Sun, Scares and Surrealism

This post is by Bensix, originally posted at his blog Back Towards The Locus.

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On 23rd of this month, England’s most Ballardian paper offered a psychosexual fantasy with a source as lurid as its claims. Yes, the Sun’s “news” section warned that “Al-Qaeda was last night claimed to be fitting women suicide bombers with fake breasts that explode“. Plopped alongside was a pair of swollen mammaries, thoughtfully noted to be “explosive“*.

I can find no evidence for this tale – just articles linking back to the Sun – so who’s the “terrorist expert” that they claimed “confirm[s]” their fears? Why, Joseph Farah: the fevered brain behind America’s World Net Daily. His report held that the MI5 have “hand-picked” a team to probe explosive breasts, but how, one wonders, could a spittle-soaked U.S. rag learn what no other outlets have? In short, there’s sod-all evidence for this claim, which hasn’t stopped Fox, the Telegraph and Jihad Watch lustily regurgitating it.

This is the paper that gave a boost to an “anti-terror expert” who created his own stories. This is the paper that screamed about the finding of a “bomb part“: sugar. This is the paper that claims upholding civil liberties makes one a “TRAITOR“. This is not a newspaper: this is the surrealist arm of the “War on Terror”.

(In the comments of Ben's original post, Richard Bartholomew notes that this, in fact, is an old Mail story that he debunked last month. One suspects that the Sun’s reporter went scavenging in LexisNexis; searching for “tits” and “bombs“.)

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More about this from Richard Bartholomew here.

*Since Ben originally posted, the picture has been changed to show a pair of implants with badly photoshopped sticks of TNT and a clock inside. Presumably from Acme.