The result? It’s pretty much as we expected – wall-to-wall censorship. Well, the victim of this widely perceived racist crime was only a young native Briton after all, and as such of no real consequence! Henry Webster will therefore be added to a long and growing list of native British victims of racist violence ignored by the media – see here  http://www.bnp.org.uk/racismcutsbothways/.

To be specific, we could find no mention in The Guardian, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Times, Daily Express or Sun.

The Labour supporting Daily Mirror provided a brief and highly “sanitised” mention – here it is in full:

A judge yesterday blasted a school where a teen was almost beaten to death with a hammer. Henry Webster suffered the beating – likened to a scene in a Tarantino film – at the tennis courts in Ridgeway School, Wroughton, Wilts, last year. It left him with three skull fractures and a brain injury. Nazrul Amin 19 , two 15-year-olds, a 16-year-old and a 17-year-old, all from Swindon, were jailed at Bristol Crown court yesterday. They were among 13 young men convicted for the attack. Judge Carol Hagen said: “What I find astonishing is not a single staff member was present when the bell went”.

The only national newspaper to produce a worthwhile report and one that, as predicted yesterday by us, would decline to make the point that one of the jailed thugs was the son of a local imam, was the Daily Mail. However, the Mail report was useful, inasmuch as it refers to racist incidents at the school prior to the cowardly hammer attack on lone Henry Webster – thus reinforcing the belief that this was indeed a racist crime. We quote:-

What began on January 11, 2007 as a confrontation between two groups of pupils, one being white, and one being Asian, culminated in the brutal and savage attack on a white pupil, Henry Webster that afternoon

The Daily Mail’s offereing may be read: here  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=565113&in_page_id=1770.

However, although not a “national”, a special mention should be made in respect of the Bristol Evening Post. Quoting from the BNP’s Regional Voices site:

You would have reasonably expected that the Bristol Evening Post would have reported on the Hammer Attack cases that have been before Bristol Crown Court, over much of the last four months, with much frequency. After all, the two separate trials were arguably the most newsworthy during that period of time. Similarly, you might have reasonably imagined that the sentencing of 13 thugs earlier today, in what many consider to have been a vicious racist attack on a lone white schoolboy, to be front page news of the highest order. But not so apparently!

Not only does the Bristol Evening Post seem selectively ignorant of crown court proceedings but it also appears totally oblivious to the fact that 13 young thugs have been sentenced following two controversial trials!

One can only wonder if the Post, which is widely perceived as a Labour-sympathetic paper, would have demonstrated a similar level of apathy had the victim/perpetrator roles been reversed – with a young Muslim youth being pulverised by sixteen white youths using a claw hammer? We suspect not! Indeed, we believe the Post would have given the story the greatest of prominence and on a regular basis!

Which all goes to suggest that censorship is not dead – at least not in Bristol!

You can discover what the Bristol Evening Post considers to be the “news” today here  http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/. Also do a search for “hammer attack” or “Henry Webster” and see if you can find a single report!