WHAT'S THAT SOUND?

An unusual sound to the ears of the citizens of the UK was being widely reported today. A sound which seems to have delighted almost all average citizens who heard it if the reader's comments on all the online newspapers are to be believed!

It was an unusual sound in that it is not a sound heard very often these days from those in positions of authority who normally all seem more interested in making sounds which appeal to a minority rather than the majority of citizens. This was the sound of common sense and reason! "What does that sound like" you may well ask? It seems to have been so long since Britain heard it from those in authority that many had to listen through twice to make sure they had heard right, and the amazing thing is, they had!

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, who also happens to be number two in the Anglican Church, has condemned Muslim extremists as no more than criminals - and told them to cherish British traditions and respect the law! Then, instead of going on to attempt to soften his stance and offer some justification for why the extremists might be doing what they are doing, he went on to say that religion, poverty or prejudice are no excuse for killing.

"It doesn't matter what god you worship - if your god is sending you to maim and kill people, I say to myself, 'what kind of a god is that?'" he said.

Dr Sentamu added: "I am quite sure some people feel alienated from main, successful Britain, but again I would like to say alienated people do not necessarily resort to acts of violence."

It was interesting to hear his ringing rejection of the arguments that terrorism is inspired by "Islamophobia" or by British military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By this point, our fearless government ministers would be looking for something which could soothe any ruffled feathers over such remarks, wary of lost votes, but not the fearless Archbishop. Instead he dug deeper with no interest in leaving a ladder to get out with. "Some people talk about radicalised young Muslims," Dr Sentamu said. "I think that gives them a glamour they actually shouldn't have. For me, they are people with evil intentions, breaking the law. And if they are breaking the law, they should be dealt with as law-breakers, not as people who for some strange reason have been given some kind of political theological ideology."

Then digging still deeper, he added, "If you are in Britain and you are British, you should really cherish the traditions that are here."

But Dr Sentamu did not reserve his words only for the muslim extremists, he then went on to say, "What I am not going to accept is that suddenly, overnight, people use the war in Iraq as an excuse to maim and kill other people. I don't want to accept that the evil in another person invariably should breed evil in me."

He said: "If you don't subscribe to the things that make Britain, you are going to be in trouble. It is the upholding of British law that is the most important thing.

"We have to make sure that people are making their home here and together we want to build a big enough tent to include everybody."

All this added to a series of criticisms he has made in recent months of multiculturalism, the Liberal/Left-wing doctrine which encourages different ethnic groups to develop separate interests, and his calls for more respect for British history and traditions, seemed to have been sweet music to the average on-line newspaper readers who were falling over themselves on almost all the comments forum to praise what they heard.

Did you notice my careful use of the phrase "almost all..." a few time there? That was because it was very interesting to note how some papers chose to present Dr Sentamu's speech to their readers. Predictably there were those who chose to all but ignore most of what the Archbishop said, with some of them not reporting the above portions of his speech at all, but choosing to focus only on a single sentence at the end of his speech, where he added a criticism of the Government's plan for 90-day detention of terror suspects without trial, saying that he believed it could bring Britain dangerously close to the practices of the Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, who was responsible for Dr Sentamu leaving Uganda in the 1970's. He said, "if you're not very careful, [it becomes] very close to a police state in which they pick you up and then they say later on we'll find evidence against you".

Isn't selective journalism interesting? And isn't it so interesting to note which papers would predictably choose to practice that form of selective journalism? There's nothing like getting your own politics across to the readers instead of the news, is there?