This story doesn’t mention the fact that after Frank Gardner was shot in Saudi Arabia, he called out to passersby, “I’m a Muslim. Help me.” Because he knew that Islam creates such a sharp distinction between believers and unbelievers that they were unlikely at best to help an unbeliever. From the Telegraph, with thanks to Kemaste:
A BBC journalist who was paralysed after being shot six times by terrorists in Saudi Arabia has vowed to return to work early next year, declaring: “You can’t keep me off air.”
In his first interview since the shooting in June, Frank Gardner, the corporation’s security correspondent, said on the BBC’s Today programme that the trauma of being riddled with bullets at point-blank range had affected only his body, not his mind.
“The weird thing is, being shot didn’t actually hurt,” said Mr Gardner, whose cameraman Simon Cumbers, 36, was killed in the same attack.
“It was a traumatic experience, but when I lay there — I didn’t know it at the time, but I had five bullets in me — I was wide awake and conscious and thinking, ‘Crikey, I’ve taken a lot of hits here, but I’m still alive, so I’ve got to stay alive for the sake of my family.’ So I willed myself to stay on.
“Fortunately they didn’t get to my brain; that remained intact. They didn’t get to my head, thank God, I’ve had no flashbacks, post-traumatic stress disorder or waking up sweating in the night — I’ve had none of that. I’ve been very lucky.”
Mr Gardner, a fluent Arabic speaker and an expert on al-Qa’eda, is currently confined to a wheelchair and is receiving treatment at a special spinal injuries unit.
He is learning to walk again through the use of special rigid leg casts, although his chances of being fully mobile are less than 50 per cent.
He said that he could remember every second of the attack, which took place as he and Mr Cumbers attempted to film the Riyadh house of an al-Qa’eda supporter who had been shot by Saudi security forces.
“I saw in the faces of the gunmen absolute hatred; they had pressed the button of violence and nothing I tried to say to them in Arabic was going to dissuade them,” Mr Gardner said.
“As far as they were concerned I was a heathen, a Western infidel who had come into their area and this was an opportunity to execute a Westerner. It was quite terrifying, as you can imagine.
“These people were hard-core militants, I don’t think it would be fair to say they were paid-up members of al-Qaeda, but they were certainly sympathisers. These were people of the same mentality as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s people in Iraq.”
After the gunmen drove off, Mr Gardner began crying out desperately for help, already aware that his legs seemed paralysed. To his dismay, locals in the western Suweidi district — reputed to harbour supporters of Osama bin Laden — appeared either unwilling or simply scared to be seen helping a Westerner.
Not a Westerner. A non-Muslim. Again the kaffir press is unwilling to draw attention to the only distinction that most likely really mattered both to those who shot Gardner and those who declined to help him.