Alleged Snow

Further to my 'Nothing Happened' post of the other day, I have to report further developments.

Well, I was promised this (...but in Lancashire):

but what I got was this:

Various fence panels have been reduced to smithereens and I am worried about the actual structure of my home which is old and splitting apart, wall from wall.

It did sprinkle vehemently on Thursday for about 3 minutes 20 seconds but there was no thick blanket of crisp white snow with foxes gamboling in't and no robins perch'd on snow-topp'd logs.

The following snowless day, some of the men arrested in Birmingham last week for an alleged plot to "kidnap and kill a member of the British Armed Forces" were charged after all and police called for the press to ignore alleged Home Office briefings.

A worrying trend, however, is that it does seem that as long as one prefixes everything with 'alleged', one can comment on the wildest speculations as if they were fact.

It was heartening to see the audience on Question Time the other night being utterly fair on the question of whether Britain is 'a police state for Muslims' with everyone, black, white, brown, pink and yellow, agreeing that the police have a job to do but worrying about the effect on the larger Muslim population of the ideas and actions of an extreme few and the way this is 'hyped up' in the media. These sentiments were expressed by a mixed audience. A white lady (presumably, but not necessarily, non-muslim) who identified herself as a chair of governors at a mixed school in Birmingham stated that the non-muslim children were worried for and writing prayers for the muslim children who were anxious that their parents would be taken away in the night. Upsetting all round.

The accusation that Britain is a police state for Muslims has been widely condemned. The general feeling is that one would not be able to say that out loud on prime time BBC telly if 'twere. I saw David Cameron or someone on the news pointing out that there is due legal process in this country which Abu Bakr (the man who made the accusation) had not been denied demonstrated by the fact that he had been released without charge.

Arresting people, questioning them and subsequently releasing them is part of normal police procedure. Remember the Suffolk murders just before Christmas. A man was arrested and later released and there was also intense media comment during that investigation. It was reported last week in a tiny corner of The Independent that a man wrongly identified as a suspect for the murders was found dead in his home. "Gareth Roberts, 48, was pictured on the front page of the Daily Mail and named as Steve Wright, who was eventually charged with the murders." He had apparently been in a photograph 20 years earlier with the real suspect and the Mail had used the wrong part of the photo.

And me, law-abiding citizen No. 1, was once stopped as I walked through Preston town centre on my way home from work minding my own business. I was surrounded by several policemen and detained for about fifteen minutes there in the street in full view of everyone. They searched my bag (OMG! they saw my sanitary products) and my smelly sandwich box, in a plastic bag which also contained an umbrella, and explained that another policeman was on his way to 'identify me'. Ergh? A police car screeched to a halt and two more men jumped out all cop-styley which was appropriate as they were. One of them paced around me like a lion on the prowl and looked me up and down and round and round, muttering into his walkie-talkie and finally declared "No, its not her." They spoke some words to me which I think were an apology but I was too terrified to absorb. It was the day before my eighteenth birthday and I was envisioning having my party behind bars. Apparently, I had 'answered the description of' someone they were pursuing across Preston who had tried to defraud Morrisons supermarket out of a petty sum of money by means of a dubious cheque. It wasn't me, I was free to go. But I did feel my lunchbox had been invaded.

It could have been worse. I could've, had the circumstances of the crime been different, been shot for carrying offensive tupperware in a plastic bag.

Similarly, accidental shootings of innocent people during the business of law enforcement happen outside of the Muslim community. Remember the farcical-if- it-weren't-so-sad case of the man coming out of a pub carrying a wooden coffee table leg in a plastic bag who was shot dead by police-someone had called the police to report an Irishman with a gun wrapped in a bag. He was in fact Scottish. And there are other cases too. So away with the myth that this is especial treatment reserved for Muslims.

As for Muslims being 'persecuted' in some way this article identifies the essence of the problem for the police -"How do you separate the racial (sic) component from the criminal threat? The terrorists exist. They happen to be Muslim. They happen to use an extreme brand of Islamic thinking to justify their actions. The terrorists have hijacked and sullied the name of Islam for their purposes. Is it any wonder that the civil liberties of Muslims have been among the first casualties?"

Many people, including friends of mine of Irish descent, are drawing parallels with their experience during the IRA period.

On the 'police state' question the article answers "Has Britain become a police state for Muslims? No, nowhere near. Just ask anyone who has lived in a real police state. Ask any mother whose son was taken in the middle of the night and disappeared without a trace. Ask any political prisoner who has been interrogated and tortured just for questioning the status quo. Ask any ordinary citizen who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and found himself in jail for years on end without trial, without any recourse to justice. That is living in a police state, not what is happening to Muslims in Britain today."

And what did I do while all this seriousness was in actual fact happening and since the roads weren't covered in snow and it was in fact possible to make unnecessary journeys? Why, I went shopping for pretty pens of course....


Read all about it...
A very sober and measured article regarding the claim that Britain is a 'police state for Muslims'. Required reading for anyone about to contribute to the topic.