Smug parents enjoy punishing Kate and Gerry McCann

Questioning the McCanns is one thing, casting aspersions at a family torn apart by the loss of a child is another.
 
Maybe this person has insecurities as well as myself eh Guest001!
 
An interesting read for all:
 
India Knight: Smug parents enjoy punishing Kate and Gerry McCann

The abuse directed at Madeleine McCann’s parents is obscene after what they’ve been through since their daughter’s disappearence
The Sunday Times Published: 15 May 2011

We have just witnessed a most extraordinary week for prurience and nastiness, occasionally masquerading as “the public interest”. Not everyone seems to be able to tell the difference between the two. I know exactly why I rushed to read the names of the superinjunctioners that were leaked on Twitter: because I am nosy and I wanted to know, not because I had a “right” to.

Crucial difference there. Nobody has a “right” to know what people in the public eye get up to in private, unless the contradiction between public and private is so extreme and hypocritical that its disclosure is in the public interest.

The hunger for this supposedly secret information is mostly to do with the public’s insatiable appetite for occupying the moral high ground, particularly when it comes to celebrities, who must increasingly be discovering that, in the age of the internet, adulation is a form of hatred.

Reading the bile directed at the people who have taken out super-injunctions and whose names were revealed, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the dear old public lived a life of exquisite probity. Nobody cheats on their wife — the very idea! — and nobody looks at p*rn. No impure thoughts chez Joe and Josephine Normal. Nobody’s ever done anything they’ve regretted.

For these people, sexuality is as uncomplicated as vanilla ice cream and the best way of not doing something you might regret is to just say no. That’s why none of them is fat or lonely or confused or unhappy. They never get drunk and they all have fantastically successful marriages. We must, I suppose, envy these paragons. Personally, I despise them. Seriously: how do you get to be an adult and found your entire moral code on smugness?

Nowhere is the confusion between prurience and “our right to know” more brutally and revoltingly on display than in the abuse directed at Kate McCann, whose daughter Madeleine has now been missing for four years.

We must assume that none of these freaks ever let their own children out of their sight: that they didn’t allow them to walk to school or to the shops McCann’s sin is to be beautiful and articulate, which means — obviously — that she and her husband played a sinister part in their child’s disappearance.

I wrote at the time of Madeleine’s disappearance about the torrent of bile all over the internet from people, usually anonymous, who disapproved of the McCanns having had dinner a hundred yards from where their daughter was sleeping.

It was only a small step from this to the wildest, most offensive conspiracy theories, directed at a woman whose child had been stolen. Incredibly, much of the abuse came from women claiming to be parents.

We must assume that none of these anonymous freaks ever let their own children out of their sight for one moment: that they didn’t allow them to walk to school, for instance, or to the shops; that their impeccable lives never involved going on holiday with a group of friends and having a few drinks; that they had never known the brief panic of losing a child in a supermarket or playground.

And now, the hatred is back. Kate McCann has written a book — serialised in this newspaper — in which she explains what happened and how she feels. Though no doubt cathartic, and no doubt intended in part to quash the accusations, the book is primarily intended to raise funds for the campaign to find Madeleine, which has more or less stalled (though the Metropolitan police are involved as of last week, thanks to a commendable intervention by David Cameron).

The first unbelievable thing I heard — more than once, and from more than one otherwise sane, emotionally intelligent person — was: “Enough now. Time to move on. Lots of children are missing.” The implication is that grief has a sell-by date, the absurd idea that any parent would say: “Yeah, you know what, I’m over this whole malarkey. She’s gone. She may be alive, she may be dead, but — whatever.”

And then the old certainties were wheeled out again: “No smoke without fire”; “She never showed any emotion”; “Something’s not right.” As I sat welling up in my kitchen listening to Kate McCann and her unimaginably distressing story on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour last week, hundreds of people used the occasion to log on to Twitter and type out poison about her in real time. Again.

Where does it come from, this bizarre idea that some people “aren’t like us” and that this makes them fair game; that we can all light our torches, brandish our pitchforks and march on the castle shouting, “Kill the beast”, bursting with righteousness? Of course these people are like us. That’s the whole point: it’s why they interest us.

Even celebrities are like us; just more successful. Some of them had no intention of being famous but were so good at their jobs that fame invited itself in. So, what? We kill them for it? We tear them apart every time they go out in public and don’t feel like smiling?

Kate and Gerry McCann are like millions of ordinary middle-class parents, which is part of the reason the story resonated so loudly in the first place: it was real “there but for the grace of God” stuff. Is it that we’re so superior, so arrogant, so convinced that ours is the right way that we feel the McCanns must be punished for letting the side down?

Last Friday even Mumsnet, the online forum, decided to intervene and delete offensive posts about the McCanns. Justine Roberts, one of the site’s founders, told me: “Given that Mumsnet is a place for parents to make each other’s lives easier, we simply don’t want to host speculation about Kate and Gerry McCann’s culpability in the disappearance of their child. So we are asking people not to speculate that the McCanns might be involved in the disappearance and/or have lied about events, deleting posts that do, and asking posters who want to do this to go elsewhere.”

Hooray for Mumsnet. But really: how tragic, how ugly is it that people should still, four years later and with a child still missing, gleefully run to their keyboards with the sole intention of being vile? That’s not the moral high ground. Where I come from we call it the sewer.

Please provide the link to the Sunday Times article. Thank you.

Yet another appallingly biased article based on the principle "McCanns good, opponents bad". I would love to believe that the McCanns had nothing to do with whatever happened to Madeleine but the evidence says otherwise.

The link doesn't appear to show on here.
 
Marian
 
Your opinion!

Garth wrote:Marian
 
Your opinion!

Who else's opinion can she give but her own?

I can't find the link to the article.

Marian
 
What evidence are you talking about here that would be 100% proof that the McCanns committed an unbelievable crime and which would warrant people pouring scorn on the family?
 
Because that's what this is about................

But it's not evidence is it, it's merely an opinion based on controversial findings. Not enough to jump to conclusions and take the moral high ground is it.....or is it!
 
Here's the link again
 

I don't think Garth is able to post a link as a guest. I will have a look for it.

I tried looking for the link but could only find a blog.

Can't see this article on the online page and when you try to access anything else it is subscription only!!

Hiya Garth, I'm pleased to have the chance to discuss the case with a McCann supporter because those I have encountered before are so unpleasant and offensive that it's hard not to sink to their level when replying. Of course I'm not 100% sure of the McCanns' guilt, I wasn't there. Is it possible to be that sure about anything or anyone? All I can say - speaking totally personally - is that, having looked at the evidence available, I do not believe the McCanns' checking story and that it was made up to explain why Madeleine had gone. I do not know what happened to her and anything I offer on that point would be pure speculation. There are so many things that make me question the McCanns - too many to go into here but they are all available on this website and others. I'll just mention two things which as a parent stick out in my mind. The McCanns admitted early on that they made no attempt themselves to look for their daughter which would be the first thing anyone would do in this scenario where the most likely answer was that the child had simply wandered off. Kate has now claimed in her book that she did make physical searches the next day but only in frustration that the police weren't doing so. Even if this is true, it still means that she made no attempt herself in those vital early moments when Madeleine had been missing for less than an hour. The second thing is the photos of Kate and Gerry coming out of church on 12th May 2007, the day of Madeleine's 4th birthday, looking ecstatically happy as if they were celebrating her safe return rather than being in a state of utter devastation, not knowing where she was or what might be happening to her. I accept that just because things can be read on the Internet or anywhere else does not mean that they are true but that applies equally to everything the McCanns say. You clearly support them which is your right as it is mine and the majority of the posters here to be sceptical of their claims. To conclude, I'm sure that we all can agree that the sooner this case is solved and the perpetrators whoever they may be punished, the better.

India Knight: Smug parents enjoy punishing Kate and Gerry McCann

The abuse directed at Madeleine McCann’s parents is obscene after what they’ve been through since their daughter’s disappearence

so parents who love their children and make sure they get a babysitter to watch their children are smug it is obscene what the mccanns put their own children through
although i assume that india knight would be happy to put her own children in the same position

I genuinely believe that most people in the UK DO have the moral highground regarding Kate & Gerry McCann AND the other people they were on holiday with if they were indeed neglecting their small children every night as they say they were. You only have to read the thousands of comments on twitter from parents who wouldnt dream of doing what the McCanns and their friends say they did.

i hope garth doesnt mind again but i've found this article
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India Knight: Smug parents enjoy punishing Kate and Gerry McCann ... As Cassandra Jardine told Telegraph readers back in 2007: “”There but ...

Found this from September 2007:-

Posted in bobsmith1698's blog 2007-09-22

A Letter To India Knight

For those of you blissfully unaware of India Knight, she is a journalist. I am tempted to say contemporary sensationalist and none too shabby at creating her own questionable self-publicity through what would seem by any means necessary.

Dear Ms Knight,

Having read your wildly ill-considered musings in the Sunday Times News Review, I felt compelled to respond. That, if I may point out from the get-go, is the only positive thing I take from your article. The simple fact that you would motivate a usually placid and amiable member of the British public (and devoted Times reader to boot) speaks volumes. If, however, you are going to tar the general populace with your preverbial 'shitty-stick', I am duty -bound to defend myself, and others like me. Most of whom, recognise these comments for what they are. That being journalistic attention-whoring in the first instance, and even more unpleasantly, unbridled and misguided high-brow swagger at an audience that is smarter than you are.

Most of your readers will be shocked at your ability to blame them for the interest surrounding the McCanns. Your responsibility is to report the news, sagely, honestly and without bias. This includes bias not only about the news, but also about your readers.

When you sat down to write your piece, I wonder what was going through your mind. I wouldn't like to think that you would be siting in front of your internet access, fingertips poised precariously over your pirate copy of Microsoft Windows, thinking;

"I know, I'll call my readers vitriolic, thoughtless and as individual as the dumbest sheep in the flock. Happy to be led where they are taken and swallow both truth and lie in equal measure.

I can guess what you weren't thinking. Your first thought wasn't to defend Kate McCann. Your first thought was to be controversial enough to get your article on the first page of section five. Please credit your audience with enough intelligence to know the difference. It is your continual lack of awareness in this department that makes your inane finger-pointing all the more frustrating, if only for the simple reason that you have the outlet that some sensible and considered people crave. Yet you abuse it for what seems mere self-promotion. That's not just folly, that's plain ignorant too.

Now I know you have a job to do like everybody else that works for a living, but do the job you're paid to do, and report the news. Your comments about how the internet is to blame for all things evil is farcical. The tale you tell about the press being whiter than white is either a downright lie or an absent-minded lack of understanding of the industry in which you work.

Not all bloggers (of which I include myself) are thoughtless individuals who hop up and down at their desks looking for an avenue of self-indulgence the way you clearly do. The majority of those people of which you speak are sane, sensible and considered in their opinions and gather information from many sources before making up their own mind about what they believe to be the truth about anything.

Whilst you blithely refer to the McCann's suffering, be it real or imagined, you spend no time telling your readership anything new about the story itself, which I am guessing is your reason for being. Correct me if I'm wrong. If you want to philosophise about the general well-being of the human race and just where it is we are all going wrong, please write a book about it instead.

Some time ago, I wrote an email to Sir Tim Berner-Lees, who is largely recognised for the invention of the World Wide Web. In my correspondence, I asked him to explain whether he thought his invention, though inspired in it's infancy, had actually turned out to be a good idea, and did he regret doing it, given all of the online piracy, junk emails, identity fraud, grooming of minors and terrorist communications that had sprung after it went global. I was playing Devils' Advocate. I already had my own opinion about his invention.

Sir Tim wrote back roughly a week later, suggesting that I made some very credible points. However, he defended his invention quite easily. He admitted that bad things do indeed happen on the internet that may not have been possible before it's invention, but there were also many good things that come from it too. I won't go into the million or so reasons I could suggest, but the simple fact that I, a mere member of the general populace, could ask direct questions of the inventor of something so vast and affecting the whole world so completely, though the very medium of his invention proved, in my eyes at least, it's own right ot exist.

Your article seems not so much about the treatment that the McCann's have suffered at the hands of the world's public, which has a readership far wider than yourself, incidentally, but more about the ineptitude of the world to understand how to carefully and succinctly express it's opinions, daft as they may be.

See where I am going here? Grab yourself a mirror Ms Knight and look yourself in the eyes and just wonder for a moment exactly where you have placed yourself.  Daft opinion and the right to free self-expression? Is that not exactly what you are doing?

Anyway, a final thought to leave you with. We do not work in the news. We rely on you to provide it for us.Hence, we did not report the fact that Maddy was missing and could have been abducted. We weren't the first to suggest that the parents may be responsible for the loss of their daughter. We didn't arrest the McCann's and question them for twelve hours, nor did we report on it.

The reason you have blogs and opinion on a whole variety of subjects online is because you have news online, all the time. Normal people do not make up the news and expect to be believed. They have a right to express their views on a news story that has been brought to their attention, however.

Don't blame the public for the treatment of the McCanns. I know you don't like hearing it, but I still blame the media. Collectively, I trust you by you, I mean collectively) even less after your little dummy-spitting, foot-stamping outburst.

Therefore, I will continue to use my own choice of resources for my news and make up my own mind, as I always have. The only thing you have highlighted here is a knack of posturing and finger-pointing, keen to uphold an industry that you, at least, believes should garner more respect than it do,

thoughts. com/ bobsmith1698 / a-letter-to-india-knight

My reply doesnt appear to have showed.
 
Will get back to you in a bit Marian.

Hiya Garth, I'm pleased to have the chance to discuss the case with a McCann supporter because those I have encountered before are so unpleasant and offensive that it's hard not to sink to their level when replying. Of course I'm not 100% sure of the McCanns' guilt, I wasn't there. Is it possible to be that sure about anything or anyone? All I can say - speaking totally personally - is that, having looked at the evidence available, I do not believe the McCanns' checking story and that it was made up to explain why Madeleine had gone. I do not know what happened to her and anything I offer on that point would be pure speculation. There are so many things that make me question the McCanns - too many to go into here but they are all available on this website and others. I'll just mention two things which as a parent stick out in my mind. The McCanns admitted early on that they made no attempt themselves to look for their daughter which would be the first thing anyone would do in this scenario where the most likely answer was that the child had simply wandered off. Kate has now claimed in her book that she did make physical searches the next day but only in frustration that the police weren't doing so. Even if this is true, it still means that she made no attempt herself in those vital early moments when Madeleine had been missing for less than an hour. The second thing is the photos of Kate and Gerry coming out of church on 12th May 2007, the day of Madeleine's 4th birthday, looking ecstatically happy as if they were celebrating her safe return rather than being in a state of utter devastation, not knowing where she was or what might be happening to her. I accept that just because things can be read on the Internet or anywhere else does not mean that they are true but that applies equally to everything the McCanns say. You clearly support them which is your right as it is mine and the majority of the posters here to be sceptical of their claims. To conclude, I'm sure that we all can agree that the sooner this case is solved and the perpetrators whoever they may be punished, the better.
 
I totally disagree with you. Whilst it is reasonable to assume in the circumstancies that the timings of the checks may vary slightly, i do not believe they were made up. They all agree on the checks actually taken place and in the order they have stated. I believe these are truths. However, and this is only speculation, they may not have been as frequent on previous nights until Madeleine told them she was crying. And maybe that is why they were more frequent. But it may be completely wrong and the checks were as often as they claim on each night.
 
Gerry done the checking with many others whilst Kate remained with one of the friends in the apartment on the instructions of Gerry, just in case there was news.
 
With regards to the photo, I'd need to see it to understand it.

Hello again Garth. No problem that you don't agree with me, that's what this site is about, to express opinions on this case without getting a load of abuse in return. As for the photos, they and various others are here on this site under the heading Photographs and Memories; other sites have them too I think. The intention is to show that the McCanns didn't act in a way appropriate to the situation they were in. I also recommend a YouTube clip called "The McCanns show their true colours - MUST SEE" where there is a very interesting moment at around 2.40 where they don't realise they are still on camera. I know that we all react differently to crises but the McCanns' behaviour defies all understanding as far as I'm concerned.