Originally uploaded by H E A R D ! S M
this is a bastardization of the meaning of the word, an anti-religious stance.///…with both tattoos referencing Christianity and Islam, which have been part of the ‘INSPIRATION’ behind many ‘holy wars’ over many thousands of years.
i have no faiths in no gods nor extra curricular militant activity, its merely my way of watering down, symbols and words by tattooing and embedding something on me forever, by having no mental nor deeper meaning to me apart from apposing the apparent misconceptions/meanings of religion/religious terms and of those who perceive them as threatening of them/ i dont feel as though im supporting either as in no way do/ would i preach nor practice any religious nor coltish values on anyone/body.
its misinterpretation, which has led to religious fueled wars for thousands of years.
Jihad is suppose to mean, spiritulised,Striving, effort, struggle; striving spiritually or physically against evil. Its essentially a good thing… but as i live in a western country surrounded by ignorant cretins everyday of my life, this may give some people something to think about…
its ink on skin, real Islamic people shouldn’t have any form of symbolism nor adornment, or iconoclastic images . Therefore it should not be offensive to Islamic people, as its just a translation of Arabic, and to my knowledge Arabic is a language , and not a religious language. Religions such as Islam use Arabic, but that does not make every Arabic person Islamic in faith and belief, we choose our own, and no religion, country of heritage has any right to judge who and who cannot do this that and the other. therefore there should be no qualms which what essentially is just a word. It has huge religious connotations but as i said no religion owns language as language is thankfully one of our last freedoms.
some how the wider interpretation of word in the western world is holy war, which is only viewed in this particular way by a very small minority of individuals who have next to nothing to do with any Islamic nor Muslim religion but happen to come from such countries where the wider ethical and morally minded peoples main religion is Islam. This does not mean, they have or are influenced by religion, as its just a word that is used within the Arabic language and Islamic faith to serve Allah as best as possible. To make one a better person. Its part of the quaran’s equivalent to the 10 commandments. To better ones self and society. It is a beautiful thing. But its more of for the daily mail readers out there who are as bad as any killer, criminal, anti-life figure. They are the people who will react to this, they are the people who need a priority re-adjustment. They are scared of what they don’t know, and they don’t know shit. Any intellectual individual may not necessarily agree with it being on me, whether thats down to personal taste or ethical reasoning, its a statement against the ignorant, and that unfortunately is a huge majority, especially in england.
You would be hard pushed to find any one more European/liberal in mannerism and mind set than I. I feel its a duty as part of a piece of fine art, living and wearing it on my forearm as a symbol of freedom and integrity. That I am in a position where i can express my huge feelings against oppressive scaremongering cunts like the daily mail and its brain dead cretinous creatures known as the general British public.
here are two articles on the daily mail from a blog, an article from the 20th of August 2007 by the Guardian and a new york post reference to a new york police officer sporting a jihad tattoo.
Depressing news in the Guardian today. The Daily Mail could be on target to become the UK’s top selling daily newspaper. It’s already the paper of choice for Britain’s terrified, ageing middle class and, according to predicted sales figures, could be on its way to bashing the once-untouchable, super soaraway Sun in the bitter circulation wars. Not that I’ll be shedding any tears for Murdoch’s red top you understand, but I think in the greater scheme of things, his tacky tabloid is nowhere near as malevolent as the Daily Mail: hate and fear spurts from every page of this vile shit rag, feverishly gripped in a permanent state of outrage about, well, everything.
The cunning tactic has been to combine their infamous right-wing, fear mongering journalism with an endless stream of celebrity obsessed piffle. A sort of cross between Mein Kampf and Now magazine. So instead of just reading news items about single mums / benefit cheats / teenage abortion / dwindling church numbers / illegal immigrants and the endless influx of darkies and gypsies, etc., readers are also now “treated” to features on the size of Abi Titmuss’s arse; the colour of Coleen McLoughlin’s socks; Kerry Whatsername’s new tits or how many cheeseburgers Britney Spears ate yesterday.
And if all this weren’t bad enough, the Mail last week dug deep into its big pockets to lure back the “talent” of its prodigal son – Richard Littlejohn. Ah, bless, he’s returning to his spiritual home. The mouthpiece for Middle England bigotry himself. The man who sees no irony in writing endless tirades berating the erosion of British society from the comfort of his home in. . . . Florida. To repeat his hackneyed phrase: "You couldn’t make it up!". (Except he does, of course. Frequently.)
So there you have it. The Daily Mail: newspaper of our times. The one that captures the zeitgeist. Probably even fancies itself as the paper of record. It’s enough to make you puke.
COP HAS ‘JIHAD’ TATTOO
By ERIKA MARTINEZ AND MURRAY WEISS – Thursday, August 18th, 2005 N.Y. Post
An NYPD Police Academy recruit of Middle Eastern heritage sports a bold
tattoo spelling out the word "JIHAD" on his forearm, with a large sword
drawn beneath it – and there’s nothing the department can do about it, The
Post has learned.
The extraordinary markings caused a stir around the academy as soon as the
6-foot tall probationary cop rolled up his sleeves and revealed the tattoo.
"People were shocked to see it," one source said.
The controversy prompted police brass to interview the officer, who said
that "JIHAD" is his nickname and made it clear that he had no affinity for
any terror causes.
In fact, "Jihad" has several meanings, ranging from "exerting utmost effort"
and "to strive," to its more sinister usage by terrorist leaders who call
for a "jihad," or holy war against the West.
Regardless of its interpretation, the NYPD, which has regulations for the
length of an officer’s hair, has no prohibitions against tattoos.
A department spokesman declined to confirm or deny that any recruit sported
a JIHAD tattoo.
Sources say the officer, whose name was withheld, joined the NYPD’s class of
about 1,500 recruits less than a month ago.
He was described as quiet and studious.
Police brass advised the officer’s classroom instructors that they are to
ignore the tattoo. But its existence captured the attention of the
department’s Intelligence Division.
It’s likely to ruffle the feathers of some cops, particularly since the NYPD
lost its first officer serving in Iraq earlier this month in a sniper
attack.
You don’t have to like or agree with a newspaper to understand that some people might want to read it. In the case of the Daily Express and its Sunday stablemate, I can never understand why anyone would choose to. I suppose upbringing might contribute, but the Express has done so much over the years to confuse the natural loyalty or inertia of newspaper reading habits that the fact that "it was the paper we had delivered when I was a child" can hardly be relevant.
Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express was selling over 4m copies a day in 1955; it sells around 770,000 today. The Sunday Express sold over 4m in 1965; it too sells around 770,000 today. And the fall goes on. Ownership is now in the hands of Richard Desmond, whose publishing history is at the smuttier end of the market, and he dislikes costs as much as journalists, employing few of the latter to minimise the former.
While there was confidence and certainty about the Express dominance of the market from the 1930s to the 1960s, the death of Beaverbrook and a succession of changes in ownership took all that apart. This culminated in the purchase of the group by Lord (Clive) Hollick, New Labour crony, in 1996. Hollick broke the golden rule of proprietorship by sacking the audience, dismissing the Express’s historic allegiance to the Conservatives, the monarchy and the empire and attaching itself to New Labour and a form of 60s liberalism. Remaining traditional Express readers must have been flummoxed.
They were to be flummoxed again in April 2004 when the Daily Express editor Peter Hill took the "historic decision" – elaborated over many pages – to return to normal service and "back the Tories". One’s sympathies lay with the then Tory leader, Michael Howard. If this ploy represented more than correcting an anomaly it did not work. Sales continued to fall.
The Express created its own agenda and sticks to it. The Daily Express’s deputy editor is Hugh Whittow (he tends to pop up in the small hours on 5 Live’s Up All Night programme) and he maintains and defends the agenda with an impressive passion. It is a simple one built on a few obsessions: lead the paper on house prices, mortgages, inheritance tax, the weather . . . or Princess Diana. It also loves ridiculing political correctness and scratching away at the prejudices of its perceived audience. I was fascinated by one issue that managed to contain all of the following: the threat to safety on our roads posed by eastern European HGV drivers in Britain, the serial sex attacker from Poland who had murdered in Britain after having a heart bypass operation on the NHS, and extensive coverage of the "evil in our midst", Muslim extremists.
But the real Express obsession is Diana. Whittow, according to his editor, has quite exceptional Paris contacts. This allows his paper to lead on Diana more often than any other subject. The headlines vary little. Diana death: new witness. Diana: new sensation. Diana death: driver riddle solved. Diana: vital evidence kept secret. Diana: it’s a whitewash. Scandal of Diana cover-up. And very many more. Nobody follows up these stories. Nobody comments on them. The conspiracy theories build without trace. And nobody really knows why.
The Express has recently applied this same obsessive attention to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. A hundred days after the child’s disappearance, when media attention generally has become more restrained, the Express is leading day after day on the story, finding "developments" where others find none. The missing factor is judgment. A front page headline – Madeleine: she is alive – hitting the reader as a statement of fact without any quotation marks was grossly insensitive.
The Express’s rival in the mid-market is the Daily Mail, although that would be to exaggerate the nature of the competition. The Mail’s domination of the sector is now unchallenged, to the extent that the Mail is now the second largest selling daily in the country (to the Sun) and the Mail on Sunday is the second largest selling Sunday, after the News of the World. Both titles now sell more than 2.3m copies, three times their Express "rivals". The daily and Sunday Express titles, although by then in rapid decline, were both outselling the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday in the mid-to-late 80s.
The reasons are many and clear. The Mail has been through no changes in ownership, the Rothermere/Harmsworth proprietorship lasting more than 100 years. In their more recent and successful period they have been dominated by two editorial giants, the late Sir David English and the current editor-in-chief Paul Dacre. They have always invested heavily in journalism and have understood their audience and its prejudices. The two Mail titles, particularly the Daily, have always reflected those prejudices rather than the contemporary world, eschewing the prevailing social, cultural and political values on the basis that there are many people, Mail readers, who do so too.
Those Mail views can be characterised thus: for Britain and against Europe; against welfare (and what it describes as welfare scroungers) and for standing on your own feet; more concerned with punishment than the causes of crime; against public ownership and for the private sector; against liberal values and for traditional values, particularly marriage and family life. It puts achievement above equality of opportunity and self-reliance above dependence.
The Mail celebrates achievement against the odds, particularly where no "state help" has been involved. It believes that too often the taxpayer is being taken for a ride and that bureaucrats are invading areas of private responsibility. A defining Mail story is of a single mother of 10 or 12 children (there is always a wide photograph), most of whom have different fathers, occupying two or three council houses knocked into one. This will be accompanied by a table computing the cost to the taxpayer of maintaining this "feckless" household.
There is of course more to the Mail success than its ideology. It was the first to realise how much newspapers could learn from magazines, particularly the technique of applying a current news story about a celebrity, a fashion or a fad to "ordinary" Mail readers. If Marks & Spencer re-invents itself, then ordinary Mail women are modelling their new range of clothes. If the debate is about whether mothers should go out to work or stay at home looking after the children, then the Mail will interview, at length, examples of both. It has the highest proportion of women readers of any national paper.
It is never afraid to revisit the much-interviewed. It is shameless about the PR interview, with the italics at the bottom signalling the new film, TV programme or book. It always prefers – like consumer magazines – the celebrity profile based on triumph over adversity, marital, medical, family or financial. No newspaper has done more to develop the now ubiquitous concept of human interest.
The Mail has a huge promotion budget and spends more than most on free DVDs and CDs for its readers. These are always carefully selected to match the "family audience", often aimed at children or, the paper has been known to admit, grandchildren. A landmark development in promotion was the recent release of the new Prince album free with its Sunday stablemate, the Mail on Sunday. It added about 600,000 to that day’s circulation and had as many consequences for the recording industry as newspapers. It is not known – it never is – how many buyers of the paper read it as well as listening to the CD.
The Mail is ruthlessly edited and always quick off the mark. Its topical features are always on the day rather than tomorrow, and it commissions much more than it uses, an expensive strategy. It has never followed the youth obsession that has so often preoccupied rivals. It regularly serialises books by or about film or pop stars of another age. It seems not to care that the 60s generation is now in its 60s. Is this because more than 40% of its readers are over 55, and 60% over 45?
Perhaps taking proper note of the demographics rather than pandering to the advertisers’ preoccupation with young consumers serves the Mail well. That is why it campaigns about wheelie bins and casinos and pensions.
It comes down to confidence, the Mail’s dominant quality. It knows it knows its audience. This is often described as "middle England" and predominantly it votes Conservative. It is spread pretty evenly across the AB, C1 and C2 social grades. It may not be as young as some newspaper audiences, but then the country is getting older. It may not have seen its preferred party in government for 10 years. But Labour leaders take careful note of what it is saying. It has, as they say, "reach". And it makes more commercial sense to sell copies than return governments.
· Peter Cole is professor of journalism at the University of Sheffield.
<a href=”http://media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,2152046,00.html”>media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,,2152046,00.html</a>
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