I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted a Headline Howler (so many to choose from, LE SIGH), but today, I saw this future classic on Remi Kanazi’s Facebook page:
Dear Daily Fail:
I am a timid gardener. I am introverted, prefer solitude over bad company, am sometimes socially awkward, and have often been called shy. I have experienced what you might call “mental turmoil”. I’ve even coped with major clinical depression and survived it, unmedicated and without psychiatric care. I’ve come perilously close to suicide. When I was at my sickest, I could not trust myself near a railroad track, because the sight of a passing freight drew me toward it like a huge and nauseating magnet. Once, on a trip with a boyfriend to Niagara Falls, I strongly considered jumping off a bridge with a seventy-metre drop into the drainage canal below. (Yes, I measured it…by timing a stone’s fall and calculating the distance based on that.) I have done many things that terrified me at the time, and later caused me to look back and cringe with mortification to think I was ever that ill.
But never, under any circumstances, have I done anything nearly as heinous as what Tommy Mair did. Which is to take out memberships for years in more than one neo-Nazi and/or white supremacist organization, buy tons of neo-fascist literature and Nazi memorabilia, including instructions on how to build bombs and homemade pistols (no doubt to thwart those strict British gun laws), and turn into a “lone-wolf” terrorist — just by sheer coincidence, I’m sure — on the day after this photo was taken:
That’s Mair’s victim, Jo Cox (holding the flag), and her husband and kids, campaigning on the “In” side of the “Brexit” question. They and other members of their flotilla were on the Thames, outside the Parliament building, in a showdown with the “Out” side.
This is why Jo Cox was killed, and not some random stranger on the street. This was no coincidence. This was no case of a simple deranged man killing the first person who looked at him sideways. This is why Mair was heard to shout “Britain First” repeatedly as he attacked and killed her. She was on the opposite side to him, politically. He picked her to stalk and kill because she was not only for keeping the UK in the EU, but also a prominent advocate for Syrian refugees. Her death was meant to send a message.
This was a targeted, political assassination. This murder was meant to intimidate and terrorize the “In” side.
If you cannot tell the difference between an actual timid gardener with mental problems, and a calculating terrorist assassin with years of membership in numerous hate groups, you may as well stop your presses for good. You can’t do journalism for shit.
Oh, and whoever wrote your idiotic headline should go sit on a barrel cactus.
Love,
Bina, the Timid Gardener.
