Weekly News 10

Mastermind killed in police raids, the driver still on the run, the 'cowgirl' who was not devout enough and the man who blew himself up: What happened to the 'devil' and his evil disciples?

The 'Mastermind' of the Paris attacks

 

This is a lead up story following the Paris attacks last week found in the Daily Mail and written Paul Cahalan In Brussels and Hannah Flint For The Mail On Sunday.

I was intrigued by this headline because of the semantic field of religion with use of words such as the devil and disciples. I thought that this was peculiar as it now makes religion a prominent theme or thought throughout the text and because all of the suspected follow their interpretation of Islam, it creates a certain prejudice around others of that faith as they are now linked with these Christianity words of hatred-even though terrorism has no religion.

The article goes on to list all of the participants of the attack with their picture and how they were caught/how they died, and also some backstories into how they became the way they were. One section I found interesting was a line about the 'Mastermind' Abdekhamid Abaaoud about when he went to his private school in Paris.

'But this weekend, classmates revealed he was a bully who once stole a Nintendo Game Boy from the school’s lost-and-found and taunted other pupils.'

This implies to the audience that Abaaoud was born evil and almost suggests his path was inevitable because he was mean as a child and 'no one stopped him'. I think this additional information adds very little to the article as, the audience already know what a horrible human being this man was, so I personally don't see why we need the justification of knowing he was naughty as a child. I understand it takes a certain type of person to be brainwashed into the ideals these men, and woman, were but something as trivial as stealing a Nintendo seems irrelevant.