I’ve been picturing homes all over Britain, switching on the telly or the radio and hearing about the missing girl from Bristol who has probably run away to be a ‘Jihadi bride.’
Straight on the back of a real missing British girl, whose parents really did make a moving, dignified, but alas futile appeal for her return, the BBC’s treatment of the Somali family’s self-proclaimed “heart-breaking’ appeal for their runaway daughter gave implied moral equivalence to the two, which many people deem highly offensive.
Judging by some of the comments on blogs and the online press, like, for example, the Independent, people all over the country are baffled at the way this story is being framed by the BBC.
I’m picturing thousands of living rooms from Land’s End to John O’Groats with people inside going “WTF?” in unison.
The only ones who think it’s perfectly credible that a “Bristol” family could wake up one day to find your headscarf-clad 15 year-old has managed to pick up her passport, book a plane, get, somehow, to Istanbul, no doubt for the sole purpose of deliberately offering herself to some brainwashed savage, all without your knowledge, or your slightest prescience, suspicion or malice aforethought, must be the BBC.
The BBC must be the only ones who assume that the public is as concerned for Yusra’s self-inflicted predicament as they were for Alice Gross, whose murder appears to have been at the hands of a deranged previously convicted offender who shouldn’t have been allowed here in the first place.
The mind boggles.
The BBC likes to insist that there are the merest, tiniest handful of naughty imams who "radicalize" the Tiny Minority™ with whom they somehow mysteriously come into contact. So how did this girl get "radicalized"? Did she seek out such a rara avis on her own? Surely, if we're to believe the BBC, there can't be one in her own family mosque, because otherwise her parents would know how it happened. Nor can there be a "radical" imam in the one down the road, or any place where your average ordinary Mohammedan gathers for prayers on a Friday. So how did this happen? I forget how many British residents or citizens have supposedly gone to join the ultra-violence. Did they all go to the same prayer meeting? Are they all from the same couple of towns?
ReplyDelete"It may have been online."
The BBC can only play this innocent game for so long.