The spread of the fiction about Tower Hamlets as "the" “Muslim run Council banning non Muslims from eating during Ramadan” was unabated two years ago.

0510 [0500] [0440] [0435] [0405] Hrs GMT
London
Monday
11 October 2010
Editor © Muhammad Haque

The spread of the fiction about Tower Hamlets as "the" “Muslim run Council banning non Muslims from eating during Ramadan” was unabated two years ago. Its impact is lethally alive and active today.
What was then spread has remained on the records and neither the "Muslim councillors" so openly accused of being behind that alleged ban nor the executive side of Tower Hamlets Council has so far [11 October 2010] issued any known independently verifiable rebuttal to the allegations.
The result is that a malignant stigma has been added at the expense of democracy and accountability and the image of Tower Hamlets as a community and as a democratic environment has suffered a diminution in the UK and in this context in the whole world.

One Tower Hamlets councillor in particular was given such prominence that those not actually familiar with Tower Hamlets and yet reading about her role in the depicted crusade for the "non-Muslim and by implication the mainly Christian and other ‘western’ religions and groups.." would think that she was leading a large group of campaigning councillors on Tower Hamlets Council.

The citations suggested that she was also much more senior and experienced than she actually was.

So was that conducive to the advancement of the due values of the “democratic process” that Andrew Gilligan [writing in July 2009 almost a year after those events of August 2008] quoted the Editor of the “East London Advertiser” Malcolm Starbrook as being concerned for?

There is no express answer to this question.

But the evidence of the role played by the “East London Advertiser” in the “locally based legitimisation” of that “claim” so wildly attributed to “Dr Stephanie Eaton” as “the Leader” of the “Liberal Democrats” on Tower Hamlets Council by the London-wide outlets the EVENING STANDARD and METRO shows that the paper was positive in its endorsement of the line that was being pushed on the issue by the DAILY MAIL and others taking their cue from that agenda-setting title.

The agenda that the Daily Mail set during the month of Ramadan coinciding with the autumn of 2008 has remained active to this day two years on.

The “AGENDA” that we are linking with the DAILY MAIL is a misleading, inaccurate, inflammatory and almost always pro-racist one.

Had the “East London Advertiser” known that “Dr Stephanie Eaton” did not have any direct statement from any member of the controlling group of councillors on Tower Hamlets Council making the claims that the DAILY MAIL the EVENING STANDARD and the METRO publicised so widely? There is no answer to this either in the published contents of the “East London Advertiser” nor in any of the comments about the paper’s “policies” in any of the trade titles.

Those trade titles, such as HoldtheFrontPage and the UK Press Gazette [of the time] have been strangely invoked by the “East London Advertiser” as part of its promotional activities in the past two years or so.

One of those activities has been of course the claim that the “East End Life” has been a threat to the very survival of the “East London Advertiser” as an “independent” “commercial” enterprise.

The invocation has been part of a business and propaganda strategy that the “East London Advertiser” Group [ARCHANT] has pursued by roping in the “services” of the Office of Fair Trading and of the [then] Opposition Conservative Party.

In particular, the title has made banal references to Ed Vaizey, who had no known record of any principled stand about anything to do with the inner city area.

Yet the “East London Advertiser” depicted him as if he had been an occupant of such an august and ordinarily inaccessible post of such immense power and influence that the people of the East End in whose name the “East London Advertiser” made those references to him ought to be thankful for their good fortune!Such behaviour as we have diagnostically contextually summarised above in the context of the “East London Advertiser” pleading for a respite from the destructive assault on it by the “East End Life” does not represent the existence of a mature let alone a truly “democratic” strategy at the heart of the operation that includes the “East London Advertiser”.

It is in fact an opposite strategy.

As is exhibited in the contents of the “East London Advertiser” where it comes to the promotion of the image of “Stephanie Eaton”.What the published record of “East London Advertiser” about its attitude to “Stephanie Eaton” shows is an emotionally justifiable but evidentially untenable bias.

There is no record that could justify her being described as a Tower Hamlets Councillor as “consistently excellent”.Could this be any reason why the “East London Advertiser” has failed to conduct rigorous investigation into what the councillors actually do and which ones are up to the task and which ones are and have been letting the community down?

Is that why there has been a curious lack of questioning about why it was only Stephanie Eaton that got re-elected while all other Lib Dem candidates were defeated at the 06 May 2010 council elections in Tower Hamlets?

Is this also linked to why the “East London Advertiser” has not asked why Stephanie Eaton changed her position from being opposed [06 February 2010] [as seen in the photograph that the "East London Advertiser" published on 09 February 2010] to a directly elected mayor to being an apparent promoter of the directly elected mayor system?

Is that why too the “East London Advertiser” has not wondered why Stephanie Eaton has been silent over the many questions raised about the irregularities, the rigging and breaches of the law concerning so many aspects of voting, the referendum and the Council’s own bureaucracy barring due access to the public to the counts?

How can the role of the “East London Advertiser” as we have shown above have been consistent with the “democratic process” that Andrew Gilligan so positively attributed to Malcolm Starbrook the Group Editor of the “East London Advertiser”?

[To be continued]