Anyone searching for sanity in the Batley Grammar school row can enjoy the news that pupils have rallied to save their teacher’s job. Sir was suspended for showing his class a cartoon of the Prophet Mohamed – the image that in 2015 Islamists took such offence to they murdered 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the French magazine that created and published the work. For a brief while lots of politicians chanted “Je Suis Charlie”. Now to show the cartoon to students at a secular school in the UK in an effort to get them thinking and foster debate gets you tossed from a job. The teacher is said to be in hiding.
Lots of people angered that the cartoon was shown protested at the school gates. The West Yorkshire school agreed with the protestors, calling the image “inappropriate”. Headteacher Gary Kibble apologised “unequivocally”. He is “investigating” the teacher.
The students are robust. They have rallied to the teacher’s defence:
“The religious studies teacher was trying to educate students about racism and blasphemy. He warned the students before showing them the images and he had the intent to educate them. He does not deserve such large repercussions. He is not a racist and did not support the Islamophobic cartoons in any manner. This has got out of hand and due to this the students have missed out on lessons.”
As ever, it’s not the open-minded, inquisitive children we should fret about, it’s the adults.
Image: In this Sept.19, 2012 file photo, Charb, the publishing director of the satyric weekly Charlie Hebdo, displays the front page of the newspaper as he poses for photographers in Paris. He was killed.
Remember all that ‘Je Suis Charlie’, the outpouring of solidarity after the deadly attack by Islamists on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The mag published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. On January 7 2015, in response Islamists murdered 12 people. This week Charlie Hebdo republished those cartoons, all 12 of them. “Tout ça pour ça,” says the headline – “All of that for this.”
Very soon 14 people will go on trial accused of helping the two Islamist attackers carry out their massacre. Hebdo has honoured the victims in the best way it can, by championing free speech and the right to cause offence – by mocking oppressive piety in all its guises, showing us how dumb humanity can be and that what we revere might just be another human with an active imagination. That does not mean you can be gratuitously offensive and rude. You need to make a point about shared humanity for satire to work best.
Too many who marched beneath the banners “Je Suis Charlie” are less champions of free thought and speech than they are against Muslims, possessed of monocular vision and the ugly inability to treat people are individuals, lumping all Muslims as something uniquely other and wrong.
People have asked the magazine to republish the images. And many doubtless just delighted in poking Islam and would be upset where their own beliefs caustically lampooned. But, as the magazine’s editorial says, the time was not right. There was no point.
“We have always refused to do so, not because it is prohibited – the law allows us to do so – but because there was a need for a good reason to do it, a reason which has meaning and which brings something to the debate,” it says. “To reproduce these cartoons in the week the trial over the January 2015 terrorist attacks opens seemed essential to us.”
Lead image: Pallbearers carry the casket of Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, decorated by friends and colleagues of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, at the city hall of Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2015
On the Daily Star’s page 2 a story about “British kids” being taken to Pakistan “and enrolled in chilling extremist summer schools”. These schools offer a “glorified version of jihad”. We hear from a “source” – unnamed. They opine: “It is highly likely his education in Pakistan, even for a short period, increases the risk of extremism for British-Pakistani children.”
Always a pity than you don’t know the name of the person giving you their opinion, especially one outlining a potential threat to national security which implicates British citizens.
As for the story, the Star says it’s in a “secret report by the Home Office”. An earlier and fuller version of this story appeared in the Mail two days previously. “Terrorism fears as 3,000 UK children a year go to ‘jihadi’ schools in Pakistan, secret government report reveals,” says the Mail. The inverted commas should alert circumspect readers to the fact that these schools are not jihadi schools.
Like the Star, the Mail says the news is “chilling” and “secret”. That voice is again heard telling us: “It is highly likely that this education in Pakistan, even for short periods of time, increases the risk of exposure to extremism for British-Pakistani children,’ the source told The Mail on Sunday.” The teaching takes place in “Pakistan’s estimated 20,000 madrasas”.
Are these madrases all a worry for the British government? Er, no. The Mail says the report “identifies three madrasas of concern – the Darul Uloom Haqqania (DUH) madrasa in the remote Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region bordering Afghanistan; the Jamia Binoria in Karachi and Jamiatul Uloom Ul Islamia in Azad Kashmir. Each has denied involvement in extremism.”
How many British children have even been to one of those three schools? Dunno. Having cast a pall of suspicion over all British-Pakistanis who choose to give their children more education, the Star and Mail don’t say.
But we are told: “Two of the 7/7 bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, enrolled on madrasa courses in Pakistan a year before they launched their deadly attack in 2005, which killed 52.” Khan was 30 when he committed an act of mass murder. Tanweer was 22. Neither was a child sent to a ‘jihadi’ school by the parents. Both were grown men when they went to school in Pakistan. The Sunday Times said Khan was assessed by MI5 in 2004, after his name appeared during an investigation into a plan to detonate a 600-lb truck bomb in London. Tanweer “looked up to Khan as a “father figure”. What role any madrasa played in their barbarity is moot.
So about those madrases… There’s no proof they’re any threat to this country at all.
Posted: 25th, March 2019 | In: Key Posts, News, Tabloids | Comment
After the massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, a man in Manchester has taken up a role as a volunteer security guard outside the mosque in Levenshulme. “You are my friends,” says his message of support, “I will keep watch while you pray.”
It might be a time to say guards and police are routine outside synagogues in the UK. But all you can really says is ‘good on him [note]’.
Note: Who he is we don’t know. But the anticipation is that he’ll be hailed and then rubbished. Let’s not all stay in our lanes.
Update: his name’s Andrew Graystone.
He says: “I woke up on Friday morning and I heard the terrible news about the killings in the mosque in Christchurch in New Zealand. I began to think about how I would feel if I was a Muslim in Manchester going to Friday prayers today, perhaps feeling afraid or angry, and what small thing I could do to make a difference. You can either meet these things with either fear or friendship – that’s the choice we have to make and in the end friendship wins.”
Nice one.
Is Shamima Begum’s situation all about Islam? Called “foolish” and an “abstract concept” for joining ISIS, media reaction to the teenager who joined an outfit committed to mass murder, who expresses no remorse for having done so, can be compared and contrasted to the treatment meted out to the Covington Boys. Like Begum, the Covington boys are religious, attending a US Catholic high school.
They are mostly white. Begum is dark skinned, her parents hail from Bangladesh. The Covington boys’ crime was to have attended the anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. and in the face of a prolonged verbal onslaught by the Black Hebrews as they waited for coaches home – during which they were called “fagots” and “products of incest and paedophiles” – were filmed smirking at Nathan Phillips, a Native American who had approached them. For this the boys were called “vermin“, racists, Trump fans whose MAGA hats were “akin to the new white hood” and “products of a hate factory”. The boys were the embodiment of “blatant hate, disrespect and intolerance”. Begum, on the other hand, was “groomed“.
The Covington boys apologised, although it remains unclear to anyone sane what they did wrong. Being a surly, sarky teen is no crime.
Begum has expressed no remorse. She says she only left the battlefields to return to the UK and have a child on the NHS.
What is it about fair-mined liberals that turns white, Catholic teenage boys in baseball caps into something less than human and demonic, but presents a dark-skinned, Islamic teenage girl who joined a death cult into a victim? They marched peacefully to end abortion. She joined a group that pledges to murder gays, Jews and Christians, rapes underage girls sold in slave markets, and murdered children at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester. They smirked and danced. Her reaction at being shown the remains of her gang’s handiwork was “When I saw my first severed head it didn’t faze me at all”.
The prejudice is blatant. But why is it there?
Not that this is to say anti-Islam bigotry is not prevalent. The Mail gives space to Tania Joy, a former jihadi who “called for Begum to be given a second chance for the sake of her unborn child – and for a law ‘to protect children from their religion’.” Ban Islam? Make it a crime to be Muslim? Why give space to such an abhorrent view?
The argument that all of Islam is to blame for a death cult is patently absurd. What of the Islamists’ many Muslim victims? But let’s no dig too deep. If you need more time to work out why calls to ban a religion are revolting, why are you here?
The paper adds:
In comments that place much of the blame on Islam rather than on personal responsibility, she added: “I wish there was a law in England that could protect children from their religion.
“If I had grown up in an agnostic, atheist, or even a Christian or Jewish home, I would not have been exposed to these suppressive ideas of women and how god controls everything – and it is just such a lie.
“I feel sorry for [Shamima], she is so young, she has been in a toxic environment for all these years where she is not allowed to think anything different from the rest of the group. She is still in that state. She is only 19 and that’s when I radicalised.
Can Shamima Begum be saved by turning away from Islam and towards Jesus?
Today, estranged from her British family, Miss Joya is the wife of IT executive Craig Bruma, 49, who answered an advert she placed on dating website match.com stating: ‘I have four kids. My husband abandoned me to go and become the next Osama Bin Laden.’
Twice divorced himself and a father of three sons, he has introduced her to ‘Unitarian Universalism’, which is based in Christianity but advocates a ‘search for spiritual growth’.
Mohammed kills. Jesus saves. An odd take on the Shamima Begum story, for certain. And it avoids the biggest question: why did Shamima Begum seek an alternative life with ISIS to the one offered in the UK? It’s lazy to see her as a passive target of grooming. You don’t happen along a video of a man preaching genocide and global jihad, keep watching and eventually sign up unless his message chimed with you. And you don’t prevent social division of a sort so violent it ends up in mass murder by presenting one group as eternal, unalloyed victims who must be tip-toed around less offence be caused.
Come home, Shamima, by all means. Face your days of reckoning. But let’s not let prejudice turn her into a martyr.
Terror in Manchester as three people are stabbed. Well, so they say. So little is said about the murder of 23 people at an Ariana Grande concert in the city back in 2017 that you suspect the news media will downplay notions of militant Islamism in this latest attack.
So what happened?
Police are investigating the stabbing of three people at Manchester Victoria station last night. They, says the Times, are treating the attack as terror-related. There’s no mention of what motives the alleged terrorist held or was attempting to promote. Maybe he’s a militant vegetarian?
The Guardian says it might be terror related but doesn’t speculate on cause. “Manchester police scour Victoria station after triple stabbing,” says the paper. “Counter-terror police involved in investigation of New Year’s Eve attack on three people.”
Or as the Sun puts it: “TERROR RAMPAGE Terror cops raid suspect’s home after knifeman screaming ‘long live the Caliphate’ stabs cop and couple in New Year’s Eve rampage.”
A 25-year-old man from Cheetham Hill, north Manchester, has been arrested. The BBC tells us:
Resident Nousha Babaakachel, 40, said a Somali family live at the address, a mother and father of five, in their 40s, who came to live in the street around 12 years ago from the Netherlands.
She said two of the four sons are at university, one works at Manchester Airport and the youngest is back in Somalia. They also have a daughter.
Both parents attend the local Khiza Mosque.
The BBC mentions a mosque but does not mention Islam. One without the other is bit like saying the alleged knifer subscribes to Netflix and shops at Asda. It’s a big ‘so what?’ But it’s enough for the Sun to copy and paste the BBC’s lines and pass them off as their own:
The BBC and the Sun agree – word for word. The Sun’s URL makes it clear what the alleged knifer said is important but no-one says he cried “Allahu Akbar”, just “Allah”.
A witness claims the suspect shouted “Allah” during his attack with a long kitchen knife. The Sun editorialises this into an “Allahu Akbar” in the URL to its story (see above). Why not just stick to the facts?
The witness is Sam Clack, a BBC producer. “It was pretty scary. It was just me on the platform and as I was standing there I heard the most blood-curdling scream I had ever heard from a woman near by. It looked like there was a fight going on. I heard the guy shout ‘Allah’ distinctly. I didn’t hear the rest of the sentence…The guy started backing up towards me. And he got to within seven or eight feet of me and was looking around very skittish. I saw that the man had a kitchen knife with a long 12in blade.”
Mr Clack said that he heard the attacker say: “As long as you keep bombing other countries this sort of shit is going to keep happening.” Which countries? The BBC says he was shouting about god being great in Arabic as he was hauled away.
But don’t worry. Manchester’s Assistant Chief Constable Rob Potts tells us: “Tonight’s events will have undoubtedly worried people but I need to stress that… there is currently no intelligence to suggest that there is any wider threat at this time.” At this time. Mr Clack is less certain, adding: “It was scary. I have never been so scared in my life. Someone with a knife six to eight feet away, he had just stabbed someone. It was the proximity. It just highlights the fact that it can happen anywhere.”
Before the horror, a look at the coppers who help us. Assistant Chief Constable Sean O’Callaghan, of British Transport Police, tells media: “I am incredibly proud of the four officers who were immediately on scene last night, detaining a man who was wielding a knife. They were fearless, running towards danger and preventing further harm coming to passengers. Unfortunately however, one of our police officers suffered a stab injury to their shoulder and we’re all relieved that this is not more serious. It is good news that he has now been discharged from hospital, we are all wishing him a speedy recovery.”
Sure thing. But what of the alleged attacker and his motives? More to come…
A “gunman” shot three people dead and injured 12 others at Strasbourg’s Christmas market. The Guardian says gunman is “a 29-year-old born in Strasbourg”. And that is all. Any idea why he did it? One day on and the paper tells us the wanted man is what the French call “gangster-jihadists”. His name is Chérif Chekatt. He is from a family “with Moroccan roots”. He moved into “Islamic extremism”. What else do we know?
Disappointing to see BBC and Sky News lead with “Allahu Akbar” in their headline on the awful shooting in #Strasbourg vs. ITV and Al Jazeera who are being far more responsible.
This matters and it’s wrong. pic.twitter.com/62rEDMVbdq
— Miqdaad Versi (@miqdaad) December 12, 2018
At what point do you report that the suspect is an Islamist?
The Express makes it plain on its page 2, the headline reads: “Massive hunt for Islamist who shot three dead.” He’s a career criminal (paragraph 1) and “radical Islamist” (paragraph 2). He is “of Algerian descent”. Not Moroccan? Or is it all the same – British, Irish, German – all much of a muchness? Another report tells us Islamic State terrorists target shoppers, including those in Britain.
The Mirror features the story on page 11. The headline tells of the “gunman who killed two”. He is an Islamic terrorist (paragraph 1). He “screamed Allahu Akbar” before opening fire (paragraph 3). Again we read of the fear that Islamic State supporters will attack shoppers in the UK. The threat is ranked as “severe”. what he said and why he said it appears to be relevant.
The Sun calls Chekatt a “French terror fiend” He is a “butcher”. We read that he yelled Alluahu Akbar in paragraph 5. He is of “Algerian decent”. He’s been jailed in Free, Germany and Switzerland.
Facts – where did you say he was from?
The Daily Mail calls him the ‘Xmas killer”. In paragraph 5 we learn that Allah Akbar man ‘god is great’ in Arabic. Only the Mail mentions the victims. One is a Thai tourist called Anupong Suebsamarn. We’re told Chekatt “was radicalised in a French jail”. But we don’t know that to be true. The Mail then adds a touch of Brexit, noting, “Free movement rules mean he would not have to show a passport” if he closed the border into Germany. The paper says Cherkatt’s parents are Algerian. At no point does the Mail use the words Islam, Muslim or Islamist or Islamism. Chekatt’s religion is not mentioned.
In “Strasbourg shooting: What we know so far”, the BBC refers to Chekatt as a “gunman”. It is only in paragraph 7 we get a possible motive: “Along the way he opened fire several times and also used a knife to seriously wound and kill people, Mr Heitz added, saying the suspect yelled “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest” in Arabic) during the rampage.” His religion is not mentioned.
The Telegraph finds space to add: “Investigators are trying to establish whether Mr Chekatt travelled to Syria or Iraq to join an Islamist group, or whether he was radicalised entirely in France, according to sources close to the case.”
Such are the facts.
Posted: 13th, December 2018 | In: Broadsheets, Key Posts, News, Tabloids | Comment
When Boris Johnson criticised Denmark’s absurd decision to ban the wearing of the burka in a to-deadline article for the Telegraph, he went on to liken women wearing the niqab to “letter boxes” and “bank robbers”. This, said many, was Johnson “fanning the flames of Islamophobia”. We’re with Johnson on his view that it’s wrong to tell “a free-born adult woman what she may or may not wear in a public place when she is simply minding her own business”. Denmark’s move to ban an item of clothing follows burqa bans in France, Austria and Belgium. The problem is that he’d ask a constituent visiting him at his MP surgery to to remove her veil – “If a female student turned up at school or at a university lecturer looking like a bank robber then ditto: those in authority should be allowed to converse openly with those that they are being asked to instruct.”
Reactions are many:
“They are absolutely demonising, misogynistic, hurtful comments and they are fanning the flames of Islamophobia. As a result, the thugs who are already snatching the headscarves of Muslim women will feel empowered that someone who is part of the establishment, who has been our foreign secretary, is giving them licence.” – Imam Qari Asim, an imam who sits on the government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group, in The Times.
“We’re still waiting for that to happen, which is not lost on a community that still feels vulnerable … My own congregation are increasingly reporting Islamophobic abuse, from having their headscarves removed to facing racist chants.” – Finsbury Park imam Mohammed Mahmoud.
Naz Shah – yep, her – wants the Conservative chair, Brandon Lewis, to send Johnson for mandatory equalities training. Shah, who once called for all Jews for be deported from Israel (she later went on a “journey” and apologised) is Labour’s shadow equalities minister. She calls Johnson’s comments “ugly and naked Islamophobia”.
An extract from Naz Shah’s letter
And:
“Muslim women are having their burkas pulled off by thugs in our streets and Boris Johnson’s response is to mock them for ‘looking like letter boxes’. Our pound-shop Donald Trump is fanning the flames of Islamophobia to propel his grubby electoral ambitions.” – David Lammy MP.
Nothing to do with Jews, then. Right? No. Because on Twitter, Channel 4 News anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy is introducing Jews:
Channel 4 News anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy wonders about Jews
Why bring the Jews into it? Is the argument that Jews get more protection? Are Jews too powerful? Is it supposed Jewish privilege he’s wafting into the debate? What’s Guru-Murty’s point? The language around anti-Semitism has become nuanced, vague, deceptive and downright dishonest. Would a criticism of a Jew’s kippah or a woman’s sheitel (a wig be worn by very religious married Jewish women) be anti-Semitic? Is it racist to call orthodox Jews living in North London ‘Stamford Hill Cowboys’? We live in a time when many anti-Semites don’t like to make their hatred too explicit. You’re left looking for the verbal wink. And you get to the point where comparing a woman in a burqa to a letter box is presented as anti-Muslim – an assault on all Muslims and the religion of Islam – and not a lazy joke about an item of clothing worn by a relatively few Muslims.
It always comes back to the Jews
Over on the BBC, it’s all about Jews. On Newsnight – ” In-depth investigation and analysis of the stories behind the day’s headlines with Evan Davis -we get this:
Always the Jews. They always bring it back to the Jews… pic.twitter.com/q3gmYY33wJ
— Anorak (@TheAnorak) August 7, 2018
A crass comment about women in burqas and you “have to ask” a question about Jews? To the knowing, sensitive and caring everything is about those pesky Jews, a group now portrayed as underserving of that ultimate 21st accolade: victimhood.
Posted: 7th, August 2018 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians | Comment
A year ago Islamists murdered eight people in an attack at London Bridge. A year on and the BBC says the eight “died”. Yesterday at a remembrance service for the victims, their loved ones lit candles at the Southwark Cathedral service. In attendance was the Prime Minister, the mayor of London and members of the emergency services. The talk is of “love”, the hashtag #LondonUnited and placards declaring “London more united than ever”.
The murdered fought back. Londoners set about the three murderers with skateboards, chairs and beer bottles. Roy Larner heard the killers shouting “This is for Allah!” as they burst into the pub where he was drinking. “Fuck you, I’m Millwall!,” he told the killers, a trio that one eyewitness referred to as the “three Muslim geezers”. Larner punched them. They stabbed him eight times. He lived. Romanian baker Florin Morariu hit one of the killers over the head with a crate. Ignacio Echeverría saw the killers stabbing at a woman. He hit them with his skateboard. The murdered him. Geoff Ho also went towards the violence. “The bastard in the Arsenal shirt came at me first. I think I got a hit in on one of them, but either he or his accomplice got me with a shot to the throat,” said Geoff, “but either he or his accomplice got me with a shot to the throat.”
When the religionists attacked, Londoners were not cowed. The names of these brave people who fought back should be all over the Press.
We should also be talking about why it happened. Can we talk about Islam and the killers’ humanity hating ideology? Only willing fools and bastards blame these murders on all Muslims. The discussion should be about violent Islamism. How can be confronted by more than pub glasses if it is not debated freely? Tackling the killers’ nihilism does not mean ‘giving into hate’. What happened was not normal, so let’s not make it appear so by our passivity.
The threat is real and active. The Guardian looks at prisoner release dates and foresees a surge in the number of convicted terrorists being released from prison in 2018. How should these people be handled?
And how can further attacks be prevented? The Daily Telegraph says MI5 will share intelligence with head teachers. This will stop students becoming turned on to violent Islamism.
The people murdered in the attack were: Christine Archibald, 30 (from Canada), James McMullan, 32 (London), Alexandre Pigeard, 26 (France), Sebastien Belanger, 36 (France), Xavier Thomas, 45 (France), Kirsty Boden, 28 (Australia), Sara Zelenak 21 (Australia) and Ignacio Echeverria, 39 (Spain). Let’s think about them – and how we can stop the poison that killed them.
Two of the victims
How important is the fact that Benjamin Herman screamed “Allahu Akbar” as he murdered Soraya Belkacemi, Lucille Garcia and Cyril Vangriecken in the Belgian city of Liege? Jan Jambon, Belgium’s interior ministers says Herman had murdered a man the night before the attack. The BBC says “the authorities were working to establish a motive”. Herman, a 31-year-old drug dealer, had been in jail but was let out for two days on Monday to prepare for an eventual release in 2020.
According to RTBF, Herman had a history of violent behaviour and convictions for theft, vandalism and drugs offences.
Benjamin Herman is dead. Why he did it is something we might never know. But can the media present a narrative?
“There are signs he was radicalised in prison, but is it that radicalisation which drove him to commit these acts?” Mr Jambon told RTL radio. “It could have been because he had nothing to look forward to, because he also killed someone the night before, the guy’s psychology and the fact… he may have been on drugs.”
What Did The Killer Say?
Reuters notes in a story that includes the phrase “Jail to Jihad”:
A police source told Reuters that he had shouted “Allahu Akbar” — the Muslim affirmation of faith — during a gunbattle with officers at a school in downtown Liege on Tuesday after killing his three victims.
Or as the BBC puts it:
Police sources quoted in local media said the man was heard shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is greatest” in Arabic).
The Guardian adds (paragraph 7):
Witnesses said the attacker in Liège was dressed in black and was carrying a rucksack. Footage aired by the Belgian broadcaster RTBF showed him chanting “Allahu Akbar” – God is greatest, in Arabic – as he walked through the city.
In the Telegraph the story begins:
A suspected terrorist on day release from prison executed two female police officers with their own guns and shot dead a trainee teacher before he was killed in a shootout after taking two women hostage at a school in the centre of the Belgian city of Liege.
The bloody rampage on Tuesday morning, which left another four officers wounded, was captured on videos on social media, which showed the black clad man waving a pistol in each hand and shouting “Allahu Akbar” before he was gunned down by elite officers. Belgium’s federal prosecutors office has opened an terror investigation into the attack.
No “police sources” to claim the killer yelled “Allahu Akbar”. It was broadcast on social media.
The Sun makes the killer’s cry the main thrust. The headline declares: “BELGIUM BLOODBATH – Liege shooting – Terrorist on two-day jail release shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ is shot dead after killing two cops and a man.”
The New York Times doesn’t mention Herman’s cry at all, whether it be an Arabic phrase or a Muslim declaration. To omit the killer’s last known words is a remarkable oversight. Compare that blinkered approach to the monocular Breitbart and its report headlined: “Belgian Gunman Appeared on Multiple Reports on Radicalism, Killed 4th Person Before Attack.” It’s an eye-catching headline that the story below does not support.
The Guardian states in its more factual headline: “Belgium shooting: man kills passerby and two police officers in Liège.”
Best to stick to the facts. Via Sky News, we get this:
Media reported that the suspect had been radicalised in prison, and an AFP source close to the investigation said he had been reported as belonging to the “entourage of an Islamist recruiter”.
But justice minister Koen Geens said there was no consistent information for the claim, adding that the case was not “clear cut” and that Herman “certainly was not someone who could clearly be qualified as radicalised”.
Such are the facts.
Three people are dead at Marseilles’ Saint-Charles train station in France. Police shot one dead after he’d murdered the other two. The Guardian says the murderer was a “man”, an “assailant” armed with a knife, a “knifeman”. And that’s all.
“Two victims have been stabbed to death,” says regional police chief, Olivier de Mazieres on AFP.
But a clue to what the “man” might have been and why he did it comes via an unnamed French official, who tells France’s Le Monde newspaper that the killer yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he stabbed two women to death.
How relevant is that chant? It’s very relevant, reasons the Daily Mail, which unlike the BBC and Guardian makes the familiar war cry of militant Islam central to the story. “Two passengers are killed as attacker shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ slits a woman’s throat with a butcher’s knife and stabs another at Marseille station before soldiers shoot him dead,” announces the headline.
The Mail mentions “Islamist radicals” in its story. The Guardian makes no mention of Islam whatsoever in its. Why is there such a clear difference in reporting? Why does one publication make Islam a key part of the narrative, whilst another ignores it entirely? I’d hazard a guess that it’s something to do with the uncertain, fearful censorious times we live in. Ever watchful of triggering the slack-jawed mob, the simplest fact is redacted from reports lest it foment a race riot. With free speech and free expression stymied, what should be objective – simply stating the facts – becomes confrontational and daring. Most worryingly, it leaves the facts to actual bigots who adopt the role of rebels and present themselves as brave and knowing sources of ‘truth’.
As for the police, well, the soldiers who shot the killer dead are part of Operation Sentinelle, the military operation launched after Islamists massacred so many at Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015.
Good the soldiers were there, then.
Aside from a conversation on armed police on the streets this attack invites, is there also a conversation to be had about Islamist violence? Since 2015, more than 230 people in France have been killed in Islamist attacks. Discuss.
Posted: 1st, October 2017 | In: Broadsheets, News, Tabloids | Comment
The Times‘ scoop became a big talking point: a five-year-old, white, native English specking Christian girl had been placed with a Muslim foster family by London’s Tower Hamlet’s council. What problem with that? If the vulnerable child needed help and help was forthcoming, what matter respective religions? The council surely vets foster parents and made an informed choice.
Maybe not.
The girl spent four months with her substitute family. She says the family did not speak English in the home, encouraging her to speak Arabic. Her primary foster carer veiled her face in public. When placed with a second foster family, also Muslim, the girl spoke of regularly eating meals on the floor. The girl was scheduled to return to the first foster carers, but a council worker heard her complain of having had her necklace removed and not returned. The necklace featured a cross-shaped pendant. The girl claimed the family had refused to let her eat carbonara prepared by her family because it contained bacon.
The girl is now back with her family, living with her grandmother on the orders of Judge Khatan Sapnara – the Mail tells readers on its front page, the judge is a Muslim; a fact the Times repeats on page 6 in a lengthy profile on the woman who arrived in the UK as child from her native Bangladesh. Judge Sapnara told the council to seek “culturally matched placements” for children. She also made a stand for free speech. Tower Hamlets tried to block the Times story but failed when Judge Sapnara made it clear she “would not stand in the way of the freedom of the press to report, within the law and in a responsible manner, in respect of this case.”
The Mail adds that the girl’s family had “pleaded” with the council to let her live with her grandmother. The girl “begged” not to be returned to the Muslim family. By page 17, Sarah Vine is telling readers about the value of “a granny’s love”. But taken in isolation, without us knowing why the child was in care at all, why grandma was overlooked in favour of foster parents and what the foster parents hope to gain from their role, opinion rides roughshod over fact. But Vine tells us that Tower Hamlets advertises foster carer allowances of “£313 and £253 a week”. “That’s a nice little earner,” says Vine.
Easy money? On the Tower Hamlets website we read:
If you are interested in becoming a foster carer you will need to meet with a social worker many times to talk about yourself, your family and your experiences of looking after children. Some people find the idea of this daunting, but our social workers are highly experienced and will do everything they can to help you feel reassured during this process. You will also need to have police and medical checks and will need to ask employers, friends and families to give references.
And Vine’s undersold the job: “Fostering fees and allowances up to £474 per week (per child in placement depending on age).” But, yes, the payments for a five-year-old are as she says. Fostering is a cottage industry. Why the public sector is turning child care into a job creation opportunity is not touched upon. And it costs:
In the 2013/14 financial year an estimated £2.5 billion (gross expenditure) was spent on the main looked after children’s services in England. The majority of expenditure (55%) was on foster care services (around £1.4 billion, 55%) and children’s homes (around £0.9 billion, 36%).
So much for the money.
What’s wrong is when Vine says the “real scandal” is that social services “would rather pay someone, irrespective of whether or not he child will be miserable, than find a home where someone wants to offer the one thing that has no price: a mother’s love.”
Eh? Surely is can be argued that the “strict Muslim” women was offering just that: a place where the child would be treated like one of their own. Moreover, where is the child’s mother? Is she able or capable of offering the kid of love Vine seeks? Let’s not pretend a mother’s love is the ultimate nurturer of life and love.
Also troubling is that the story is presented as one of child abuse. The child was refused food. The child was with “strict” adults. The child was upset. The child “sobbed”. Everything is presented to make readers suspicious of adults. The child’s view is pure and passes challenged. We’ve not heard from the Muslim women at the centre of the story. The overriding impression from reading this story is that when society revolves around child protection, everyone who works with children is cast as a suspect.
Posted: 30th, August 2017 | In: Broadsheets, Key Posts, News, Tabloids | Comment
Worse than video nasties, scourge of the 1980s, sex and trolls are YouTube videos possessed of a power to radicalise the viewer, transforming a normal bloke surfing the web for Wiggles songs and old episodes of Play For Today into a mass murderer. No circumspection, reflection or deliberation. To see is to do.
Jonathan Sacerdoti notes:
I’ve watched plenty of extremist videos and heard some dodgy speeches over the years. I even watched a couple of videos online this last week of extremist Rabbis preaching against rational and modern thought as well as homosexuality. But I didn’t become a backwards thinking fanatic.
Why do some people want to say “was radicalised” (a passive thing), rather than “chose to become an extremist and murderer”?
Passivity reduces the killer’s free will to dust. He’s one step closer to becoming a ‘vulnerable’ victim. And – boy – do Islamists love being victims. The actual victims – the people murdered – are reduced, their innocence linked to the killer’s vulnerability, the good boy or good girl from a good family who was ‘groomed’ online by powers too strong to resist. We are corralled into looking not only at the victim and saying “There but for the grace of god…”, but empathising with the killer, too. And you can’t blame a victim, so the narrative goes. You can’t get angry at a victim.
Radicalisation doesn’t come out of the blue or from a YouTube snuff movie or tweet. It’s rooted in the Islamists’ antagonism towards the prevailing culture and a search for a form of aggrandised, pristine identity they can embrace and be defined by. You might call them fascists.
Posted: 6th, June 2017 | In: News, Reviews | Comment (1)
After the London attack: Geezer Watch:
People fleeing #LondonBridge but the bloke on the right isn’t spilling a drop. God Bless the Brits! pic.twitter.com/ceeaH0XxeX
— Howard Mannella (@hmannella) 3 June 2017
At £6 a pint, who can blame him?
Posted: 4th, June 2017 | In: Reviews, Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
“We were throwing bottles, chairs, stools, anything we could get. A stool hit one of them on the head,” says Gerard Vowls, an eye-witness to the attack on London Bridge and Borough Market.
“They were running up going ‘this is for Allah’, they ran up and stabbed this girl, I don’t know how many times, ten times, maybe 15. She was going ‘help me, help me’ and I could not do anything. I tried to help her, I threw something at them. There was a bike on the floor, I tried to pick up the chair but it was locked to it, to throw it at them, to get them away from her…
“They kept coming to try to stab me … they were stabbing everyone. Evil, evil people.”
A chef from Fish restaurant tells us: “I saw two men with big knives downstairs outside Roast. They were stabbing people. The guy with the knife was killing two people. We were shouting ‘stop, stop’ and people threw chairs at them.”
Gerard and the other people fighting back make me proud to be a Londoner. The Islamists murdering people enjoying a night out in London are scum. Police shot three attackers dead.
Owen Evans was there. He says: “Then they told us to leave the pub and to run, and a policeman standing outside with a gun was shouting, ‘Go, get the fuck out.’ We ran down the street, turned left at the Market Porter, than ran down the road and away. We got to the South Bank and then waited ages for a tube, and eventually got home.”
The police make me proud to be a Londoner.
Politicians do not make me proud. To suspend the election campaign so close to the vote looks like capitulation.
The front pages:
Posted: 4th, June 2017 | In: News, Reviews, Tabloids | Comment
Salman Abedi murdered 22 people at a pop concert because… he smoked marijuana. Rather than leading to long spells sat on the sofa watching daytime telly, weed turns you into someone who massacres families at an Ariana Grade concert in Manchester.
Well, maybe it does.
Dr Max Pemberton asks, “Is marijuana a factor in jihadi murders?” The Mail adds portraits of all the losers who murdered so many people in Tunisia, London, Nice, Orlando and Paris. All adhered to radical Islam. All saw the West as their enemy and murder as a duty. But Pemberton wonders if cannabis might be to blame.
If you want a meaningful debate on drugs, it might be better to turn the question around: why are so many attracted to smoking it?
The Mail’s poser is an agenda-driven, to-deadline question perched atop a weak argument. The idea that weed was a factor – that getting wasted made it “easier to disregard the welfare of others” and butcher them – absolves individual terrorists of responsibility for their actions. It wasn’t me. It was the weed.
So we can answer the Mail’s question very simple. It’s ‘no’. They don’t get off that easily.
SEXIST!
So far the attack on Manchester in which saw 22 people were murdered at a pop concert by Salman Abedi has been used to illustrate racial harmony, insult footballers, lambaste apathy, find missing children in Australia and spot fake news. Joanna Williams has a great look at how the horror is being used to insult men.
Just hours after the attack, feminist writer and speaker Jaclyn Friedman tweeted: ‘Here is what the coverage will not say: targeting an Ariana Grande concert is targeting young women. This is a violent act of misogyny.’ …
The argument that the bombing was ‘a massive act of gender-based violence’ has continued. The headline of one article, ‘The bombing at a Manchester Ariana Grande show was an attack on girls and women’, is as simplistic as it is inaccurate. Most obviously, it overlooks the fact that men died in the attack too – fathers, brothers and boyfriends attending the concert or waiting to take people home. The author goes on to explain how ‘Grande has advanced a renegade, self-reflexive sexuality that’s threatening to the established heteropatriarchal order’. Rubbish. Grande’s Nickelodeon cuteness combines bunny ears with pink balloons. She’s loved by teen girls because her sexuality is safe and fun and threatens no one.
And it keeps coming.
“It’s not Muslims or people with mental-health problems who are most likely to kill you in a terrorist attack – it’s men’” –Independent.
Why Manchester Bomber Targeted Girls – Rolling Stone.
During Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman tour, Abedi gave the world a sick reminder of the dangers of being a woman in public in 2017, attacking largely female concertgoers for doing nothing but enjoying themselves while listening to music.
These girls and women weren’t just listening to any music, either – this was feminist music.
Williams nails it: “In presenting terrorism as part of a broader gender war, feminism ultimately reduces mass murder to just another example of everyday sexism.”
Read and weep as journalism takes on the Manchester terror story and fails epically:
To Indonesia’s Aceh province where the court has sentenced two men (ages: 20 and 23) to 85 lashes for having sex with each other. The Associated Press reports:
The couple were arrested in late March after neighborhood vigilantes in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh, suspected them of being gay and set out to catch them having sex.
Aceh is the only province in Muslim-majority Indonesia to practice Islamic law, or sharia, which was a concession made by the national government in 2006 to end a years-long war with separatists. It implemented an expanded sharia code two years ago.
How how dies the UK view Indonesia?
UK and Indonesia enjoy a close relationship, with many common interests and values. We are partners in challenges like terrorism and global warming, and work together closely within the G20. We are also here to support and protect UK interests in Timor Leste.
Global warning takes precedence over whipping consenting adults for being gay. Who owns your body?
The women accused of being Britain’s “first all-female terror gang” are in the dock at Westminster magistrate’s court. They are all charged with conspiracy to murder. The judge asked both women who appeared in veils that covered their faces to lift their veils. One, says the Mail, lifted hers “for a few seconds”, but the other did not.
What is telling is that the Mail, Express, Star (front page), the Sun and Mirror all feature the court artist’s sketch.
If court is to be a place where getting to the truth is all, should not the accused be encouraged to be at ease, and that includes dressing as they would in accordance with their culture?
Next stop for the ladies is the Old Bailey, where men and women in horsehair wigs and long cover-all black gowns will judge them.
Posted: 12th, May 2017 | In: Reviews, Tabloids | Comment (1)
Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen – the final ‘d’ is silent, so I’ll leave it off – says all Austrian women should wear a headscarf. This will help Muslims feel comfortable and to battle prejudice, he reasons.
“If Islamophobia continues to spread,” he told a room full of students, “the day will come when we will have to ask all women to wear headscarves. All of them, in solidarity with those who [wear them] for religious reasons. This isn’t too far-fetched.”
Van der Bellen continued, adding that he remembered a story about some non-Jewish Danes wearing the Star of David during the German occupation of Denmark in World War II.
Alex, mate, they did that to counter the censors, bigots, meddlers and murderers not because they were forced to on pain of law. Wearing a Star of David when it could get you abused, raped and killed by the invaders’ enforcers is an act of bravery. If you force people to wear the veil and view those courageous Danes as your inspiration, you will celebrate freedom by doing exactly the opposite. And as for reducing a symbol of conservative religious beliefs to a sign of your own liberal views, well, good luck with that.
The Washington Post adds:
The Austrian president seems to have been surprised by the scandal. “We should be happy if we don’t have bigger problems than the question of the headscarf,” he told reporters during a visit to Slovakia this week. “I am not a friend of the headscarf, but there is freedom of expression in Austria.”
Not always. The JTA reports:
An Austrian woman who questioned the Holocaust was found guilty of violating an Austrian law that makes Holocaust denial illegal.
The woman, 53, was given a suspended jail sentence and fined $1,280 by a court in the western Austrian city of Feldkirch on Friday, the Associated Press reported.
She criticized a post on Facebook which showed a German soccer team commemorating the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi camp, in which she accused the team of “spreading lies,” according to the AP.
During a search of her home a sign was discovered over her toilet reading: “This Hitlerine needs a clean latrine.” It also is illegal in Austria to praise the Nazi era.
Nasty. False. But to criminalise an expression of bigotry that makes liars of the millions murdered and praises their killers suggests Austrian lawmakers do not have much faith in their own people to hold ignorance and racism up to the light. Bellen is wrong, then. Freedom of expression is not sacrosanct in Austria.
Undeterred, Bellen moved on:
In a statement posted to his Facebook page, the president’s office attempted to explain the context of his statement, noting that a student had asked about whether a ban on headscarves would shut some women out of the labor market.
The president was talking about “the stigma of headscarved women,” the statement said, and the president did agree that in some specific circumstances a headscarf might be prohibited but that other religious symbols should be prohibited, too, in those circumstances. The president was also concerned about “racism from the other side,” the statement said, pointing to the example of a Muslim cabdriver who refuses to accept Orthodox Jews as passengers.
Racism from the other side? No, it’s just racism.
Such are the facts.
Anyone who bought a ticket to hear Ayaan Hirsi Ali speak on her Australian tour will get a full refund. It’s been cancelled because her opinions as so outrageous they present a threat to her security and the safety of every Muslim in Oz. Stick a ‘BANNED” label on a record cover or book and we all want to listen to it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali might think about getting “Banned in Australia” on a T-shirt or a medal.
She’s banned because when 400 Muslim women petitioned for her to be stopped from spreading her “divisive rhetoric” and thus amplifying “hostility and hatred towards Muslims” the State caved in. Hard won freedoms about speech and thought were obliterated. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s words are unfit for human consumption. No debate. No ridicule. No Q and As with her sympathizers and accusers. Just banned.
Ali, a campaigner for women’s rights and a strident critic of Islam, which in her words is “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death”, is taboo. A woman who was abused under Islam cannot criticize it. However potent or toxic Ali’s view is, banning her quashes progressive moves for the airing and exchange of ideas in a public space. It increases separatism, otherness, division, conformity, intolerance and misunderstanding. Ideas hermitically sealed in closed groups fester and curdle into something claustrophobic and suffocating.
“Shame on you for carrying water for the Islamists, shame on you for trying to shut people up who are trying to raise awareness about sharia law,” said Ali is response to the ban. “We can’t have that open discussion, we can’t stop the injustices if we say everything is ‘Islamophobic’ and hide behind a politically correct screen. We should not make the mistake of finding ourselves inadvertently allied with the Islamists, as these petition-signers are doing.”
The event, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Hero of Heresy”, was advertised as an opportunity to “step inside the controversy” surrounding Islam and Muslim womanhood. The controversy rumbles on, albeit in private.
Spotter: SMH
Tweet of the Week was supplied by @S_alqsimi , via, Deanne DuKhan (@DukhanD), who responds to news as to why women driving is forbidden. “Lorraine in the UK asks, which makes and models please?”
Hey, ladies, Curb Your Enthusiasm (language is NSFW):
Posted: 28th, October 2016 | In: Key Posts, Reviews, Strange But True | Comment
Hot dogs are un-Islamic, says the Malaysian Islamic Development Department (MIDD). To receive halal certification,the MIDD, a religious government body, says hot dogs must be renamed.
MIDD’s Sirajuddin Suhaimee explains says: “In Islam, dogs are considered unclean and the name cannot be related to halal certification.”
Yes, but the hot dog contains no dogs, it being most often a composite blend of pigs’s scrotum, anus and lips.
“Malaysian halal food guidelines say halal food and halal artificial flavour shall not be named or synonymously named after non-halal products such as ham, bak kut teh, bacon, beer, rum and others that might create confusion,” he adds.
The Auntie Anne store has been refused halal certification unless it renamed its “Pretzel Dog”. Mr Suhaimee says it should be called a Pretzel Sausage”.
And in keeping with Islamic law, Auntie Anne might care to ‘circumcise’ the tip of its Fat Torpedo:
Warts and all
Posted: 20th, October 2016 | In: Reviews, Strange But True, The Consumer | Comment
On July 18, the Sun featured a column but its former editor Kelvin MacKenzie in which he asked, “Why did Channel 4 have a presenter in a hijab fronting coverage of Muslim terror in Nice?”.
That the question was rhetorical became apparent in the next line: “Would C4 have used a Hindu to report on the carnage at the Golden Temple of Amritsar…of course not.”
And again: “Would the station have used an Orthodox Jew to cover the Israeli-Palestine conflict? Of course not.
Hundreds complained to Ipso, the press regulator. This meant lots of people were talking about the Sun and MacKenzie – and so both became relevant.
MacKenzie posed more questions:
…I could hardly believe my eyes. The presenter was not one of the regulars — Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Matt Frei or Cathy Newman — but a young lady wearing a hijab. Her name is Fatima Manji and she has been with the station for four years. Was it appropriate for her to be on camera when there had been yet another shocking slaughter by a Muslim?
Was it done to stick one in the eye of the ordinary viewer who looks at the hijab as a sign of the slavery of Muslim women by a male- dominated and clearly violent religion?
So why did they do it?
…
With all the major terrorist outrages in the world currently being carried out by Muslims, I think the rest of us are reasonably entitled to have concerns about what is beating in their religious hearts. Who was in the studio representing our fears?
Questions upon questions. And like all good columnists, MacKenzie triggered a heated debate.
Manji called MacKenzie’s words “ill-informed, racist and Islamophobic”.
Ben De Pear, who edits the Channel 4 news show, said:
“Whilst we agree that freedom of expression is a fundamental right, we do not believe that it should be used as a licence to incite or discriminate. His inflammatory comments on Fatima Manji’s professional status, which were widely condemned, and his attempts to equate the wearing of a hijab with support for terrorism, have no place in a properly informed and tolerant society… We employ reporters based on their journalistic skills, not their ethnicity. We see no reason why a Muslim journalist should be prevented from covering any story and Fatima will continue to report and present the news on the issues of the day with impartiality and depth. We are grateful for all the support shown to Fatima during this difficult time.”
Difficult time? Really? (See those questions are catchy.) Channel 4 is hardly a fan of the Sun and its readers. Surely the broadcaster got some satisfaction from MacKenzie’s rant? Prejudices, you know, we do so love them when we can back them up with evidence. Manji did not like it. But Ipso has rejected her complaints.
“There can be no doubt that this was deeply offensive to the complainant and caused widespread concern and distress to others. This was demonstrated by the number of complaints IPSO received.
“The article was highly critical of Channel 4 for permitting a newsreader to wear the hijab. It also contained pejorative references to Islam. But the essential question for the committee was whether those references were directed at the complainant.
“Clause 12 seeks to protect individuals while respecting the fundamental right to freedom of expression enshrined in the preamble to the code.
“The article did refer to the complainant. But it did so to explain what triggered the discussion about a subject of legitimate debate: whether newsreaders should be allowed to wear religious symbols.
“While the columnist’s opinions were undoubtedly offensive to the complainant, and to others, these were views he had been entitled to express. The article did not include a prejudicial or pejorative reference to the complainant on the grounds of her religion.
“Clause 3 seeks to protect individuals from harassment. In the light of its findings under Clause 12, and given that the course of conduct complained of was the publication of a single article on a matter which, while sensitive, was the subject of legitimate public debate, the Committee took the view that it did not amount to harassment under Clause 3.
“The columnist’s view that Islam is ‘clearly a violent religion’ was a statement of his opinion. This view, however extreme or offensive to many, did not raise a breach of Clause 1.
“The suggestion that the complainant was a ‘pawn in this tv news game’ was clearly conjecture, and underlined that the author’s criticism was directed at Channel 4 and not at the individual newsreader. There was no breach of Clause 1.”
Kelvin MacKenzie and newspapers are still relevant after al these years. Who knew?
Posted: 19th, October 2016 | In: Reviews, Tabloids | Comment
