Marketing Terrorism for Terrorists

We’ve all recently witnessed the shocking, savage murder on the streets of Woolwich of our brave soldier, Drummer Lee Rigby. With technology as it is these days, it was inevitable that the images and words spoken would be broadcast across social media channels. To anyone who’s fully aware of social media and what happens there, this was no shock. What was a shock was the sheer enthusiasm and glee with which both the publish and broadcast media went about telling us.

First thing to bear in mind is that they were perfectly happy to show, what was then an un-identified body lying in the street following the attack. How this ultimately made the victim’s family feel, as they will inevitably have seen these images we may never know. Should the likes of the BBC have shown this footage whilst Lee remained unidentified? Personally, if that was my son, I’d have to say NO.

Then we have, for me, the most shocking action of the media, the broadcasting of the murderer covered in blood with a knife in his hand explaining to us all why he did it. He said he carried out the attack because British soldiers killed Muslims every day. He then came out with "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you." and “We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." All this is doing is giving terrorists the publicity they crave. Interestingly, if he’d said the word “fucking” in the middle of his rant the BBC would have bleeped that out in case it offended us !! And thats what wrong with us today !

The BBC then excelled themselves by allowing the radical Islamist preacher Mr Choudary to appear on Newsnight on Thursday.  Mr Choudary said Mr Adebolajo had made comments that "I think not many Muslims can disagree with", he was asked on several occasions by presenter Kirsty Wark whether he "abhorred" what had happened in Woolwich but instead he said he was "shocked" by what had happened. He also said: "One man killed in the street does not equate to the hundreds and thousands and millions, in fact, who've been slaughtered by the British and American foreign policy."

Yes we have free speech in the UK but that tends to be one way. You can say what you want providing you don't offend anyone, well Mr Choudary and the murderers both offend me and (I suspect) the British population in general considerably.

All of this 'free speech'  continues to give more and more free publicity to the radicalist cause.

Why Should We Allow It ?

Remember Margaret Thatcher's desire to starve terrorists of the "oxygen of publicity"?

Our former PM's remark was a precursor to the Tories' broadcasting ban in the late 1980s that prevented supporters of the Provisional IRA in Sinn Féin – or indeed loyalists – from talking freely on the UK's airwaves. The thinking behind this prohibition was that terrorist groups were exploiting the broadcasters, that the enemies of democracy were subverting the system by harnessing a key tenet of democracy – a free, open media.

Maybe we should be looking at imposing this again !!!