Islamic Party Of Britain
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Media Poison and How It Indictrinates Us
by Alexander Baron A while ago I was watching a
"thriller" on TV. The name of the film isn't important. The subject was the host
of a crime show, a bit like the popular BBC “Crimewatch” programme. Every week
the show would re-enact crimes in the hope of bringing the perpetrators to
justice. During this particular season there was a
serial killer on the loose. We saw in the film his handiwork. He picked up a
woman, who was not a prostitute but what might be described as a good time girl,
and the two of them walked down a dark alleyway where she would quite likely
have had sex with him willingly. He though had other
ideas; he stabbed her in the stomach, and cut her eye out as a "trophy".
It was the task of the crime show
host to re-enact such crimes, and the serial killer made him a big star. Then
the killings stopped, and his fame began to evaporate, so in order to boost his
show's ratings, he took up where the anonymous killer had left off, and started
killing innocent women at
random. I don't know how the film ended,
because at this point I switched off. It had taken me this long to realise that
this was not my idea of entertainment. Who in his right mind would want to watch
a film about a psychopath who lures totally innocent women down dark alleyways,
murders them, then mutilates them in such
an horrific fashion? If I hadn't been hardened by watching such "thrillers" from
my teens I would surely have switched off sooner, but it is frightening how
quickly all of us become hardened to this sort of senseless brutality, sadism
and inhumanity. It is frightening too that a large
percentage of the population of the Western world considers this sort of garbage
to be entertainment. It is even more frightening that by presenting such
horrific crimes in a Gothic or almost a romantic fashion, that some people are
indeed "inspired" to follow in the footsteps of fiends
who snuff out the lives of innocent men, women and children just for kicks.
The recently convicted Brixton,
Brick Lane and Soho bomber, David Copeland, has been widely described as a Nazi
and a White Supremacist. Copeland himself said he wanted to start a race war.
However, it is clear from his own pronouncements that he didn't really
understand politics. One of the senior police officers
responsible for Copeland's arrest summed up his real motive in a nutshell: he
wanted his fifteen minutes of fame. A film that depicts the murders of
innocent people is not necessarily a bad thing. In most such films the bad guy
is caught, symbolising the triumph of good over evil, if nothing else. Some such
films can even be didactic, or useful social documentaries, monuments to the
victims, or warnings to us that serial killers and mass murderers such as Pohl
Pot and other tyrants are ordinary men like us, and that absolute power makes
tyrants of everyone. But far too often, films of this nature degrade the human
spirit. They teach us that it is natural
for a woman to walk down a dark alleyway and have sex with a total stranger.
That "punch-ups" and car crashes can be fun. That murder can be a form of
entertainment, and that the entertainment content of a film is to be measured by
the "body count". Even those films in which the bad
guys are vanquished are often disguised triumphs of evil over good. In the 1970s
in particular there was an entire genre of films in which criminal procedure was
depicted as being a mere technicality standing in the way of bringing obviously
guilty and sadistic perpetrators to justice. In these
films – “Dirty Harry” and “Taxi Driver” are probably the most notorious - we see
maverick police officers torture suspects to extract confessions from them, and
in the case of “Taxi Driver”, a man on a mission sets out to rescue a young girl
who has beenentrapped in prostitution, and in
the process shoots dead her pimp and anyone else who stands in his way.
The message of such films is clear;
it's all right for the police, or for your local vigilante, to act as judge,
jury and executioner. Crime is perpetrated by evil men who can and should be
shot or disposed of in some other equally Draconian manner. And if only the
police had the power to "clean up the streets", life would be so much better for
the rest of us. The reality though is very
different. Although we each and every one of us has free will, some have more
free will than others, and crime and inhumanity are caused by deprivation and
other social evils as much as by wantonness. As Islam points out, when poverty
enters a city, theDevil is close
behind. "Cleaning up the streets" involves
far more than shooting dead suspected killers and torturing suspects in order to
obtain confessions. If the state abandons the rule of law, there remains only
tyranny. And we all suffer. Although murderers and rapists must be brought to
book and made to pay for their evil deeds, the
majority of people - men and women - who end up serving "hard time" are not
inherently evil and can be rehabilitated if they can be removed from the vicious
circle of prison, offending, homelessness, unemployment, drug abuse, etc.
In the film “Taxi Driver”, the
"hero" was little better and maybe worse than the pimp he shot; earlier in the
film he plotted the assassination of a politician, not because he considered
this man to be evil - the Senator was actually a good guy - but because like
David Copeland and sundry others, he wanted his fifteen
minutes of fame. This is not a plea for censorship,
or even for self-censorship. Censorship of any kind is the thin edge of the
wedge, and once it is accepted in principle it is quietly extended into more and
more areas and more and more subjects until no one may unbutton his lip without
the express permission of the state. There can
be no doubt though that just as we are influenced by news and other reports, so
too are we influenced by the films and other fictionalised dramatisations we
watch. In some cases, particularly those of the young and vulnerable, this can
have drastic consequences - the Columbine High
School massacre, for example. We should always think twice before
watching a film in which murder and inhumanity are portrayed as run of the mill,
where the entertainment value of a film is supposedly enhanced by the body
count, or films in which entire groups of people are stereotyped, and perhaps
most dangerous of all, where the forces of law and order adopt the morality of
the outlaws they are trying to bring to book. When the ends are used to justify
the means, evil always triumphs.
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