I seem to recall that a California blog received e-mail threats from an office building where Bungy was employed.
The conviction last Thursday of the self-styled "Lyrical Terrorist", 23-year old Samina Malik, marks a further dramatic erosion of our liberties in the United Kingdom.
The British public was outraged when the leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, complained of "Nazism" in the UK, and did so 1 day before "Armistice Day" (Nov. 11)
In the wake of the guilty verdict, several newspapers printed extracts from her attempts at poetry, including gems such as How to Behead, and The Living Martyrs. The court had heard that on an online social networking group known as Hi-5 Samina Malik had listed her interests as "helping the mujahideen any way I can" and, in the section for her favourite TV shows, she entered "watching videos by Muslim brothers in Iraq, yep, the beheading ones".
However, Malik was also said to have downloaded some material from the internet including The al-Qaida Manual and The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook - it took me less than a minute to find both of these using Google, along with a document entitled How To Win Hand-to-Hand Fighting.
Although she was acquitted of the more serious charge under section 57 of the Terrorism Act of possessing an item for a "purpose" connected with terrorism, she was still convicted under section 58 of the same act which states:
A person commits an offence if ... he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism
It hardly needs stating how incredibly broadly this act can be interpreted. The act does allow a defence for a person to download such material if the person can "prove that he had a reasonable excuse for his action or possession". Evidently, the court felt that Samina Malik had no such reasonable excuse and as the Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke, of Scotland Yard, remarked after the trial: "Merely possessing this material is a serious criminal offence."
It is to be hoped that this case may yet serve as a demonstration of just how badly-framed some of our anti-terror legislation actually is. In a truly free society, it should not be a crime to merely download and read such material.
During her trial, Malik argued that she was not a terrorist and that she had chosen the online moniker "Lyrical terrorist" simply because it had "sounded cool" and that her poetry, online remarks and downloading of internet material was undertaken in an attempt to attract male admirers.
The "poetess" clearly declared her hate for the majority in her adopted homeland, and she more than advocated violence, she expressed an intent to personally act on her hate.
Her story is quite plausible and I am sure there must be many more like her. Countless young British Muslims visit popular internet sites such as YouTube every day to obtain footage of what is really happening in Iraq and come across sickening material such as US soldiers deliberately killing a clearly wounded Iraqi and then appearing to gloat over the murder, a US soldier in Iraq using a loudhailer to taunt Muslims with his expletive-filled mocking of the Islamic call to prayer, footage graphically showing the enormous and terrible impact of the US-led war on Iraqi civilians (this last one has the haunting Manic Street Preachers hit, If you tolerate this your children will be next ... as its soundtrack). If you have not already done so, then do try viewing some of this material - there is a lot more out there - and ask yourself whether, if you were a 23-year-old it might not also have prompted dark thoughts to cross your own mind, however fleetingly, and perhaps even have led you to download similar material from the internet.
Samina has been put under house arrest for the time being, but she must return for sentencing on December 6. As one blogger noted, it will be interesting to see if the judge chooses to make an example of her in order to discourage others or if he chooses instead to make an example of what is undoubtedly a bad and illiberal law whose primary purpose is to punish people for having the wrong thoughts.
There would appear to be something preposterously wrong with our criminal justice system if nearly five years after the Iraq war was launched and hundreds of thousands of wholly unnecessary deaths later, Tony Blair is able to just walk away from his responsibility for the ongoing carnage and unbelievably emerge as a Peace Envoy to the region, while a foolish young woman who did not harm anyone now faces a maximum 10-year term in prison for what can only be described as a thought crime.
Free speech? Bungy and the MCB have a habit of demanding "hate" prosecutions of non-muslims who scrutinize his cult. He would jail "islamophobes" if he had the power.