Firstly, Dr.Norman Kember (insert sanctifying personal history and blurred pictures at peace rallies here), a British professor and peace activist who abandoned his wife at their 'pebble dashed' (how is that relevant? This is on Sky News for heaven's sake) home in London to campaign for peace on the ground in war-torn Iraq. This report in The Times further serves to highlight and entrench the modus operandi of villifying the terrorists and elevating the victim. WHY DOES THAT NEED TO BE DONE? Kindapping and murder in Iraq are tragic and wrong irrespective of who the victim is, what the victim's history is and whether the victim's home was pebble dashed or a mud hut.

All this manages to do is detract from substantial argument and research re what these groups are, how and why it is they keep burgeoning and off shooting and try and talk (
which is what Dr. Kember was there trying to do in the first place) to mid-east specialists and government officials that might help to paint a clearer picture of what is happening in Iraq instead of all this simplistic coverage aimed at pensioners and ignoramuses.

The Britons killed this week were en route to Shiite holy cities of Karbala, Najaf and Kufa and were in a hired bus. The fact that these Britons were British Asian Shiites who were dressed in Islamic garb did not seem to inspire any postulation as to whether they may have been targeted as Iraqi Shiites but merely more reports bewailing how they were merely good Muslims who wanted to visit holy sites (in a war torn country where there would just have been a teensy weensy itsy bitsy chance that they would have been blown to smithereens or caught in crossfire)

((My parentheses, not even The Times has sunk that low))

And George Bush wants to bomb Al Jazeera.