Dear amateur forensic criminologists, If reality falls short of expectations, perhaps you should conclude that Hollywood’s special effects have been exaggerated all these years, rather than claim that what you saw on the news was a fictitious dramatization. Yours sincerely.
Reminder to self: stop returning to the news, where you will only drown in the hatred of the angered masses. Think instead of the composed plea of the murdered policeman’s brother, who restored the humanity of the victims, stripping back the layers of politicised agitation.
The big lesson to me this week has been to resist paying too much attention to the News – to avoid PM on Radio 4, to switch off Channel 4 News, to put the newspapers to one side. Had I done so, the non-stop commentary would never have sent me into a spin and a …
On 10 July 2013, two days after 51 demonstrators were killed and another 435 were injured in protests against the military coup in Egypt, Charlie Hebdo published a front cover showing an Egyptian Muslim dying in a hail of bullets, despite holding a copy of the Qur’an to his chest. Yes, that was the punch …
Both the act of terrorism and the reporting of terrorism are political. Tuesday’s suicide bombing in Istanbul was featured in Breaking News and took second position on the BBC News website that evening, but was a mere footnote on the world news page by Wednesday morning (hours before the atrocity in Paris took place). By …
Events like this are meant to silence us in multiple ways. To silence our response to extremism, because it must be on mainstream terms. To silence our opinions, because they supposedly legitimize the actions of extremists. To silence our voices in our own communities, because the world is framed as a polarized us and them. …
In Europe, we have Freedom of Expression within the law. That is why Maurice Sinet was sacked by Charlie Hebdo for an allegedly anti-Semitic column and charged with inciting racial hatred. In France, racial insults in public are punishable by up to six months in prison and fines of up to €25,000. But we’re not …
You may be right that now is not the time for Muslims to object to being bashed over the head for their alleged hatred of freedom in response to the actions of two or three criminals… Conversely, you might argue that now is not the time for journalists, columnists and politicians to debate the fate …
The way British journalists talk about Freedom of Expression, you’d think they had never picked up a book on Publishing Law. The copy on my bookshelf lists a vast range of exclusions, though perhaps even the author could not have forseen the broad restrictions added in the decade and a half since publication. In Britain, …
I’m sorry, but the reporting and commentary on the BBC news this evening was shocking. Knowing nothing about the identity of the attackers, we learn that France must ask itself whether it has got its approach to immigration right. Now rolling commentary on communal tensions. But who’s to say the perpetrators aren’t natives, self radicalised …
I was wondering why yesterday’s suicide bombing in Istanbul disappeared from the front pages of our newspapers. Then I realised: it was apparently carried out by Marxists. So that’s all right then. The redefinition of terrorism goes on.
We love to praise and celebrate people who seem to agree with us, even when they’re plainly idiots. Life in the twenty-first century.
2,200 people were killed in attacks on Gaza this summer. 203 mosques and 2 churches were targeted. 73 were destroyed completely. We shrugged our shoulders.
What we really need is balance. If all the good people withdraw, fearing harm or evil, the voices of negativity and hatred will only be amplified and all the more pervasive. Good people need to make themselves heard, felt and known.
As a people, we suffer from serious amnesia and as a result make these crass statements based on the news of the day. We forget that 70 million people were killed over six years during World War II, of whom around 60% were civilians. We forget that the twentieth century saw 160 million people killed …
