British children - taught to HATE. posted by Richard Seymour

Kids as young as five are being exposed to a filthy, racist comic book that is full of violence, blames the Muslim world for every ill and encourages children to be ready for a life slaying the 'Mohamedan threat'. This comic is graphic, blood-spattered and filled with poison. It entices innocent minds with bingo, cheap holidays, sexual titillation, crosswords and idle celebrity gossip, and then whallops them with a load of hate.

Or, to put it another way, The Sun has done its part for the 'bomb Iran' drive. They have been sent some naughty pictures by the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (you can read more about that egregious outfit here). For a laugh, here are some quotes from the scum's 'exclusive':

While British youngsters are brought up reading harmless stories about characters like Biff and Chip, young Iranians are being poisoned by a curriculum of hate.

The graphic, blood-spattered books are designed to poison a generation of young minds against Israel, the US and Britain.

In contrast, British primary schoolkids are taught to read with the help of wholesome characters such as Biff, her twin brother Chip, their pals and Floppy the dog.

They really had to tell their readers twice that British schoolkids read about Biff and Chip. Then there's this:

The Iranian hate books encourage self sacrifice like suicide bombing as a duty for everyone.

Except that they don't, and nowhere does the article back up this assertion. And then:

Britain is blamed for a huge amount of the world’s current ills.

A book called History of Iran and the World says: “England chose various means, beginning with deceit and ending in murder and massacre, until they eventually took control over India.”

In some rarefied academic circles, accurately describing the British role in India is known as 'telling the truth'.

The utter cynicism of this piece is too obvious to dwell on, but I would like to point out that the author, Tom Newton Dunn, used to work as 'defense correspondent' for The Mirror during its brief antiwar period. There he wrote stories about victims of the US bombing of Afghanistan, and a number of pieces opposing war on Iraq. During the invasion of Iraq, he seems to have reported from inside the protective cocoon of the British Army, and much of the pooled copy from Iraq that was used widely by the British media came from him. He was nominated for an award in the British Press Awards last year, and I would hesitate to suggest that this was solely because one of the owners of the Press Gazette (which organises the awards) is Matthew Freud, who is married to the daughter of Newton Dunn's current boss Rupert Murdoch, and the other is Piers Morgan, his former boss. Always casually racist, his writing since moving to The Sun has focused on proving the lies of the British government, especially with regard to an alleged threat from Iran. His father is Bill Newton Dunn, a Liberal Democrat MEP. I only raise all this because while Newton Dunn is conceivably not a very bright man (I fervently believe this to be the case), he understands what he is doing. He is the paradigmatic mediocrity of this embedded age, someone who knows how to flatter and be flattered by military officials, who knows how to tailor his vocabulary and prose for a range of media outlets (in his current role, he exhibits an ability to write like a twelve-year old), with infinitely malleable principles and politics. I think there should be an award for this, some kind of collective gong for utter mindnumbing servility. The Press Gazette could organise one, I'm sure.