On being and not being shocked

Here's a footnote to Dilpazier Aslam's dismissal (free registration) by the Guardian. Aslam is reported as saying:

I am shocked by the manner in which this whole affair has been handled.

A reader of normblog points out the way in which Aslam's statement echoes the piece he wrote for the Guardian and in which he declined to be shocked about the London bombings of 7 July. If you've forgotten, you can remind yourself:

[L]et us do ourselves a favour and not act shocked.
.....
Shocked would... be to suggest that the bombings happened through no responsibility of our own.

Evidently, the termination of his employment at the Guardian is more shocking to Dilpazier Aslam than the murder of a few dozen Londoners. The reader who drew this to my attention suggests:

Please do yourself a favour and don't act shocked. Shocked would be to imply that you were unaware that when the trains and bus were blown up, the people in them were dead but not forgotten...

One wonders how far external pressures on the Guardian played a part in their deciding to part company with Aslam. Here, in any case, is one letter they received, which I post with the permission of its author; it is dated 19 July:

As a loyal Guardian reader of some twenty years' standing, I think your readers deserve to see a statement from the Guardian's editorial team explaining why they apparently see fit to employ a member of a proscribed proto-fascist Islamist organisation, and even give him space on your op-ed pages to publish a thinly-veiled apologia for Islamist terrorism.

I firmly believe that in a free society, we are entitled to hear all points of view. The Guardian does a far better job than most newspapers of exposing its readers to a mutiplicity of viewpoints. However, to publish Dilpazier Aslam's piece within a week of the mass-murder in London goes beyond insensitivity and into the realm of reckless irresponsibility. Similarly, the piece you published on Saturday by Mundher al-Adhami ('Not hate, vengeance' 16.07.05) sets forth a dangerous argument. If the terrorist murders of innocents (by people, it should be noted, who would appear to have had no direct personal connection with any victim of the 'war on terror') can be described as 'straightforward revenge', what description would you then apply to the random murder of Muslims by white, British thugs? When, as will assuredly happen, innocent Muslims in Leeds and elsewhere are targeted by [them], will you then publish a thoughtful piece... on how such attacks do not proceed from hate but are merely 'vengeance'? If not, why not?

The Guardian's current silence on the issue of Dilpazier Aslam and Hizb Ut Tahrir is uncharacteristically cowardly. I have not yet stopped buying the paper, as I simply find it too hard to break such an ingrained habit, but each morning I spend a little longer in the newsagent's before picking it up. If no statement on this issue is forthcoming, you will lose at least one reader by the end of the week.