Only one thing can rescue us from this autumnal slough of despond. Bring on the kittens!
“oh shitshitshitshitshit…”
“2 of us under each paw, yeah, that should do it… hey! You two! Get a room!”
“Are you my mummy?”
Read more: Friday cat blogging
I alluded in my previous post to the preconceived ideas that the media has about brown-skinned people in general and Moslems and Islam in particular.
Not only does the media selectively use news items to construct their xenophobic narrative, but they also make up reality out of whole cloth to reinforce it. Witness Hollywood’s treatment of Arabs, as shown in this collection of videoclips, Planet Of The Arabs, from Jackie Shalloum via Sabbah’s Blog, courtesy of the always thought-provoking Brown Femipower :
It’s not really until you see all those clips back to back like that that you get the full impact of the continual anti-Arab propaganda put out by the movie industry. No wonder the wingnuts are the way they are if this is what they’re swallowing 24/7.
No doubt the directors, producers, scriptwriters etc who’re responsible for this out and out racism will say ‘Hey, it’s just entertainment, we’re just movie-makers’.
Uh-huh. Leni Reifenstahl was just a movie-maker too.
Read more: Media, Movies, Hollywood, Video, YouTube, Blogs, Racism, Islam, Moslems, Arabs
You may not have heard about it but a huge terrorist plot to bomb various UK locations and kill potentially thousands of innocent people was foiled recently, and the case heard in a lancashire court.
What, you didn’t hear about it? Why could that be, I wonder?
Lenin asked that very question of the BBC:
BBC on unreported fascist bomb factory. posted by lenin
I wrote to the BBC asking why they had not covered the story that bat020 drew attention to of the huge bomb factory discovered in the hands of far right activists, and I got the following reply:
Dear ______,
Thank you for your email about the court appearance at Penine Magistrates of two men accused of possessing chemical explosives. It is indeed interesting. Unfortunately BBC TV news didn’t know about the police find.
I would like to assure you the BBC takes very seriously its responsibility to report all issues fairly, accurately and impartially. This is as true of issues involving potential terror plots by former BNP activists or radical Islamists. The BBC has a long history of exposing the BNP and any past wrongdoing.
I have investigated how the story was missed. It appears a reporter from BBC Radio Lancashire investigated initial reports but the police “played it down”. Our regional televison centre in in Manchester found out about the story only after it was reported in the Colne Times. By this time it was several days old. On investigation they discovered that reporting restrictions were in place which severely curtailed what could be said by the media.
Two arrested men are due to appear at Blackburn Crown Court on October 23rd, BBC TV News will attend the hearing.
Thank you for alerting us to this story.
Best wishes
Debby Moyse
Assistant to the Head of BBC TV News
Police played it down, reporting restructions, we didn’t hear about it. The trouble is, the BBC’s excuses aren’t completely threadbare: in cases of ‘Islamic’ terrorism, they would be very quick to hear about it from the police and the government, and no amount of playing down would be involved. On the other hand, a story being several days old has not always prevented the BBC from covering it. Realistically, they could so easily have made a very big top news story about it, and chose not to. Whether this is because they take their cue from the police and the government in such matters is, of course, not for me to say (they do).
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Something similar happened in Holland & Belgium recently when a major infiltration of far-right would-be terrorists into the Dutch and Belgian militaries was unraveled. I had to get the report from Xinhua news, of all places.
Belgian police made two further arrests on Friday in connection with suspected terrorist plots, Belgian media reported.
The move came one day after 17 alleged right-wing extremists were detained at various locations across the country, 10 of whom soldiers. The 19 people are suspected of planning to carry out attacks to destabilize the state.
Three soldiers and three civilians remain in custody on Friday. Magistrates in the East-Flemish city of Dendermonde continued the questioning of the suspects late on Friday.
The main suspect is a 25-year old soldier thought to be the founder of the far-right group Blood, Soil, Honor and Loyalty. The group was in the news in 2004, when it organized a neo-Nazi gathering.
The man is alleged to have recruited people with extreme-right thoughts from within and outside the military. Most of the weapons seized were also found with him.
The judicial authorities had been watching the man and his accomplices for several years. The man was said to be in contact with the Dutch extreme-right organization Nationale Alliantie.
The public prosecution office decided on Thursday to carry out a series of house raids because the Belgian suspects allegedly started selling weapons.
Police found explosives and sophisticated warfare weapons and also a letter claiming a possible attack.
Though no evidence was found that the main suspect was planning a concrete attack, police have rarely encountered an extreme-right group so well organized and so heavily armed.
Police seized in total enough firearms to fill two police vehicles, bullet-proof vests, gas masks, ignition switches for mines, neo-Nazi symbols, marijuana and anabolic steroids. The Belgian army did not wish to react on the news.
Did you hear about it? Did you see any reports about the infiltration of NATO troops by fascist operatives? No, me neither, bar the small news item that alerted me to it in the first place.
Change the terms ‘far-right’ or ‘BNP’ to ‘Moslem’ or ‘Islamic’ in these stories and you can bet your sweet patootie it’d be all over the world’s media like a rash. Because the western media, particularly, have their terrorism narrative all worked out, and they’re not going to stray from their predecided story arc – it’s brown people, it’s strangers, evil Moslems, they’re all coming to kill us in our beds, let’s get them first and hurrah for western enlightenment.
Meanwhile the real danger in our midst, that of a resurgent and heavily armed European fascist movement with deep political and financial connections in the US and elsewhere, carries on recruiting and organising unabated, unacknowledged and unchallenged.
Read more: Europe, UK, Lancashire, Netherlands, Belgium, Fascism, BNP, Terrorism, BBC, News reporting, Media
Best pseudonym of the day (maybe even the year) too. From Ezra’s hit-piece on Christopher Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens Has Gone Mad:
Hitchens foresaw “a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate.”
That would be all the distilleries in the world beating the crap out of Mother Teresa.
Posted by: calling all toasters Oct 12, 2006 7:52:25 AM
Read more: Internet, Blogs, Bloggers, Pundits, Comments, Comment of the day, Character assassination, General Bitchery.
ATF doing real homework
While everyone else is distracted by by Republicans and their under-age sexual high-jinks, First Draft are keeping their eye on the corruption ball:
The Adults Are In Charge
Posted by Holden_C on Wednesday, October 11 @ 16:08:34 CDT (89 reads)
The man who stepped down recently as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ordered his staff to help with his nephew’s high school homework, wasting the agency’s time and resources and violating ethics rules, a Justice Department inquiry concluded Wednesday.
The nephew’s project — a documentary about the ATF that took 10 months to complete — was one of a half-dozen examples of lapses in judgment Carl J. Truscott committed before he resigned in August, according to the report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.
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Apparently up to 20 employees were detailed to help with the homework project. The nephew got an A. How nice for him. But that’s not all:
[…]
Fine opened the investigation after he and Special Counsel Scott J. Bloch received an anonymous letter dated Jan. 20, 2006.
It contended that Truscott had horribly mismanaged federal dollars in a variety of ways, including demanding a larger security detail than needed, making unnecessary upgrades to the new ATF headquarters building project, and taking expensive trips to London, New York City, Boston, and Ottawa on the agency’s bill. The letter also complained that Truscott created a hostile work environment by directing two staffers to serve lunch to him and his guests.
Ah, the entitled generation, don’t you just love them? They treat everyone, including senior civil servants, as their personal body-slaves (“But they deserve it! They have no trust funds, they only have their salaries – what a bunch of losers!”) and they use taxpayers’ funds as their own personal piggybank, blatantly and with no sense of shame.
Fuckers.
Read more: US Politics, Corruption, Nepotism, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, Investigations