In my last blog, I posted an interview with Fareed Ahmad, President of Devon and Cornwall’s Muslim Society (Ahmadiyya Muslim Association). In the interview he talked about the dangers of what sites like live link can do, with regards to his faith. To view the hanging please (warning the video contains extreme and graphic images of people dying) click here.
My main gripe with how the hanging was portrayed on live leak wasn’t to do with the actual showing of the hanging. It was to do with the lack of information written alongside it. It tells you nothing of why the two men are being killed, and only has what seems to be a presumption that it is murder that the woman is being killed. Yet we do not know who or how many people she killed, and in what circumstances the murder took place.
There is also a lack of explanation into Iranian law on the website. The feel of the website as a whole in my opinion is very much from a Western perspective, mocking the rules and laws of another culture by exposing what would be perceived as outrageous in this country.
As I stated in my earlier posts, in my opinion we are too sheltered from the news and the grave reality of what goes on in other cultures. But I feel if we are to see the unregulated news events of other countries, we at first need to understand fully about other countries cultures and rules and the reasons for those rules. Unregulated ‘news’ websites like Live Leak, can therefore be a danger if they are put into the hands of people who are not able to ‘read’ the media properly. I feel this is why it is imperative that schools teach children about how to read and challenge the media at a very early age (see David Hampshire interview in last post).
