Compare and contrast.

An internet blogger has been jailed for 12 years after admitting soliciting the murder of MPs who had voted in favour of the Iraq War.

Now, he’s a very naughty boy. I may occasionally talk about lamposts and piano wire, but I don’t for one moment counsel such a course of action. You can’t go round inciting people to murder and expect to be given a free pass. And even accounting for:

Bilal Zaheer Ahmad, 23, from Wolverhampton, was also sentenced for other terrorism offences.

We have to assume that as these ‘other terrorism offences’ aren’t disclosed in the article that they aren’t sufficiently sexy or, dare I say it, explosive to bother about.

12 years does seem a little steep, mind. Trying to get someone to off an MP is one thing, actually making them do it is another. Given that no-one is in the dock on a charge of conspiracy to do so, or on a charge of actually doing it suggests he wasn’t that effective.

In what has been a bad news day for my fair city of Canterbury, I cannot help compare the sentence handed down to Ahmad with the sentence handed down to our former Sheriff:

A former Sheriff of Canterbury has been sent to prison today after admitting indecently assaulting a vulnerable youngster and downloading child pornography.

It turns out he’s got a young girl to undress and sit on his lap, he also seems to have, somehow, managed to get himself into a situation where he’s been able to grope a woman under her clothing, and also whilst she was in bed. I’m assuming he wasn’t in the bed at the time. Then there’s the 11 charges of indecent images, including sado-masochism being visited upon one poor child that he’s also been convicted of.

Fisher [. . .] was jailed for a total of 15 months and banned him from working with children for 10 years.

Really? 15 months?

I’m not going to blame the judge as she has a framework she has to work from, but it doesn’t seem right to me that writing about killing MPs is in the eyes of the courts almost ten times as worse as actually engaging in a physical act of sexual abuse against a child.

Something is very wrong here.

Also available on the new thesnowolf.com