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Telling a Whopper

Posted by sim-o

July 29th, 2010

“I have been shunned, publicly abused and received numerous extremely distressing and frightening telephone calls and text messages,” he said. “I have received death threats and on occasions felt unable to leave my home for fear that I may be attacked.”

That, is Parameswaran Subramanyam. The Tamil who went on hunger strike in the middle of 2009 protesting against Sri Lankan governments last push against the Tamils.

The reason Parameswaran was shunned and abused and received death threats was because of the report in the Daily Mail that inspired other articles like this one. (The Sun also churned out copy based on the Mails’ article too.)

The Daily Mail piece has obviously disappeared, and they have now published an apology, but their claims of Parameswaran costing the Met Police over £7 million in overtime due to a hunger strike was designed to do more than make people gasp at the cost of the demonstration; the Mail even claimed the hunger striker was a fraud and was having sneaky meals of fast foods.

And what evidence did they have for this? None at all. Police “surveillance teams using specialist monitoring equipment had watched in disbelief as he tucked into the clandestine deliveries.” Apparently.

But the police couldn’t have recorded any McDonald’s being eaten by Parameswaran…

[T]he Met superintendent in charge of the policing operation had also confirmed that no video evidence existed because there had been no police surveillance team using the “specialist monitoring equipment” alluded to in the Daily Mail article.

Whether the Mail was fed that line about the surveillance from someone in the Met or they managed to think it up all by themselves in unknown, but the linking of it to the overtime bill for the whole protest concentrated all the hostility that these two pieces of information could generate on the one man who was making the ultimate political protest, and it seemed as if it were designed specifically to undermine him and his cause.

“Fasting was the sacrifice [Subramanyam] was making to bring the UK’s attention to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Tamils being killed and injured by the Sri Lankan government,” she said [Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh].

“To suggest that he had broken his fast in secret, at the height of the civil war was an insult to him, to his community and to those victims.”

The Mail doesn’t care about any of that though. To the Mail it’s just yet more foreigners costing us money.

(hat-tip Exclarotive)

Categories: Politics | Tags: , , , , | 19 Comments