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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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This was published in Private Eye recently ...
 

 
Two days after a report was published on the extensive allegations of sexual abuse against Jimmy Savile, the Sunday Express carried a front-page splash, “SAVILE WAS PART OF SATANIC RING”, and an inside page story starring none other than Valerie Sinason, a Harley Street psychotherapist who has been one of the UK’s main proponents of a belief in Satanic ritual abuse.
 
The report on Savile, a joint effort by the Metropolitan Police and NSPCC called “Giving Victims a Voice”, revealed that 450 people had made allegations of sexual abuse against Savile. The report concluded that Savile was “a prolific predatory sex offender and the scale of his abuse is believed to be unprecedented in the UK”, while acknowledging that the information against the former DJ had not been corroborated and could not now be tested in court.
 
Was any such caveat attached to the Express’s Satanic claims? Er, no – even though Satanic abuse was debunked as a myth by a government-funded inquiry as long ago as 1994. Since then, no physical, forensic corroborating evidence has been produced anywhere in the world to substantiate the existence of Satanic ritual abuse, in which an international web of devil-worshipping paedophiles are claimed to rape children in Satanic rituals including the sacrifice of babies and animals.
 
This lack of corroboration did not dissuade Sunday Express reporter James Fielding, however, who wrote sensationally and without question: “Jimmy Savile beat and raped a 12-year-old girl during a Satanic ritual in a hospital. The perverted star wore a hooded robe and mask as he abused the terrified victim in a candle-lit basement. He also chanted ‘Hail Satan’ in Latin as other paedophile devil worshippers joined in and assaulted the girl at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire. The attack, which happened in 1975, shines a sinister new light on the former DJ’s 54-year reign of terror… The girl kept her torment hidden for nearly 20 years before finally opening up to therapist Valerie Sinason.”
 
Based solely on the interview with Sinason – no evidence or interview with the alleged victim – the Sunday Express went on to relate Sinason’s account of another patient who she said had been abused five years later “during another black mass ceremony held at a house in a wealthy London street”.
 
Sinason, director of the NHS-funded Clinic for Dissociative Studies in London, said the victims made these allegations to her independently when they were in therapy in 1992 and 1993, while she was based at the Tavistock Clinic in north London. At the time, the paper reported, Sinason was involved in a Department of Health-funded study (never published) into “sexual abuse committed during rituals and religious ceremonies”. Sinason told the Sunday Express: “Both these witnesses did speak to police at the time but were vulnerable witnesses and on encountering any surprise or shock did not dare to give all the details.” The paper reported: “The police took no action.”
 
It added, however, that Sinason had passed details of these two “Satanic” cases to officers from the Met’s Savile inquiry, Operation Yewtree, launched last October after the controversy over Newsnight’s failure to broadcast an investigation into abuse allegations against Savile and ITV’s subsequent programme, Exposure: The Other Side to Jimmy Savile, carried interviews with five alleged victims.
 
The Met/NSPCC report does not reveal whether the Satanic claims from Sinason were included; nor whether the claim that Savile was part of a Satanic ring was even treated as credible. What the report does say is: “There is no clear evidence of Savile operating within a paedophile ring, although whether he was part of an informal network is part of the continuing investigation and it’s not therefore appropriate to comment further on this.” No doubt Valerie Sinason will be submitting her “evidence” forthwith.
 
Meanwhile, as 31 alleged sex abuse victims of Savile sue the BBC for compensation, it remains to be seen how many more of the remaining 450 alleged victims will also launch actions against the broadcaster and various NHS bodies where Savile worked. The tricky question remains of how, in the absence of corroborating evidence, genuine claims can be separated from spurious ones and settled fairly.

 

 
The GOS says: It's coming to something, isn't it, when if we want calm, reasoned factual reporting on an emotive issue we have to rely on a satirical magazine, because all the major newspapers are overdosed on sensational bullshit?
 
There is, of course, a history of hysterical accusations of ritual child abuse going right back to Roman times, when various religious cults – the Jews, Christians, Mithraists, you name them – were accused of slaughtering children in the course of their worship. It was all rubbish, of course, as have been practically all the highly-publicised incidents in recent years – Rochdale, the Orkneys, the McMartin Preschool trial and its aftermath, “Michelle Remembers” and so on. In none of these was there any shred of actual evidence for satanic ritual abuse, but untold harm was done not just to the reputations of the accused people but also to the children the law was supposed to be protecting. Many of the criminals (because if you set out to ruin the life of an innocent person you must be a criminal, surely?) responsible for this damage are still working and still in positions of authority.
 
The Sinason study mentioned by Private Eye features in this newspaper report from the year 2000.
 
One of the very few cases in which there has been even the smallest shred of credibility in the ritual element of abuse was in March 2011, as described in this article. On the other hand, in the same year “journalist” Robert Green was imprisoned in Scotland for carrying out a vigorous campaign of vile and baseless accusation against blameless people – a campaign that gained a great deal of support, incidentally, because people do love a good conspiracy theory.
 
If you want to know more about this silly and dangerous hysteria, the Wikipedia article is an excellent place to start. In the meantime, thank God for organs like Private Eye whose natural scepticism enables them to maintain a balanced view of the world that seems to elude the newspapers.
 

 
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