Just another dent in the damage…

This week’s Channel 4 Dispatches focused on piecing together the horrific terrorist attacks that hit Mumbai last November. It is incredibly detailed in its tracking of the young terrorists’ movements and their communications with their ‘commanders’ in Pakistan, featuring original voice recordings of mobile interceptions, amateur video footage and CCTV, interviews with eye-witnesses and news coverage of the time.

It’s pretty difficult to watch given the inclusion of extremely graphic images depicting the carnage that left at least 173 dead and a further 308 injured but an excellent documentary nonetheless. They’ve done remarkably well in reconstructing the group’s movements across the city and collating detailed descriptions of the plot that took the city of Mumbai hostage for three days.

It makes me question what the Indian authorities were doing at the time during these intercepted telephone conversations, was there contact with Pakistani administration? Were they able to trace the calls to find any further information out about the ‘controllers’? What has been/is being done to identify the leaders of the mob and how will Lashkar-e-Taiba be held accountable? What is to come of the Kasab trial (the sole surviving terrorist caught by the Indian forces and currently held in custody) given that on May 6th he pleaded not guilty to 86 charges? Surely there is enough evidence here which says otherwise?

And finally was it really appropriate for the Dispatches team to end the documentary with the ‘controller’s’ message to the media? – ‘this was just the trailer. wait for the rest of the film’.

There are 28 days left on the 4oD platform to catch-up or see Youtube’s five part break down:

• Part 1;
• Part 2;
• Part 3;
• Part 4;
• Part 5.

If you’re still not convinced though have a quick peek at this Channel 4 News report for a taster:

I just want to say that this week’s Heroes is UNREAL. It’s so amazing. everything you need:

• An Iranian threat (the mention of not an actual threat);
• Guantanamo Bay style kidnap;
• A tough-ass secret service and crazy government leader;
• Amazing super powers;
• etc etc.

It could almost be real life! I ♥ Peter Petrelli.

You’ve four days left to catch it on the iPlayer.

Last week I watched one part of the three part BBC drama, Family Man in which Trevor Eve stars as a fertility expert and revolutionary IVF doctor. One of the families that turn to Dr Patrick Stowe for treatment lost their son in a tragic accident and seek help to determine the sex of an embryo before embarking on the IVF process. With three daughters already the couple are desperate for a boy, not to serve as a replacement for their loss but to ‘fill the hole left by little Nick’. With the Ethics Council, growing public opinion and the majority of his colleagues all firmly opposing such action, Patrick is left to make an agonising decision over whether it would be morally ‘right’ to break the law in order to help them.

The concept of choosing whether to have a baby based upon the knowledge of its sex however is more like common practice in certain parts of India. Yesterday’s Independent featured an article linking the high abortion rates of female foetuses to its modern day slavery.

Indian parents want boys because girls are seen as a heavy financial burden: the parents have to provide expensive dowry for their weddings, while sons will bring money into the family when they marry, and have better job prospects.

With only 861 women for every 1,000 men there are just not enough women to marry. This severe shortage of women has therefore led to a growing market of trade in which women are brought and sold as a commodity. Many of the women are brought as ’sexual brides’ from the poorer villages and later sold on at a profit. While abortion in India is legal, testing the gender is not and as strict laws come into force in order to prevent this practice doctors are becoming increasingly more inventive in notifying parents of the foetuses sex.

To get around police, doctors have started using codes to tell the people the sex of the baby: if the ultrasound report is written in blue ink, it’s a boy; if it’s in red ink, it’s a girl. If the report is delivered on Monday, it’s a boy, if it’s a Friday, it’s a girl.

Last week the BBC reported on the first sex selector doctor to be jailed for revealing the sex of an unborn baby and agreeing to abort it. It seems however that the damage to gender ratios has already been done with an estimated ten million aborted female foetuses in the last twenty years! Dominic Lawson goes on to comment that ‘the women’s movement saw this one coming a long time ago’. He refers to the publication of Mary Anne Warren’s Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Science in 1985 as a prediction of ‘the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender)’.

Having asked if ‘gendercide’ would be ‘no less an atrocity than genocide, Warren’s conclusion was that choosing the sex of one’s child was wrong only if its intent was discrimination against women. Or in other words, the act is neither right nor wrong – it is the thought behind it that counts. With the concluding part of Family Man coming up on Thursday I would therefore suggest (using Warren’s model) that in fact the act of identifying the sex of an embryo is neither right nor wrong it’s actual irrelevant when you see that the families need for a male embryo is far from any kind of gender discrimination. However as the family are still in mourning over little Nick and quite clearly suffering psychologically with blame and guilt would it be right to help them if their inability to come to terms with their loss would be detrimental to their new son’s development?

Look what Lenin has to say!

The most bizarre TV show I’ve recently come across is something I watched last night. Taking the gameshow formula, this programme tricks ‘petty criminals’ into handing themselves over to the cops. I was only half watching but the general idea was to get these ‘wanted’ criminals to attend a football competition where they get to hang out with models and potentially win a car. Once the contestant scored they were ushered to ‘walk the plank’ by the show’s host, in order to collect their prizes. But here’s the twist — There is no prize. The other side of the curtains hidden away are the police ready to cuff ‘em and take ‘em away.

Are the producers actually aware of the mockery this makes of our justice system and the police institution? Maybe that’s their intentions. Who knows. I couldn’t give a shit anyway — I am an Anti-Christ and I am an Anar-chist!