dublinka

Today's Guardian is running a story on the conviction of Samina Malika -the supposedly self dubbed, but conveniently media friendly label, 'Lyrical Terrorist'. Malika was found guilty under anti-terror legislation for possessing information useful to terrorists. On interest to Dublinka is that her poetry was cited in court as evidence against her.

Malik, wrote at least two poems entitled How To Behead and The Living Martyrs:

The Living Martyrs, read: "Let us make Jihad/ Move to the front line/ To chop chop head of kuffar swine".

The second poem was called How to Behead. "It's not as messy or as hard as some may think/ It's all about the flow of the wrist," it read.

On first impressions you might indeed be tempted to think of these as gory evidence. But the sad reality is, that if poems now count as terrorist fingerprints, you could probably, with a little probing, arrest most poets in the country - for an array of crimes. And imagine how many nationalist folk/terrorist singers you could fill the Old Bailey with...The paper merely reports the lyrical 'evidence' however, and simply files it under its now burgeoning 'terrorism' folder - as can be seen by looking closely at the url:http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2207426,00.html

Has the Guardian ceased to think about what it reports?