10-Year-Old Muslim Boy Probed For 'Terrorist House' Spelling Error (bbc.com)

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10-Year-Old Muslim Boy Probed For 'Terrorist House' Spelling Error (bbc.com)

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday January 20, 2016 @02:06AM from the if-you-see-something,-think-with-your-head dept.

AmiMoJo writes: A 10-year-old Muslim boy who mistakenly wrote that he lived in a "terrorist house" during an English lesson at school has been investigated by police. The pupil, who attends a primary school in Lancashire, meant to say he lived in a "terraced house." The boy was interviewed by Lancashire Police at his home the next day, and the family laptop was examined. The 2015 Counter Terrorism and Security Act means that teachers have been legally obliged to report any suspected extremist behavior to police since July. Miqdaad Versi, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, the UK's largest umbrella group for Islamic associations, said he was aware of dozens of cases similar to that of the schoolboy.

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News for Nerds? by 110010001000 · 2016-01-20 02:15 · Score: 4, Insightful

They should change the slogan to "Half-Story Clickbait to Bring the Foaming-at-the-Mouth People to the Site". Not catchy enough?
1. Re:News for Nerds? by jdavidb · 2016-01-20 02:31 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  They should change the slogan to "Half-Story Clickbait to Bring the Foaming-at-the-Mouth People to the Site". Not catchy enough?
  Nerds are frequently concerned with stories about rights and injustice.
  
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2. Re:News for Nerds? by 110010001000 · 2016-01-20 02:34 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Really? Since when? 5 years ago this story wouldn't even have been submitted to Firehose, much less been posted to the front page. However AmiMoJo has a special relationship, so he can post whatever he wants.
I'm not seeing the problem here by BarbaraHudson · 2016-01-20 02:17 · Score: 5, Insightful

The kid's background doesn't come into it - if any kid had written that they live in a terrorist house, it would be checked out. This is not a case of profiling, no matter how much the Muslim Council of Britain tries, without actually saying so, that it was targeted at a Muslim.

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"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
1. Re:I'm not seeing the problem here by 110010001000 · 2016-01-20 02:30 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  I'm not paranoid, but that is likely the case. The same with the "Clock Boy" and his sisters antics. They were all staged.
2. Re:I'm not seeing the problem here by AmiMoJo · 2016-01-20 02:50 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  if any kid had written that they live in a terrorist house, it would be checked out.
  Even if that were the case, it's still outrageous that teachers apparently feel they are required to report obvious spelling errors and that the police feel they are worth investigating. At any point someone could have said "this is stupid, it's clearly a mistake, let's not waste time and money or cause unnecessary grief for this family", but no one had the guts. This is what happens when you create a climate of fear, where if some kid decides to go to Syria because J1hadi2011 told him to his teachers get blamed for not spotting it.
  Even worse, where is the judicial oversight? Shouldn't searching the family laptop require some kind of check, especially when it is based on such incredibly flimsy evidence? It seems like if someone outside the school/police had looked at it, there might have been a chance for a sane outcome.
  In any case, I really doubt the probability of unfortunate spelling errors being reported to the police is the same for a nice 99% white school in rural Hampshire as for a 99% Muslim school in Birmingham. We need to do a test like those identical CVs with Christian/Muslim names on the top, but with two kids called Dave and Mohammed.
  
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3. Re:I'm not seeing the problem here by jabuzz · 2016-01-20 02:58 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The thing is legally the teachers had to report it to the police. Failure to do so could lead to prison.
  The other thing is that children are horrible at keeping secrets and will grass even themselves up all the time. Therefore it was appropriate to investigate and the fact that he was from a Muslim household in my view makes it extra worthwhile following up. Now that the Irish terrorist threat has all but gone in the UK, statistically that fact makes it more likely that it was not just a mistake and hence worth investigating.
  Imagine his family had disappeared to Syria in a couple of months to join Daesh?
4. Re:I'm not seeing the problem here by Jason+Levine · 2016-01-20 03:17 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  And they the American Northwest "YallQaeda" folks are being allowed to come and go from the Federal land as they please even after it was found out that they are wrecking havoc on the lands. So you have armed folks taking over Federal lands, ruining them, and they are allowed to come and go without being arrested? Do you really think they would be treated the same way if they were 150 armed black men or 150 armed Muslims?
  
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5. Re:I'm not seeing the problem here by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-20 03:35 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  When I was about his age, I couldn't tell the difference between "Skull" and "School". They just sounded identical to me, so I would use the spellings interchangeably. Note that I don't have any learning deficits or other disabilities, and I wasn't the only one I knew who had similar word mixups. Young children just sometimes hear words as being the same. Especially with an accent, Terraced and Terrorist can certainly sound similar enough that he could mix up the spellings. This definitely sounds like an honest mistake to me.
Re:Polaroid Obama by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-20 02:21 · Score: 2, Insightful

Bullshit
Officials by internerdj · 2016-01-20 02:36 · Score: 4, Insightful

I'm not much of one to sympathize with politicians but I'm pretty certain this is what we sound like to someone in office:
Terrorist attack...
Constituents: "Why didn't you stop all these people from dying? Do something to keep it from happening again."
Does something...
Constituents: "Why are you attacking the freedoms of all these innocent people? You are being racist and evil."
Terrorist attack...
Constituents: "Why didn't you stop all these people from dying? Do something to keep it from happening again."
1. Re:Officials by amiga3D · 2016-01-20 03:00 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  You can either be free or you can have the illusion of safety. Most people willingly choose the latter.
Re:Plot twist by gstoddart · 2016-01-20 02:37 · Score: 3, Insightful

Well, yeah. It's like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
If you try hard enough, you can likely find a super tenuous connection to an act of terrorism to almost anybody.
Somewhere there's a bizarre chain of crap which says "Rik Sweeney went to school with a guy who went to the same mosque as a guy who washed the floors where a guy was in the same English class with the guys who delivered pizza to guys who did the Boston Marathon shootings". Ta da, you're linked to terrorism.
If you go chasing shadows you can make up any old crap. It doesn't make it evidence of a damned thing.
The problem is both the press and the idiots who claim they're trying to protect our freedoms treat these tenuous links as if they are meaningful.

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Fucking hell, the comments here are awful. by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-20 03:54 · Score: 4, Insightful

Here's how you "investigate" the problem. Here's how teachers would have "investigated" things before laws saying that anyone saying something slightly wrong had to be reported to the police.
Teacher: What do you mean by "terrorist" in this sentence?
Boy: Well, the houses are joined together in both sides.
Teacher: Are you sure you're using the right word?
Boy: Um well I'm not sure how to spell it but I thought that was it, I heard it yesterday.
Teacher: Yesterday we used [these words], was it any of these?
Boy: Ohhh! it was "terraced".
Here's how teachers are expected to behave now:
Teacher: A likely spelling error! I MUST CALL THE POLICE OR I CAN GO TO JAIL!
I would not have children in the UK today. I'm terrified by this environment. My father was brought up in a dictatorship, and taught in a school under that same dictatorship, and not even he was supposed to monitor kids like this.
Re:Of course its gonna get checked by BarbaraHudson · 2016-01-20 03:58 · Score: 3, Insightful

The Christian bible is just as bad ...

--
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Re:Polaroid Obama by Anonymous Coward · 2016-01-20 05:21 · Score: 0, Insightful

found the bigot