“Forced marriages: School holidays prompt warning,” says a current headline on BBC News. The article explains that annually, “more than 5,000 people from the U.K.” are reportedly being forced into arranged marriages:

Teachers, doctors and airport staff need to be alert to the problem of forced marriages over the school holidays, the government has warned. Ministers said there were concerns about teenagers being taken abroad thinking they were going on holiday but being forced into marriage instead. Figures suggest cases are particularly common during the summer break. The government’s Forced Marriage Unit received 400 reports between June and August last year.

The piece is remarkable mostly for what it doesn’t say. The words religion, Muslim, God, and Islam are all missing. Another feat is that the reporter more or less manages to sweep the misogynistic aspect of the arranged-marriage phenomenon under the rug, the BBC’s favorite phraseology for the victims being “teenagers” and the non-descript “people,” rather than “girls” and “young women” (those words aren’t anywhere in the article, either).

Unfortunately, it’s nothing new. Over the past decade, I’ve gradually lost a ton of respect for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Once the worldwide gold standard of impartial (radio) news, its feckless, feeble web reporting is so shot through with the desire not to give any possible offense to Muhammad fans that the old-time accolades have ceased to apply. Auntie Beeb will no more assign blame — or simply call a spade a spade — than any of Islam’s lily-livered Western apologists.

Want examples? When the riots and bloodshed resulting from the Danish cartoon controversy had finally subsided, and after the BBC had already apologized for “any offence” it caused by showing a few of the cartoons, the broadcaster marked the one-year anniversary of the cartoons’ publication by asking, verbatim,

The question everyone is asking is has Denmark learned its lesson?

Right. “The question everyone is asking.” It’s an interesting turn of phrase, abundantly clear in its implication that you were quite the oddball if you did not happen to wonder whether the Danes had been properly chastised by Islamist thugs.

Roughly around the same time, the BBC, in its specifically religious-news written sections, began appending the letters PBUH (peace be upon him) to the name of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It’s one of the finest examples of dhimmitude I’ve ever encountered.

Or consider how the BBC covered the horrendous Islamist terror attacks that occurred in Mumbai in late 2008. Four days after the world got re-acquainted with what Islam’s extremist followers are capable of, the BBC pretended that the motives of the attackers were a complete mystery:

Perhaps we do not know enough about where the perpetrators are from, because they could have come from almost anywhere.

Really? Almost anywhere? Well, they most assuredly didn’t come from Japan’s Shinto community, or from Mormon circles in Canada, or from atheist groups in the Netherlands. Nor were they spawned by Quaker quilting bees in Pennsylvania, or by evangelical church gatherings in the Congo, or by coteries of Romanian Rosicrucians.

Where they did come from, spiritually, is the much-vaunted religion of peace.

The BBC article never mentioned this. In fact, neither the word “Islam” nor the word “Muslim” appeared anywhere in the piece, presumably so as not to tick anyone off.

Spot a pattern here?

With the addition of the latest whitewash, concerning the thousands of female U.K. residents as young as 11 who are married off against their will, I propose that the acronym BBC, at least where the website is concerned, should now be understood to mean “Blithering British Cowards.”

(Image via Shutterstock)



