The McCann's Version - Despite Conscious Effort to Believe It- My Doubts Remain.

This video raises a lot of the questions that continue to perplex me about this case, please watch it. Writing below the video link, I attempt to explain why despite wanting to believe the McCann's version of events, I remain wracked by doubt.

I think that I must be like a lot of people who have been following the tragic case of the missing child Madeleine McCann. I was appalled by the fact that a young innocent child sleeping in her bed, on a lovely family holiday could go missing. I found it very upsetting to think through the implications of her disappearance, an abduction of one so young could only be for the foulest of motives. Like many, I guess I understood what the possibilities were, she sadly could be dead, probably killed by the panicking and deeply disturbed individual who snatched her in the first place, in an attempt to avoid judicial punishment and the huge weight of shame and culpability which would descend on the perpetrator and his family, and yes it was going to be a male in my minds eye,in all likelihood somebody not too dissimilar in profile to Ian Huntley. I suppose, I too toyed with the notion of an abduction to order, that old deeply seated fear of western Christians, that Muslims, in all likelihood the archtypal abductor of blond Christian children the 'Moors' could be responsible. At least the child would be alive.Yet staging an abduction to acquire a blond child, when the former USSR is full of blond children whose parents or orphanages would only be too happy to supply such a child for a fat bribe seems far fetched and derived more from some folk memory of Moorish raids. Acquiring a child through the well established people trafficking trade, could presumably achieve the same end at a significantly smaller price and far less risk and hullabaloo, and for considerably less trouble than snatching a sleeping child from a crowded holiday resort in Portugal. A resort which is not even particularly close to Morocco compared with the many Southern Spanish resorts,thronged with blond visitors in the summer months.
I observed the battle developing over the case, the PR 'War' and like many others I fell in line with the view, widely touted, that the Portuguese police were immensely unprofessional and in some obscure way vaguely incompetent. The coverage led one to cry in exasperation, 'if only a decent police force could take charge', it would be possible to get to the bottom of all this. Somewhere during this wet summer I started to think the unthinkable....I began to wonder how it was that I and my critical faculties had been so readily suspended.I sadly came to the conclusion, that not for the first time in my error strewn life, I had bought the story I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that this poor innocent little girl had been abducted by a mysterious active force for evil, an evil unknown perpetrator. After all were not the alternative possibilities too difficult to contemplate? To even consider the possibility that this young girl was not actually abducted at all, opens up a vista of possible deceit and inhumanity which one instinctively seeks to quell as soon as it enters your head. On many occasions when that thought has entered my mind, I have remorsefully dismissed it as a possibility, even beating myself up a bit emotionally for even thinking such a thought.
Observing the 'PR War' I wrote a piece for this blog about that battle for hearts and minds which was going on, and tried to pinpoint why the McCann parents were in my opinion 'losing' that battle. After a relatively short while, I pulled that posting from this blog because it was clear that some of the 'facts' of what happened that night were not in truth established facts at all, in particular what happened when the unfortunate Kate McCann discovered Madeleine was missing from her bedroom. I realised that so much was unclear and unproven, that even an analysis of the reasons why the extremely well resourced McCann family campaign for Madeleine was hitting the sand, seemed to be plumping on one side of the controversy about who was responsible for her disappearance. I simply did not want to adopt a judgemental position on this matter. I was appalled of course by the fact that the child and two even younger children were left alone, but my sympathies for the plight of the parents were so strong, that like many others I tended to ignore that 'elephant in the room'.Castigating the McCann's for this huge error of judgement seemed a bit inappropriate, like turning around after a car crash and saying something like it would never have happened if you had'nt insisted on embarking on the journey 'despite the weather forecast I told you about the night before' , an utterly useless sentiment, akin to bolting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Yet, despite all the attempts to summon up sympathy, I find myself getting very angry about this case. This anger puzzles me , it is not really stemming from lengthy analysis, (although I have read a lot of material about the case). Rather this very real anger is coming from a nagging and insistent perception, call it intuition if you wish, that something about the versions of events being propogated in the British media, and originating from the McCann's themselves and their closely knit circle of friends is fundamentally flawed,to me it just does'nt hang right. This sense of not being told it how it really was, persists and in fact gets stronger the more PR effort is expended , and the more spin doctors called Clarence are brought to bear on my brain . When I am expected to be sympathising with a grieving McCann family it just does'nt come, I want it to, but that human emotion does'nt come to order, it needs certain emotional cues. Sympathy for the child Madeleine I have aplenty, but for Gerry and Kate the emotional buttons are'nt being pressed, I find myself comparing my reactions to the truly grief stricken mother of the late Rhys Jones after he was gunned down in Liverpool, and the reaction I had to that scene was strongly and deeply sympathetic, because the emotions and body language of Rhy's mother were utterly unambiguous and profoundly human. I hope that my persistent doubt is misplaced, I genuinely do. I hope that this 'Moorish' abductor makes an error and little Madeleine is reunited with her parents. If the poor misfortunate is dead, then I hope the perpetrator or perpetrators are brought to justice swiftly, not least so that this child can be laid to rest with the dignity that she and all human beings deserve.