The Shroud of Silence - Are you asking WHY?

Original here.

It’s ironic that in the ‘age of information” people are being kept in the dark more than ever. And we’re not talking of Iran or China and their undemocratic control of the press, the media and the internet. Western societies are taking for grated its renowned freedom of expression.

Money and power are the Iran and China of Europe.

If you have one or both, then nothing is sacred or impossible. Even because indifference is rife.

Here’s a screaming example of control of information, apathy and even censorship:

In 2007, a 3 year-old British girl – Madeleine McCann - goes missing in a holiday resort in Southern Portugal. I’m not even going into it – there has been enough talk about the details of the case.

What should have been just another missing person’s case, became not only an international media frenzy but also a political case – almost a political incident, between Portugal and the UK.

The question “why” is certainly pertinent in the aftermath, but nearly 3 years later, not only there’s no answer to that question and others; there isn’t even a scenario where questions can be put.

We are at a stage where posing questions equals “libelling”; where inconvenient questions are quickly met with law suits, and thus, questions are quickly silenced.

Maybe that explains another “whys”:


- Why have the media, namely the British, removed many inconvenient articles for the McCann from the cyberspace?

- Why have the British press suddenly become an “official” organ of propaganda for the McCann?

- Why are the McCann, unlike other parents in a similar situation, treated as starlets and spared “tough”, reasonable questions?

- Why is this preference being given to this couple?

- Why are books, DVDs, TV programs all over Europe being suppressed by the McCanns’ lawyers?

- Why they have so much power?

- Why are they allowed to get away with all this?

- Why has a judicial case been allowed to go out of the judicial sphere?

- Why is this couple and their Tapas friends refusing to go back for a reconstruction to answer the inconsistencies in their depositions?

- Why is this couple apparently above the law?

- Why have they step up a Fund so fast but are unconcerned that no police force is looking for their daughter?

- Why aren’t people outraged that this is happening?

- Why aren’t people reacting to the clear infringement of their right to unbiased information?

- Why aren’t the parents and the people demanding the re-opening of the case, in accordance with the “leaving no stone unturned” mantra?


These are just a few questions off the top of my head. Many more could and should be posed by a responsible society, to a couple who has used the media and the public attention as they pleased.

I hope we will have answers to these and other questions, soon. With your help, we will. Remember the CEOP message: "If you stay silent, you are just as bad".

Please add your "whys" to these in the comments or write your own manifest.

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