Nice to know the U.S. government doesn't have the lock up on stupid. I can connect the dots between Republican opposition to critical thinking skills in schools to their desire that people don't think for themselves, though they would deny this vehemently.
First of all, this isn't the entire UK government, it's one local authority. The population of Camden is roughly 76,000. You can find plenty of daft things that local authorities do if you look hard enough.
Secondly, if you actually look at the leaflet and don't cherry-pick one or two claims out of context, it's pretty clear that it's saying "obviously this could be standard teenager behaviour, but if your child is being radicalised you might notice a number of things going together". Being pissed off at what the government is doing is a perfectly normal behaviour; but if you're also talking about how jihadis have the right idea and we should shoot a bunch of squaddies (say), well, that's more significant. It's possibly clumsily-worded (although note that the politics thing is right at the end after a bunch of more reasonable stuff), but I wouldn't say that it's any like as bad as the "1984 was an operations manual" posters Transport for London put up about reporting dodgy people you see in the street.
Can you identify the other languages the pamphlet comes in? The first is Somali according to Google translate. The other two are images in the PDF, so I can only guess that one is a variant on Hindi and the other a variant on Arabic. Those could be Urdu and Pashto, among other possibilities.
Bengali is the one with the line along the top, had to look it up but Bangladeshi is the largest non-white ethnicity in the borough and Wiki tells me the top line is a distinctive feature.
The last I'd guess, like you, is a variant of Arabic but I don't know for sure, Urdu is also likely given the demographics.
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(no subject)
Date: 2015-12-03 09:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-12-03 09:14 pm (UTC)Secondly, if you actually look at the leaflet and don't cherry-pick one or two claims out of context, it's pretty clear that it's saying "obviously this could be standard teenager behaviour, but if your child is being radicalised you might notice a number of things going together". Being pissed off at what the government is doing is a perfectly normal behaviour; but if you're also talking about how jihadis have the right idea and we should shoot a bunch of squaddies (say), well, that's more significant. It's possibly clumsily-worded (although note that the politics thing is right at the end after a bunch of more reasonable stuff), but I wouldn't say that it's any like as bad as the "1984 was an operations manual" posters Transport for London put up about reporting dodgy people you see in the street.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-12-04 01:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-12-04 07:17 am (UTC)The last I'd guess, like you, is a variant of Arabic but I don't know for sure, Urdu is also likely given the demographics.