British TV promotes "alternative view"

All in the name of “freedom of speech”, of course. Unfortunately, the PC-driven,  sensitive wankers from Al Bebeeceera  never offer us an  “alternative view on Islam”, but instead Channel 4 provides a soapbox for a rant from Iran’s demented thug-in chief Ahmad-in-jihad. So ‘balanced’ and so ‘alternative’ it makes your head spin. What’s next? Fidel? Mugabe? Kim Yong Ill or any other Islamic thug from the 57 OIC member states?

By Liz Thomas/Daily Mail

 

Ahmadinejad: Merry Christmas, “bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers”

 
Channel 4 was accused of causing international offence last night for inviting the president of Iran to give an alternative Christmas Day message.

Viewers saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claim that if Christ were on earth today he would
stand in opposition to warmongers, occupiers, and bullies – a clear attack on allied forces who invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Robert Spencer:

In other words, he will be calling the British people to convert to Islam. In Islamic theology Jesus was a Muslim prophet whose message was corrupted by his followers to create Christianity. The idea that society’s problems are rooted in rejection of the message of the prophets is a call for society to adopt Sharia, Islamic law, which is a comprehensive program for every aspect of society.

The broadcast, by the man who once paraded captured British sailors on Iranian television, brought heavy criticism from human rights campaigners and politicians, and also prompted a rare, damning response from the Government

Attacked: Campaign groups say the broadcaster’s decision to air the speech is ‘dangerous’ and motivated by ratings

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: ‘President Ahmadinejad has during his time in office made a series of appalling anti-Semitic statements.

‘The British media are rightly free to make their own editorial choices, but this invitation will cause offence and bemusement not just at home but amongst friendly countries
abroad.’

The broadcast had been scheduled at the same time as the Queen’s Speech on BBC and ITV, as in previous years.

However, it was moved to 7.15pm to avoid a clash and to diminish the offence caused.

Speaking in Farsi with subtitles, Ahmadinejad said: ‘If Christ were on earth today, undoubtedly He would stand with the people in opposition to bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers.

‘If Christ were on earth today, undoubtedly He would hoist the banner of justice and love for humanity to oppose warmongers, occupiers, terrorists and bullies the world over.’

But the comments were met with incredulity. The Israeli Embassy said the message had a ‘sick and twisted irony’.

Earlier this year Ahmadinejad said that ‘Israel should be wiped off the planet’.

In the past week, nine people, including one woman, have been hanged according to Iran’s state owned newspaper.

Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor said: ‘In Iran, converts to Christianity face the death penalty. It is perverse that this despot is allowed to speculate on the views of Jesus, while his  government leads Christ’s followers to the gallows.’

He said Channel 4’s decision to broadcast the message was a ‘scandal and a national embarrassment’.

The U.S., Britain and others suspect Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons, but it insists its uranium enrichment programme is intended solely for civilian energy. 

Ties with the UK and Iran are already strained. In 2007, 15 British sailors and marines
were held for 13 days after they were accused of straying into sovereign waters. Tory
MP Philip Davies, who sits on the media select committee, said he was ‘disgusted’ with Channel 4.

He said: ‘The alternative Christmas message has simply become the festive equivalent to Big Brother. Each year they are trying to be more and more shocking. It is just unacceptable.’

Louise Ellman, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside and chairman of the Labour Jewish Movement, was equally as scathing. She condemned the channel for giving an ‘unchallenged platform to a dangerous fanatic who denies the holocaust while preparing for another’.

She added: ‘Who will deliver next year’s alternative Christmas message? Will it be David Irving or Robert Mugabe?’

Channel 4 head of news and current affairs Dorothy Byrne said the broadcaster was offering viewers an insight into ‘an alternative world view’.

She added: ‘As the leader of one of the most powerful states in the Middle East,
president Ahmadinejad’s views are enormously influential. We are offering our viewers an insight into an alternative world view.’

In Islam, Christ is not recognised as the son of God, but is regarded as a Prophet.
In his speech, Ahmadinejad refers to the Abrahamic faiths – these are Christianity,
Judaism and Islam. They all recognise Abraham, who appears in the Old Testament
of the Bible, as the first Prophet.

Caroline Glick comments:

Iran and Hamas do Christmas

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Both Iran and its Hamas proxy in Gaza have been busy this Christmas week showing Christendom just what they think of it. But no one seemed to have noticed.

On Tuesday Hamas legislators marked the Christmas season by passing a Sharia criminal code for the Palestinian Authority. Among other things, the code legalizes crucifixion.

Hamas’s endorsement of nailing enemies of Islam to crosses came at the same time as it renewed its jihad. Here too, Hamas wanted to make sure that Christians didn’t neglected as its fighters launched missiles at Jewish day care centers and schools. So on Wednesday Hamas lobbed a mortar at Erez crossing point into Israel just as a group of Gazan Christians were standing on line waiting to travel to Bethlehem for Christmas.

While Hamas joyously renewed its jihad against Jews and Christians, its overlords in Iran also basked in jihadist triumphalism. The source of Iran’s sense of ascendancy this week was Britain’s state-owned Channel 4 network’s decision to request that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad give a special Christmas Day address to the British people. Ahmadinejad’s speech was supposed to be a response to Queen Elizabeth II’s traditional Christmas Day address to her subjects. That is, Channel 4 presented his message as a reasonable counterpoint to the Christmas greetings of the head of the Church of England.

Channel 4 justified its move by proclaiming that it was providing a public service. As a Channel 4 spokesman told the Jerusalem Post, “We’re offering [Ahmadinejad] the chance to speak for himself, which people in the West don’t often get the chance to see.”

While that sounds reasonable, the fact is that Westerners see Ahmadinejad speaking for himself all the time. They saw him at the UN two years in a row as he called for the countries of the world to submit to Islam; claimed that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is divinely inspired; and castigated Jews as subhuman menaces to humanity.

They saw him gather leading anti-Semites from all over the world at his Holocaust denial conference.

They heard him speak in his own words when he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

And of course, over the years Ahmadinejad has often communicated directly to the British people. For instance, in 2007 he received unlimited airtime on British television as he paraded kidnapped British sailors and marines in front of television cameras; forced them to make videotaped “confessions” of their “crime” of entering Iranian territorial waters; and compelled them to grovel at his knee and thank him for “forgiving” them.

The British people listened to Ahmadinejad as he condemned Britain as a warmongering nation after its leaders had surrendered Basra to Iranian proxies. They heard him — speaking in his own voice — when he announced that in a gesture of Islamic mercy, he was freeing their humiliated sailors and marines in honor of Muhammad’s birthday and Easter and then called on all Britons to convert to Islam.

Yet as far as Channel 4 is concerned, Ahmadinejad is still an unknown quantity for most Britons. So they asked him to address the British on Christmas. And not surprisingly, in his address, he attacked their way of life and co-opted their Jewish savior Jesus, saying, “If Christ was on earth today undoubtedly he would stand with the people in opposition to bullying, ill-tempered and expansionist powers.”

He then reiterated his call for non-Muslims to convert to Islam saying, “The solution to today’s problems can be found in a return to the call of the divine prophets.”

The fact of the matter is that Channel 4 is right. There is a great deal of ignorance in the West about what the likes of Ahmadinejad and his colleagues in Iran, Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas stand for. But this isn’t their fault. They tell us every day that they seek the destruction of the Jews and the domination of the West in the name of Islam. And every day they take actions that they believe advance their goals.

The reason that the West remains ignorant of the views and goals of the likes of Hamas and Iran is not that the latter have hidden their views and goals. It is because the leading political leaders and foreign policy practitioners in the West refuse to listen to them and deny the significance of their actions.

As far as the West’s leaders are concerned, Iran and its allies are unimportant. They are not actors, but objects. As far as the West’s leading foreign policy “experts” and decision makers are concerned, the only true actors on the global stage are Western powers. They alone have the power to shape reality and the world. Oddly enough, this dominant political philosophy, which is based on denying the existence of non-Western actors on the world stage, is referred to as political “realism.”

The “realist” view was given clear expression this week by one of the “realist” clique’s most prominent members. In an op-ed published Tuesday in Canada’s *Globe and Mail* entitled, “We must talk Iran out of the bomb,” Richard Haas, the President of the Council on Foreign Relations argued that given the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran and the dangers of a US or Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear installations, the incoming Obama administration must hold direct negotiations with the mullahs in order to convince them to end their nuclear weapons program.

In making this argument, Haas ignores the fact that this has been the Bush administration’s policy for the past five years. He also ignores the fact that President George W. Bush adopted this policy at the urging of Haas’s “realist” colleagues and at the urging of Haas himself. Moreover, Haas bizarrely contends that in negotiating with the mullahs, the Obama administration should offer Iran the same package of economic and political payoffs that the Bush administration and the EU have been offering, and Teheran has been rejecting since 2003.

Even more disturbingly, Haas ignores the fact that Teheran made its greatest leaps forward in its uranium enrichment capabilities while it was engaged in these talks with the West.

So in making his recommendation to the Obama administration — which has already announced its intention to negotiate with the mullahs — Haas has chosen to ignore Iran’s statements, its actions, and known facts about the West’s inability to steer it from its course of war by showering it with pay-offs.

Haas and his colleagues in the US, Europe and on the Israeli Left are similarly unwilling to pay attention to Hamas. In an article in the current edition of *Foreign Affairs*, Haas and his colleague Martin Indyk from the Brookings Institute call on the Obama administration to either ignore Hamas, or if it abides by a ceasefire with Israel, they suggest that the Obama administration should support a joint Hamas-Fatah government and “authorize low-level contact between US officials and Hamas.” The fact that Hamas itself is wholly dedicated to Israel’s destruction and Islamic global domination is irrelevant.

Similarly, Haas and Indyk assume that Syria can be appeased into abandoning its support for Hizbullah and Hamas, and its strategic alliance with Iran. Syrian President Bashar Assad’s views of how his interests are best served are unimportant. Both Assad’s statements of eternal friendship with Iran and his active involvement in Iran’s war effort against the US and its allies in Israel, Iraq and Lebanon are meaningless. The “realists” know what he really wants.

Muslims aren’t the only ones whose views and actions are dismissed as irrelevant by these foreign policy wise men. The “realists” ignore just about every non-Western actor. Take Iran’s principal Asian ally North Korea for example.

This week North Korea’s official news agency threatened to destroy South Korea in a “sea of fire,” and “reduce everything treacherous and anti-reunification to debris and build an independent, reunified country on it,” if any country dares to attack its nuclear installations.

North Korea made its threat two weeks after Kim Jung Il’s regime disengaged from its fraudulent disarmament talks with the Bush administration. Those talks — the brainchild of foreign policy “realists” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Assistant Secretary Christopher Hill — were based on the “realist” belief that the US can appease North Korea into giving up its nuclear arsenal. (That would be the same nuclear arsenal that the North Koreans built while engaged in fraudulent disarmament talks with the Clinton administration.)

After Pyongyang agreed in February 2007 to eventually come clean on its plutonium installations (but not its uranium enrichment programs), and to account for its nuclear arsenal, (but not for its proliferation activities), Rice convinced President George W. Bush to remove North Korea from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terror and to end its subjection to the US’s Trading with the Enemy Act this past October. And then, after securing those massive US concessions, on December 11 Pyongyang renounced its previous commitments, walked away from the table and now threatens to destroy South Korea if anyone takes any action against it.

North Korea’s behavior is of no interest to the “realists” however. As far as they are concerned, the US has no option other than to continue the failed appeasement policy that has enabled North Korea to develop and proliferate nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. As the Council on Foreign Relations Gary Samore said, “I think we’re sort of condemned to that process because we don’t really have any alternative.”

Samore and his colleagues believe there are no other options because all other options involve placing responsibility for contending with North Korea on non-Western powers like China, South Korea and Japan. More radically, it involves holding North Korea itself accountable for its actions and making it pay a price for its poor behavior.

As the “realists” claim that the US has no option other than their failed appeasement policies, back in the real world, this week military officials from the US’s Pacific Command warned that North Korea may supply Iran with intercontinental ballistic missiles. These warnings are credible given that North Korea has been the primary supplier of ballistic missiles and missile technology to Iran and Syria and has played a major role in both countries’ nuclear weapons programs.

Defending Channel 4’s invitation to Ahmadinejad, Dorothy Byrne, the network’s head of news and current affairs, said, “As the leader of one of the most powerful states in the Middle East President Ahmadinejad’s views are enormously influential. As we approach a critical time in international relations, we are offering our viewers an insight into an alternative world view.”

When you think about it, broadcasting Ahmadinejad really would have been a public service if Byrne or any of the delusional “realists” calling the shots were remotely interested in listening to what he has to say. But they aren’t. So far from a public service for Britain, it was a service for those who, unbeknownst to most Britons, are dedicated to destroying their country.