Trevor Kavanagh on Muslims and confusion over crime.

Almost a week on from the protests in Luton by around 15 Islamists, those out to milk it for all its worth still haven't let go. Today Trevor Kavanagh in the Sun, having previously treated us to Islamophobia in response to accusations of Islamophobia instead introduces us to his amazing knowledge of both the terrorist threat and the Muslim community:

IF you thought public fury over the latest ‘IRA’ atrocities was impressive, wait for the uproar over the next 7/7.

For the jihadists haven’t gone away, either.

They are just furious that a few flint-eyed extremists from the Real IRA and Continuity IRA have beaten them to it.

How does Kavanagh know this? Simple: he doesn't. The jihadists haven't gone away, it's true, and undoubtedly the threat from them is worse than it is from Republican dissidents, but it's also worth bearing in mind that there now hasn't been a major attack foiled since the liquid bomb raids, over two and a half years ago, not counting the dismal failure of the Tiger Tiger and Glasgow airport patio gas canister attacks.

Last week’s Belfast demos involved peace-loving citizens from both sides of the community.

The question is, will we see peace-loving Muslims, preferably some in hijabs, filling the streets of Bradford after the next Islamist outrage?

Most British Muslims are as appalled by violence as the people of Northern Ireland.

Some bravely condemned the Luton fanatics who spat bile at our soldiers as they marched home last week.

But would they turn out in their thousands to denounce another massacre like the London Tube murders?

Unlikely. Yet, if they fail to join other British citizens in publicly expressing disgust, they risk being seen as silent sympathisers.

Kavanagh here doesn't see the flaw in his own argument. He is suggesting that Muslims would be the only ones that wouldn't turn up to denounce a second 7/7 attack, yet there was no response after 7/7 akin to that which we saw last week in Northern Ireland, also unlike the response in Spain to the Madrid attacks there. And why preferably some in hijabs? Because Kavanagh assumes that women wearing them must be more extreme, or more devout? This mirrors Kavanagh's previous comments regarding hijabs, which he described as "provocative", when they are nothing of the sort. Niqabs maybe, hijabs from this secularist's view unpleasant and unnecessary but not "provocative". Kavanagh's remarks that if they fail to live up to what he demands of them they "risk" being seen as "silent sympathisers" could not be more clear: he views them as outsiders unless they distinguish themselves by denouncing something that was not done in their name but by those who claim to share their religion. He wouldn't subject any other group in this country to this sort of treatment; what makes it's acceptable to do it to Muslims?

Not satisfied with this, he then, like the Sun has repeatedly, questions the allegations made by Binyam Mohamed regarding his rendition and torture:

But lying is the default position for Islamists. Which is why we should question Guantanamo inmate Binyam Mohamed’s claim he was tortured by America and hung out to dry by the British.

On balance, I prefer the word of our security services.

The Ethiopian asylum seeker is another ex-druggie convert, deluded by fantasies of Islamic purity in hellholes such as Chechnya and Afghanistan.

Yet we are giving him sanctuary, at huge cost and potential risk.

He is not British. He should be sent home, along with ALL foreign terror advocates who trade off the freedoms they are so determined to destroy.

Except he doesn't claim that it was only Americans that tortured him. His main mistreatment occurred in Morocco, where he was rendered by the Americans (undisputed, as we have the flight logs which showed a trip on the correct date on a plane associated with the rendition programme) and where, as the Intelligence and Security Committee has already said, MI5/6 provided his interrogators with questions which were used while he was tortured. How much evidence does Kavanagh actually want? Does he want to see Mohamed's penis, which was sliced with a razor and still bears the scars? That he has lived here since he was a teenager has no real links to any country other than here is irrelevant to Kavanagh; he should just be thrown out because of his own ideological bias.

Much of the rest is the same old spouting that the Sun has cranked out for years, all without anything approaching proof or anything approaching insight, bringing up the old already disproved idea that it's foreign imams that are brainwashing the youth when in fact the radicalisation process is far more complicated and more to do with groups of like-minded individuals and the internet than simply listening to the sermons of the Qatadas and Hamzas. The new tactic is to quote at length those who have turned their back on radical Islam, even when they themselves are discredited. Shiraz Maher, who produced a report which had the most ridiculous and rigid recommendations for the government when tackling extremism for the think-tank Policy Exchange, discredited over Islam after Newsnight exposed that it had fabricated parts of a previous report is given space, while Ed Husain, more reliable but also unwieldy in what he thinks should be done, unlike his more amenable colleague Majjid Nawaz, also of the Quilliam Foundation, is also given room to voice concern over how Luton didn't turn out to denounce 15 people who weren't even all from the town, despite pictures from mosques on Friday which featured many worshippers condemning the protests.

All of this covers up the fact that the very thing Kavanagh seems to want is in fact just as likely to alienate as it is to unite. Demanding that Muslims as a block denounce something that doesn't in any way represent them is the exact sort of thing that is guaranteed to cause resentment towards a society which is already fearful and sceptical, and in some cases even prejudiced against them. The Sun's entire coverage of terrorism and the war on terror has been conducted in an "us and them" style, completely wedded to the Bush administration's policies on it, and scornful of the alternatives. That this has been counter-productive could not be more plain, yet the paper continues to defend it, ridiculing those tortured and demanding that terror laws be ever further tightened.

Elsewhere, the Sun's leader is typically confused (url will change as usual):

CRIME statistics alone cannot reveal the truth about Broken Britain.

They can be twisted any way the Government likes.

The Tories point to Justice Ministry figures showing convictions for teenage violence and theft doubling since Labour took office.

True, says the Government — but only because we’re bringing more yobs to book.

In fact crime is DOWN by a massive 39 per cent.

Does someone really need to explain to the Sun that just because crime is down that doesn't mean that convictions must also be down? It seems like it. As with Kavanagh, the Sun has already decided what's actually happened: Britain is broken and the government twists the statistics. True, it doesn't help when the government is caught doing just that, such as over the knife crime statistics released late last year, but the Sun itself fell for that and then claimed that no one had believed them anyway. The Sun then launches its own survey:

Crazy, isn’t it? So we must all decide for ourselves.

Today, we report four teenage murders in three days.

Do you think crime levels are lower than in 1997?

Do you feel there are enough police to keep order? That sentences are sufficient deterrent?

Do you think Labour really has been “tough on crime”? Do you feel safer than when they came to power?

We’ll bet the answer, every time, is No.

And the Sun is determined that the answer remains no, as its hysteria over "Broken Britain" and demands for ever more police and prison places continue unabated.

Fooled on knife crime.

The Sun is in full voice over the dodgy knife crime statistics released by the government:

"HOME Secretary Jacqui Smith says sorry for pretending stabbings are down.

Falsifying evidence is embarrassing for a minister responsible for fighting crime.

But nobody believed Ms Smith — even BEFORE statistics chief Sir Michael Scholar blew the whistle."

Nobody? Really? Does the Sun really think that its readers are so stupid that they can't remember back to last Friday? From that day's leader:

"That horrific total is reason enough to welcome the small fall in knife crime that has followed a police crackdown in a few targeted areas.

This is largely due to increased stop-and-search police action — an anti-crime measure once condemned by politically-correct whingers as racially biased.

Those caught carrying knives are now three times more likely to end up where they belong: behind bars."

The Sun then believed the statistics - as long as they confirmed their own prejudices and gave them an opportunity to rail against the ever handy "politically-correct whingers".

Back to today's leader:

"The Home Office is scandalously incompetent, negligent and secretive."

Three adjectives which apply more than adequately also to the Sun.

Update: As Tim points out in the comments, Friday's page 3 girl also believed the knife statistics, making Rebekah Wade an even bigger boob than the ones she publishes.

A knife for the girls.

Another teenager dies as a result of a stabbing, which means the Sun just has to find someone or something to blame, and in this instance it happens to be Katy Perry. Yes, her of the kissing girls and liking it song.

The Sun has decreed that she must apologise for this heinous insult to all the families grieving as a result of knife crime. Perhaps if the photograph was recent, or as they describe it, from a recent shoot, she would have done: instead, the Katy Perry forum suggests that the photograph is two years old, and was residing until a Sun journalist spotted it, on, you guessed it, Perry's MySpace gallery. This friends is how you invent a scandal and make money out of it.

Much longer post on this over at mine.

Knife crime and cooking the figures.

Apart from the Sun's inexorable hypocrisy, one of its other main exports is its shockingly bad journalism. Sometimes it's just downright laziness; on other occasions it's abundantly clear that it's both laziness and someone not having the first clue what they're talking about.

A perfect example is today's "Just one in 5,000 knife kids jailed":

"JUST one in 5,000 kids who carry knives are locked up for the crime.

Shocking figures obtained by The Sun show that of the 1,164 ten to 15-year-olds caught with blades last year, just 30 ended up behind bars.

That is a fraction of the 150,000 of that age who admitted in a Government survey to carrying a knife over the past year. Victims’ charities branded it “deeply disturbing”.

The Sun’s figures, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, show three kids a day were caught carrying a knife in England and Wales in the year up to April.

...

Around half escaped with a caution.

The other 600 were prosecuted, but of those just 30 — a mere five per cent — were locked up."

Of all the figures presented here, the only ones which aren't nonsensical are the ones from the Sun's freedom of information request. That's the 1,164 10-15 year-olds that were caught carrying a knife, the "around half" which "escaped" with a caution, the 600 which were prosecuted, and the 30 which were imprisoned.

The "government survey" which the Sun alludes to is the "young people and crime: findings from the 2006 Offending, Crime and Justice Survey", available as a PDF here. This is a survey based on a sample of 4,591 interviews, after the responses from those over 25 were discarded, which has been weighted to the population at large. The survey found that 3% of 10-25-year-olds had carried a knife in the past year; of this 3%, 46% had carried a pen knife, 20% a flick knife and 12% a kitchen knife, while 54% of that 3% had only carried the knife once or twice during the year, with 18% carrying it three or four times and 17% 10 times or more. Only 4% of this 3% had used the knife to threaten someone, and just 1% of this 3% had actually used it to injure someone.

The Mail, helpfully, extrapolated this 3% to be equivalent to 353,000 young people carrying a knife at least once a year when it reported the survey's findings, although without providing the ultimate figure from which they've worked this out. The Sun is only interested in the 10 to 15-year-olds who have carried a knife, further lowering the 353,000 extrapolation to 150,000, again without providing a base figure for its working. The 5,000 in the headline is then arrived at by simply dividing 150,000 by 30 - the number of those given a custodial sentence.

Any insight that might have been provided by the survey is then completely lost in both the extrapolating and in the complete lack of any explanation. The way the article is written makes it seem as if the 150,000 had directly admitted to carrying a knife - when that itself is a figure that has been arrived at first from a weighted survey, and then by re-calculating the 3% to just include the 10-15 year-olds rather than those up to 25 who were also covered in the survey. Nowhere in the article is there space for it to be pointed out that of the original 3%, over half only carried the knife once or twice over the year, and even then it was a pen knife, which many carry without so much as a thought on a key-ring. Nowhere does the hack responsible, Rhodri Phillips provide the extended quote which the "victims' charities" gave, nor does it explain which victims' charities they were. Nowhere is it questioned whether prison, or a young offenders' institution is the best place for someone between the ages of 10 to 15 to be sent for being caught once carrying a bladed item. Being the liberal lunatic I am, I think such a penalty is only likely exacerbate the problem in the long-term. Finally, just to add insult to injury, the Sun asks for comments for how readers would punish "yobs", which anyone carrying any sort of blade at any time anywhere must instantly be:

"and i wish the other 4,999 got knifed themselves."

In this age of churnalism, the Sun's lazy and dishonest journalism has already spread, with this Telegraph (yep, the Telegraph) article almost certainly being knocked out almost in its entirety from the Sun's original, with some additional figures from the Met's Operation Blunt 2 being tacked on to the end. Here, aspiring journalists, is your lesson in the ways of the industry.