More bullying? Surely some mistake?

I had started to type up a quick response yesterday to the further bullying of Aisha Amzi by the Mail in their article 'Veil girl's father may have met 7/7 bomber'. In it, I would have said much the same as I did in 'Just when you thought there was no lower to sink' about how the links are only alleged and very tenuous indeed, and pointed out the need for the Mail to deny the very thing it implies with the article because it really does have nothing. There would have been a reference to someone dancing naked on a table with a flower sticking out of their bum as well, so you've lost out there.

I thought the article sounded a bit fishy, though. To go, in the space of a couple of days, from a gingerly asserted possibility halfway through the article (which was primarily about another bomber) that Shehzad Tanweer might have possibly perhaps maybe visited the Markazi mosque to an assertion that it has been widely reported that he attended the seminary seemed a bit of a leap for me. Especially as the seminary is primarily for 12-16 year-olds (although most stay on and it's not unknown for pupils to return). So I thought I'd check a little bit into this claim:

His attendance at the seminary has never been confirmed, but it has been reported many times since the July 7 attacks and has never been denied.

thinking I might find that it had only been reported many times on hate sites, or by the sort of professional Islamophobe like Melanie Phillips or Daniel Pipes that I could scoff at, but not much else. I was also prepared to be proved wrong, and find out that it was all over the place that Tanweer had attended the seminary but I'd just missed it. I wasn't expecting to find little but tumbleweeds.

All I could find after hours of searches for possible combinations of relevant words was one reference from the Times, which appeared one day before the one in the Mail, in an article called, 'How bombers' town is turning into an enclave for Muslims'. The article has one offhand statement that Tanweer attended the seminary, without any reference to a source, or mentions of the claim being widely reported.

What I did find though, were a whole load of references to Tanweer attending a seminary in Pakistan called the Markaz-e-Dawa seminary. Now, I can't help thinking - Markazi and Markaz-e sound pretty similar. Is it possible that there has been some mistake here? Has the Times reporter confused the two seminaries and included the statement without checking, and the Mail based their article on what they read without checking? This sort of thing is not unheard of.

Back in 2003, the Telegraph reported that a school in Tower Hamlets had banned hot-cross buns from its Easter menu, and suggested that they'd been replaced with naan bread. The article even included a picture of some schoolkids tucking into some good, old fashioned hot-cross buns. The trouble was, once the story was investigated further, it turned out to be completely false. The council involved stated that they'd never actually served hot-cross buns at Easter, so the idea that they'd been banned was totally specious. Who knows where they got the naan bread idea from. The picture had been achieved by the photographer nipping up the road to buy some from a bakery.

By the time this was discovered, the story had been covered by other papers and columnists, reported as true. These papers, as well as the Telegraph, had to issue apologies retracting the story, but it had already taken its place in the great 'PC gone mad' mythology, along with the idea that nobody's allowed to ask for black coffee and that manholes have to be called 'person-holes'.

You can still read the story on the Telegraph website, and there's no mention on the page that it has been retracted, no mention that it wasn't true, and no link to the apology, which you can only see on the site if you know where to look, or open one of the search results for 'hot cross buns' that doesn't actually mention hot cross buns until you click the link.

The Daily Mail still reported this story as true earlier this year - even though it was proven false and retracted three years ago.

And let's not forget that only a few days ago, the Mail included a column by Melanie Phillips that repeated a completely incorrect story from the Sun. You can read more about the Sun story at Ministry of Truth, Pickled Politics, Clive Davis and Obsolete.

So, this sort of thing does happen. Something gets misreported somewhere, the shonky report gets picked up and reported in other places and it becomes accepted wisdom that it's true. Except it's not. It'd be pretty bad if this story became part of the accepted history, especially as it seems to have become a stick to bash Aisha Amzi with.

I have emailed the home news editor at the Times and the news editor at the Mail to ask for references and point out I think there might have been a mistake, but I'm not holding my breath. I kind of hope they do get back to me and prove there hasn't been a mistake - because it won't exactly speak very well for the country's press or the current anti-Muslim climate if there has. If anyone stumbles across this (and one or two people have stumbled across the blog, so there) and does have some other references, I'd like to ask that they stick them in the comments so I can have a look at them.

If I'm wrong, I'll stick a correction at the bottom of this post, so nobody's in any doubt I've made a mistake.

Just when you thought there was no lower to sink . . .

You can trust our friends at the Mail to do just that for us. While their partners in bigotry across at the Express are urging the UK follow the lead of some Arab countries in what can only be a surreal about face - the Mail is busy alleging connections between Aishah Azmi and terrorists.

In 'Veil teacher link to 7/7 bomber', the Mail goes to extraordinary lengths to invent a link between Aisha Azmi and one of the 7/7 bombers, and then, within the very same article, denies the very link it has set up. Words almost fail me.

See, apparently, the bomber 'is said to have' attended the same 3,000 person capacity mosque that Ms Amzi's family worships at, and has a school attached that her father was headmaster of. That's it. That's the extent of the link. It'd almost be weirder if two or three Muslims from the same area hadn't at some point visited the largest mosque in the area. The Mail knows this 'link' is nothing but bullshit, so it covers its arse from being sued to Kingdom Come by saying:

However, there is no suggestion that Miss Azmi or anyone in her family have any connection with terrorism. [...]

As a woman, Miss Azmi is more likely to pray at home than attend the mosque, although it does have a room reserved for females.

But this doesn't make things alright. Not by a long shot. Even though the paper says there's no link between Ms Azmi and terrorism, it clearly wants its readers to infer one - otherwise why bother printing this story? Without the implication of this kind of link, what has the paper got? Why say she played a major role there when it was her father who did, and she might have never even been there? Two or three Muslims from the same area might have visited the largest mosque in the area. That's all it's got. In short, it's got nothing. A non-story. The only thing that makes the thing worth printing is the implication of a connection between Ms Amzi and terrorism. That's why it's there, and that's why the headline mentions the link between her and the bomber.

This is the lowest any paper could ever sink. There can be no lower. Question for John Reid: who's the bully now?

Daily Express headlines worth the paper they're written on?

The Express are a dab-hand at producing headlines that bear a very limited relation to reality. They famously ran the headline 'Bombers are all spongeing Asylum Seekers' after the failed bombings of July 21 last year - even though the identity of only two of the four bombers were known, and neither were asylum seekers. They got away with that, too. Today's headline (left) is a fine example.

The important word in that headline is the word 'costs', especially as it follows the word 'loses'. It gives the impression tha the case has been lost and has cost £250,000. But this impression is entirely false, as the article itself reveals:

Earlier this year, her lawyers battled with counsel for her
employer, Kirklees Council, in a five-day hearing. The total costs for legal bills so far could top £50,000. [...]

The lengthy hearings and appeals that would follow could easily cost £50,000, a bill that would be matched if she were to be granted permission to go to the House of Lords. [...]

"If she goes all the way to the European Court then the total costs in this case could be very large, it would not be unreasonable to say £250,000," said employment lawyer Clive Howard. [Emphases all mine]

So, the case hasn't cost £250,000 - it just might. Perhaps. Maybe. In the future. If she does something else, and it costs as much as possible. And you'd only find that out if you read past the headline and on to the next page of the report, which you wouldn't do if you were just walking past the newspaper rack. More people do that than actually buy the paper or read it - so the Express has managed to create a false impression in the minds of the majority of people who read this headline. Hurrah for honesty!

There's also no way to see how Clive Howard came up with his figure, as the numbers the paper mentions only add up to £150,000. Interestingly, in the Guardian's coverage of this case, the figure for legal aid so far is estimated as £10,000 - so the Express' figure 'could' be five times as high as the actual figure.

To go with the false impression created by the dishonest reporting of figures, we get to see some nice Express prejudice. 'Veil case teacher [sic] costs us £250,000'. The veil case teaching assistant is British, was born in Britain and pays her taxes. So why not just say 'costs £250,000'? (Adise from it being a dishonest way to use figures?) Because without that 'us' qualifier, you can't imply that she's one of them and not one of us.

The treatment of this case, both in the press and by politicians, has been nothing short of appaling. I'd need to know far more about the actual specifics of the case before I made up my mind about whether or not Mrs Azmi would be able to do her job while wearing a veil from a practical perspective, but I do know that it's dead wrong for Government Ministers to comment on ongoing cases, and for papers to whip those comments up into a frenzy of criticism and attack against a group of people - and to carry on doing the same after the woman has lost the case by, say, exaggerating figures on their front page headlines. More on this at Bartlett's Bizarre Bazaar - which mentions me! Which is nice - but you should read it because it's good.