Who will safeguard the victims of our culture wars? | Gaby Hinsliff

Pity the families in the Muslim fostering row. They needed help but ended up as collateral damage

Wherever there is war there is invariably propaganda. Conflict feeds on half-truths, twisted out of shape; on myths and misinformation, and sometimes downright lies. The challenge for reporters is to pick through all these competing versions of the truth, in places where emotions run high and facts are hard to prove. And that is becoming as true of the culture wars now gripping Britain and the US as it always was of conventional battlefields.

A little white Christian girl is taken from her London home and fostered by a niqab-wearing Muslim mother who doesn’t speak English. The cross around this five-year-old’s neck is supposedly snatched away and she is denied her favourite food, spaghetti carbonara, because it contains bacon. The clear and inflammatory inference of the Times’s exclusive story this week was that a child’s identity was being heinously erased while a council unwilling to confront religious intolerance – at least, when perpetrated by Muslims – stood back and let it happen.

There’s a scandal in the foster care story all right, but not the one you think

Related: We dedicate our lives to fostering. So why are we treated with such disdain? | Sarah Anderson

Related: Child in fostering row 'should live with non-practising Muslim' grandmother

Continue reading...

from Children | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2eI8YjD