It Must Be Global Warming

No Ice At The North Pole screams another typical front page headline from the left-wing newspaper, The Independent this morning.

According to The Independent, the article is apparently ‘an exclusive’ – but truth be told, it is not. In fact the story came to light more than eight years ago in the United States and has cropped up in the global and national media more than a few times since.

Back in August of 2000, The New York Times printed a similar but equally erroneous report suggesting that ‘the North Pole is melting’. Yet, the Times were forced to issue a retraction after it was pointed out by other scientists that in the summertime open stretches of water in the Arctic were a normal occurrence.

Thus, the US-based Capitalist Magazine observed less than a year after the New York Times article:

Objective science reporting has become a casualty of the Kyoto crusade. Last August, for example, the New York Times hastened its slide from respected news source to leftist propaganda rag, by screaming from its front page that ‘The North Pole is melting’.

The story was based, not on scientific data or even computer models, but on the claims of a single scientist – an apparatchik in the UN global warming bureaucracy – who attended a summertime tourist cruise to the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker. The tourists arrived at the pole, the Times breathlessly reported, and saw open water. ‘The last time scientists can be certain the pole was awash in water’, the reporter declared, ‘was more than 50 million years ago’.

Real scientists reminded the Times that stretches of open water in the Arctic are a normal summertime event, caused by shifts in the ice, and the paper was forced to publish an embarrassing retraction.

However, the eco-left were not content to let the story lie forgotten and managed to revive it again in April this year with ABC News claiming that the ‘North Pole Could Be Ice Free in 2008’. Today, eight years after the original claim and two months after its latest appearance in ABC, The Independent has just caught up and republished the falsehood.

What’s more, the Independent article fails to even mention the volcanic eruptions that have very recently been discovered by scientists under the arctic icecap. But then why would The Independent worry about such trivial matters as truth, fact and good journalistic standards and practices? They are convinced that Global Warming is almost solely caused by the activities of humanity and will publish any evidence, whether true or not, to persuade others that they are correct.

Blogging The Qur’an

I have just noticed on my travels across the internet that the Guardian website has a new section called ‘blogging the Qur’an’. And no, I’m not going to link to their website.

Apparently each week, writer, broadcaster and cultural critic (whatever that may be) Ziauddin Sardar will blog on a different verse of the Qur’an. The blurb in the about section describing the reason behind the site says:

Muslims have been wrestling with the meaning of the verses and words of the Qur’an from the early days of Islam. Non-Muslims, meanwhile, often have wildly inaccurate notions of its content … Through Blogging the Qur’an, we hope to try and untangle some of those meanings and misconceptions.

Can you imagine, for example, the Guardian affording this level of treatment to Christians and the Bible, or indeed any other religion? Of course not, they would be ridiculing Christianity as a backwards, intolerant religion as they have done for decades, and would have no interest in ‘untangling’ some of the ‘meanings and misconceptions’ surrounding the Bible.

The development of this site, along with many other things the Guardian and the likes of the BBC have said, makes you wonder why it is that they are clearly so desperate to appease Muslims rather than shower them with scorn as they do Christianity.

Could it be that hidden behind a hastily constructed façade of reverence, is the fact that those on the left actually rather fear Islam. They know that most Muslims won’t quietly or meekly surrender their beliefs in the face of adversity or opposition as some Christians might, but instead would vocally and sometimes explosively fight back.

Expanding Horizons

The BBC is set to spend £25m of taxpayers’ money every year on funding the creation of a new Arabic television station which it claims will provide news ‘without fear or favour’. Yeah right.

If the BBC’s own domestic coverage is anything to go by, the new Middle East station will not be impartial, independent or authoritative. Instead it will be instilled with the BBC’s usual anti-Israeli, anti-Western sentiments.

Only the BBC and those that support its liberal-left, politically correct worldview desperately continue to claim that the corporation is without bias. Surely if the BBC were so impartial they would have had no reason to spent £200,000 of license fee money last year in an attempt to suppress an internal report on bias against Israel?

At the time as the BBC attempted to deny public access to the report through the courts, Labour MP Louise Ellman commented:

There has been a bias and lack of context with the BBC reporting of Israel. Problems are related to citing individual acts of Israeli aggression by failing to put them into context or explaining the reasons. It makes them look like unprovoked acts, when in fact they were reaction to a terrorist act. I would certainly like to see what’s in the report.

Much like the BBC’s coverage of the European Union, this is an example of what Lord Pearson of Rannoch recently referred to as ‘bias by omission’. Does the Middle East really need yet another news network when it already has so many other commercial broadcasters? Should the Foreign Office really be funding this undertaking? Of course not, but this Middle Eastern adventure will still go ahead nonetheless.

Under Dreaming Spires

Last night’s much publicised Oxford Union debate on the freedom of speech involving BNP leader Nick Griffin and historian David Irving was delayed after protesters broke into the debating theatre.

Perhaps this outcome was in the end not all too much of a surprise since there will always be individuals willing to prevent others engaging in democratic and free debate with whose views they do not agree?

Many Universities in Britain currently hold a ‘no-platform’ policy for groups such as the BNP and the likes of David Irving. Only last year the University of Bath’s Student Union voted to bar Nick Griffin from speaking at a private event hosted in one of its auditoriums. Therefore it actually came as a pleasant surprise to discover that the Oxford Union had actively voted to allow Mr Griffin to be challenged in an open debate.

Regardless of whether you agree with Nick Griffin or David Irving (and I for the most part do not) then it should be generally accepted that if their views are so wrong, then they should be challenged through debate and their arguments shown to be incoherent - not instead to try and force Mr Griffin and Irving into silence, which benefits no-one and in the end often has the undesirable effect of providing them with public sympathy.

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