Young Britons Sentenced For Inciting to Riots On Facebook
Riots in Tottenham
British authorities have sentenced two young men to four years in jail each for a failed attempt to incite people to participate in the riots that jolted the capital and the major cities a week ago. The names of the two young men were Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, and they were convicted for creating Facebook pages in which they were calling for violent riots in northwest England.
The pages were called “Smash Down Northwich Town” and “Let’s have a riot in Latchford.” Police say they infiltrated Blackshaw’s page and that there was no one to like it, while Keenan’s was taken down by the builder himself one day after it had been built.
Meanwhile a page called “Free Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan” was created on the same Facebook, and has already 38 followers.
Another young man appeared before court under a more serious accusation than creating a page on Facebook. He is accused of murdering Richard Bowes, 68, during the last week’s riots. On top of that, he was charged with violent disorder and burglary.
3,000 people were charged with participating in the riots across England that started two weekends ago, lasted for a couple of days and left behind five dead and a huge amount of economic damages.
It also left behind a sarcastic laughter of people like Iranian president, who blamed David Cameron for using methods he usually criticizes when they are used by Iranians.
Police was accused during these riots of not having interfered in due time to stop the violence from spreading into the capital’s neighborhoods. They replied that protecting lives was a more important mission than protecting buildings, and reminded the public they were a little short of staff, after governmental cuts.
David Cameron pledged to take serious measures to make sure such things do not happen again. And he did: he flooded the streets of London with police officers, so that 16,000 police were in the capital the next weekend after the riot started, in stead of 2,000.
He also authorized the use of rubber bullets and probably would have authorized the use of water canon should the riots have continued.
The authorities arrested crazy kids for playing the big revolutionaries on Facebook, and sent them to years in jail. It is said that half of the 3,000 arrested people were riot-related, that is they may have not been in the streets.
Burning Building in London
All these measures in place, the only thing that is still to be done is address the real problem: Why do the people in Tottenham or in Manchester’s neighborhood feel excluded from the life of Briton society to such a point that they want to smash it down?
Why do they come to a point where nothing else matters? How deep the hypocrisy runs when we, the Western people, pretend to be civilized people, while some of us commit themselves to burglary and shoplifting the minute they feel the police is no longer capable of defending public propriety?
There was a time when people carrying television sets and computers from the shops they broke into during a riot was just a movie scenario. An intellectual debate. Since then it has been done in more than one occasion: during the riots in Los Angeles, in 1994, during the riots in Paris in the 2000s, during the riots Premier David Cameron so bravely crushed last week. Not to mention Greece, where smashing windows is a sport during the riots.
When Japan went through the tragic events of Fukushima, the entire world media was shocked about one thing: there was a totally decomposed society there, with no law enforcement agency, with no institution in place to watch the normal course of life, yet, during the entire tragedy at Fukushima and the Myagi province not one single person was caught, or seen, taking something from a shop, or from a general store. No one stole anything, no one behaved like it was there for the taken.
Furthermore, there were reports that even the feared Yakuza, the famous mob organization in Japan and Asia, was among those who did relief work.
Maybe the prime minister of UK should be more concerned about what is driving the Japanese to continue to behave like civilized people even when the state is down and no longer can enforce the official doctrine, if such a thing even exist in Japan.
Maybe the PM of Britain should meditate about what drove those crazy kids to want to smash down their little town in the northwest of England? Was it a show off act? Was it that they really felt excluded from its life? Was it that they wanted to be cool on Facebook? Was it that they disapproved of the government’s policies?
Arresting people for placing adds on Facebook have been seen all over the world this year, especially in the Muslim world, since the Arab spring started. In more or less democratic countries.
No one disputes the provision of a law that states that inciting to social disorder is punishable. But the mechanisms that drive the people to break this law should be looked into even for the mere reason of understanding them, so that devices can be built to prevent them from happening again.
