Khalil Khan was found guilty recently of making bombs out of tennis balls. He aimed to kill many people, and had extremist literature in his house. He was arrested by chance at a railway station for an unrelated offence. His ex-girlfriend said that he was always a violent man, and had talked of killing his boss (I found this data when I googled his name, in an article on the BBC website).
The article I am about to link to says:
One veteran home affairs correspondent told me he had asked his editors why the trial wasn’t being covered. “They didn’t want to hear about it,” he said. “They just weren’t interested. It’s outrageous.”
In another case, Ali Shah was arrested,tried, and found guilty of posessing a huge amount of explosive material in his home which was:
described by police at the time of his arrest as the largest amount of chemical explosive of its type ever found in this country. The national coverage [of this story]... amounted to exactly 56 words in a single “news in brief” item in the Sunday Times.
There was almost no media coverage.
Or take the case of Ayaan Ali. Police found:
nail bombs, bullets, swords, axes and knives in his flat, as well as a note in which he had written, “I am so sick and tired of hearing... talk.. of blowing up churches, of fighting back. Only to see these acts of resistance fail to appear. The time has come to stop the talk and start to act.”
Again, there was very little interest in this story. Do you find this as shocking as I do? There are other cases described in the article I am about to link you to, and apparently none of them were given much coverage by the mainstream media.
I'll give you the link to the article in a moment, but before I do I want you to remember just how shocked you were, and why.
Now I have a small confession to make: I told a fib or two. I changed the names of the people I spoke about above, and I replaced the word "mosques" with "churches". But I left all the other facts alone. Every single one of those people was a white British citizen, and not a muslim.
Dutch people will have probably suspected this already, since "Ayaan Ali" was a (female) Dutch politician, who is an ex-Muslim and to say she's outspoken against Islam would be like saying that George W Bush likes Jesus a bit.
My question to my readers is this: were you shocked by the first part my post above? And did your feelings change when you learned that the terrorists were not muslim, and not asian?
You should also google the names in the linked article. It claims that all these trials were hardly reported. But google the names, and you will find news reports.
The article claims that the total national news coverage for Robert Cottage (the BNP member jailed for the huge amount of explosive in his house) amounted to 56 words in The Sunday Times.
Yet google linked me easily and directly to a BBC article, published in 2007, which was well over 57 words in length. Admittedly it's a local article, not national. But it has quite a different slant: the defence stated that he intended to make "bangers", and when he was found guilty, he got less than three years. Is this a terrorist, or a fucked-up racist twat with a thing for making things go "bang"?
The linked article implies the former, but the BBC article implies the latter. Who is right? The linked article tells us it was the largest amount of an explosive material found: but does that mean that he had a lot of nitro cylerine stockpiled, or did he like dropping magnesium into water and watching it fizz?
What is meant by "explosive material"? We are not given that vital detail.
But regardless of bias and possible cherry-picking, the article has a valid point: I was not aware of these stories before now, and I would very much like to know why that is. Why have these acts of terrorism not been thrust into my face by the media as other acts of terrorism are? I agree with the central point of the article: had these guys really had the names which I attributed to them, then I am pretty sure I'd have seen their photographs on the front page.
The moral for today is this: question everything. No matter what the source, and no matter how much you insinctively agree. Including the links that I direct you to. Ask your own questions, and reach your own conclusions.
I leave you now, feeling safe in the knowledge that I have, as usual, been patronising to an annoying level. I am also feeling quite smug.
As the poster of the original piece, I should raise my hand. I broadly agree with most of what you're saying here, but I suppose there's a couple of thing I might flag up. My googling also uncovered an article from the Sun as well as the BBC one. I think the basic point that the case was underreported remains valid though, as the total coverage it received is still not the kind of blanket hysteria you'd get with comparable Islamist cases.
ReplyDeleteFollowing on from this, I'd suppose I'd use the same technique you did and ask whether a court, or perhaps more relevantly to the context of this post, the media, would have accepted Robert Cottage's flash-bang social breakdown defence. Personally I think it's plausible, but only because I know a fair amount about creepy ultra-right survivalism: but how would a Robert Mohammed have been viewed and treated?
Hi "James"! I suspect that you are the original facebook contact who I mentioned above.
ReplyDeleteYour points are valid, and reflect (I think) what I was driving at originally: that the reports we receive from the media are not as objective as one would hope for in an ideal world.
Who would have thought it?
I especially like the "Robert Mohammed" analogy: this is was what I was trying to make my central point.