Germany (12 million), Leopold II massacre in The Belgium Congo (8 million), Stalin's Communist regime in Russia 9& million), Japanese Emperor Tojo's World War 2 massacres (5 million), The Ottoman Empire's massacres of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks (2 million), Pol Pot's Cambodian regime (1.7 million), Kil Il Sung's North Korean regime's purges and concentration camps (1.6 million), Menghistu's Ethiopian regime (1.5 million), The Biafran killings (1 million), Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet regime's massacres in Afghanistan (900,000) and the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s (800, 000. The figure attributed to Saddam Hussein is 600,000.


So we have, excluding those victims of  war, estimates of between 250,000 and 600,000 people killed by Saddam Hussein's regime. We have an agreed range. Well not totally agreed because @The_Mitch92 claims that only 5,000 were killed. Of course @The_Mitch92 has an agenda, he's claimed that

Pauvre Francois Hollande, people just don't want to shake his hand

Poor François Hollande, people just don't want to shake his hand.

Correcting a liar or a fool

I have been engaged in a Twitter debate with another anti-Israel type whose grasp on reality is poor. This one goes by the handle @The_Mitch92 and has tweeted that both 9/11 and 7/7 were false flag operations, but more of that later. @The_Mitch92 sees no place for a Jewish state, except maybe in Antarctica, says that Jews have no historical connection with the land of Israel and tries to blame Israel and America for all the troubles of the world.

Here's one example of @The_Mitch92's output and my responses...

@The_Mitch92's response was not to try and justify his initial claim but to ask...

I've told him to look at Ask.com for a start but the Iraqi figures are pretty well accepted and on many sites, as is the less than 5,000 Palestinian deaths figure.

I'd like to see @The_Mitch92 accept that his initial claim was ridiculous but somehow I don't think he's man enough to admit that he was guilty of lying with his initial claim. I'd also quite like to see @The_Mitch92 try and provide figures to backup his claim but that might be tricky...

For the idiots who believe the 9/11 conspiracy theories, including @The_Mitch92

I often read conspiracy theory nuts who state that 9/11 was an inside job and that the buildings couldn't have fallen so quickly etc. etc.

Can I suggest that such people either seek psychiatric help or read this Popular Mechanics report.

More Pallywood lies that the anti Israel Western media will ignore

The same family that was killed in Syria by Assad, also killed by IDF bombing Gaza few days ago. 

 

#Pallywood in action

Some anti-Israel 'satire' - allegedly from the BBC but I cannot confirm that

Oh ha ha ha, remind me where the satrical videos about Palestinian terrorists cuttingthe throats of Jewish babies is.

BBC News - Bulgarians and Romanians free to work in UK as controls end

The BBC report that:

'Home Affairs Select Committee chairman Keith Vaz greeted the first flight from Romania as it landed at Luton airport on Wednesday morning. '

Surely being met by Keith Vaz violates these Romanians' human rights, a cruel and unnecessary punishment in my book.

BBC News - 'Injuries in Kenya grenade attack'

The BBC report that:

'At least 10 people have been injured in a grenade attack at a Kenyan tourist resort south of the port city of Mombasa, say police.

Attackers hurled the device into a bar in the Diani area late in the night.

"We had an explosion at the bar and about 10 people were injured," said local police chief Jack Ekakuro, quoted in local media.

The injured are said to be in a stable condition and have been taken to hospital.'

A random attack? Or are the BBC hiding who the attackers are and what their motives were? Are the BBC protecting Islamist terrorists again?

Sherlock's back tonight

Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman return as Sherlock and Dr Watson in The Empty Hearse, episode one of the third series of Sherlock which returns to BBC 1 tonight.

In the meantime, here's the prequel...