Can I be a martyr too please?

Moving away from the Express for a bit, which is a relief, it's over to the Mail for some typical Daily Mail fodder about how poor Christians are terribly persecuted in this country where Christianity is the national religion, its representatives get unelected positions in the second house, the head of state is also the head of a Chritian sect, where the Prime Minister has to be a certain kind of Christian and the national anthem is an extended Christian prayer.

The article is 'Porter sacked by hospital after he asks for 'multi-faith' prayer room crucifix be made visible'. Great image, that headline. You can just see the timid porter in his uniform, wringing a cap in his hands and looking at his shoes as he mumbles, 'mmblmm can we er mblmblm cross?' toward a forbidding looking woman behind a desk the size of a small car.
'What? Speak up man!' booms the woman.
'Umm...it's just...d'you think we can show the uh cross in th-'
'Whaaaaat? Uncover the cross? You're sacked, you insensitive little man. Don't you realise this is a multicultural society? Get out of my sight!'

The Mail are great at this sort of thing - that is reducing whatever someone the paper has sympathy for is supposed to have done to the most innocent, unassuming sounding thing possible when the reality is likely to be a bit different.

We see it every time some pretend martyr pops up whingeing that they're not allowed special treatment. It usually happens when they're not allowed to wear jewellery but Muslims are allowed to wear scarves. Except scarves aren't jewellery.

We've seen this before, with Nadia Ewedia, the BA employee who insisted on not only being allowed to wear a cross, but to wear a visible one. The papers were all over her, her sad put upon face became splashed across front pages and she even boasted support from a number of MPs. Guess what? Turns out she wasn't quite so innocent and hard done by, and BA had bent over backwards trying to accommodate her insufferable, god-bothering demands.

This story looks as though it's about a similar situation, as it later reveals:

Mr Protano, a Roman Catholic who has worked two years at the Royal Manchester Children's Hospital, Pendlebury, entered the room when three Muslims were using it - two patients and a doctor.

An argument broke out after he asked them to remove a cloth covering the crucifix and statue and to turn a picture of the Virgin Mary face up.

And:

Police quizzed him for four hours last month, on suspicion of religiously aggravated assault, but he was released without charge.

And a little later, in amongst a bit of testimony from a friend, we get:

They are saying he should not have gone into the prayer room and it is alleged he used racist language, which he totally refutes.

So instead of being sacked after he asked for the cross to be uncovered, it appears he was sacked after interrupting people who were using the room, and some sort of assault and the use of racist language has been alleged. Perhaps the headline should be changed. And I doubt he 'refutes' the claim, I suspect he just 'denies' it.

Later still in the article comes this:

The friend said Mr Protano went into the prayer room about six times a day to check that the statue and crucifix were not left covered because he felt could be upsetting for visiting Christian parents to find them covered up.

Six times a day? Are we to conclude that this sort of behaviour is normal?

One final bit of support for the guy comes in the second last paragraph, with:

The case has angered many hospital staff, who think he has been treated unfairly.

Many hospital staff. As the Express has demonstrated in the past so well, sometimes 'many' actually means 'none'.

There are currently four comments on the article, all supportive of the porter. This is my favourite:

I can see civil war breaking out in this country before too long. The politically correct extremists are creating the fertile grounds for this to happen. I don't hear the church making much of a fuss, because they too are scared or part of the extremists agenda for a total breakdown in society and war on our streets. Its not muslims (apart from the extremist muslims) that are to blame for this, and it's not the catholics, it's the poltically correct extremists that are creating the problems for us all.

- Bob, merseyside

Perhaps, Bob, nobody's making a fuss because the bloke sounds like a nutter who just might possibly have assaulted someone while throwing about racist language. It's now Political Correctness Gone Mad to suggest this sort of thing is unnacceptable.

And what does this article imply without saying? It comes out and says that the porter was sacked just for asking to uncover the cross, but by mentioning that he entered the chapel and glossing over the alleged racially aggravated assault, what is the article implying about Muslims? It implies that he walked into a room, asked the three Muslims, one of them a doctor, to uncover the cross, 'an argument broke out' and then the Muslims pretended he'd assaulted someone and threw around racist language.

In short, it paints the Muslims as crazed fanatics who start arguments and lie about racially motivated assaults that result in someone's sacking when that person merely asks them to do something. And it does that without actually stating they did. This is where the Mail is much better than the Express, in allowing its readers to draw their own conclusions from the heavily slanted evidence it gives them.