Extra! Extra!
I've just read the newspaper. It's made me angry and saddened. The front cover reports on a fire-bombing of a Mosque in Birkenhead, supposedly in retaliation for the London bombings. Now I thought that 'retaliation' meant to pay back an injury in kind. As far as I know, we still do not know who caused the bombings for certain, but we may be sure it wasn't the elderly muslim cleric who was caught in the building and had to be rescued by fire fighters.
These incidents seem to have sprung up over the country, in Bristol, Bradford, Leeds and most recently in London. That shocks me. We expect it of America with their insularity and fairly homogenous society, but that the same sort of irrational race hatred should happen in one of the most cultrally diverse cities in the world is deeply depressing.
What really made me angry as I read the article was the behaviour of the press though. This particular article burned with self-rightous, bleeding heart indignation, yet in the London bombing press conference which I watched in its entirety, this same newspaper's representative (which, by the way, isn't a tabloid) was using inflammatory language of the worst kind. You know, 'Muslim Terrorists' 'Islamic attacks' etc. Like Meg I applaud Paddick's response, but I was really disgusted by the emotive language used by the press. To then comment on the "shocking" attacks on Asian families and religious centres which they at least in part have occassioned makes me feel ill.
They are utterly crass in their hypocrisy - anything to sell a rag.
posted by Shizue @ 4:29 PM
2 Comments:
Having established that the newspaper in question is The Independent and that it was the copy I purchased the other day I was quite surprised by Becky's reaction. You see I was comparing it to the other newspaper headlines that day many of which had chosen to focus on "..Muslim clerics who preach hate" (Daily Torygraph)kind of topic. So I was quite impressed that The Independent had taken a stance more sympathetic to Muslims. Having not seen the news conference that Becky did I did not feel the same sense of hypocrisy. But newspapers do have different writers and this article was not written by the same person who was at the news conference. I even nearly wrote a blog the other day about how "The Independent" was going up in my esteem but then I saw the front cover today which like most of the other papers focused on the CCTV image of one of the men that carried out the bombings. I then felt rather nauseous from the senstionalist front pages, faintly stupid and very naive for my brief love affair with The Independent and declared I'd stay clear of the British Media for a while. Thing is I want to keep up to date with the news but any time I hear or read anything now I either get depressed or angry. I've already effectively renounced the TV, now I'm renouncing the papers. I'll be leaning even more heavily on the radio from now on - much less sensationalist I think.
radio 4. if it's good enough for dylan moran, who are the rest of us to argue?
I tell you what, it's not just the hypocracy and violence of it, it's the raging bloody stupidity. all that firebomber has done is remind everybody that there are poisionous dickheads in every group. and that whatever he says next will be wrong. A clever racist arsehole might try to make whitey look like a better man than whoever by not using violence. mind you, who's ever met a clever racist?
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