The Mirror pictures are now, predictably, fanning the flames of anti-British feeling to the extent that graves in the Gaza Strip have been desecrated:
The images are too strong, and doubts about their authenticity too late. Pictures of British soldiers allegedly mistreating Iraqi prisoners have already drawn the retribution of the mob.
While Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, questioned the pictures’ veracity yesterday and the Daily Mirror abandoned its bullish confidence that they were genuine, a group of Palestinians did not wait to debate the fine detail.They burst into one of the few havens of peace in the Gaza Strip and desecrated dozens of British soldiers’ graves that had lain untroubled for 87 years. Brandishing shovels, axes and rifles, they broke a number of headstones in the Commonwealth war cemetery, while others were daubed with swastikas, slogans and copies of the picures, which show inmates being abused by guards in Abu Ghraib prison.The slogans left little doubt that the attack reflected anger at the pictures. One read: “Curse will chase you for ever.”
Meanwhile in Italy:
Sir Ivor Roberts, the British Ambassador to Italy, had to be given police protection in Bologna yesterday after anti-war protesters shouting anti-British slogans threw stones and bottles as well as tomatoes at him as he arrived to give a lecture. He was unhurt.
Piers Morgan, as I argued here, is fighting to save his skin by arguing that it doesn’t matter whether the pictures are genuine or not:
Piers Morgan, the Mirror Editor, while no longer insisting that the pictures showed actual instances of abuse, says that even if they were reconstructions, “they still accurately reflect something that went on”.
This is breathtaking. Why bother with evidence at all? Just make up the news as you go along. “Here’s a picture of an Iraqi girl being gang-raped by British soldiers. It shows the sickening degradation of our troops, and the utter immorality of the war, a position which the Mirror has always maintained and which is now vindicated by the publication of these shocking photographs. The fact that we paid large sums of money for these photographs, and the fact, as it now turns out, that they’re extracts from a pornographic film entitled “Teenage Sluts on Heat” filmed in a garage in Slough, in no way mitigates the horror, for we know that this is the sort of thing that goes on all the time in Iraq.”
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