LETTER: Open letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph ...

Dear Mr Linnell,

One of your columnists, Piers Akerman, decided to publish a comment on his blog which said the following:

Reality check people.

In the pirates we are dealing with illiterate stone-age savages who come from a racial group whose average IQ is in the 60s (retarded). There is a reason why Africans did not invent the wheel, writing, or any system of government above the tribal level.

There is only one way to deal with these pirates that will make an impression on their dull minds: freaking kill them and the horse that they rode in on.

Warships should prowl the area with orders to engage and kill (notice I said kill, not capture) all pirates on sight. Armed drones should prowl the sky with the same intent.

Merchantmen should carry a contingent of marines during their passage through this area, who would have orders to kill all pirates on sight.

If or when any pirates were taken alive, interrogate (aka torture) them until they reveal their home village or town.

Then . . . use either a fuel air weapon or a daisy cutter (depending upon the size of the target) to turn that village or town and all its inhabitants into a smoking hole in the ground. Nothing less is going to get through to these people.

Anything else will be viewed as weakness and they will continue to laugh at the foolish and weak white man . . . and they will be correct to do so.

CarlT of Gold Coast (Reply)
Mon 13 Apr 09 (07:59pm)

An excerpt from a further comment is as follows:

If they or their wives are fat in Somalia they are crooks and pirates. Hang or chop the hands off all the fat ones. Leave the Skinny’s.Sink any Somali vessel with a motor. Sails only ...

john allen of Southport Qld (Reply)
Mon 13 Apr 09 (09:13pm)

I was wondering if you could advise me how your newspaper's publication of this comment does not breach NSW and Commonwealth laws proscribing racial vilification.

If this question is too difficult for you to answer, perhaps you could refer the matter to someone from your legal division.

Regards
I Yusuf

PS: I noticed an advertisement on your website from Tourism NSW. I thought I would send this letter to their person in charge of "News and Trade Media". No doubt Tourism NSW would be most impressed to see their funds going toward the publication of racist and xenophobic commentary on your newspaper's website. I'm sure Sydney would be able to attract lots of overseas visitors would would be pleased to see a major Sydney newspaper that prints violently xenophobic material. Oh, and I also thought ABC Media Watch might be interested.

UPDATE I: Feel free to send your own e-mail of complaint to the following:

Garry Linnell - linnellg@dailytelegraph.com.au
Margaret Rayner - raynerm@dailytelegraph.com.au
Isabella Kennedy - kennedyi@dailytelegraph.com.au
Danial Creech - creechd@dailytelegraph.com.au

UPDATE II: I received the following e-mail from Mr Akerman on 15 April 2009:

Thank you for your note, you will see that I responded several days ago to another respondee. Posting remarks in no way signifies agreement with the sentiment contained.

My response to Mr Akerman of same date was as follows:

Posting such comments does signify that the moderator and the newspaper regard themselves as not being subject to State and Federal laws applying to other businesses. It also signifies that the newspaper does not really follow its own publication guidelines.

The fact that comments calling for genocide are seen as within the bounds of lawful discourse on a blog necessarily reflects on the author of the blogpost and on the newspaper.

UPDATE III: Daily Telegraph blogger and opinion editor Tim Blair frequently cites material from one Sheik Yer'Mami. The Sheik has some interesting observations to make about my correspondence with the Daily Telegraph. You can read them here. Some of Yer'Mami's commenters are as bad as Akerman's. Check this out:

kaw April 15, 2009 at 7:46 am
Having read Irfans blog, with an entry in the comment section that he has put in himself, I would say that every person should write to the editors listed, and to the state government complaining about Irfan. He found a published comment objectionable, so rather than reply to the comment, he tries to sue the newspaper for publishing it!!! ... The sooner this islamist piece of shiite is shut down the better.

And how about this?

kaw April 15, 2009 at 7:54 am
... My IQ, incidentally is rather high. I am also quite literate. I read “War and Peace” by Tolstoy when I was eight years old, and I actually have no problems in taking you on in, well, almost anything really. Now you have a nice day beating your head against the wall!

And what delightful discourse we have here.

Thomas H. April 15, 2009 at 11:32 am
... Obama is a lying, treacherous, puffed up, arrogant, ignorant, dishonest, sleazy hot-air bag, who bows deep to a mohammedan piece of excrement the ruler of both Mecca and Qaqa.

Now is it really so strange that a “man” exhibiting all these typically mohammedan traits is assumed to be a mohammedan? OK, the chance he is something else is, of course, there, but so is the chance of a lottery win. Statistics, dear dumn, statistics.

Besides, dear dumn, his middle name is Hussein and his demented daddy was a 100% muhammedan

Of course, Yer'Mami and his extremely literate friends are free to say whatever they like. The Daily Telegraph bloggers such as Blair and Akerman are also free to source information from whichever source they like. And we are free to reach whatever conclusions we wish about the integrity or otherwise of this newspaper.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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MEDIA: Telegraphic hypocrisy?

The Daily Telegraph recently reported on a stoush between shock jock Ray Hadley and ABC Media Watch host Monica Attard.

MEDIA Watch host Monica Attard has had the tables turned on her after being exposed for initially refusing to pay a tradesperson - then hiding behind legal threats through ABC lawyers.

The "self-appointed guru of what's right and wrong" copped a serve of her own yesterday after 2GB broadcaster Ray Hadley read on air an email complaint from a listener referring to Attard as "the rudest person I think I've ever spoken to".

I'm not sure when Monica declared herself a guru of anything, let alone so difficult a subject as ethics. However, it is a bit rich for the Telegraph to be accusing Ms Attard of using ABC's in-house lawyers.

Why do I say this? Because some years ago, I myself was threatened with defamation proceedings by a Tele journo for a posting I made on a closed internet discussion group which at the time had less than 100 subscribers.

The letter I received (which I still have a copy of) was written by ... you guessed it ... an internal News Limited lawyer! I refer to that incident in this article ...

Some years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the first Bali bombing, a former client of mine was charged with possessing possible explosives. One journalist reported that this fellow had Arabic books in his house and had recently started attending religious classes at the local
mosque.

The police involved in the investigation had already ruled out the possibility of terrorism. Yet the journalist involved wanted to use the pages of his Sydney newspaper to spread hysteria about the
possibility of terrorism by making reference to a recent religious conversion on the road to Damascus (or in my former client’s case, Mecca).

Ironically, the journalist involved had a distinctly Arabic-sounding surname. His* own background suggested that a visit to his own home might reveal Arabic books and possible visits to the institutions of religious denominations at the heart of Middle Eastern conflict. I raised these points on an e-mail group, with a view to levelling the playing field and exposing what I felt was the journalist’s hypocrisy.

Some four months later, I received a letter from an in-house lawyer of the media organisation for which that journalist worked. That letter corrected some erroneous assumptions I had made concerning the journalist’s ethno-religious background (I got his Middle Eastern denomination wrong in my e-mail).

More importantly, the letter threatened me with defamation proceedings for daring to question the journalist’s integrity on a private subscriber-only e-mail list. Perhaps the journalist should have
realised that sometimes threatening a litigation lawyer with legal proceedings is as effective as threatening a surgeon with a penicillin injection.

To make matters worse, the journalist did not even bother to spend his own money to brief a lawyer, preferring to use the resources of the company’s legal department to fight a personal legal
battle.

(*Not the journalist's real gender.)

So what's good for a tabloid scribe isn't good for an ABC journalist. Then again, this is the same newspaper that complains about a TV Soap that "leads kids astray" while showing pole dancing, yet makes hundreds of thousands of dollars advertising strippers, massage parlours, brothels and other "adult services" in its classifieds section.

Words © 2007 Irfan Yusuf