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(not satire – it’s the Murdoch press)
The Times Foreign Correspondent Tom Coghlan recently wrote an article accompanied by a photograph which purported to show Shia militia fighters executing Sunnis in Iraq:
Iraq death squads target Sunni victims by name
In fact the original photograph was half-inched by the Times from the LiveLeaks.com website – and actually shows Sunni militia fighters from ISIS executing Iraqi soldiers (scroll down to see the same photo):
Irak – new photos of the Islamic State near Diyala
To add insult to injury The Times didn’t even bother to translate the Arabic caption which would have shown their story was wrong: “Elimination of several individuals of the army of Dajjal in the City of Nahiya”
(Dajjal is a derogatory term: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masih_ad-Dajjal – used in this case to refer to the Iraqi army)
Time was that the Times newspaper was universally respected for high quality journalism.
That was until Murdoch got his hands on it and turned it into little more than a posh version of the Sun – with the same lack of journalistic integrity and casual adherence to truth.
But you’d think Murdoch would be able to invest at least a tiny part of his $14.3 billion fortune in an Arabic translator and a few decent journalists at his so-called flagship title.
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Big thanks to Miqdaad Versi for the heads up on the photograph and the Arabic translation.
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Pride's Purge 
All Muslims Shia or Sunni belief’s in their religious rights according to their Holy scriptures, spoken by Mohammed some time in 700 a.d.
Today 2014 a.d We have Rupert Murdoch’s holly empire of dajjal shining down upon the Earth ,Moon & Stars. Whoops I almost forgot those other twittering journals of little substance of information at the other tittering Sun of our Times .
I think we are well blest in this country with people of many faiths & beliefs who are not so easily fooled or ridiculed by racism or religious prejudice. I could be wrong but I am an agnostic .
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Reblogged this on Beastrabban’s Weblog and commented:
I am not remotely surprised by this shoddy piece of journalism in the Times. It was the Times, after all, that effectively stitched Hugh Trevor-Roper by publishing his opinion that the notoriously forged ‘Hitler Diaries’ were genuine, after Trevor-Roper had revised his opinion and come to the opposite and correct conclusion. It was also the Times, under David Leppard, that libelled Michael Foot as a KGB agent, called ‘Comrade Boot’, to the hilarity of Private Eye and just about everyone else not sharing Thatcher’s paranoia about Commies in the Labour party.
It also shows up a more serious flaw in the Times’ journalism. The correct identification of the forces in the photo was in the caption in Arabic. To cover the events in the Middle East, and to understand them at the depth you’d expect from the ‘paper of record’, some understanding of Arabic is needed. It’s not an easy language for Indo-European speakers by any means, but it’s hardly an obscure language. Teach Yourself Books have a volume on it, and at the most basic level there’s even an Arabic-English picture dictionary. And as the language of Islam and its scriptures, at the very least you could ask the imam of local mosque for help, even if no other interpreters or native speakers could be found, which is hardly the case given the extremely diverse nature of the London population. This simply looks like Murdoch’s journalists simply couldn’t be bother. It makes you wonder how trustworthy the rest of their coverage of the region and its troubles is.
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What proportion of Times readers would notice… or care? None of those stone-age people over there killing each other are nice, caring Christians like us, so what difference does it make?
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P.S. Tom – I’m impressed, but I don’t think it’s popular. Don’t listen to me, I’m in a minority of not much more than one!
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Sloppy journalism is dangerous and harms those that do take care to ensure accuracy.
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