Is his majesty's new scandal a redherring?

The Coffee Shop
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For those of you who are as apathetic as I am to the scandalous news of other countries’ monarchies, Prince Harry, the third in line to the throne of Wales, was abashed and forced to apologize for referring to a fellow soldier by a racially offensive term in a video taken during one of their training missions in 2006. As usual, the media in the UK has dedicated their headlines to report on this “news” and the subsequent reactions to it. Furthermore, the Muslim community in Britain has, very predictably, issued protracted open letters to express their anger and condemnation of the royal family as usual. Ever since, the discussion forums of the British news sites have been vastly populated by heated discussions about the required course of punitive measures or lack thereof.

But the question is, why the news of a video taken three years ago, should emerge now, and not just nowadays, but right NOW!?
To answer this question, one has to wonder what else would have occupied the front pages and engaged people in discussion in lieu of this recent scandal. Or better, who has interest in deflecting the attentions from what the UK press had been actively reporting on a priori to unveiling this video? Let us entertain this notion a bit by looking at the source of the news. The Guardian says the incident is revealed first by "News Of The World”, a UK based celebrity gossip magazine; nothing unorthodox for these kinds of situations so far. But how did this publication get its hands on such a controversial piece that was managed to be held private for three years? Checking its ownership, we find out that the medium is a child company of News Limited which belongs to, ladies and gentlemen: Mr. Rupert Murdoch! Of course he needs no introduction for those blessed by his other network on this side of the ocean: THE FOX News.

Am I too cynical to think of this as yet another manifestation of Mr. Murdoch’s self-professed aptitude for unwinding the news in favor of his endorsed agendas ? If this kid, Harry, with all the royal blood in his veins is not secure from being exploited as a whipping boy, then what else, from whom else, does the emperor hold tight in his bag of tricks, only to pop out in the next most suitable opportunity ?

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Brings up the age old argument of nature vs. nuture. He should have been smarter than this.

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To me calling a Pakistani a ‘Paki’ doesn’t sound any worse than any worse than calling a Britain a ‘Brit’ or an American a ‘Yank’. I guess it depends on the spirit in which it was said. As far as using the term ‘raghead’, I can definitely see how an Arab or Muslim person would be offended and it was probably bad form for a person in the spotlight to say that (especially on film) but it may have been some un-PC military banter without any racism behind it. I suppose only he knows the spirit in which it was used.

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This is not the point of the thread though.

I am proferring a “conspiracy theory”, if you wish, by conjecturing that the video is being used as an instrument for distraction from Gaza that had been the sensational topic in the UK over the past week.

Why had that magzine been sitting on this particular piece of news for so long before letting it out?

Look at today’s and yesterday’s issues of Telegraph and Independent. You won’t see what you saw on their front pages last week. Similarly, much of the debater’s focus is diverted on this scandal. The implicit and tentatively reached alignment of the Muslims and Anglos in Britian, over the past week or so, in their joint protests to the war, is once again diminished and gave its place to futile “Us vs. Them” clashes over immaterial things such as the terms used by a twenty and change years old boy three years ago. It only corroborates my thesis when you also consider its concurrency with intensification of the raid on Gaza and how unchallenged this weekend’s pro-israeli rallies in the UK came about.