Where Is The Intelligence?

Take nothing at face value.

In the past few weeks we have seen some horrendous things happen worldwide.

During prayers on Friday, 15 March, there were concerted mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 50, and leaving another 50 injured.

On 18 April, rioting in Derry, Northern Ireland, resulted in 29-year-old writer and journalist Lyra McKee being shot dead by operatives of the New IRA.

On 21 April, Easter Sunday, concerted bombings of three churches in Sri Lanka, three bombings of luxury hotels in the capital, Colombo, and smaller explosions at a housing complex in the housing district of Dematagoda, and at a guest house in Dehiwala, killed 253 people, and injured 500.

On Friday, 26 April, Sri Lankan police attempted to raid a terror cell connected to the bombings, and the Islamist terrorists first returned fire, then set off explosives, killing 15, including six children.

On Saturday, 27 April, on the last day of Passover, a 19-year-old white, anti-Semitic man walked into the Chabab of Poway Synagogue in San Diego, USA, and opened fire with “an AR type weapon”, killing one woman, and wounding three others.

Now, at first glance, anyone can see that all of these incidents have one thing in common; religion.  But while religion must indeed be considered a factor in all of the above, to suggest that they were all because of religion is to attempt to present a false equivalence in my opinion.  There is something much deeper going on here.  A look around social media presents a hell of a lot of ignorance, and that is being perpetuated by a hell of a lot of people spreading hate-filled propaganda.  Sadly, there are far too many people willing to buy into that.

In the wake of the shooting of Lyra McKee, I saw posts of people glorifying Irish republican paramilitaries as some sort of heroes.  I even saw some trying to suggest that it was a false flag, some suggesting that the British armed forces actually shot her, and even some suggesting that the young journalist was actually a British or loyalist agent.  And had any of them actually known anything about Lyra McKee, they would have been aware that this young woman was a lesbian, which alone immediately would have seen her being vilified by the ultra-Protestants of the loyalist community, and she was an agnostic secular humanist who took neither side in the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland.  As a secular humanist myself, I had previously read and heard Lyra McKee, who was listed in Forbes “30 Under 30 in Media in Europe”, and I was left absolutely stunned and numbed by her brutal murder.  I first heard of Lyra in a TED talk she gave, “How uncomfortable conversations save lives”, in which she recounted her experience growing up a gay woman in Northern Ireland, he many fights with the Roman Catholic Church (she was brought up a Catholic – so much for the conspiracy theories), and of the prejudice she faced from all religions, including that in the USA.  She told in that talk how religion can actually be a positive voice against prejudice, but emphasised that it is religion, and those who follow religion, who have to change.  As a diehard, cynical atheist myself, that talk had a profound effect upon me, and I still find it hard to reconcile how the life of this wonderful young woman could be so senselessly snuffed out.

This article similarly aims to challenge perceptions.  It is an uncomfortable conversation, which may cause the reader to face some uncomfortable truths about themselves.  But in doing so, I don’t care whom I may offend.  If you are offended by my writings, then it may just be possible that you need to be offended.

Just as the killing of Lyra McKee brought out those with their own agendas, so did the other killings.  The Christchurch mosque shootings initially brought out some whom, without any evidence, automatically assumed and posted that it was possibly sectarian violence between opposing Islamic sects.  Then when the truth came out that it was Christian white supremacists, there were those (sometimes the same people) who played the No True Scotsman fallacy of saying they were “not true Christians”, and others who played “whataboutery” by pointing to atrocities against Christian churches, and trying to claim persecution and play the martyr.  Even among atheists, there were some still went on about Islam being inherently violent.  Anything but show some compassion and respect for the dead.

So it was when the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka took place, many were quick to jump upon it to vilify all Muslims.  Certainly, they Sri Lanka killings were indeed carried out by Islamist extremists, and I even predicted as much before it was confirmed, or before IS tried to claim responsibility.  But some of the same people claimed that this was an attack upon Christians, solely Christians, while ignoring the facts that a) the hotel bombings indiscriminately killed people without regard for their faith, and b) that at least one of the churches targeted was often frequented by Theravada Buddhists.  Recent years have seen a lot of conflict between Theravada Buddhists and Muslims in Sri Lanka, where actually it has been the Buddhists, believe it or not, who have been responsible for the murder of many Muslims.  But of course, those with an axe to grind were never going to admit to that; they merely saw Muslim extremist attacks upon churches, and were more than quick to paint that as exclusively Muslim persecution and slaughter of Christians.

Likewise, in the wake of the San Diego synagogue shooting, within two hours of the news hitting the Internet, I saw one comment, “Everyone’s sad when one Jew is killed but nobody’s saying anything about Israel’s massacre of Palestinians.”  Really.  Within two hours, someone immediately jumps the shark, and ties every single Jew on the face of the planet to the actions of the Likud regime in Israel.  No compassion for the dead woman, who bravely threw herself in front of the Rabbi to protect him, the wounded, or those psychologically scarred by the incident; only immediate condemnation of all Jews for the actions of Israel.  It disgusts me, but it does not at all surprise me.  It is a typical reaction that many seem incapable of differentiating between Jews around the world, and the state of Israel.  And sadly to say, a lot of this comes from the political left, right up to and including the UK Labour Party.  Their members who see ‘Jew’ and immediately think ‘Israel’, is precisely why Labour are riddled with anti-Semitism.  It’s not only unhelpful and uncaring; it actually drives anti-Semitic hatred, and drives incidents such as the attack in San Diego.  This is one area where the political extreme left are so far up the political horseshoe, that they are meeting the extreme right at the other end.

Looking at all the above incidents, it would be very easy to blame and castigate religion, or at the least, extreme interpretations of religions, for all of them.  But while such fundamentalist interpretations must indeed take some of the blame, and religion can indeed poison minds, that cannot be the full extent of what drives the extremist mindset that is all too prevalent today.

We in the developed and developing world are sadly living in time where extreme right politics are on the rise.  We have a low-intellect, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, anti-abortion, climate change denying, warlike President of the USA.  The UK voted to leave the EU, and there has been a disturbing rise in attacks upon immigrants, refugees, and ethnic minorities.  Brazil has a president who can only be described as a neo-Nazi, and I write this in the wake of the Spanish election, in which the Socialists only scraped home, and will have to seek help to form a minority government, while the extreme right Vox Party have gained 24 seats in the Spanish parliament – the first time that the extreme right have had seats in the Cortes since the death of the fascist dictator, Franco, in 1975.  Without a doubt, religion plays a part in all of these things, but to the lesser extent, and where it does it is usually a kneejerk reaction to Islam, and those who spread scare stories of “Islamification”.  This is where we will learn that propaganda is a powerful tool, and never more powerful when people are frightened.

A 2016 study by Columbia University and the French National Institute found that 59% of social media users would share a story without actually clicking on and reading the content.  This does not at all surprise me.  In fact, the only thing that does surprise me is that the figure is not much higher.  Playing into this, the satirical website, Science Post, posted an article on Facebook with the headline, “Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.”  The article started with one paragraph repeating the headline, and the rest of the text was three paragraphs all in Latin, beginning “Lorem ipsum”; literally “dummy text”.  The article to date has had 120,000 shares on Facebook.  Okay, some may have shared it for the humour value, and it was indeed funny, but it makes the point that people read what they want to read, and they believe what they want to believe.  Very few will actually open and read an article.  Fewer still will actually go to the extent of digging deeper to confirm stories, or seek alternative opinions.  There are even those nowadays who dismiss Snopes and Hoax-Slayer, because they have made one or two mistakes, while at the same time ignoring the overwhelmingly majority of times that these excellent fact-checking sites are accurate and correct.

Media outlets are more than well aware of this phenomenon, and they deliberately word their headlines to influence public opinion.  Here’s a recent example:

”Fife-born SNP MP Natalie McGarry admits embezzling £25,600”

So on 24 April 2019 ranted the Dundee-based newspaper, The Courier, which is published by D.C. Thomson, who also publish the very conservative Sunday Post.  Shocking, eh?  Yes, Natalie McGarry was indeed elected as Scottish National Party Member of Parliament for Glasgow East in 2015.  Yes, she did indeed plead guilty in court to embezzling £21,000 from the group Women for Independence, and £4661 from the Glasgow and Regional SNP Association.  But what the SNP headline failed to mention that when the accusations against her broke in November 2015, she resigned the SNP party whip, was thereby automatically suspended from the party, and for the remainder of her time in office until the 2017 General Election, she fulfilled that role as an independent MP.  The Courier did subsequently change their headline to read “former SNP MP”, but not until several people, myself included, pointed this out.  And given that Natalie McGarry was for most of her time in office an independent, I would suggest that while not wholly inaccurate, the headline is still skewed.

Words are powerful, and you have to be careful what you do with them.  Anyone already biased against the SNP would immediately read the original headline, latch upon that, and share it, no doubt damning the SNP in doing so.  Others would read such posts, and would immediately jump to conclusions that the SNP are not to be trusted.

But the Natalie McGarry case is merely the thin end of the wedge, and a rather vanilla example.  Some can be much, much more disturbing and damaging.  In March 2019, the story broke of British-born Shemima Begum, who had left the UK to help Islamic State terrorists in Syria, wishing to come back to the UK to have her third child, her other two died, to give the baby a chance of survival, and a decent upbringing.  Needless to say, there was already a lot of hostility towards Shemima Begum, fed in no little part by the media posting front page headlines of the “Jihadi Bride”, and stories which stirred up some of the worst racism I have ever read.  But on 11 March 2019, after Shemima had actually given birth to a baby son, who sadly died, The Metro sank to a new low by running the front-page headline, “Too Risky to Rescue Jihadi Baby”.  And what’s wrong with that headline?  It castigates a baby, a dead baby, as being an Islamic extremist terrorist.  The lack of sympathy in that headline was staggering, and the gloating comments it elicited from racists, cheering that a baby had died, was downright disgusting.

When the media and / or those online use the Internet to push a bigoted agenda, it can be hugely damaging to certain sections of society, and this is never more true when it comes to sexual and gender identity.  Gender self-ID is soon to be legal in Scotland, and England (dragging their heels as usual) is currently debating such, has got a lot of people with their knickers in a knot, and using a minority of wrongdoings by transgender people – and some purporting to be transgender, it must be said – to smear every transgender person.  Sorry, I should say transgender women, as they rarely make any mention of transgender men (yet another example of prejudice and misinformation).  Sadly, one of the main proponents of this is a pro-Indy blogger, who on a daily basis fills his Twitter account with transphobic smear stories, and examples of where transgender people have been abusive, in an attempt to discredit an entire section of the community as all the same.

“Transgender Prisoner who Sexually Assaulted Inmates Jailed for Life”, thundered The Guardian, allegedly a left-wing, ‘liberal’ newspaper on 10 October 2018, covering the story of Karen White, a transgender prisoner at New Hall Prison, England, who sexually abused other inmates.  True, she did.  But the facts are that Karen White was already a known paedophile and rapist, whom the prison authorities put in with mainstream prisoners in a women’s prison.  The fault there lies with New Hall Prison, and certainly not the vast majority of law-abiding transgender women.  As Scotland is soon to introduce gender Self-ID, some opposed to the new legislation are very quick to point to the Karen White case, while they are either unaware, or are aware but choose not to mention, the fact that the Scottish Prison Service has been placing transgender inmates in prison spaces based upon self-ID, almost 10 years, with no reports of such sexually assaulting other inmates.

It is in the Scottish independence camp that we of all people should know better.  How often have fellow Nats seen loaded headlines and stories about “separatists”, “anti-English racists” (I wasn’t aware that English was a race, but the media seem to think so) and “cybernats”, accompanying stories surrounding the wrong doings of a tiny minority, to condemn the entire independence movement?  So it is I suggest that the said blogger, and others who use smear tactics against transgender women, are doing absolutely no different from the way the media treats Scots Nats.  Shame on you.

The Internet has given us all the power to fulfil that which Andy Warhol once predicted; we can all have our 15 minutes of fame – and then some.  Those with any particular agenda they wish to push, and they can be among some of the nastiest people in the world.  Many play upon the fears and emotions of others, in the full knowledge that most will not go further than the headline, and even if they do, will not question the validity of a story, and fewer still will bother to research it.

I recently removed a story from a group I run on Facebook, with the headline “Settlers Poison Well in Eastern Yatta”.  I was immediately dubious of this story, and in looking for a source, I could only find it on pro-Palestinian news sites, website that support them, and some blogs.  Not a word of it on the BBC, nothing on Reuters, and nothing on Associated Press.  There were two reasons I doubted this story.  Firstly, why would Israeli settlers in a desert region poison the only source of fresh water, which could only hurt them as well?  Secondly, and more importantly, I am aware of the historical context of such claims.  Such claims of Jews poisoning wells go right back to Medieval times, and are part of the anti-Semitic ‘blood libel’; that every Jewish man had to kill ‘non-believers’.  When the Black Death hit Europe, there were accusations of Jews spreading the disease by poisoning drinking wells, which saw a great many of them persecuted and killed.  The story has continued down the centuries in many forms, leading to further persecution, and even Joseph Stalin used it in 1953, when he alleged the “Doctor’s Plot” of Jewish physicians poisoning prominent Communist leaders (whom Stalin himself had in fact had killed), leading to many of the surgeons thrown in gulags, and some of them executed.

I could in fact give many other examples of photos, memes, and stories purporting to show Israeli brutality against Palestinians.  Look, we all know that the current regime in Israel is disgusting, and they do indeed carry out a great many atrocities.  Just be aware that not all of these stories and pictures are true, some are indeed anti-Israeli, and even anti-Semitic, propaganda.  Do your research and check the facts before sharing them.  Goodness knows, the Israeli regime is brutal enough without having to make up or share downright and utter lies about them.  Trust me, they do more than enough to condemn themselves, but when anyone shares a fake story, it has the potential to create a “boy who cried wolf” scenario, whereby people may not believe the genuine stories of Israeli atrocities.  And should anyone think I am an apologist for Israel, let me assure you that I have been boycotting Israeli goods since the early 1980s, which is longer than many reading this will have been politically aware, and before some were even an itch in their fathers underpants.

It was on 30 April 1993 that CERN made the World Wide Web available to the public.  This has created the single most powerful information tool which mankind has ever known, literally at our fingertips.  As a result, mankind should be becoming increasingly intelligent.  Instead, many of the public appear to have become more poorly informed than our species has ever been, which prompts me not only to ask “Where is the love?” but indeed, “Where is the intelligence?”  I can only put it down to mankind’s predilection towards tribalism, religious dogma, societal and cultural prejudices, but most of all, laziness.  People do not like change, and when someone already has ingrained perceptions of that which is familiar, they feel threatened and frightened by anything that challenges these perceptions.  Elvis Costello said as much, long before the Internet became public, in his song Pills and Soap; “Give us now our daily bread in individual slices.  And something in the daily rag to cancel every crisis.”

The media and others know this, and they feed it.  Firstly with loaded headlines, then with stories full of disinformation, half-truths, right-wing populism, downright lies, and increasingly – and this is something I really object to – articles on their websites which have the story in the form of an attached video attached to the top of the text.  That is encouraging people’s laziness not to read, which in turn will make them all the less likely to question or research a story.  Believe me, I have often seen comments on blogs others or I have written, or Internet posts, which read “TL:DR”  (“Too Long: Didn’t Read”).  So if you’ve made it this far in this article, well done you, because you are one of a dying breed.

Perhaps it’s the punk in me, perhaps it’s the atheist, perhaps it’s the sceptic, perhaps it’s merely my enquiring mind; perhaps it is all of the above.   But my watchword has always been “Question everything.  Because it’s only by asking questions that you get answers.”  Unless something can be proven or disproved, I take absolutely nothing at face value, and I keep asking questions until I get an honest answer, even if that answer is an uncomfortable truth that I do not like.

Your brain is the greatest friend you shall ever have, so please treat it well, and do not feed it garbage.  Whenever you come over a headline that may make your hackles raise, step back a minute, take a deep breath, and then read the article.  If it seems in the least spurious, search online for supporting stories, and facts that support it.  If you cannot find any such, or you find a reliable source refuting such, then disregard it, and above all, do not be afraid to speak out and show up fallacies for being just that, and those who spread malicious lies for the sort of people they are.

Not only will you be more intelligent and better informed for doing so, you will be a much better person, and you shall be having a positive impact that may improve the lives of others.