Cannot believe that Britain ever considered joining the EU! Thanks for posting this and explaining everything.
A little more info on Mr. Kilroy-Silk. Except for his apology, I see nothing to disagree with. I am looking for the rest of the article, entitled "We owe the arabs nothing"
BBC suspends talkshow after anti-Arab outburst
The BBC suspended a popular daily talkshow on Friday after its presenter branded Arabs “suicide bombers, limb amputators and women repressors” in a newspaper article.
Show presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk, a former parliamentarian with the ruling Labour Party, later expressed “very deep regret” over the column which questioned whether Arab nations had contributed anything to civilisation.
The BBC said it would suspend his daily talkshow “Kilroy” from Monday while it conducts an internal investigation into his article in the Sunday Express newspaper.
“The BBC strongly disassociates itself from the views expressed,” the publicly-funded broadcaster said in a statement. “We stress that these comments do not reflect the views of the BBC.”
The article, headlined “We owe the Arabs nothing”, asked: “What do (Arabs) think we feel about them? That we admire them for being suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors?”
Kilroy-Silk said the column had been republished in error, and had originally been written in April last year in response to opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq. “It is not what I would have said today,” he said in a statement. “It has obviously caused great distress and offence and I can only reiterate that I deeply regret that. The article contains a couple of obvious factual errors which I also regret.”
Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, a publicly-funded body which campaigns against racism, said it was “indisputably stupid”.
The Muslim Council of Britain welcomed the BBC’s suspension of Kilroy-Silk’s talkshow and called on the Sunday Express to scrap his column, which it said had become a “platform for bigotry and Islamophobia”. —Reuters