Storm Babet may have left us alone for most of yesterday but today she’s making up for it. The trees are blowing around and the rain is lashing down. It’s real curl up on the sofa with a good book weather! It’s playing havoc with my exercise routine!
It could be worse, of course. We are not being told to evacuate our homes, as has been happening in parts of Scotland.
Well, that’s the weather report over and done with for the time being.
There was a report yesterday of a 13 year old boy who was “rammed” off his bike by a police car. This was not an accident. Apparently it’s standard procedure when they want to stop someone on a bicycle. The report tells that “At 3.45pm on Wednesday 19 July police say an officer “saw a male on a bicycle pointing what was believed to be a handgun at a young girl”. Armed officers were called, with two armed response vehicles attending the scene.”
I suppose a 13 year old boy can look quite big and bulky but what he had in his hand was a blue plastic water pistol. (Thats BLUE and PLASTIC - do handguns come in a range of colours? Maybe they do.) The young girl in question was his younger sister, also armed, in her case with a pink water pistol. They were playing in the street. Having been knocked off his bike, the boy was seized, arrested handcuffed, surrounded by officer pointing submachine guns at him. When they realised his “weapon” was only a blue plastic water pistol, they de-arrested him.
The Metropolitan Police said “no misconduct issues had been identified”. This despite the officers on the scene telling the boy’s mother that he was “lucky” not to have been formally arrested. Standard procedure? Imagine the fear those two children must have felt. They won’t want to play out on the streets for a while, I would think.
This was in Hackney. The boy in question was black. A friend of mine, whose son is mixed race, said she was glad not to have had to bring her children up in London.
I suppose that to some extent it’s a sign of the times we live in that there was that over the top response by the police - but would it have been “over the top” if he really had been pointing a gun at someone- and that a young boy could find himself in danger of being arrested and shot on our streets.
The Met has since apologised to the traumatised family.
Meta, the parent company of Instagram, has also apologised, this time to Palestinian Instagram users who had the word “terrorist” added to their profile. Apparently it was a artificial intelligence problem rather than deliberate discrimination. “The issue, affected users with the word “Palestinian” written in English on their profile, the Palestinian flag emoji and the word “alhamdulillah” written in Arabic. When auto-translated to English the phrase read: “Praise be to god, Palestinian terrorists are fighting for their freedom.”
Coincidentally, I read a short article the other day, an article I have been unable to find since, in which a Palestinian Christian explained that Allah simply means God, the same God, by the way, worshipped by Christians, Jews and Muslims. And so he uses the word all the time, as he does expressions like “alhamdulillah” (praise be to God) and “inshallah” (God willing). It’s just Arabic. This does not make him a terrorist.
“Inshallah”, by the way, is the origin of the Spanish “ojalá”, used for “if only!”. My Spanish teacher long ago used to explain to us that it was a contraction on “un ojo a Allah”. It’s not surprising that it’s there in Spanish; after all much of Spain was occupied by Arabs until 1492.
We mustn’t let use of language or colour of skin influence the way we see and treat people.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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