BBC Admits ‘Syrian’ Airstrike in Recent Story on Scarred Boy Turned Out to Be Turkish

Sputnik

The BBC has corrected its August 19 news story about a Syrian boy who was severely wounded in a 2018 airstrike, which the broadcasting company first said was carried out by Syrian forces but later admitted could be blamed on Turkey.

Some Twitter users posted screenshots showing that the BBC had actually redacted its text several times.

The headline of the short story, featuring a video about the life of a four-year-old Syrian boy whose face was scarred in the airstrike, originally referred to the incident as “a Syrian airstrike.” The mention of Syria was then deleted with an indication that it was “not clear who was responsible for the attack.” Now the headline refers to it as just “an airstrike,” and the article clarifies that “evidence indicates that Turkey carried out the airstrike.”

Last January, Turkish forces launched airstrikes on Kurdish fighters in Afrin, a city located in northern Syria, as part of a military operation dubbed Olive Branch. The boy, named Jouma, and his family were fleeing their home in Syria when an airstrike hit the bus they were on.

Jenan Moussa, a reporter for Arabic Al Aan TV, wrote on Twitter that Tolin Hassan, a close friend of the wounded boy’s family, told her that Jouma’s relatives “mentioned over and over to BBC-journo that the car was hit by a Turkish strike after escaping Afrin.”

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“Saving Syria’s Children”: Response to the HuffPo - The BBC's history of faking news

Comment: Incontrovertible evidence that the BBC is a primary propganda outfit working for the British Deep State. (The Jimmy Savile cover up already proved that). 

So, please donate to Robert's crowdfunding campaign here.

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Robert Stuart
Off Guardian

Corrections and clarifications to “Keith Allen Thinks The BBC May Have Faked ‘Apocalyptic’ Attack In Syria”

News and opinion website The Huffington Post has written about my campaign to crowdfund a documentary about the 2013 BBC Panorama programme Saving Syria’s Children.

Keith Allen Thinks The BBC May Have Faked ‘Apocalyptic’ Attack In Syria was published on May 4th 2019. Some notes in response follow.

Stuart says he has spent nearly six years compiling “a mountain of evidence” that shows the BBC’s footage was “faked”. He claims the national broadcaster worked “cheek by jowl with Isis” to produce the Panorama documentary, which was broadcast in September 2013.

Evidence that sequences in Saving Syria’s Children were fabricated is set out on my blog. Readers are free to make their own topographical analogies.

During the programme’s making BBC Panorama reporter Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway were embedded with then ISIS partner group Ahrar al-Sham – a group described elsewhere by the BBC as “hard-line Islamist”. Less than three weeks earlier Ahrar al-Sham, ISIS and other groups together killed over 190 civilians, including women, children and elderly men, and kidnapped over 200 mostly women and children.

In the programme’s climactic scenes of the aftermath of an alleged incendiary attack the BBC crew filmed at close quarters an ambulance prominently bearing the ISIS emblem and its militarily attired occupants, at least one of whom was armed.

In an interview with TalkRadio on Friday, Stuart claimed “the only source of [this attack] is the BBC”. However, the strike was also reported by NBC News who interviewed doctors who described the “apocalyptic” attack in detail, documented in painstaking detail by the Violations Documentation Centre in Syria (VDCS), and confirmed by Human Rights Watch.

The NBC News article cited features an interview with a single volunteer doctor named “Roula”. This is clearly Dr Rola Hallam. Dr Hallam and Dr Saleyha Ahsan were being followed by the BBC Panorama team of reporter Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway as they visited hospitals run by the UK charity Hand in Hand for Syria. As such Hallam was central to the BBC reports in question and cannot be considered an independent commentator. [1] [2] [3] [4]

The Violations Documentation Centre in Syria report cited gives the time of the alleged attack as follows:

On 26 Aug 2013, at 02:00 pm, the Syrian air forces shelled ‘Iqraa’ Institution in Orm Al Kubra in Aleppo, which had been under the Free Army’s control for several months then.

The VDCS report also quotes Mustapha Haid, “Head of ‘Doulati Organization/My State Organization’”:

At 3 in the afternoon, On 26 Aug 2013, I was in Al Atareb City and I heard rumours about a ‘chemical attack’ on Orm Al Kubra and that tens of casualties were brought to Al Atareb Hospital.

However the BBC has categorically stated in complaints correspondence that:

The attack happened on the 26th of August at around 5.30pm at the end of the school day.[5]

The VDCS report quotes a second witness, Issa Obeid, “Head of Nursing Department in Al Atareb Hospital”, who provides a first-hand account of his actions at Atareb Hospital:

We washed the casualties with water and serums after taking off their clothes. We used ‘Florasline’ liniment on the burnt areas and provided the casualties with fluids and some of them were given tranquilizers like Morphine.

However on 26 August 2013 Issa (or Iessa) Obied would appear not to have been present at Atareb but to have been attending a battle first aid training course in Antakia, Turkey. [6]
Iessa Obied has been photographed posing with an arsenal of weaponry including assault rifles, an anti-aircraft gun and a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. [7] [8] 

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The Stench of Color Revolution in Serbia

Tim Kirby
Strategic Culture

At any given moment there are mass protests happening somewhere for some reason. Whether the protestors have a legitimate call to arms is a very delicate question. However for the Mainstream Media things are much more black and white and this narrative is a critical component of each and every Color Revolution.

Over the last few months a protest movement has sparked up in Serbia and we are going to take a look at this via the mainstream media coverage of it. The actual motivations behind it (although proving motivation beyond a reasonable doubt is impossible) do not matter so much as what the media declares them to be. The Mainstream Media creates a narrative about the movement in order to either motivate us to sympathize with those in the streets (thus legitimizing them) or to be repulsed and afraid of them (thus blocking any chance of legitimacy). Ignoring the obvious and hoping it goes away is a common third option.

You will see this dynamic in action if we take a look at the BBC’s breakdown of the protests…

“Thousands of demonstrators in Serbia have rallied for the fifth week against President Aleksandar Vucic.

Protesters say the president has seized control of the media and launched attacks on the opposition and journalists.

An attack on opposition politician Borko Stefanovic by unknown assailants in November triggered the marches.

Opposition umbrella group Alliance for Serbia (SZS) says they were supporters of Mr Vucic - a claim authorities deny.”

At a quick glance this may seem very neutral but the first words of the article make a very bold hint to the subconscious of the reader. First off, the BBC makes it clear that the protestors are just normal Serbian citizens, when in fact all protests are organized and the more successful ones are organized by professional activists. Thousands of normal people on their own don’t just drop their lives for two months to walk around with signs in the hope of making some abstract changes. Even if the masses agree with the protestors there is no way to prove this.

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BBC Producer Blows The Whistle & Admits The “Gas Attack” Footage From Syria “Was Staged”

Arjun Walia
Collective Evolution

 

“The problem of fake news isn’t solved by hoping for a referee, but rather because we as citizens, we as users of these services, help each other. We talk and we share and we point out what is fake. We point out what is true. The answer to bad speech is not censorship, the answer to bad speech is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters, now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting more popular.” –Edward Snowden (source)

It’s truly amazing what’s happening in regards to information today. It’s being heavily censored. News browser extension NewsGuard is one of the latest examples, which promises to help readers pick out fake news. However, NewsGuard is funded and run by individuals tied to the CFR, Atlantic Council, and prominent elite figures who own mainstream media. You can read more about that here.

There is a war on information right now, especially any information that threatens the elitists’ and globalists’ agendas or corporate profits. It’s not morally right to have government authorities step in and determine for the population what is real and what is fake, and what to censor and what not to censor. Our free speech is being shut down, and this is evident by Facebook’s recent deletion and mass censorship of multiple alternative media outlets acting as a new ‘ministry of truth.’ It’s truly Orwellian-like.

Truth, however, cannot be stopped, and it’s mainstream media that’s recently been outed as promoting the most ‘fake news,’ which is evident by the multiple award-winning mainstream media journalists who’ve ‘blown the whistle,’ so to speak, about mainstream media and how they are paid by corporations, governments and intelligence agencies to spread and alter the news they share. There are also some very telling documents that go into detail regarding mainstream media’s relationship with multiple governments, and how it’s used to alter the perception of the masses and keep a tight grip on the information that’s disseminated through academia and journalism. I provide many examples within this article if you’re interested, which includes access to those documents. The article is about William Arkin, a well-known military and war reporter who is best known for his groundbreaking, three-part Washington Post series in 2010, who just went public outing NBC/MSNBC as completely government run agencies.

But let’s get to this latest example regarding Syria.

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BBC staffing guidelines say one in six on-screen roles 'must be gay, lesbian, trans, or disabled' by 2020

Comment: This report is from 2016. 

As we approach 2020 any cursory glance at drama from Les Miserables to Silent Witness and every other drama has come under the jackboot of the diversity police - regardless of historical realism and intrinsic merit. 

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Daily Mail
via Sott.net 

One in six of all on-screen BBC roles must go to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender or disabled people by 2020, the corporation's new diversity targets state.

In a bid to deter criticism that it has been failing to reflect its audience, the BBC has pledged that LGBT and disabled people will each make up eight per cent of all on-air and on-screen roles.

The new targets follow a heated debate in the House of Commons led by David Lammy MP on the issue of the broadcaster's diversity.

Fifty per cent of all on-screen and broadcasting roles will go to women, who already make up 48.5 per cent of the BBC's total workforce.

However, the BBC will still be able to commission shows where the main roles are more likely to be male-dominated.

Radio 2, which has a particularly male-dominated line-up of broadcasters, including DJs and presenters Chris Evans, Simon Mayo, Jeremy Vine and Bob Harris, faces an overhaul.

Last year, a review by the BBC Trust, the corporation's watchdog, found that six stations - including Radio 2 - raised concerns that they were failing ethnic minority audiences.

Radio 2 was highlighted as having particular difficulties in attracting non-white listeners.

It was said to reach an average of only 12 percent of BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) adults each week, compared to 35 percent for all adults.

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Documents Expose British Government Covert Anti-Russian Propaganda and Truth Behind Skripal Case

"We have a programme, the Integrity Initiative, whose entire purpose is to pump out covert disinformation against Russia, through social media and news stories secretly paid for by the British government. And we have the Skripals' MI6 handler, the BBC, Porton Down, the FCO, the MOD and the US Embassy, working together in a group under the auspices of the Integrity Initiative."  

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Craig Murray
Craigmurray.org.uk

It is worth starting by noting that a high percentage of the Integrity Initiative archive has been authenticated. The scheme has been admitted by the FCO and defended as legitimate government activity. Individual items like the minutes of the meeting with David Leask are authenticated. Not one of the documents has so far been disproven, or even denied.

Which tends to obscure some of the difficulties with the material. There is no metadata showing when each document was created, as opposed to when Anonymous made it into a PDF. Anonymous have released it in tranches and made plain there is more to come. The reason for this methodology is left obscure.

Most frustratingly, Anonymous' comments on the releases indicate that they have vital information which is not, so far, revealed. The most important document of all appears to be a simple contact list, of a particular group within the hundreds of contacts revealed in the papers overall. This is it in full: 

Tantalisingly, Anonymous describe this as a list of people who attended a meeting with the White Helmets. But there is no evidence of that in the document itself, nor does any other document released so far refer to this meeting. There is very little in the documents released so far about the White Helmets at all. But there is a huge amount about the Skripal case. With the greatest of respect to Anonymous and pending any release of further evidence, I want you to consider whether this might be a document related to the Skripal incident. 

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Monty Python’s Cleese to leave UK due to British press - ranked bottom of EU trust league

Omar Baggili
RT

Actor and comedian John Cleese has declared he will leave the UK later this year due to the “lying and triviality” of the British press – ranked the least trustworthy among 33 European nations. 

Cleese appeared on BBC Newsnight on Tuesday to express his frustration at the current state of Britain. While exasperated at the level of debate on Brexit, he more pointedly stated that his “particular beef” was with the British press.

The 78 year old, a long-time Liberal Democrat supporter who voted leave in the 2016 EU Referendum, came armed with a clipboard and chart to highlight the research carried out by the EU each year on the trust level, in the printed media by its citizens.

The eccentric actor got BBC presenter Emily Maitlis to confirm that according to the extensive public opinion polling carried out by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the UK is ranked last out of 33 European countries on levels of trust in the press.

Cleese laughed when Maitlis suggested the statistics illustrated that the UK press was robust, adding: “Least trusted does not necessarily mean not true.”

Cleese, who has been a vocal supporter of electoral reform, advocating a move to proportional representation, as well as press reform, told the BBC that he was upping sticks to relocate to the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis in autumn later this year.

"It’s one of the nicest islands I’ve ever been on. The relationship between the races is absolutely superb. The people there are really kind,” he said of Nevis.


So has the UK got an issue with levels of public trust in the print press and the media more widely?

Based on the EBU’s latest 2018 report, which surveyed approximately 1,000 people aged 15 or over in 33 European nations in 2017, it would appear so.

As Cleese said, the UK is ranked 33rd out of 33 on public trust in the press. Almost two-thirds of British people surveyed “tend not to trust” their print media. Only 23% “tend to trust” and 4% “Don’t know” if they trust the British press - meaning the British public have a net trust level of -50 in the written press. 

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The Medium Is (Not) the Message: Political Indoctrination Through Media Literacy Initiatives

Ed Hannan
INSURGE Intelligence

When misrepresenting recent events and exaggerating external threats have become standard practice, are we aware of the influence that bias in mainstream media has on young people?

 

Published by INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded investigative journalism platform for people and planet. Support us to report where others fear to tread.

 

Anyone paying attention to popular culture trends in the West often disregard the messages that aim to shape political opinions of young people, whether this is through Hollywood or the gaming industry, TV shows or music. If the children that we know personally tend to have good mental health and carry a sufficient sense of self-awareness and emotional intelligence, then we’ll generally regard this messaging as innocuous. We would reserve more careful judgement for when these messages might influence vulnerable young people. But the problem with this is it has made us much less vigilant.

New efforts ostensibly intended to inform young people of the dangers of fake news and misinformation are increasing in line with collective Western attempts to contain Russia and China’s growing influence. However well-intentioned they are, even a cursory look at these efforts reveals they are promoting confirmation bias: their content ranges from mild propagandistic messaging to full-blown jingoistic deception. They have made it easy for critics to anticipate a process that will look subjectively instructional rather than objectively educational.

The BBC launched their iReporter game earlier this month. On March 15th it was received positively while news of the initiative spread online. We were told it aims to educate young people on “the dangers of Fake News” and predictably the mainstream reports welcomed this without any scepticism, and without a definition of what fake news actually is:

indy100.com: “Which sources should you trust? How quickly should you break the story with limited facts? And how are you going to do all this and keep your editor happy?”

belfasttelegraph.co.uk: “…led by the broadcaster called School Report, which also offers workshops and events featuring BBC journalists, including Huw Edwards.”

gizmodo.co.uk: “…designed for kids and their teachers, in an effort to show how to recognise which sources can be trusted and which ones are complete nonsense.”

huffingtonpost.co.za: “Fake news has become a problem over which both governments and social media companies have had to step in and take action.”

I have asked in a previous piece — which examines the meme of fake news — that if the dangers of misinformation are so great as to warrant legislation which can threaten our freedom of speech and right to privacy, then should not every article that sets out to inform us about misinformation do that task more rigorously?

As outlined in the mainstream’s stenography journalism, the game is part of larger initiative called the BBC School Report national programme to help 11–18 year olds identify fake news; and, they claim, to develop “critical thinking and media literacy skills” in young people. BBC cited A National Literacy Trust report which details (deep breath): the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Literacy’s launch of the Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills in Schools. Their claim is that one in five children believe everything they read online is true.

And so primary and secondary school teachers will be entrusted with leading new initiatives because they are described as “ideally placed” to help children develop the skills they need. I’d suggest that parents should hope the teachers will be open to refining their own critical literacy skills in the process. The director of the trust, Jonathan Douglas, had this to say:

“In this digital age, children who can’t question and determine the reliability of the information they find online will be hamstrung — at school, at work and in life […] By bringing together the greatest minds and authorities on fake news and education, the new parliamentary commission gives us a fantastic opportunity to make the case for critical literacy to sit at the heart of our education system.”

This is a very serious matter, so much that the greatest minds and authorities on fake news must be enlisted to help the children. I can’t argue with the case for critical literacy to sit at the heart of an education system, but how might one determine who the greatest minds and authorities on fake news are? I’d suspect it would be those who propagate the notion that fake news is a profound threat to our Western democracies. In which case we can rest assured that the children will indeed be guided by those with authority — how great their minds are, though, would remain to be seen.

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F**k you Sunday Times, but the truth is winning

Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlin Johnstone.com

For months leftist analysts have been warning that the increasingly hysterical anti-Russia narratives being aggressively promoted by the western media would eventually be used to target the political left. Those warnings went largely unheeded in the United States where the Russiagate narrative was being ostensibly used to undermine the Trump administration, and the McCarthyite feeding frenzies which have become normalized for American audiences have now metastasized across the pond to the UK.

As a result, the Poms have now quickly found themselves in a political environment where anyone who remembers the Blair government's lies about Iraq is smeared as a "useful idiot", a private British citizen can be falsely labeled a Kremlin bot by a mainstream publication without retraction or apology, and a BBC reporter can admonish a veteran military analyst for giving a truthful analysis about the alleged Douma chemical attacks on the grounds that it could hurt the "information war" against Russia.
And now, in what is undeniably a whole new level of Russophobic shrillness, Russia is being blamed for the gains made last year by Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party.

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Index On Disgrace

Craig Murray

The second half of my life has been a continual process of disillusionment with the institutions I used to respect. I suppose it started with the FCO, where I went from being Britain’s youngest ambassador to being sacked for opposing the use of intelligence from torture, at the same time having an insider view of the knowing lies about Iraqi WMD being used as a pretext for invasion and resource grab.

I still had some residual respect for the BBC, which respect disappeared during the Scottish independence referendum where BBC propaganda and disregard for the truth were truly shameless. My love of the universities was severely tested during my period as Rector of Dundee University, when I saw how far the corporate model had turned them from academic communities developing people and pursuing knowledge, to relentless churners out of unconsidered graduates and financially profitable research, with nearly all sense of community gone. My respect for charities vanished when I discovered Save the Children was paying its chief executive £370,000 and had become a haven for New Labour politicos on huge salaries, which was why it was so involved in pushing a pro-war narrative in Syria. When Justin Forsyth and Brendan Cox – both massively salaried employees who came into Save the Children from the revolving door of Gordon Brown’s office – were outed over sexual predation, that seemed a natural result of “charities” being headed by rich party hacks rather than by simple people trying to do good. As for respect for parliament, well the massive troughing expenses scandal and all those protected paedophiles...

It has become difficult to hang on to respect for any institution, and that is unsettling.

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BBC shows its faith in al-Qaeda after terror attack kills 126 in Aleppo

Paul Mansfield
Sott.net

The BBC truly outdid itself with a vile piece of fake journalism on the occasion of the recent horrific deaths of 126 people, including 68 children, on buses taking people out of the US-backed jihadi-besieged towns of Foua and Kefraya in Syria. The very first thing to be said is that the BBC in the above mentioned article (linked above) makes absolutely no reference to terrorism. It doesn't use the words 'terrorists' or 'terrorism' even once. The only thing we get is "bomb attack", "attack" or "bus attack". We should all justifiably be outraged that the innocent civilians of this henious act aren't even afforded the dignity of being named victims of terrorism.

The article makes no comments on the horror of children's suffering who made up over 50% of the deaths. Apart from the description of 68 killed, the only reference to this attack being unconscionable is a quote from Pope Francis, saying it was a "vile attack on fleeing refugees".

This is what you call 'de-weaponising propaganda'. The natural reaction of most people to this event is that it is likely the work of the "Syrian rebels," and such a huge loss of life would draw quick criticism of the West's support for these jihadi mercenaries. So to protect Western government assets in Syria, the BBC attempts to obfuscate the truth with innocuous descriptions, while pursuing other angles that subtly shift responsibility from the US-backed terrorists to the Syrian government.

To take the heat out of public rage towards the 'rebels', the BBC report states that "no group has claimed responsibility for the bus attack." But by saying no "group" the BBC is muddying the waters. We can say there are only two groups who could be responsible; forces under the control of Bashar Al-Assad and the opposition forces. But there are many different groups that make up the 'opposition forces'.

While it may be conjecture at the moment to categorically point the finger of blame, it can be said with confidence that it was very likely some element of 'the opposition'. While the BBC casually points out with a one liner that no one has stepped forward to claim responsibility, it coincidentally forgets that we are in the midst of an epic public relations battle being waged in the war on Syria. What opposition individual militia, let alone alliance of fighters are going to confess to gruesomely murdering 68 children?

Idlib governorate, in which the attack took place, has been under the control of Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham (Al-Nusra) led Salafi-Jihadists since early 2015, who have imposed a virtual Islamist emirate in the province. The extremist ideology prevailing in the region only hardened after the agreement for hard line opposition fighters to relocate to Idlib following the liberation of Aleppo.

Space is at a premium in any article by the BBC, but given their scant coverage of the deaths of children, surely they have space to devote to exposing the extremist nature of the "rebels" who are likely responsible.  

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St. Petersburg Metro Bombing, Syria Chemical Attack - Trump Folds to the 'Deep State'?

Joe Quinn
Sott.net

It's been an interesting few days in the world of geopolitically-relevant terror attacks and 'Trump vs. the Deep State' (both of which are far from mutually exclusive).

First we had the St. Petersburg attack where some young guy from Kyrgyzstan with no history of violence decided to detonate an IED on a train, killing himself and 14 innocent civilians. Russian police apparently found the DNA of Akbarzhon Jalilov, who had lived in Russia for a number of years, in the metro carriage where the explosion happened, and on a second unexploded device at another metro station. Of course, this doesn't mean that Jalilov acted alone or was the 'mastermind' of the atrocity. As I have hypothesized on several occasions, anyone naive or manipulatable enough to carry a backpack, given to them by someone else, to a specific location, can become an instant unwitting 'suicide bomber'.

So who might have been Jalilov's accomplices? According to the Western media, somewhere near the top of the list is Putin himself. The BBC had no problem in theorizing that the bombing was "some kind of attempt to distract attention from calls for a corruption investigation and calls for President Putin himself to step down..." 

[...]

 Oh really? Do go on, BBC correspondent. What exactly do you mean by the bombing being an "attempt to distract"? Are you really suggesting that a state (in this case, Russia) would go so far as to carry out a bombing that kills its own civilians and then frame a 'Muslim terrorist' for it in the interest of redirecting public attention towards some specific narrative? If so, that sounds like an outrageous conspiracy theory, and a dangerous one too. Much more talk like that and we might have to revisit the narrative around the 9/11 attacks, or the London or Madrid bombings! New York Post columnist John Podhoretz echoed that sentiment by noting that it was "interesting that the bomb blasts in Petersburg come so hard upon the demonstrations." 

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BBC's anti-Syrian propaganda forces one producer to tear up his contract

Jonathan Cook Blog

Robert Stuart, a tenacious blogger, has been picking away at a scab the BBC would rather leave firmly in place.

His forensic research concerns an edition of the BBC's flagship investigative current affairs show Panorama called Saving Syria's Children. It was broadcast more than three years ago, as many in the media were trying to push the British government into intervening in Syria with bombing raids against the Syrian government - in a move that would effectively have bolstered ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria.

The Panorama programme was one important piece of evidence advanced for such intervention. The footage it included was broadcast in several different formats, and purported to show the victims of a chemical weapon, or possibly incendiary, attack by the Syrian military on a school. The BBC reporter for Panorama was Ian Pannell.

From the outset, there were concerns about the authenticity of the footage, as I noted in a piece on my own blog in October 2013.

But Stuart's sustained research and questioning of the BBC, and the state broadcaster's increasing evasions, have given rise to ever greater concerns about the footage. It looks suspiciously like one scene in particular, of people with horrific burns, was staged.

Rather than confront these concerns and dispel them, the BBC and Pannell have tried a mixture of going to ground, stonewalling and misdirection. That has included trying to remove the footage from social media sites where it had been available.

Even by the BBC's current dismal standards, its behaviour has been, on the best view, outrageously arrogant. Remember that the BBC is a publicly funded broadcaster. And yet the corporation appears to think it is not even minimally accountable to the British taxpayers who fund it.
In a fascinating new development, a leading freelance TV and radio producer Victor Lewis Smith - and one with a rare conscience and backbone - has intervened after viewing the footage.

He raised troubling questions with the BBC about the Panorama programme and threatened to tear up his contract for a forthcoming radio comedy pilot unless the corporation provided satisfactory answers.  

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Martin Armstrong Exposes The Real Fake News: Did The BBC Get Caught Fabricating News To Start A War?

Zero Hedge

"The press has been routinely creating fake news reports to start a war," exclaims Armstrong Economics' Martin Armstrong, pointing to a recent report exposing The BBC allegedly faking news over chemical attacks in Syria...

What follows is shocking evidence that crisis actors, green screens, CGI, and paid propagandists are being used to fake worldwide events in order to scare people into giving up liberties and sending us into war. To say this was shocking would be to put it lightly.

From video proof showing “dead soldiers” killed by “chemical weapons” walking around after they thought the videos stopped recording, to digitally altering sounds to add in “explosions” that never happened, this segment demonstrates some of the most damming evidence against the media ever shown on television.

Armstrong continues... "This is a serious issue for the press is conspiring against the people to create war, sell climate change, and rig elections. This is by no means something new."

They taught me in high school history class about how the press started the Spanish-American War by reporting that the Spanish attacked a US ship, which never happened.

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Video of the Day – CNN Anchor Embarrasses Herself in Interview with the UK’s Daniel Hannan

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg 

 “I was bribed by billionaires, I was bribed by the Americans to report…not exactly the truth.” 

–  From the post: “Non-Official Cover” – Respected German Journalist Blows Whistle on How the CIA Controls the Media

If you want a perfect example of why everyone hates the media so much, take a look at this interview, I mean interrogation, of British MEP Daniel Hannan by CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour.

Her bias is so unbelievably transparent, it’s embarrassing.

Finally, while we’re on the topic of CNN, I’ve got another gem for you. Take a look at how easily Vladimir Putin undress CNN’s Fareed Zakaria:

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Infrakshun Comment: And you might want to see Putin wipe the floor with another shamefully biased and ignorant veteran BBC "journalist" John Simpson:

What’s the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism?

Comment: The fact that this sort of coverage has appeared at the BBC of all places shows that there is sufficient pressure to address it even if it is an attempt at damage limitation. That said, for the BBC it's not a bad write up.  Slowly, the heat is being turned up on Zionist injustice. 

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BBC News Magazine

• 10 High Street stores of 1976 that have disappeared
• What are US university ‘honour codes’?
• The lost art of reading other people’s handwriting
• Debate over China city’s women-only bus

The UK Labour Party has been at the centre of a row over anti-Semitism, including its relationship to anti-Zionism. What do these terms actually mean?

• Anti-Semitism is “hostility and prejudice directed against Jewish people” (OED).
• Zionism refers to the movement to create a Jewish state in the Middle East, corresponding to the historic land of Israel – anti-Zionism opposes that.
• But some say “Zionist” can be used as a coded attack on Jews, while others say the Israeli government and its supporters are deliberately confusing anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism to avoid criticism.

Former London Mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended from Labour following a series of remarks about Israel, including the suggestion that Hitler supported Zionism before the Holocaust.

It follows the suspension of Bradford West MP Naz Shah after it emerged she had once suggested, among other things, that Israel should be moved to the United States. The new president of the National Union of Students, Malia Bouattia, has also been heavily criticised for remarks she made about Zionists.

Many in the Jewish community say the use of “Zionist” as a term of abuse reflects a rising tide of bigotry and racism directed at Jews.

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Western media brought to you by state-sponsored terrorism

Finian Cunningham
Sputnik

Multi-million-dollar advertising money has long been suspected as an unspoken filter for Western news media coverage. If the news conflicts with advertising interests then it is simply dropped. Western complicity in Yemen's conflict is a case study. Add to that the celebrity sheen of Hollywood stars Jennifer Aniston and Nicole Kidman. What we then have is an illustration of how ugly realities of killing and war crimes are cosmetically air brushed from public awareness.

Let's take three major Western media outlets — BBC, CNN, France 24. All are notable for their dearth of news coverage on the bloody conflict in Yemen. On any given day over the past nine months, these channels have rarely given any reports on the daily violence in the Arabian Peninsula country. Yemen is heading into peace talks in Geneva this week, so there might follow some desultory reports on the said channels. But over the past nine months when the country was being pummelled in an appalling onslaught by foreign powers, the same channels gave negligible reportage.

It also turns out — not coincidentally — that major advertisers on these same news channels include Qatar Airways, Emirates Airlines and Etihad. The latter two advertisers feature screen celebrities Jennifer Aniston and Nicole Kidman, posing as satisfied customers of these Gulf state-owned companies. Other prominent advertisers on BBC, CNN and France 24 are Turkish Airlines and Business Friendly Bahrain. This advertising complex has, undoubtedly, a direct bearing on why the three mentioned Western news channels do not give any meaningful coverage of the disturbing events in Yemen. Notwithstanding there is much that deserves telling about Yemen — if your purpose was journalism and public information. The poorest country in the Arab region is being bombed by a coalition of states that include the US, Britain and Saudi Arabia, as well as a handful of other Persian Gulf oil-rich kingdoms. The latter include Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Thousands of Yemeni civilians — women and children — have been killed in air strikes by warplanes from this foreign military coalition, which claims to have intervened in Yemen to reinstall a regime headed up by a discredited president who was forced into exile in March this year by a popular uprising. The uprising was led by the Yemeni national army allied with guerrilla known as the Houthis.

Out of Yemen's 24 million population, nearly half are in dire humanitarian conditions from lack of food, water and medicine, according to the United Nations. The suffering is aggravated by a sea and air blockade of Yemen by the Western-Arab military coalition. Due to Western involvement in a humanitarian disaster unfolding in Yemen, one might think that Western media would be at least giving some coverage. Well, not if you watch BBC, CNN or France 24.

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'Je suis Netanyahu': BBC headline rewrite caves to Israeli intimidation, again

21st Century Wire

Are Israel and Saudi Arabia really 'friends' of press freedom?
Wait, what about free speech? Ce qui est arrivé à...'Je Suis Charlie'

PRESS INTIMIDATION: Netanyahu's photo-op at Charlie Hebdo seems even more meaningless now after bullying the BBC. Back in April, 21WIRE discovered an interesting media anomaly which no other media outlet picked up.

The New York Times had run a front page story in their early morning US domestic print edition, with a headline that read: "Saudi Defiance on Yemen Reflects Limits of U.S. Strategy"

Later, we looked for this same article online, only to find that the headline has been changed to: "Saudi Resolve on Yemen Reflects Limits of U.S. Strategy"

Why? Was pressure applied on the NYT editors, and if so, who applied pressure to the editors to make such a significant change on a lead story to change it from 'Defiance' to 'Resolve'? In an effort to sanitize the carnage in Yemen, did Saudi Arabia throw its weight around, causing NYT editors to cave in?

Perhaps a much worse situation has been happening recently between the BBC and the State of Israel. It seems that Israel has been pressuring BBC into changing its headlines.

How did Israel manage to do this to the BBC? Incredibly, Israel has been doing this on a regular [basis]. On at least one occasion, Israel even demanded an official apology from the BBC and issued a threat to revoke press cards of BBC journalists working in Israel.

Very few people are aware that the pressure applied to the BBC emanates from an Israel lobby organization that's embedded in the UK called BICOM (Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre). They claim to be, "An independent organisation devoted to creating a more supportive environment for Israel in the UK."

As we can now see, it's anything but independent, and its hardly supportive, especially when it comes to press freedom and free speech. BICOM's mission is simple: to sanitize UK media coverage in the in the event that Israel is ever exposed doing what it does on a daily basis: oppressing the native Palestinian population.

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Fabrication in BBC Panorama “Saving Syria’s Children”: Substitution of “Napalm Bomb” Footage

BBC Upholds Complaint

 

Robert Stuart

Global Research, July 25, 2015

bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com

 

The below admission from the BBC that its substitution of Syria footage between two 2014 broadcasts breaches its own Editorial Guidelines on accuracy is a modest victory in the battle to attract scrutiny to the wider charges that one of the reports in question (at least) was largely, if not entirely, fabricated.  

For almost two years I have pursued the question of whether scenes of the aftermath of an alleged incendiary attack on an Aleppo school – filmed by BBC staff and first broadcast as UK legislators voted on military intervention in Syria – were staged for the purposes of propaganda.   

Many compelling evidence points have arisen: the widely contradictory accounts of precisely when the alleged attack occurred – including disagreement between the BBC reporter and cameraman concerned; the testimony of a former Free Syrian Army commander stationed in the vicinity denying that an attack occurred; a fortuitously-grabbed screencap of one of the alleged teenage victims grinning broadly into the camera; “victims” sharing the same “costume”, and, most astonishing of all, the self-identification of a “victim” seen in footage from the day (in reality a 52 year old Netherlands resident) who contacted me on Facebook, anxious that she may be recognised.

The backgrounds of the two doctors featured in the BBC’s report are of considerable interest: Dr Saleyha Ahsan, a former British army captain, has a personal connection with a military officer who runs large-scale medical simulation exercises, employing professional casualty make-up artists; Dr Ahsan’s colleague, Dr Rola Hallam, is the daughter of Dr Mousa al-Kurdi, who is “involved politically with the Syrian National Council”. The co-founder of Hand in Hand for Syria, the “humanitarian” charity for which the doctors are filmed volunteering, has expressed bloodthirsty promises to bring Assad to justice “NO MATTER WHAT LIVES IT TAKES, NO MATTER HOW MUCH CATASTROPHE IT MAKES”.  A Hand in Hand for Syria nurse seen working alongside Drs Ahsan and Hallam is pictured elsewhere tending to the wounds of a child opposition fighter.

Very many other discrepancies are noted on my blog. It is hard to escape the conclusion, voiced by former UK ambassador Craig Murray, that the BBC’s ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ “documentary” represents the fruit of a collaboration between BBC personnel and UK state security services and marks a unique and historic breach of trust between the corporation, its UK licence fee-payer funders and its millions of viewers and listeners worldwide.

Robert Stuart

bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/
 

UK Survey: 70% of People Polled Don’t Trust BBC’s Commentary on GMOs

Comment: why would you trust BBC reporting on anything when it has proven itself to be riven with bias and propaganda over and over? It's no different to CNN or Fox News it just has great production values and a British accent...

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Christian Sarich
Natural Society

Do you trust the mainstream media (MSM)? The BBC, one of the UK’s biggest media companies, is just one example of an enormous media outlet turning to a dinosaur in the age of UFOs. A new survey reveals that almost 70% of the public doesn’t trust the station’s reporting on GMOs. More specifically, the public doesn’t trust the independence of experts featured on the programs.

The mainstream media has been struggling to stay relevant for a while now. As more individuals realize that the MSM’s reporting is slanted entirely to favor the cartels that run the world, and that there is the inability of these mega-companies to provide unbiased insight into real world issues, people turn instead to alternative news.

The ‘experts’ featured on BBC programs to discuss GMOs are not holding up to public scrutiny. Of more than 1000 people polled form both sides of the GMO debate, 667 of the responders said that the ‘authorities’ presented on programs like Panorama, Countryfile, and Radio 4’s Today were not so believable.

Just one of the latest BBC programs that was presented as an unbiased discussion on GMOs took a pro-GMO stance, and invited 3 experts with known ties to the development of GM technology.

As reported by Beyond-GM.org:

• “Professor Jonathan Jones from the Sainsbury Laboratory owns several GM patents. He is the co-founder of several biotech companies and owns a company established to commercialize GM crops.
• Anne Glover co-founded a biotech company before promoting GM technology in her recent role as chief scientific advisor to the EU President
• Mark Lynas, a pro-GM advocate, is employed as part of the Cornell University’s programme to promote GMOs globally.”

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