“Researchers have been told to refer all media queries to Ottawa. The media office then asks reporters to submit their questions in writing. Sources say researchers are then asked to respond in writing to the media office, which then sends the answers to senior management for approval. If a researcher is eventually cleared to do an interview, he or she is instructed to stick to the ‘approved lines.’
“. . .The one area exempted from having to go through head office is the weather service, “due to volume and technical nature of inquiries.”
The woman with the righteous gob on her is Wafa Sultan, a psychiatrist of Syrian origin who lives now in Los Angeles, and is a naturalised US citizen. May I live to see the day when Dr Sultan and others like her can speak thus while sitting in a TV studio in Riyadh.
I strongly favour homicidal fanatics being caught, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for long periods. So do most residents of Sparkbrook and Sparkhill, districts of Birmingham that I used to represent in parliament. But I fear that the events of last week - arrests without charge and off-the-record briefings about abduction and decapitation - will make them less enthusiastic about seeing all forms of extremism stamped out. Press has combined with police to make them feel that the whole Islamic community is under suspicion. And they resent it. Although very few of them will ever feel any sympathy for suicide bombers, their alienation from the forces of law and order creates a hinterland of sorts. The terrorists will shelter in the emotional comfort that comes from seeing the gulf widened between Muslims and the criminal justice system.
Note that the “West Midlands police held a public relations exercise in the area, distributing thousands of leaflets reassuring Muslims that they were not targeting communities or faiths, but suspected criminals”.
I have met with the family of one of the suspects - whom I know [There’s a surprise]. We all believe firmly that his innocence will manifest itself in due course.
Iraq-style beheadings, with hostages dressed in Guantánamo-style orange suits, may have been planned on British soil - if we are to believe the reports. It is after seeing images of the British hostage in Iraq, Norman Kember, that I recalled my own time in an orange suit and pleaded for his life to be spared and for his release. The irony is that one of the men now held by the police in Coventry police station is the same man who encouraged me to make the plea.
