Richard Castle of the Burton Mail wrote the following story about a recent act of vandalism: Vandals deface the town war memorial :
A ROYAL British Legion boss says vandals have “dishonoured those who have given their lives for our country” by defacing Burtonʼs war memorial.
Roy Whenman, vice-chairman of the town’s Legion branch, received calls from members saying an extremist message had been written on the statue. Having been informed at 9.20am, borough council chiefs had cleaned the graffiti from the relic, situated outside Burton College, in Lichfield Street, by 9.40am.
Mr Whenman, of Birches Close, Stretton, has described whoever committed the offence as “diabolical”.
He said: “There’s nothing worse, in my eyes, than discrediting a war memorial. It dishonours those who have given their lives for our country.
“I don’t know how long it was there for, but I was pleasantly surprised by the council’s quick action and I commend them for it.
“What I would say to them is there are other ways of expressing your anger about certain issues.”
Dennis Fletcher, chairman of East Staffordshire Racial Equality Council, said he suspected someone from the far right was responsible.
He said: “My reaction is one of horror. Just two nights ago at our general committee meeting we were talking about the harmony between communities in the borough.
“I suspect members of the far right have done this to stir things up and there are generally very good inter-cultural relations in East Staffordshire.
“Graffiti of any type is terrible but when it includes racist material it has to be considered utterly unacceptable.”
An East Staffordshire Borough Council spokesman said: “We would say that this vandalism is deplorable and we do our best to clean such graffiti as soon as we possibly can.”
â– The Mail has manipulated the mainpicture to remove some of the content of the message.
The Burton Mail would like you to think that what was removed in the manipulation was swear words or something like that.
Actually, no. A picture of the graffiti has been posted by “OldWarDog” of the “4 Freedoms Worldwide” blog. It shows that the censored words were…
…Before I tell you, see if you can guess. Not the exact words, but the general idea. You can make a guess based on this gnomic comment from the vice-chairman of the Burton branch of the British Legion: “What I would say to them is there are other ways of expressing your anger about certain issues.” (What issues? Why are you talking in this strange, indirect way?) You can make a guess from the otherwise inexplicable involvement of the chairman of East Staffordshire Racial Equality Council, and his guess – unsupported by any evidence – that “someone from the far right was responsible”, when the British Far Right are usually all too anxious to muscle in on displays of support for the armed services. You can make a guess from his further comment, which only starts to make sense when you realise that something is being hidden, that “Just two nights ago … we were talking about the harmony between communities in the borough.”
Did you get it? Here is the picture.
And in case that link goes dead, let me just tell you. The graffiti says “Islam will dominate the world. Osama…” The next few words are difficult to read in the picture. Never mind, you guessed the general thrust of them anyway.
Now read Kathy Shaidle’s post :When media bias becomes media malpractice.
What is the Burton Mail playing at? I was about to write, “you can’t get away with that sort of thing now we have the internet” until half a second’s more thought told me that you couldn’t get away with that sort of thing in the days before the internet either. Hundreds of people in Burton must have seen the graffiti, even if it was removed quickly by the council. When even one or two of these hundreds saw that report in the Burton Mail they will have instantly realised they were being lied to, and will have become far more likely to spread the news about what they really saw. The graffiti on its own will do harm to race relations. The graffiti plus the cover up will do far worse.
(Via House of Dumb)
Indeed. If the MSM claim to exist to inform people what is going on, then clearly they are not fit for purpose.
Now tell us something we did not already know 🙂
To some extent the aim of this post was to tell the Burton Mail something they evidently did not already know, namely that they can’t get away with it. And by extension, convey the same message to such of the rest of the MSM who may hear about this affair.
Just to try to argue the other side for a second, anyone could have wrote that about anyone. It is a pretty easy way to make someone else look bad. People sometimes lie. Maybe, just maybe, it was the “extreme right wing” who wrote it to give someone else a black eye.
Unless you know who did it, may it is best to not publicize the message. It probably isn’t a good idea to publicize graffiti anyway, to not give them the attention they want and not encourage it.
Some dude: if you are suggesting that graffiti is best ignored all together, I can see your point. But that’s not what they did: they took a real story and twisted it to suit their particular agenda. Sure, it could be true that it could have been done by the ‘extreme right-wing’, to make muslims look bad. But, like you said, the Mail does not know this.
Some dude,
Yes, it’s possible that it was written by someone flying a false flag. Such things do happen – the word “Moby” was coined to mean a left winger who posts inflammatory comments in right wing forums and blogs after some singer suggested this.
And I do rather regret that spreadig the news does reward the vandals by further publicising their message.
However, while there might a case (though not a good one, IMO) for not reporting the graffiti at all, or for reporting its general nature without showing the exact words, or even for manipulating the image, as the Burton Mail did, there cannot be a case for reporting an unsupported speculation that the extreme right did this while not reporting the far more obvious and likely explanation that Islamic supremacist graffiti was written by Islamists.
Alisa – our posts crossed.
Yes, I see. They shouldn’t have put forward the unfounded allegation that extreme right wingers might be responsible. No story would have been better.
Well, islamofascism IS about as far right as you can go, putting women barefoot and pregnant under burhkas, blowing up Buddha statues, hating on western music and movies, making the Amish seem progressive. That said, I doubt that idiot meant it in this way.
But it’s obvious that the graffito was written by someone from the Right – no misspelled words!
Dennis Fletcher, chairman of East Staffordshire Racial Equality Council, said he suspected someone from the far right was responsible.
He said: “My reaction is one of horror. Just two nights ago at our general committee meeting we were talking about the harmony between communities in the borough.
“I suspect members of the far right have done this to stir things up and there are generally very good inter-cultural relations in East Staffordshire.
Hmm, well in the words of Mandy Rice Davies…
He would say that wouldn’t he?
I suspect that given the swiftness of the Graffitti being removed, the Council knows very well that fundamentalist Islamists did this.
BNP types are not so subtle as to go for the double bluff, they just spray paint Mosques and Synagogues with Swastikas.
I was puzzled by the collective outrage over this story, until I realized that I’m looking at this from a different perspective. I used to live in Burton, and have lived in or been associated with Leek and Ashbourne. All three towns (as well as others) have their local paper provided from the same parent company. That company’s only objective is to fill enough space round the adverts, preferably with pictures of local people, to sell sufficient newspapers to make a profit. Journalism has nothing to do with what they put out, unless your definition of journalism is ‘typing in columns’. The copy will have been written by someone who has never done genuine reporting in his life, but is trying to use big words and breathless accusation just like he thinks the ‘real men’ on Fleet St do. To include this newspaper in the ‘MSM’ is to broaden the definition to include anyone who has a wordprocessor and at least one opposable thumb (makes it easier to hold the phone while you take down ad copy).
In short (too late!) this is a non-story in a non-newspaper.
I’m curious, PaulH; did this non-reporter writing this non-story in this non-newspaper also script that little bit of insanity coming out of the chairman of the East Staffordshire Racial Equality Council’s mouth (as if you could expect something lucid coming from a man who’d even want such a position)?
See, my reading is that it isn’t so much the paper that manipulated the main picture. It’s the local government. The Burton Mail accurately reported what the local government wants the story to be. Maybe a better news outlet wouldn’t have gone along with the cover-up, but somehow I doubt that.
What does the quality of the local paper have to do with Denis Fletcher trying to point fingers at anybody except the logical suspects, in the name of race relations? And the rest of the various entities doing their best to hush things up?
Mike,
I don’t know from whence you hail, but knowing the Amish as I do, they don’t deserve to be lumped in with islamofascists-after all, they give each child the option of living like the secular, an option most of them don’t take for a reason….
I’m going to make a wild-ass guess and say that this was a Moby, not an actual Islamist. The phrasing seems off. Islamists don’t talk about “dominating” the world, generally. They talk about spreading the true religion and such. It comes out to the same thing, of course, but this reads more like a warning of what will happen unless good British fascists man the barricades.
Also, the choice of target. An Islamist would be more likely to go after a religious structure, or else a purveyor of godless materialism like a booze shop.
It would help if we could get the end of the sentence, of course. The reference to OBL also seems out of place, since he is not trying to become Khalif; he swore allegiance to Mullah Omar, so an Islamist would not likely invoke him when discussing world domination.
I am inclined to agree it was a false flag: the addition of the name Osama is intended to add to the irritation.
Even for islamofascists the structure of it makes no sense.
And for those worrying about local newspapers and investigative journalism, the local rag never was about finding any sort of truth, and most journalists I came across in that line were not very bright and had no worldly wisdom. In turn this explains why they all want to work at the Grauniad or Al-Beeb and make pompous and worthy statements about AGW and other important issues that populate their conversations with like-minded friends.
You have a point, Mastiff, but the point of the post still stands, regardless, since neither the local gov., nor the paper know any of this for a fact.
In the interests of combating racism, Dennis Fletcher assumes (without any evidence whatever) that white people are to blame.
@MattP – I’m not sure it’s reflecting what the local govt. wants it to be, as the local govt. (in the piece) just said it was vandalism, they’re opposed to vandalism, and they removed it quickly. Nothing too controversial there. And while ESREC has some ties to the local govt., it does to 23 other bodies as well, so I’m not sure that makes it a mouthpiece for the council. It could be, of course, but in the spirit of not making baseless accusations I couldn’t support that.
I think the key here is the statement from the OP: “The Burton Mail would like you to think that what was removed in the manipulation was swear words or something like that.”
No, The Burton Mail would like you to buy their paper. That’s it. If lurid speculation does that, so be it. If reports from the WI achieve that, then that’s what they’ll report.
PaulH: but if the purely commercial motive was the only one behind the Mail’s decision, they could have just as well blamed Muslims, or not have blamed anyone and just reported the incident, it being newsworthy in itself, without any accusations attached. Why, of all three possible angles, did they choose the ‘extreme right-wing’ one?
@Alisa – because it was easy; why else would they pick it? To incite 65,000 Burtonians to rise up against the right as part of the global MSM-pseudo-crypto-neo-fascistic conspiracy? The reporter saw a way to fill some column inches. Either he got fed the quote directly, or he saw something about racism and called ‘the racism people’ and wrote down whatever they said. That’s sloppy reporting, and the ESREC people are on this evidence morons, but I don’t see that it’s more than that – Hanlon’s Razor isn’t always true, but it’s always a good place to start.
PaulH:
Right. But how is this different from the ‘big-time’ MSM?
@Alisa – I guess you have a choice of two options:
1. The more skilled journalists gravitate to the ‘big-time’ MSM, because of greater rewards, higher ideals, etc. The reflection of those higher ideals is more journalistic integrity, plus the resources to back that up.
2. The MSM’s goal is to support the leftist hegemony through the manipulation of truth to protect key players and blind the populace.
It doesn’t really matter which you choose; either way The Burton Mail is so far away from the MSM that it’s not even playing the same game.
Mastiff & Watcher, I don’t rule out at all the possibility of a false flag being flown by far right extremists. However the phrase “Islam will dominate the world” has been used very publicly by at least one Islamist. On this link to Snopes.com scroll down to the very bottom of the page where it shows a picture of a brown-skinned man at a protest (probably in Luton, according to Snopes) holding a placard saying “Islam will dominate the world.” I vaguely remember noting this at the time.
PaulH: actually I happen to disagree on both points:
Yes, but skilled at what exactly? I am not sure you and I would give the same answer. There’s no argument on the ‘rewards’ part, but as to ‘ideals, again, it begs the question: what are these ideals?
Again, no argument on the ‘resources’ part, but are you really saying that there is more journalistic integrity in national papers than in local ones? Sorry, but there is too much evidence to the contrary.
I am definitely with Hanlon on this one, although I’d paraphrase him slightly and substitute ‘malice’ with ‘conspiracy’, as it better describes the picture as I see it*. The simple truth is that the majority of today’s journalists went through an education system that is heavily slanted leftwards (see ‘ideals’ above, *and this also addresses the stupidity part of Hanlon’s razor). People with similar world view tend to behave similarly in certain situations. Add to this the herd mentality to which all humans are prone, and there really is no need for actual conspiracy.
Alisa – I’m a little puzzled. Are you saying that journalists don’t want to work in the big leagues to become better journalists (whatever better might mean), and they don’t want to do it to maintain or overthrow the existing world order? If it’s neither of those, or somewhere in between, then why do they do it? They needed a way to earn money and they’d picked up some shorthand already, so they became journos?
In the meantime, to answer your direct questions: Journalists who are skilled are good at telling a story that reflects some aspect of the truth (because no story worth reading can ever reflect the whole truth). Their ideals are to tell bigger stories to more people. As an addendum, they all fail, but that’s the way it goes with ideals.
And yes, there is more journalistic integrity in national papers than local ones. That’s no reflection on the individuals (I vaguely know a reporter on one of the Burton Mail’s sister papers, and he always seemed a decent enough chap), but a simple reflection of reality. Local papers don’t do journalism, therefore they can’t show journalistic integrity. The Independent (not a paper I’m a particularly fan of, btw, but it will do as an example) does journalism, hence it can show journalistic integrity. It can also fail to show it, off course, and I’m sure it often does so.
To back this up slightly, in the 10 years I read our local paper in Leek (a pretty typical local paper) I don’t recall ever seeing an instance of what I’d consider journalism, which centers on the idea of investigation. Stuff happened, they summarized the details, put in some ‘he said-she said’ stuff if applicable, and added a photo where possible. At no point were dots joined to tell me something I couldn’t have found out by spending the evening in a couple of strategically chosen pubs. That’s no great criticism of the paper; local people wanted to buy a paper that told them who’d crashed their car, not whether the council was concealing figures showing that the net present value of school improvements was 2% below reported numbers. Would that they did.
OK Paul, I see your general point, and I don’t think that I disagree with it all that much*. But I don’t think much of it makes much difference on the point of the post above (we both have a bit digressed from it). The original point was that that particular report was biased in a very clear direction, and AFAICS this bias has nothing to do with the prominence or size of the paper in question.
I would guess that in the beginning they go into the field for all the right reasons, just like many people in many other fields (think lawyers, teachers, even politicians). But you would surely agree that things very often change along the way, and very often not for the better. And the fact that the particular ideology into which most journos are indoctrinated is not conducive to those ‘right reasons’ cannot be completely dismissed out of hand. As to upgrading to the ‘big league’, you forgot the great importance of the prestige factor, which is not unique to this particular field either.
“The graffiti on its own will do harm to race relations.”
Islam is a race? I did not know that…
The words were a direct quote from Osama Bin Laden.
This would be bad enough if Bin Laden and his followers were like the Christians (and there have been many over the centuries) who betray the life and teachings of Jesus by using the methods of persecution.
However, there is an important added factor here – the life and teachings of Mohammed.
All the attacks on Robert Spenser and other “extreme Jews” (the attack is from “Time” magazine – which ignores the fact that many scholars who argue that the life and teachings of Mohammed are evil are NOT Jews – “extreme” or otherwise) does not refute their specfic charges.
Remember all Muslims (Sunni or Shia – and of all sub factions) claim to take the life of Mohammed as a guide. and claim to take the teachings he supposedly took from divine sources as a guide also.
If Mohammed led an evil life (not before he became a religious leader – but after he became a religious leader) and the teachings he spread contain much evil – then how is peaceful coexistance in the towns and cities of Europe (and elsewhere) possible in the long term?
“But most Muslims are not very religious” is not an adequate reply. Islamic populations have a history of returning to the roots of their faith – often with suddenly, with little warning.
It is like living next to an unexploded bomb waiting for it to go off.
Of course a strong culture need have little fear of the above.
The newcommers would be converted to Christianity (or whatever the main faith of the strong culture was).
But most of the West is no longer a strong culture – to put it mildly.
When Osama Bin Laden said that in a contest between a strong horse and a weak horse people will (in the end) support the strong horse, he did not mean (at least in the early stages) “strong” in the sense of having lots of jet fighters and tanks. He means “strong” as in belief.
He knew his own Muslim followers were strong in belief – and he knew that most Westerners were weak (if not nonexistant) in belief.
So, in the end, there could only be one outcome to the struggle.
“We should not convert the Muslims to Christianity – we should convert them to athiesm”.
Well the athiesm of the ruling class of the dying West (the athiesm of Philip Pullman, Richard Dawkins …… and the academic and media classes, indeed even of the “mainline” “religious leaders”) is not very impressive – a lot of nonsense talk about “social justice” and what not.
However, I admit that the athiesm of the followers of Ayn Rand is impressive – (although I do not share it), an inspiring vision of life.
However, in Britain I see no effort being made to convert the Muslims to Randian Objectivism. Any more than I see any effort to convert the Muslims to Christianity. Indeed Rowen Williams would be horrified by any major effort to win souls for Christ – although “in a very real sense” Dr Williams believes in God (a “modern interpreation” of “God” of course). It is all to do with more government spending and regulations and ….. so on.
Islam has its own “social teaching”, but it also has a strong faith out to claim souls and political power. A faith that people like Rowen Williams (and he is typical of the “Christian” establishment in the dying West) can not begin to understand.
So they try and cover everything up – like the good leading citizens of Burton and the local newspaper.