‘I Am the Mother of the Boy that Was Brutally Slaughtered by Your Son…’

This letter was forwarded to a blogger on a Dutch news site. It was written by a woman in Antwerp to the mother of an imprisoned Moroccan criminal. The woman wrote the letter after seeing the criminal’s mother on a Flemish television news program. Many thanks to Timo of the Dutch Defence League for the translation:

I saw your vehement protests in front of the TV cameras against the transfer of your son from a prison in Aarlen to a prison in Leuven. I heard your complaints about the distance that separates you from your son and the difficulties you have in visiting him. I also noticed the media attention from journalists and reporters about other mothers in similar situations: they are defended by several organization for human rights and such.

I am also a mother, and I completely understand your protests and discontents. I want to join you in your battle because, as you will see, there is also a large distance between me and my son.

I work hard, earn less, and have the same financial difficulties in visiting my son. With a lot of effort I can reach him on Sundays, because I work all the other days, even Saturdays, and besides that I have my family duties towards my other children.

In case you didn’t understand it yet: I am the mother of the boy that was brutally slaughtered by your son, in the gas station he used to work for at night to pay for his studies and support his family.

I will visit him again next Sunday. While you hold your son in your arms and cuddle him, I shall only lay some flowers on his modest grave at the city cemetery.

Oh, and I almost forgot: you don’t have to worry, the state keeps a part of my lousy wage to pay for a new bed for your son, because he burned the two previous ones in his cell where he is doing time for the brutal crime he committed.

Finally, also as mothers, maybe we can contribute something to stop the inversion of human values. Human rights should only be there for the rightfully deserving.

So much for a letter from a grieving mother. Maybe this is something that we, in these dark days, should think about more often!

The actual Dutch source blog entry:

http://www.wuz.nl/wuzlog/oostelijke%20buurman/page/1/2

Translate using Yahoo’s Babelfish...

Here is the first sentence:

“I got letter mentioned below sent of a friend from Belgium. He had got this letter of its neighbour, purebred Antwerp ‘ moeke’ and it had been aimed to a mother from Moroccan bowl.”

In other words folks...our so-called “Secondary” source is actually the Tertiary source who got it from a “friend” who got is supposedly from a “neighbor”.

In other words...that dog don’t hunt...

=8-)

Doesn’t make it false either. Falsification would be inherently difficult under the circumstances. That’s why you deploy five decades of listening to people telling truth or lies and use your own best judgment.

Besides, think about it, what if the story was true after all? Any piece of information you are suggesting as proof would instantly reveal the Antwerp mother’s identity with certainty. I have not exposed all the facts I have acquired because I really don’t want to be the person who gets someone hurt or killed just so I can jolly around on FR, especially where there’s absolutely nothing to be gained by it that outweighs the value of an innocent human life.

One of the most difficult things to do is suspend judgment indefinitely, but sometimes it’s just the best thing to do. Like Jimbo says, loose lips sink ships.

Peace,

That’s a question of standard of proof. If you want a criminal conviction, you have to get past reasonable doubt. If you want to satisfy one of the key canons of journalism, in general, you have to be properly sourced.

However, even the standard practice of Journalism allows for an occasional exception of single anonymous sourcing for a story, based on the judgment of the participants. And getting a criminal conviction is not the objective here, so neither is reasonable doubt sufficient to demonstrate falsity.

But calling it fiction is too strong for me. Fiction implies conclusively false, does it not? I just don’t see that here. I see uncertainty, yes, but not conclusive falsehood. And I see no standard, whether legal, journalistic, or logical, that permits an absolute falsification where the facts suggest a reasonable possibility of truth.

What then? Would you have no stories told that did not expose the teller’s identity, even if that exposure involved lethal risk? Was the writing of “Publius” strictly fiction when he authored the Federalist Papers? And was “Deep Throat” only capable of fiction until the day his true identity became known?

No, while anonymity does introduce uncertainty, there are times and circumstances where the risk of uncertainty is outweighed by the benefit of publicizing an important message. The Antwerp mother, howsoever real she may or may not be, has crystallized with her story a painful irony of the cultural insurgency that is engulfing Europe, and that message is worth hearing, even if shrouded in the uncertainty of an anonymity designed to protect life.

OK, so let me see if I get this. Fiction equals not true, and not true means false, so fiction equals false. Which, if the story is true and its only disability is we are not absolutely sure it’s true, calling it fiction is not true because the story is not false. Calling it plausible but unproven is more accurate. Accuracy matters. You’re leaving no intermediate category, as though the sole measure of truth or falsity is whatever has entered the field of public perception. That’s not realistic.

For example, my current work assignment involves legislative, technical, and business assessments of a system designed to discover radiological risk through various detection measures. If the equipment is known to be functioning correctly, and not delivering a signal of a radiological anomaly, I am entitled to believe that there is no radiological anomaly. However, if the equipment is NOT working correctly, then I am NOT entitled to dismiss the possibility that there is in fact a radiological risk, even though I am not being alerted to it by accepted means. More succinctly, in our line of work, we have to assume the worst is true unless we get proof it is false.

And that’s what I was getting at about standards of proof. If you want to believe that the Flemish mother is a total fabrication, that’s up to you, but even in law the standard of proof is often lower than what you have set. You seem to be applying a pure logic or math standard, where each premise must be absolutely certain before one proceeds to the conclusion. Yet even in math suspended judgment is possible, a belief that something might be true, as an intermediate state, as the long search for formal proof of Fermat’s Equation demonstrates.

But law and life are not like math. In law there is such a thing as circumstantial evidence, a set of claims for which there is some general support (Antwerp prison riots, fires, anarchist uprisings, etc.), and for which no counterproof exists. Any slight bias in favor of the proposition being tested may provide a jury with a reasonable basis for concluding some proposition is true, especially if the witnesses, testifying in person, evince personal credibility.

Think of it as probabilistic truth assessment. We all do it. When you swing your feet over the side of the bed in the morning you are acting on a definite but unproven proposition that the floor is still there and will support you when you attempt to stand on it. You are doing this because, given the totality of the circumstances, the probability is extremely high that you are correct.

Other circumstances have lower probabilities, and as the probability diminishes we shift from a bias of probably true to probably false. For different circumstances different thresholds apply. If you (mis)applied a mathematical standard of proof to getting out of bed in the morning, you would never do it, or you would do it with an irrational fear of falling through the floor. But if your internal “probability machine” is in sync with your peers, then, for any given set of circumstances, you will likely make a reasonable judgment as to the security of your bedroom floor.

And that’s the whole point of the jury system, and that’s why we do not use a math standard to evaluate a story delivered to us under conditions that amount to war, where the risk of serious injury and death changes the operating threshold by which we assess the truth or falsity of a given message. Arbitrarily labeling all anonymously sourced stories as “Fiction” simply does not account for the pragmatic realities of life under difficult conditions, and is therefore, in the final analysis, an unhelpful oversimplification in the quest to discover the truth of the matter.

Waaaait a minute. For jimt its “rumor/unverified/suspect until further notice,” but for me its “fiction?” Double standard that is, because not the same they are. You could’ve saved me a whole lot of time if you’d started OUR conversation that way. Oh well. Water under the bridge. :)

BTW, I am getting more factoids. It’s messed up. Really messed up. Here’s the short form, until I have more. The kernel of the story, that there was a grieving Flemish mother who lost a son to a Moroccan murderer sometime within the last year, can still be classified as unverified but resoundingly believed to be true by everyone in the source chain.

However, ... wait for it ... wait for it .. the letter itself has now been admitted to be the work of a male neighbor of the Flemish mother, allegedly based loosely on … are you ready for this? … another letter, written back in 2006, and written not by the Flemish mother but by a Brazilian “someone,” and in Portuguese, not Dutch, and probably about a totally separate set of events. What a mess.

Anyway, I’ve got work obligations, so I have to let up for now, but next week I plan on trying to nail down the exact time frames involved and call VTM (Big Flemish news channel) and find out what I can about the TV part of the story. Also waiting to find more about the Portuguese letter.

Why should I bother? 1) It’s fun. 2) I really want to know what happened. Kind of a Sherlock Impulse, I guess. 3) The irony in the story as originally presented is a worthy sentiment, and should not be drowned out, IMHO, simply because the person to whom it happened was not interested in publicizing it through a letter.

In fact, I now feel a greater freedom in pursuing the details because, happily, I have also discovered that allegedly, the motivation for anonymity is not fear of retribution, but a desire to avoid embarrassment and undue exposure to a grieving mother, whose desire for privacy I still intend to respect, should I get that close. I understand that this new framework still does not let us reclassify the story as “verified,” but it does keep the factual component of the story well within the range of “plausible,” given the twists and turns of human nature.

So cheers to you on being vindicated as to authorship (sincerely, no sarcasm), but this dog is not done hunting till the Brazilian sings!

Peace,

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