Madeleine McCann..The Daily Express....& Robinson Crusoe

As the time since Madeleine McCann's disappearance draws past the 6 month mark, the ever greedy British middle-brow press, represented by titles such as the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, grow ever more desperate to keep the pot boiling and interest maintained in a case that seems to be able to sell their papers as readily as Princess Diana's story in both life and death used to. Its now open season on any person or agency which seems to be genuinely puzzled by the inconsistencies in the team McCann version of what happened on that fateful night in May. The Portuguese police are portrayed as sleazy lazy greasy fat dagoes who spend their time quaffing wine, chewing their toothpicks removing congealed sardines from their dentures, and smoking foul smelling cigarettes scheming to imprison the brave British medics whose only crime was that they went out for a few drinks.....( leaving their toddler in charge of twin babies in an unlocked apartment two hundred yards from their restaurant ) ....{er remove the last bit.. Ed}. Another target of the Express in particular seems to be the denizens of the country of Morocco which seems to possess a morbid fascination for the journos at the Daily Excess. The latest rash of 'sightings' of 'Maddie' , as she has now been tabloidly re-christened, seems to be quite regularly in Morroco. This has the perfect combination of dusky skinned natives, Islam, and some kind of vague association with slavery and sexual skulduggery. Although it must be said that the historic perpetrators of most paedophilia in Morroco have largely been derived from European male paedophile visitors, who historically preyed upon poverty stricken youngsters in Morroco, a practice testified to in numerous literary memoirs over the decades. The latest serving from the Express is a classic of its kind, under the header ' ‘MADELEINE WILL BE USED AS A LITTLE MAID’ Thursday November 1st 2007 By Nick Fagge ( ho ho ) in Morocco and Martin Evans in Portugal... we discover, thanks to 'Nick' and Martin, that " MADELEINE McCann may have been condemned to a life of slavery working as a “little maid” for a rich Arab family in Morocco, child trafficking experts claimed yesterday. But as a child slave, Madeleine could be regularly abused by her host family or by visitors invited to meet the blonde-haired “curiosity”....."Collected by rich families as “curiosities” as well as domestic servants little maids can live with their host families their whole lives, receiving a pittance in wages which is sent directly to their family. And without the protection of family members these young girls are often abused – physically, emotionally and sexually. " Hang on where have we heard this before? There's something familiar in all this talk of 'curiosities' and 'domestic slavery', and no I am not talking about the thousands of Morrocan women working as 'au-pairs' in London, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid....No its older than that, as old as 1719 in fact, when 'Robinson Crusoe' by Daniel Defoe was published in England, Robinson Crusoe amongst his many misadventures is captured by Moors and made a personal slave....as described in Defoe's classic prose below,

"However, to cut short this melancholy part of our story, our ship being disabled, and three of our men killed, and eight wounded, we were obliged to yield, and were carried all prisoners into Sallee, a port belonging to the Moors.
The usage I had there was not so dreadful as at first I apprehended; nor was I carried up the country to the emperor's court, as the rest of our men were, but was kept by the captain of the rover as his proper prize, and made his slave, being young and nimble, and fit for his business. At this surprising change of my circumstances, from a merchant to a miserable slave, I was perfectly overwhelmed; and now I looked back upon my father's prophetic discourse to me, that I should be miserable and have none to relieve me, which I thought was now so effectually brought to pass that I could not be worse; for now the hand of Heaven had overtaken me, and I was undone without redemption; but, alas! this was but a taste of the misery I was to go through, as will appear in the sequel of this story.
As my new patron, or master, had taken me home to his house, so I was in hopes that he would take me with him when he went to sea again, believing that it would some time or other be his fate to be taken by a Spanish or Portugal man-of-war; and that then I should be set at liberty. But this hope of mine was soon taken away; for when he went to sea, he left me on shore to look after his little garden, and do the common drudgery of slaves about his house; and when he came home again from his cruise, he ordered me to lie in the cabin to look after the ship."

It is interesting, depressing, but frankly unsurprising, that the British press is digging into reservoirs of cultural memory, derived from a world view which was probably quite out of date within a century of its publication in 1719. Digging into veins of racism and prejudice which only need the slightest of prompting for it to come oozing out of British middle class opinion. Meanwhile it is widely reported that the Portuguese police are continuing along a definite line of enquiry, a line of enquiry that posits the notion that in common with 70% of all child homicides, no abductor at all was involved, no abductor , neither Morrocan, nor Muslim, in fact no dirty greasy foreigner of any description appears to be in the frame at all. Instead the Portuguese police are annoyingly insistent on investigating issues such as DNA traces, employing almost 100% foolproof UK based 'cadaver dogs' , and questioning the existence of an 'abductor' who quite apart from having no facial features at all was only 'seen' by a close friend of the McCann's and not by one single other of the thousands of holidaymakers thronging the resort of Praia de Luz that evening in May. I suppose eventually they will see sense and search instead for 'Corsairs' in Dhows with turbans, beards, and an unspeakable appetite for the strange and previously unseen and unheard of curiosities spoken of in the hareems of Araby as 'the blond haired ones' .

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.