Two news items. Similar theme, different content. Starkly different reactions.

Item 1:

Over 100 Hindus staged a noisy mock-slaughter of a cow outside the British parliament to highlight legal loopholes that they say allowed authorities to euthanise a temple cow last year.

The protestors staged the mock-slaughter on Wednesday as Hindus in India’s holy town of Varanasi scattered the ashes of the euthanised Jersey blue-cross, named Gangotri, in the Ganges.

Organisers Hindu Forum UK say the cow, which was unable to stand after an accident, was being cared for by devotees at Bhaktivedanta Manor temple in the northwest London suburb of Watford.

They say vets from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) put down the cow with lethal injection on December 13, 2007, while devotees were praying.

Item 2:

The UK Government has drawn up controversial new guidelines on the"language of terrorism" to advise civil servants on how to talk about terrorism without causing offence to Muslims. The rule book is designed to suggest ways to avoid implying that Muslims are specifically to blame when talking about the nature of a terror threat. Officials have also been instructed to no longer blame fanatical extremism on Islam for fear of upsetting the Muslim community. The guidelines, written by Home Office civil servants,suggest that instead of talking about Muslim or Islamist extremism,officials should say "violent extremism". [...] According to this key language planning, "Islamophobia" should be simply termed"discrimination", while those purporting to carry out jihad and attacks in the name of Islam should be called "criminals, murderers or thugs".

It also claims that the use of concepts like "the struggle for values" or"a battle of ideas" plays into the hands of those who wish to frame the issue in terms of a clash of civilisations between Islam and the West.A more productive approach is to stress the idea of shared values, it suggests.

The Home Office researchers have prepared a table of key words and have suggested possible alternatives. It suggests that "challenge" or"threat" should be used instead of terms like "war", "battle" and"clash". "Rehabilitation" is preferred for "de-radicalisation"

In the first instance, the cow-slaughterers simply promised to "look into the matter." The second is a toast to proactive behaviour on the part of the spineless UK government. Nothing works like the threat of violence.