Talk about going early.
Today, the Age offers up an opinion piece from a Guardian writer named Fiachra Gibbons - French right caught up in the storm it helped create
"Police are a long way from understanding what was going through the head of someone who could catch a little girl by the hair so he wouldn't have to waste a second bullet on her. But some things are already becoming clear. He shouted no jihadist or anti-Semitic slogans, going about his grisly business in the cold, military manner oddly similar to Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian gunman who massacred 77 people last northern summer."
So now it turns out that Gibbon is the one who has rushed to judgement. The killer is a jihadist and an antiSemite but the extreme right and the extreme left are no different in this case - nor are their apologists.
My guess is the we won't be reading much more from this Gibbon person in the future.
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Gerard Henderson's Media Watch Dog gives the Age a caning over this. In particular, it's failure to issue an apology for publishing a lie.
But what the heck?
It's the Age.
http://www.thesydneyinstitute.com.au/media-watch-dog/
THE GUARDIAN-ON-THE-YARRA’S RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY GET SHOT DOWN IN TOULOUSE
It was during Andrew Jaspan’s late and unlamented failed editorship of The Age that MWD classified the Melbourne broadsheet as “The Guardian on the Yarra”. These days Mr Jaspan is on the taxpayer drip as editor of the government subsidised The Conversation website. But “The Guardian on the Yarra” continues to take copy from the real thing – The Guardian in London and its bevy of leftist columnists.
On Wednesday, The Age ran a piece on its Opinion Page by the Paris based writer Fiachra Gibbons, which originally appeared in The Guardian, titled “French right caught up in the storm it helped create”. Put simply, Gibbons blamed the French right for the recent murders in the Toulouse region of France – including the killings of three Muslim members of the French Army along with a rabbi and three Jewish children outside a Jewish school.
Gibbons had no evidence of any kind to support his theory that the murderer was a member of the extreme right – but The Age gave him a run anyrate. Here’s what The Guardian’s man in Paris had to say:
All of those who have been shot or killed in and around the city [Toulouse] in the past eight days have had one thing in common. They are from visible minorities. They had names or faces that marked them out as not being descended, as Jean-Marie Le Pen would say, from “our ancestors the Gauls”. Their roots – both Jewish and Muslim – were in the Maghreb or the Caribbean….
Police are a long way from understanding what was going through the head of someone who could catch a little girl by the hair so he wouldn’t have to waste a second bullet on her. But some things are already becoming clear. He shouted no jihadist or anti-Semitic slogans, going about his grisly business in the cold, military manner oddly similar to Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian gunman who massacred 77 people at a social democrats summer camp last summer.
Interesting theory. Pity about the facts. Last night (Australian time) French authorities shot dead Mohammed Merah after a siege in Toulouse. It is alleged that Merah, a French citizen of Algerian background and of Jihadist bent, committed all the murders. In other words, Fiachra Gibbons’ conspiracy theory blaming the French right for the killings was hopelessly wrong. Also there is evidence that Merah is said to have filmed his murders and that he did shout jihadist slogans when killing the French soldiers.
In Crikey on Wednesday, Guy Rundle came up with a similar conspiracy theory as that advanced by Fiachra Gibbons. However, Rundle apologised for his error yesterday. Not so The Age. The Thursday edition carried no correction and there is no correction today in the print edition or on The Age’s website where Fiachra Gibbon’s howler-ridden column remains in its original form."
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