Wednesday 2 September 2009

Circumnavigation beats decapitation

“A court in Utrecht yesterday becalmed the plans of a 13-year-old Dutch girl to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world. In a case which has generated worldwide debate about parental responsibility the court placed Laura Dekker under the guardianship of childcare officials for two months”, reports one mouthpiece of the mainstream media. And there are 5,044 other past month hits for “Laura Dekker” on Google News.

At the same time the placing under the guardianship of childcare officials in Florida of Rifqa Bary, a girl of similar age from Ohio who ran away from home for fear her parents might do their duty under Methodism and cut off her head with a blunt knife for having “converted” to Christianity, merits only 709 past month hits on Google News, and few of these are MSM reports. So this case has obviously generated much less “worldwide debate about parental responsibility” for some reason.