Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Er… but… surely… and… but… eh?

Just as we're coming to the end of the Noughties (as we must, wearyingly, call it I suppose, given the wave of 'Ooh let's make up lots of lists to bulk out the TV schedules!' programmes littering the screen at the moment) and just when you thought it was impossible for the Express to out-Express itself in terms of bewilderingly frying-pan-smashed-into-own-face dumbness, comes this late entry for most fuckwitted headline of the year, decade, century and probably millennium:

After reading that, I had to sit down in an armchair, quietly, staring at the wall, slapping my face at regular intervals with a piece of barbed wire dipped in sheep shit. I considered sticking my head in a bowl of ice-cold water, or, better still, licking the toaster element to try and wake myself up from what was surely a delusional episode, but thought better of it.

It's quite a revolutionary thing, though, that the Daily Express are proposing: that terrorists shouldn't be allowed on planes.

Fancy that! And there I was, thinking that they should be let onto aircraft with a cheeky wave and a "Mind how you go, sonny, hey, you've dropped your explosive device!" rather than not being allowed on planes, what with them being terrorists and all. Thank goodness we've got the trusty Express to set us right: whereas we might think it's perfectly acceptable, once we've identified people as terrorists, to think that they won't do any harm and they're all a bunch of loveable lads really, the Express - very cleverly and quite counter-intuitively, you really have to say - has decided that that's a bad thing, and that in fact people who are terrorists (you know, the sort of folk who might well try to attack mass-transit vehicles in order to create a spectacular news event to further publicity for their cause) shouldn't be allowed onto mass-transit vehicles carrying lots of passengers.

"Experts", furthermore, say that "only those who pose a genuine threat" should be singled out. And again, you have to marvel at the brilliant lateral thinking that's gone into that. Ordinarily, you wouldn't think twice about people who pose a genuine threat being allowed to pose a genuine threat; but in fact, the truth is that people who pose a genuine threat shouldn't be allowed to pose a genuine threat. Who knew? Perhaps, with hindsight, we should have noticed that people who posed a genuine threat were actually most likely to be the kind of people who might be more dangerous than people who don't pose a genuine threat. But it's not always that easy to see that at the time, is it?

Actually, I may have been guilty of being mildly sarcastic with those last couple of paragraphs. In fact, the Express is being a sight more coded than it normally is, and the startlingly dumb clusterfuck of a front page conceals something a bit smellier than downright stupidity:

MUSLIM travellers must be singled out for airport ­security screening to foil future Al Qaeda attacks on airliners, a terrorism expert said last night.

Ah, now it all falls into place. For once, the Express was being subtle. Well, I say 'subtle' but this is about as subtle as the Express gets - it's like being stabbed in the face rather than set on fire by a man dressed as a giant fluorescent crab. Not really subtle, but not as obvious as it could be.

For once, the Express is asking its readers to join the dots rather than telling them what to think. Only two dots, I grant you, but dots nonetheless. Dot one: TERRORISTS SHOULD BE TARGETED. And dot two: MUSLIMS SHOULD BE TARGETED. Now, I imagine a lot of Express readers will strain over that puzzler like a blank crossword grid with no clues at all, but I think there might be just the teensy-weensyest implication that Muslims are those who 'pose a genuine threat'.

Yesterday a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said Abdulmutallab’s actions should not be used against the law-abiding Islamic community. He said: “The actions of one misguided individual should not tarnish the reputation of the majority.
“We will let terrorists win if bigotry is allowed to flourish.”

Oh, it's flourishing all right.

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