Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Paramilitary?

The BBC is scaremongering again, there was a demo outside Dewsbury Magistrates' Court to highlight the case of a young man charged under the Communications Act 2003. He'd written an offensive Facebook message about the deaths of six British soldiers in Afghanistan.
BBC.
Protesters gathered outside a court as a teenager was accused of posting an offensive Facebook message about the deaths of six British soldiers.
Azhar Ahmed, 19, of Fir Avenue, Ravensthorpe, appeared at Dewsbury Magistrates' Court charged under the Communications Act 2003.
A racially-aggravated public order charge was withdrawn at the hearing and Mr Ahmed denied the new charge.
He was bailed to appear before Huddersfield magistrates on 3 July.
There was a large police presence outside court as about 50 protesters staged a noisy demonstration when the defendant arrived and left.
Some of the protesters held placards - featuring the name of the paramilitary group Combined Ex-Forces - calling for those who insult British armed forces to be jailed.
Now, I know the term paramilitary generally means a group of citizens organized in a military fashion, especially to operate in place of or assist regular army troops. It can be used to describe terrorist organisations such as the IRA (and others) who are engaged in armed insurrection against a state. However for all CXF are well organised and ex military, I don't believe the term "paramilitary" could be used to describe them. They are like the EDL and other groups similar simply apolitical single issue protest groups. However as a scaremongering tactic to put a hint of "these guys are dangerous" onto innocent people, well the BBC seem to have decided that this is the path to go down. For pretty much the same reason they always tag "right wing" in front of the EDL, it seems the BBC in their wisdom have decided to tag paramilitary in front of CXF. If anything it's a compliment, as they have no real answers to the questions raised by CXF as do the government who refused to accept a petition from them.
If you want to know what the CXF have to say for themselves  you can read a statement at the Casuals blog.

Passionate and committed, yes, paramilitary? No.

Btw, I believe in freedom of speech, so Azhar Ahmed was entitled in my view to write what he did.
I also believe he has the freedom to take the consequences of his actions and it should not be in front of a judge...

2 annotations:

Anonymous said...

What irritated me more was the silly girl (the only comment broadcast) who moaned about the deaths of Afghanis in, erm, Afghanistan, and that this was just set up as a warning to them because they were muslim (ah, another professional victim in training).

While she might be correct in beleiving that some deaths are attributable to the Western armed forces, she obviously does not know that the population of Afghanistan would be living under far greater fear, and there would undoubtedly be many, many more deaths of the locals were the West not there.

RSP

James Higham said...

Beeb just doing it's job for Big Brother.