At the BBC, the Arab Spring has only just ended

Have you seen much on the BBC news about the persecution and indeed murder of Syria’s Christian population by the liberal-minded and agreeable rebel forces who are not at all Islamist maniacs allied to al-Qa’eda? Nope, me neither. There was a short report in April about the Christians fearing that they might be ‘caught in the middle’ of the fighting — in much the same way, I suppose, that Bosnian Muslims were somehow ‘caught in the middle’ between the Serbs and, er, themselves. 

There was no suggestion that the rebels might, for some mysterious reason, have it in for the Christians: this wouldn’t fit the template for the BBC’s coverage. I saw nothing on the BBC a week or so back about Christians being ordered out of the town of Qusair by the local Islamist rebel commander, and either fleeing to Damascus or Lebanon or being shot while their churches were occupied and destroyed. The Vatican complained long and loud but I don’t believe its protestations reached as far as Shepherd’s Bush. Maybe it was on, and I missed it. But I don’t think so because I would have remembered a piece of journalism from the BBC which suggested that the rebels were anything other than brave, secular students and academics fighting with their bare hands to overthrow fascism. I haven’t seen one of those pieces yet, but one lives in hope.

There was a strange reluctance to follow up the story about two alleged Britons, Hassan Blidi and Walid Hassan, who were killed while occupying themselves in Syria with a spot of rigorous jihadi-ing. According to the boss of MI5, Jonathan Evans, there are quite a few British-born Islamist mentalists journeying to Syria and Libya and the like for a few weeks training with al-Qa’eda, from whence they will return to fail to blow us up as a consequence of their own incompetence.