In the Telegraph, John Simpson, a journalist since 1966 with the BBC, and its World Affairs editor since 1988, upon whom all sorts of awards have been lavished, writes a more-in-sorrow article about Aung San Suu Kyi. What interested me was not his denunciation of her, or his complete disregard of how the Buddhists in Myanmar see the threat of Islam, but a statement he made about how, during World War II, the Rohingya had fought the Japanese. This of course puts them in a good light. But what actually happened is that the retreating British forces gave weapons to the Rohingya, on the assumption — or perhaps the promise — that they would use them against the Japanese. They did not. Instead, they used the weapons in 1942 to massacre tens of thousands of Buddhists, members of the Rakhine ethnic group, in Northern Rakhine State. The Buddhists then retaliated, and thus began decades of inter-communal, and intermittent, violence.
Despite fifty years as journalist specializing in foreign affairs, apparently John Simpson could not be bothered to find this out, though a minute’s googling would have produced that information. He was determined to denounce Aung San Suu Kyi, taking her to task for her refusal to say exactly what the U.N., and the O.I.C., and the BBC, and John Simpson himself, thought she should say. Her failure to condemn her fellow Buddhists outright, because she knew their history of conflict with the Rohingya, including that 1942 massacre, and the repeated attempts of the Rohingya to join the Northern Rakhine State to Pakistan, beginning in 1946 with an approach made to Mohammed Ali Jinnah even before Partition, and because she understood the Buddhists’ fears of the seeming unstoppable Muslim presence in Europe, and their long memories of how Islam effaced Buddhism in India — all this was beyond Simpson’s knowledge or understanding or sympathy. His mind was made up: Aung San Suu Kyi could only be either a prisoner of the Burmese military or a “monster.” Nuance is not John Simpson’s strong suit.
Had Simpson an inquiring mind, instead of one that was perennially made up early on, and never against the BBC grain, he might have tried to understand, rather than to simply berate, Aung San Suu Kyi. But he could not be bothered. Besides, just because Islam led to the demise of Buddhism long ago, and 75 year ago the Rohingya were on the warpath, why should Buddhists today in Myanmar be so alarmed?
John Simpson proclaims at his website that he is “doing my best to make sense of a crazy world.” On the subject of Islam, he has been among its stoutest apologists. When he interviewed Pim Fortuyn, he infuriated that supremely intelligent man with his absurd charges about Fortuyn’s “racism,” and his obstinate refusal to accept Fortuyn’s statement of the obvious, that Islam is not a race; the courtly Fortuyn ordered Simpson and his BBC crew to leave his home after accusing the newsman of “failing to show him any respect.” You can read Simpson’s report on the man he called “Holland’s anti-Islam dandy,” here. Notice the sneer in his description of Fortuyn’s “high-camp charm” and how the Dutchman “sat in his garden bower like an 18th century dandy whose wig had fallen off.” There’s a lot of this dismissive stuff, and hardly anything about what it was that made Fortuyn so apprehensive about Islam. Fortuyn is only quoted as saying that the Netherlands was already “too crowded,” but he had much more to say about Islam, which didn’t appear to interest John Simpson. Of course, even knowing exactly nothing about Fortuyn’s views on anything other than Islam, Simpson goes right ahead and pastes on Fortuyn that all-purpose epithet “right-wing.” He doesn’t pick up on Fortuyn’s remarks about the treatment of women and homosexuals in Islam; apparently that wasn’t worth Simpson’s while. He was too busy describing Fortuyn — quite unfairly — as a supercilious and dandiacal coxcomb.
Four days after their meeting, Fortuyn was murdered by a man who resented his views on Muslims. John Simpson felt no need to stop and express dismay. Instead, he described Fortuyn as the “archetypical right-winger” (there was nothing to support this assertion unless you think that Fortuyn’s opposition to Islam is enough to make him “right-wing,” though all kinds of well-known left-wingers, including the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, have been just as, or even more, anti-Islam than Pim Fortuyn) and ended with this bit of nastiness, very much in the john-simpson vein: Fortuyn, he concludes his “tribute,” is more likely to be remembered for “the hatred he gave rise to than for his own achievements.”
You will not be surprised to learn that John Simpson’s reports on Israel have been consistently, almost comically, unfair. This decades-long anti-Israel bias, with Israel being presented as an aggressive little Sparta, always hell-bent on making trouble for innocent Palestinians, is a staple of BBC reporting, usually on the lines of “the Israeli tail seems to wag the American dog.” In 2001 he described Ariel Sharon as “the architect of the massacre at Sabra and Chatila in 1982.” As everyone knows, it was not the Israelis, but the Christian Phalange, settling scores because of the PLO massacres of Christians in northern Lebanon, who were responsible for Sabra and Chatila. But twenty years after the massacre, John Simpson was still blaming the Israelis. You can find out much more about Simpson’s coverage here. Let it be noted that this anti-Israel bias makes him no different from most of his colleagues at the BBC, such as Jeremy Bowen, about whom you can read here, or Barbara Plett, who wept openly when she heard that Arafat died, or Lyse Doucet, whose presentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict makes one wonder if she is merely taking dictation in Ramallah, as you can see here. All in all, it’s a hair-raising spectacle, and no matter how well-reasoned and soberly fact-based the torrent of complaints about its Middle East coverage may be, the BBC continues to largely ignore such criticism.
John Simpson has also been greatly impressed with one of the most insidious charges brought against Israel, one that is a favorite of antisemitic websites. This is the claim that in the middle of the Six-Day War, in all the confusion, anxiety, alarm, misidentification, miscommunication, exhaustion, contributing to the well-known “fog of war,” Israeli planes deliberately attacked the ship, the U.S.S. Liberty, knowing it was American, and killed 34 Americans and wounded more than 100, and did so at the urging of the American government. Exactly why Israel would have wanted to attack a ship belonging to its closest ally no one has ever made clear, though that has not stopped conspiracy theorists from conspiracy-theorizing. The most detailed account of the whole affair, including material newly released, is that by the historian Michael Oren, which is well worth a careful read and can be found here.
John Simpson, however, of the BBC, was so enamored of the story of a conspiracy, so convinced that Israel was guilty of deliberately attacking an American vessel, though he was no better at offering a plausible reason for such an attack than anyone else, that he chose to write an enthusiastic introduction to one of those books about a supposed U.S.-Israel conspiracy to “hush up” the real reason for the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty. John Simpson’s respectful treatment of one of the favorite fantasies of antisemites apparently does not disqualify him from running the BBC World Services. The book for which he wrote the introduction, Operation Cyanide, is by Peter Hounam, a journalist who specializes in many sorts of conspiracy theories, as in his Who Killed Diana, which purported to prove that she was “murdered” by shadowy figures. Here is the summary of this preposterous book, Operation Cyanide: “This hard-hitting investigation shows that on that day in 1967, the world came closer to all-out nuclear war than ever before — this incident made the Cuban Missile Crisis seem tame by comparison. Peter Hounam reveals that the attack was part of a clandestine plan between the US and Israel known as ‘Operation Cyanide,’ designed to ensure victory for Israel in the Middle East. By blaming the attack on the Arab world, retaliation on a grand scale would be justified.”
“This book will shock any reader interested in Middle-East affairs, as it shows that the U.S. was prepared to sacrifice its men and risk nuclear war to ensure victory for Israel.”
This is the kind of thing John Simpson apparently takes seriously. But it’s not his palpable antipathy to Israel that is now most disturbing. Even more alarming is his coverage of Islam or, rather, his failure to have the BBC cover the subject adequately. He is the man who mocked Pim Fortuyn, both before and after his death, and refused to engage with Fortuyn’s justified anxieties about the future of Europe. He is the man who called Aung San Suu Kyi a “monster,” because she doesn’t share his one-sided views on the situation in Myanmar. He is the man who a few days after the bombings in the London Underground and on buses, wrote that “Thursday was a terrible day for London; yet we mustn’t forget that much the same number of people died that day in Iraq, and no one dedicated acres of newsprint to them.” And he was all for minimizing the reaction to such attacks, belonging, as he does, to the “that’s-what-the-terrorists-want” school of idiocy, insisting that “If there is journalistic over-kill, there is also security over-kill.” A decade later, he was still at it, attacking the British press for paying too much attention to Muslim terrorism in Europe; “It’s [the press] grotesquely selective actually. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I think the [Paris attacks] don’t matter, it matters hugely what happened in Paris. It’s one of the most important things of this decade. It’s just that you know, 130 people die in other countries and we shouldn’t let ourselves be blinded to that simply because we’re more interested in Paris.” If you think the Western media is giving too much attention to Muslim terrorism, John Simpson is the man for you.
John Simpson has been misinforming people now for more than fifty years, on matters big and little, doing his best “to make sense of a crazy world.” His best is not nearly good enough. It’s time for a change. He deserves a rest. And more importantly, so do we.
Anurag rai says
Right
David Scoltock says
Wrong
Robert Spencer, as always, has a biased and one sided interpretation of history.
The Rohingya did engage Bhuddists in WW2, what Spencer deliberately neglects to mention is these Rakhine Bhuddists where allied and complicit with the Japanese invasion of Burma and the resulting war crimes.
Also, trying to paint these sectarian conflicts as “muslim bad, anything against muslim good” is a very dangerous and slippery slope.
I think Spencer should be careful when it comes to history, his biased propoganda is a double edged blade.
Americans tend to forget what happened in Burma, the British do not.
Terry Gain says
Islam bad? Yes. Islam is responsible for more killing than any other ideology. You have to be absolutely daft not to understand that supremacist, xenophobic, barbaric and Totalitarian Islam is indeed Evil.
Greyhound Fancier says
The article is attributed to Hugh Fitzgerald, not Robert Spencer.
Flavius Claudius Iulianus says
No you’re wrong. The Rakhine Buddhists (in fact, all Burmese) suffered at the hands of the Japanese. The Japanese Imperialists looked down on all races that were not of their own. (You must have gotten your information from that awful Wikipedia article that is full of misinformation.)
And the so-called Rakhine (Mohammadin Bengalis), to prove my point, have continually repeated their insurgencies throughout the twentieth century: in the 1950s, in the 1970s, in the 1990s. It’s about time the Myanmar army did something about this ongoing separatist threat to the country!
Flavius Claudius Iulianus says
“And the so-called Rakhine (Mohammadin Bengalis),” should read:
“And the so-called Rohingya (Mohammadin Bengalis),”
Robert Spencer says
Scoltock, you are, as always, such a dope.
I didn’t write this. Hugh Fitzgerald did. As anyone less careless than you would see from the byline.
Brian Hoff says
In WW2 the native people of Indonesia greet the Japanese soldiers as free then from demeaning dutch rule.Japon total occupation force number10 000 men. We have plan to invaded Indonesia which we have to cancel as the local people would have throw rodden foods at our soldiers.
Janakiraman Rajalakshmi says
Due to oversight you have written Spencer . That is irrelevant.
However you are right. Whatever name we decide to use the Rohingyas ( muslims & hindus) were actually manipulated by the british colonizers. I remember posting an article from swarajya. Just as british colonizers ( british christians are GUILTY of unwarranted invasions. They call it “upliftment civilizing evangelizing democracy export , trade & commerce ” but we KNOW the christians are GUILTY. Period. Be it problems in Sri Lanka , India getting fragmented into Pakistan , Bangladesh , India – all troubles & genocides are wantonly engineered by christian DEVILS.
There is no NEED to shed tears for the buddhists. China gets it right when they say
” buddhist monks are VIOLENT people”. They are not renunciates as we presume. The truth about buddhism & jainism both of which turned into extremely VIOLENT fanatic movements in Bharath trounced by Vedic SAGES have been detailed well by Kaanchi MaHaPeriyavar.
Buddhism did some selective cherry picking from VEDAS spurning many Vedic Injunctions thus degenerating into debauchery & violence. Buddhist monks were so treasonous plotted against various Hindu Kings inviting Muslims to invade . Hence their buddhaviharas in India incinerated by MUSLIMS was their comeuppance. Jains started persecuting Hindus making jainism state religion & converting many Vedic Hindus to jainism. Not a single Hindu could apply Kumkum & Holy Ash. Lord Ssiva’s Temples’ Pujas were stopped . disrupted by jains. Lord MURUGA as ThiruGnanaSambandhar impaled the jains trouncing jainism & re-established Vedic Traditions.
MUSLIMS are also children of the SAME God as Hindus. The anti Muslim plaque in my brain was busted away by Ramana Bhagavan . Ramana Bhagavan is GOD. The AUTHORITY.
Not america , uk , vatican christian papacy. CERtainly not gravenimage , her clones & cheerleaders.
Flavius Claudius Iulianus says
Janakiraman Rajalakshmi, I don’t know if you are a troll, misinformed or attempting to misinform. EVERY paragraph you have written is so full of absurd suppositions that I am forced to believe that these were composed for no other purpose than to get a rise out of readers.
Sorry, I can’t be bothered to rebut your claims; I already wasted enough time reading it.
martin says
Hinduism has a demon god for every sin to justify it
John Forbes says
Actually the fall of SINGAPORE signalled the END of the BRITISH EMPIRE & COLONIALISM World Wide !
The British , poorly prepared & very badly led & with no air cover were EASY BEATS for the Armies of Japan who had been fighting in China for many years before the attack on Malaya !
Some of the quoted arrogance of the British was ASTOUNDING !
They paid a really terrible price for this later !
Many ethnic & Religious groups responded with Violence against age old enemies none more so than the Muslims !
They turned on the HINDU’s & Christians & Buddhists but the one thing that dies almost instantly in any conflict is the TRUTH !
What is a fact now though that in every country where there is MUSLIM MIGRATION there is conflict !
SO NOW the WEST is being TREATED with VIOLENT & INDIFFERENCE by MUSLIMS & being Ignored by their OWN GOVERNMENTS !
Children Gang raped by MUSLIM GROUPS & the Governments cover it up because they are AFRAID & do not know what to do !
We are all sleep walking into a WAR we may well not win !!
Forse says
Good article!
Shame on John Simpson and shame o. The BBC
dsinc says
+1
Mark A says
I completely agree with Hugh Fitzgerald about the biases of John Simpson.
But Simpson works for the BBC. Need we say more?
Antonin Dlouhy says
John Simpson is famous in Afghanistan for his fascination with the “bacha-buzhi” – the infamous markets selling young boy-slaves for sex, and his utter failure to report on them. This is no surprise. He’s just one of the legions of BBC/Foreign Office pederasts faithful to the Arab cause because the Arabs are the people who share their perversions.
Between him and Lyse Doucet, antisemite supreme with never a “report” she hasn’t set up (e.g. paying Pali youths to start something with the Israeli security forces while the light is good for photography and she’s still got time for lunch; “oppressed” Afghan girlies giggling behind their hands while they ask “Am I saying it right?” in Fars-Dari, and so on), supporter of the criminal elements of the IRA. etc., they’ve got BBC live “reporting” of conflict sewn up.
Swine, the pair of them.
carpediadem says
Great comment, Antonin. If you can provide more examples or details re Doucet setting up incidents, especially in Israel, please do. Thank you.
Antonin Dlouhy says
Chapter and verse unavailable, I’m afraid. It’s just a given among certain journalists. I first became aware of such “set-ups” in Northern Ireland decades ago when, as a starry-eyed and naive greenhorn reporter, I encountered the Murdoch press paying quite big money to louts and hooligans to wind up the security forces so that they could get their pictures of the awful English oppressors being nasty. I got out of news journalism not long after that. Life and the hippy trail took me took Afghanistan for a long while and I picked up more than a smattering of Farsi-Dari. When the Afghans were still cute documentary-bait, we travellers howled with laughter at a BBC campfire scene featuring a Pathan “singing the day” (as they do, with marvellous wit, smut and accuracy) and describing, one by one, the “kushadi” – recipient partners in male homosexual intercourse – filming them. Mentioning this in the watering holes of foreign correspondents all over the Persian/Urdu-speaking zone (for want of a better term) over the decades has brought on a deluge of similar stories and Doucet stars in an awful lot of them, not only in Israel, by any means.
Getting back to a more JW aspect of the thread, it must be noted that lying and story-telling are part and parcel of Near/Middle-Eastern life, and the population are all masters – and mistresses – of it. Your social status is enhanced by “winning” a lying match, or getting paid a small fortune for a totally fictitious story. Starting a negotiation or argument with the truth is seen as a sign of ultimate foolishness – and failing the social “idiot test” they all deploy at some point in any relationship reduces one to lower than dhimmi, just prey, fair game for anything. Yes, I know, we all do this to some extent, but the difference in scale and competence between West and East is gigantic. This is obvious throughout reporting on Islamic matters everywhere but on JW and a few of its noble counterparts: amateurs, starting from the wrong place, losing by missing the starting gun when the enemy has jumped it, for want of a better metaphor.
Sorry to ramble on, but the point to be made is that Simpson, Doucet et al. are only doing what media dhimmis/fifth columnists do – wallowing in an evil zeitgeist. And we’re just sucking it up while the BBC and its equivalents wax ever more smug and obese on their high-fat diet of easy, profitable and bloody treasonous carrion.
DP111 says
Your post is one of the best I’ve read on the systemic lefty bias of the BBC.
If you dont mind, I have linked it here
https://biasedbbc.org/blog/2017/09/28/his-masters-voice-2/#comment-870187
You would be most welcome in the blog too.
MasQueNada says
Yes, the “creative” treatment of truth by Muslims is something that should be widely known by now, but the media are furiously stepping up their brainwashing to suppress this understanding.
UNCLE VLADDI says
Too many metaphors.
Antonin Dlouhy says
Uncle Vladdi – not enough words. Please let us know what you find difficult and I’m sure other posters will be happy to help you out. Chapesh?
WorkingClassPost says
Accidents do sometimes happen in war, didn’t America invent the phrase ‘friendly fire’?
As for the Rohingya cover-up, there’s scant mention of the jihadist leader Ata Ullah in any reporting of the ongoing conflict.
He is the head of ARSA and has been fomenting trouble since at least 2012.
Wiki doesn’t say much, but he was born in Pakistan and served as an imam in Saudi Arabia before leaving Mecca to organize the mayhem in Myanmar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ata_Ullah
Just your ordinary devout muslim, of course.
And absolutely nothing to do with islam.
Hugh Fitzgerald says
I had no idea how frequent “friendly fire” incidents were — though of course thousands died from friendly fire in the Vietnam War. A few of the incidents can be found here: http://listverse.com/2012/11/03/8-worst-cases-of-friendly-fire/ I found the last one– the Cap Arcona incident– the most disturbing.
WorkingClassPost says
That’s a scary list, which puts the USS Liberty incident into perspective
mortimer says
John Simpson is being paid by Gulf oil money.
Michael Copeland says
Thank you for another excellent dissection.
Expat88 says
Conspiracy theories run rampant everywhere in the Middle East. It is what they thrive on. It is how they define what is happening in the world. Simpson is playing right into their hands and validating their worldview.
I have never trusted Simpson. The smarmy meter always goes up when I watch him on BBC. He is just a typical Lefty apologist for Islam.
Frank Gardner of the BBC was nearly killed in an attack in Saudi Arabia. It was a premeditated ambush on them during a supposed interview that had been set up in a dangerous neighborhood of Riyadh named Suweti. His cameraman, Simon Cumbers, was shot to death. Gardner was shot 6 times and left permanently paralyzed in a wheelchair. But he went right back to the BBC shilling for Islam.
That tells you all you need to know about the BBC. Even those who should know better don’t dare buck the system. Dhimmitude reigns supreme.
jewdog says
Simpson sounds like the sort of pompous fool who holds opinions according to what the latest rage is for the chichi cocktail set: No originality or depth, but a lot of clever catch-phrases and put-downs.
I’ve read that some stores in Canada are selling bottled camel urine in certain neighborhoods. He needs a stiff drink from one; The Prophet recommends it.
exposesithlords says
If John Simpson wishes to detail ethnic cleansing of tribal peoples in Burma, he could speak about the Karen and other northern tribes.
The Karen, I was told, actually always fought against the Japanese with the British and were the first to defeat them in jungle warfare.
I suppose it is no surprise that Simpson and the BBC have remained largely silent about the huge scale abuse of these people over the decades.
here are some links from a quick search about the Karen:
http://www.csw.org.uk/our_work_profile_burma.htm
http://www.karen.org.au/karen_people.htm
http://khrg.org/about-us
The awful truth says
Saudi Arabia heads up the UNHR brigade, while busily destroying Yemen having killed 400k people, the comparative storm in a teacup in Myanmar is of course “genocide” but Saudi Arabian own HR violations are staunchly defended by Trump and UK eager for Saudi investment in their arms industry.
els_g says
BTW, it is very strange to me that Saudi Arabia was altogether given membership to the UN Commission on Human Rights. As far as I know, this state has never signed the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights which is the very foundation for establishment of this Commission. How comes that they became head of this institution is utterly beyond me.
DP111 says
BBC liberated Kabul’ says Simpson
Media monkey: Simpson liberates Kabul singlehandedly
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2001/nov/19/warinafghanistan2001.afghanistan1
FYI says
BBC
Britanistani Bolshevist Cabal
Maybe they should change the name….. to Leftard Fake News network
Once upom a time the BBC was a reliable news service.In recent years it has proven itself to be utterly incapable of objective reporting.
martin says
BBC is becoming like a dirty word to many decent brits.