A warning about deliberately provocative propaganda
I have just been cruising around different sites, stopping here and there, reading a bit of this and a bit of that and somewhere along the line I found myself being drawn into an anti Islamic video. This video apparently ‘proved’ statistically that once the number of practising Muslims rose above a certain percentage per population within any given State, that State would automatically suffer Islamic driven violence and loss of democratic freedoms. I didn’t take it too seriously; there is a whole lot of politically motivated propaganda out there and some of it ‘leaks’ in here.
AND THEN……………..as I was getting rather bored with the whole thing and about to click away, I saw a series of photos someone had posted in the comments. This set of photos apparently showed an 8 year old boy who had been caught stealing bread from a market in Iran, he was being held down so that a truck could run over his arm as a punishment for stealing. They were pretty realistic pictures and the agony on the boys face looked real.
BUT; well I’ve been caught out before so I thought I’d check it out on the ‘urban myths’ pages. Sure enough there were the photos and the explanation. The images were apparently ‘real’ in so much as they had not been digitally edited or altered, they were first published in 2005 but the young boy whose arm was run over was not being punished for a crime. He was part of a "Maareke giry" or street magic act and allegedly performed the stunt for money.
At the bottom of the story in the urban myths pages was this poll;
Poll: Did you find it plausible, at first glance, that these photos depict an example of 'Islamic justice'? 1) Yes 2) No 3) I wasn't sure
For me, the poll proved more worrying than any thing else, because I couldn’t be 100% sure I could answer ‘’NO’’, I would like to think I was immune to this type of propaganda, but I am?? In honesty I don’t know. What a horrible truth to realise about yourself.
