loco
A couple of things to note here ...
1. I don't pretend to know what the ostensible ethnicity of those charged here is, but the last person who butterted that the authorities had covered up some Arab malfeasance turned out to be 100% wrong. I've yet to see a rescission from that person of the claim, still less an apology for soemthing that appears to be an instance of paranoic racial animus.
2. It seems to me that those apparently guilty of criminal acts ought to be dealth with robustly, fairly and promptly by the relevant authorities, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds. One's ethnicity should neither be a free pbutt nor a millstone when facing the law. So as a general rule, I'm against specifying someone's background, and in truth, I rarely hear it mentioned in cases, and later, when a name appears, and it turns out to be someone non-Arab, there is still no mention of the person's ethnic descent. That's as it should be, since it's simply NOT relevant, most of the time.
Now there's a manWHY? You agree with fascist infidel? He is right sometimes and you know it as you both...
3. There may well be occasions where mentioning the ethnic descent of an accused person serves the public interest -- eg when mentioning it serves to subvert the attempts of demagogs to turn public anxiety against a visible section of the community to violent ends. Thus, if a person who allegedly bashed and raped an Arab girl turned out to be another Arab, or conversely, if a person who did the same to an Anglo girl turned out to be another Anglo, it might well be desirable to reveal this so as to foreclose outbreaks of revenge attacks and disorder. In such cases, revealing this information would not harm the accused measurably. No PC conspiracy is required to justify such a position, because in the end, the primary responsibility of the state authorities is to protect the innocent, not fuel tribal rage.
So in the case you mention, even if it did turn out that the boys were of Lebanese Muslim extraction, I'd favour withholding that information for as long as possible. Creating an atmosphere in which it was impossible for them to be tried fairly would not serve the public interest.
Fran
