{"id":1302,"date":"2005-11-29T16:52:05","date_gmt":"2005-11-29T15:52:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2005\/11\/29\/bombers_sister_a_nasty_piece_of_work_apparently"},"modified":"2025-10-11T11:36:38","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T10:36:38","slug":"bombers_sister_a_nasty_piece_of_work_apparently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2005\/11\/29\/bombers_sister_a_nasty_piece_of_work_apparently","title":{"rendered":"Bomber&#8217;s sister a nasty piece of work, apparently"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An update on my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2005\/11\/28\/zahid_and_parveen_sharif_acqui\">earlier entry<\/a> on the brother and sister of Omar Sharif who attempted to blow up a pizza parlour in Tel Aviv; I suspected that people would find them guilty even if they were acquitted, and that has indeed happened.  Apparently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.timesonline.co.uk\/article\/0,,2-1895384,00.html\">some schoolkids said<\/a> that she made some comment about being &quot;on Bin Laden&#39;s team&quot; while working as a supply teacher at the time of the 9\/11 attacks.  She is also accused of having told the kids that, if they had any relatives in New York, they were dead.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Well, two things stick out about this.  The first is that it&#39;s not been the first time that someone has been cleared of a criminal act and smeared by the authorities afterwards.  Bob Woffinden, a well-known campaigner on miscarriages of justice in the UK, noted that the police came up with a load of smears against Stephen Downing, who spent well over 25 years in jail after confessing under duress to a murder he didn&#39;t commit, in order to justify their actions and clear their criminal officers of any wrongdoing.<\/p>\n<p>The second is that the supposed comments were made while working as a supply teacher.  What schoolchildren ever like supply teachers?  They&#39;re the nasty strict teachers who make you sit and do some stock worksheet, and have a load of rules you aren&#39;t familiar with.  And the evidence was discounted because of the age of the children involved.<\/p>\n<p>So, it&#39;s inadmissible in court.  But not in the newspapers, of course.  And like the words in the email, the words are ambiguous.  A lot of Muslims did not believe Osama bin Laden was behind 9\/11 and some still don&#39;t.  Many saw him as a courageous fighter against Soviet oppression, against Northern Alliance thuggery and later against American imperialism.  If someone said <em>then<\/em> that they were &quot;on his team&quot;, it is no evidence that they were <em>involved<\/em> in terrorism.<\/p>\n<p>The fact remains that it does not prove that she was guilty of this particular offence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An update on my earlier entry on the brother and sister of Omar Sharif who attempted to blow up a pizza parlour in Tel Aviv; I suspected that people would find them guilty even&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transport"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-l0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1302"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42705,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1302\/revisions\/42705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}