Readers' Ombudsman: Nazi links of alleged plotters in United States cannot be denied

Published on Sunday 21 September 2008 22:01

THERE is an expression: if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are it’s a duck.

I have another version of that: if it wears a swastika ring, belongs to white supremacist group Aryan Nations and allegedly plots to assassinate a black man, chances are it’s a Nazi.

I’m talking, of course, about the arrest of three men who police in the United States believe were plotting to assassinate Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama in Denver.

Named police officials identified the men, revealed that one had rifles and ammunition in his truck, one had apparently confessed to the plot, and that the third had jumped out of a sixth-storey hotel window in an attempt to evade capture. Officers also stated all three were linked to Aryan Nations.

We ran the story of the alleged conspiracy on our front page under the headline “Nazi link in ‘plot to assassinate Obama’”.

Hamish MacQueen writes: “Surely the headline was wrong – there can’t be many card-carrying members of the Nazi party left. Presumably ‘neo-Nazi’ was meant, but why not just use ‘fascist’?”

So is “Nazi” inaccurate in this context? The word comes from the German Nazional-sozialist. As is obvious from their name, Aryan Nations draw deeply on the beliefs of Hitler’s Nazis.

Their website has a stylised eagle image very much like those used by Hitler on top of a swastika. They describe themselves as National Socialists. They even call themselves the Fourth Reich.

Nazism was a political movement, not a country. My view is that the people in this organisation are Nazis, regardless of the fact they are also American citizens. Despicable politics know no national boundaries.

PICTURES continue to be a controversial topic. Ken Gow believes we may be being unkind or at least unthinking towards young people who have appeared in a photograph published in The Scotsman.

He writes: “The image of an obese boy (and his sister?) accompanying your story on children’s exercise has now been used by you at least three times to illustrate this general news area.

“Each time I have seen it I have felt a bit sorry for these children. Various parties will be making money from their use. Maybe their parents signed a contract so that a proportion of any money would be held in trust for them, but that apart, I wonder how much say the children themselves had in putting themselves forward for this modelling job.

“I can only imagine the bullying they would get if their school friends came across them in this way. Your story would stand without any illustration; readers don’t need to be shown a photograph of obesity to understand the condition.”

Firstly my congratulations to Mr Gow on his memory. It turns out from our archive we have indeed used that picture three times, but there has been more than a year in between each use. However, Mr Gow does serve to remind us how loyal many of our readers are, and if he has noticed it then so will others.

These “stock” pictures, as we call them, allow us to illustrate a story with a generic image and therefore give it a more powerful presentation. It is how we give prominence to certain stories, and there is a limited library but we should not use a stock picture any more than twice, and those uses need to be separated by a reasonable amount of time, and what Mr Gow tells us is it needs to be longer than a year.

In this particular image there is a modelling agreement, so the children I imagine have agreed to it, and although I cannot be 100 per cent sure, I am told that it is very likely these children live abroad, as this is often the standard way of these things, built in to minimise any chance of embarrassment or difficulty for the children. The image was certainly filed by a global agency.

Contact Ian Stewart at 108 Holyrood Road, Edinburgh EH8 8AS or via e-mail at [e-mail] or on 0131 620 8633.