Brights News Feed

The Independent calls Hrant Dink “the 1,500,001st victim of the Armenian genocide”.

An educated and generous journalist and academic - editor of the weekly Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos - he tried to create a dialogue between the two nations to reach a common narrative of the 20th century’s first holocaust. And he paid the price: two bullets shot into his head and two into his body by an assassin in the streets of Istanbul yesterday afternoon.

Turkey has been struggling to change the perception of itself, with the EU demanding that it relax censorial laws before it can enter the Union. Writers like Hrant Dink himself have previously been accused and found guilty of the crime of “insulting Turkishness”. The nationalists who are in all probability behind the assassination may at the same time have dealt a further blow to Turkey’s bid to join the EU.

Controversial right-wing British National Party (the BNP) gets into trouble every so often, because although it claims that its policies are not motivated by racism, its members keep getting filmed making racist remarks, charged with incitement to hatred, and (as reported previously on the Brights News Feed) found with a large stash of chemical explosives. (That trial, by the way — which continues to lie beneath the scan of mainstream media — will hear a plea on Monday, and the trial begins proper on February 12th, see NUJ New Media.)

Now a man from Swindon has pleaded guilty in an attempt to firebomb a mosque on which he had already dawbed racist graffiti. Mark Bulman made the attack in August, and when the Molotov cocktail failed to explode inside the empty building, he turned himself into police, knowing that his fingerprints would be found on the bomb. The police found him near the building, wielding an improvised weapon, in fear of the “enemy”.

Not only did the botched bombing result in his arrest, and not only did the police find his house full of racist material, and not only is he a member of the BNP, and not only did he also act as spokesman for the Swindon branch of the BNP, but, speaking on the conviction of a man who made a previous attempt to burn down the very same mosque, Bulman himself — in his capacity as BNP spokesman — said, “We just want to say that justice has been done and he deserves to be locked up for this attack on the Muslim community.”

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This story is actually over two weeks old. None of the UK’s national papers or television news sources have covered it except for one belated “News in Brief” mention.

And yet it involves the police recovering from two private properties:

• a massive haul of explosive chemicals (the “largest amount of explosive chemicals of its type” ever seized in the UK)
• 22 bomb-making components
• at least one rocket launcher
• and a nuclear or biological protective suit

And this was all found in the homes of an election candidate for the British National Party and a co-accused fellow party member!

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