This week, a British youth named Azhar Ahmed was found guilty of the crime of causing offence.
Following the massacre of Afghans by, according to the eye witnesses, a group of US soldiers, the young Bradford man in question did what we all do occasionally and wrote a stupid Facebook post lamenting the lack of coverage over Afghan deaths, he went on to suggest that soldiers should burn in hell.
As a veteran myself, his first point isn’t even controversial. Afghan lives are by and large irrelevant in the tallies we are given here at home. Most Afghan deaths are attributed, often without supporting facts, to the Taliban. Those who do so conveniently ignore the fact that the insurgency, virtually non-existent in the country before 20006, is a response to the occupation. A occupation, it must be said, increased partially to save face over the failure in Iraq. And as an atheist, I don’t waste my time over suggestions of hell.
Among the people who saw these offensive posts, the court heard, were family members of the six infantrymen killed earlier this year in Afghanistan in the biggest single fatal incident since an ageing RAF Nimrod spy plane crashed in 2006, killing all 14 servicemen on board.
Another person who saw these posts was Private Scott McHugh, who belonged to the same regiment as five of those killed. His responses manifested venom similar to Ahmed, the 20yr old who was convicted for his comments. Only unlike Ahzar Ahmed, who in a bizarre twist was reported to have been first arrested for racially motivated offences, McHugh’s comments were actually racist and loaded with old, familiar terms like Paki and Raghead.
It seems likely that McHugh, who served in the same unit as those killed, was like Ahmed, overcome with juvenile rage. It’s a terrible commentary on the effects of the ten years of war-induced Islamophobia to think that these two young Yorkshire men may have lived streets away from each other; one of Ahmed’s former schoolmates even knew some of the young British soldiers killed that day. A community broken? we might ask. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere there are casualties at home as well as abroad.
McHugh, by all accounts was not arrested. Neither for the comments he made regarding Ahmed’s foolish ranting’s, or for the older comments of his which it emerged he had posted just before he was due to deploy to Afghanistan. While Ahmed was wrong to make those statements, McHugh was going to war with those racist ideas.
Again and again double standards are emerging.
Jeremy Clarkson, that friend of liberty and would-be executioner of striking dinner-ladies has been repeatedly let off after racially-tinged commentary of such seriousness that a number of foreign embassies saw fit to complain to the BBC. Meanwhile, Frankie Boyle, a genuine satirist as well as critic of errant stupidity, is attacked for tweeting that the Afghan War is basically about ‘murdering shepherds’. Clarkson, an establishment golden boy as well as patron of that utterly sinister project known as Help for Heroes, gets nodded through while Boyle – who in this Afghan veteran’s opinion came up, perhaps unintentionally, with the best bit of political analysis on the occupation of Afghanistan in years – is shouted down.
Likewise, only a few weeks ago pint-swilling manly man William Hague was puffing out his chest and threatening to invade (single-handed?) the Ecuadorian embassy. Even now as embassies burn and diplomats barricade doors in fear of irate, ray-gun wielding Muslamics coming asking about the apparently Zionist-funded film denigrating their prophet, the US and UK acts indignant at the idea of such a violation of sovereignty.
Much the same could be said for David Cameron’s recent tax antics with regards to which private citizens tax-avoidance schemes are of public interest and which are not, no names mentioned.
Jimmy Carr.
