My heart goes out to the family of Lee Rigby who was brutally murdered last Wednesday. For a brief moment, before this story was hijacked by Islamaphobic rhetoric, the media spotlight shone on the “Angels of mercy”. Armed only with compassion and the ability to listen, these women managed to stem a murderous rampage, preventing further carnage during the excruciating 20 minutes it took the police to appear.
The traditional masculine model of leadership which emphasises, confrontation rather than conciliation, and telling rather than listening, accounts for much of the mess we find ourselves in. If Tony Bliar had listened to the British public over Iraq, the world, I believe, would be a safer place. Instead, testosterone charged men played (and continue to play) toy soldiers with our lives and it is ordinary women and men left to pick up the pieces once the havoc is unleashed.
In the wake of 9/11 and later 7/11, I was disturbed by the media’s propensity to conflate Islam with terrorism. I was running a training course shortly after 7/11 when a participant arrived late. He had been jumped on by a gang of “skin heads” who shouted Islamaphobic obscenities while beating the crap out of him, ending with “Go home Paki”? He was a cockney atheist but he was flaunting a deep tan at the time, which, under the circumstances (media whipping up hatred of any one “foreign looking”), was foolhardy. Tanning booths in Dale Winton’s neighbourhood were on the brink of bankruptcy for a fortnight.
I wrote about the disturbing discourse in the media as it unfolded and started working with news editors behind the scenes. Rendered almost catatonic with anxiety at the potential fallout from the media’s response to the alleged Forest Gate plot, I wrote the following letter to a reputable newspaper;
“Your handling of the alleged plot was gratuitously sensationalist, misinformed, grossly irresponsible and, like most of the other mainstream media, completely out of sync with the public's take on events.
Blair and Bush have lost the plot, pursuing their deluded "war on terror" that effectively equates to an indefensible war on Muslims. They act in defiance of public outrage and as a consequence they are systematically destabilising the world and putting our lives in danger. At a time like this, the public expect the media to be asking questions about: the timing of the alleged plot [deflecting the government’s procrastination over Lebanon] and Blair/Bush's tendency to play the politics of fear card to win back support when faced with the back lash of a morally corrupt foreign policy, before naming and shaming innocent (until proven guilty) civilians and stoking an already volatile climate of Islamaphobia.
Your main story lacked basic journalistic integrity, such as widespread dispensing with the use of the word "alleged", presenting the story as fact, naming the suspects and dissecting their lives, the disproportionately large image of the model sister. Do you seriously believe your readers would be more impressed by salacious scare mongering and pictures of a pretty model than by the desire to see our government's actions scrutinised?
Sensational coverage, which amounts to trial by media of British Muslims, leads to a direct increase in faith hate crimes on the street. Everything from torching of mosques, beatings and rape, to murder. All I ask is that you are cognisant of the above and that you ask more discerning questions before blindly acting as the establishment's propaganda machine”.
Shortly afterwards the two men arrested were completely cleared, though their lives were irreparably marred. Seven years on, the malestream media remains overwhelmingly homogeneous with the same Islamaphobic overtones, inciting yet more hate crimes against Muslims. In the absence of any real connection with various communities, the police, politicians and the media resort to hackneyed, dangerous stereotypes.
Foreign policy that sanctions torture abroad will always come back to bite. There is no greater recruiting sergeant for terrorism than torturing innocent civilians. We know from history that if we oppress and deny people their right to self determination, abuse them and deprive them recourse to justice, they will fight back. Whilst the killing of Lee Rigby was barbarous and his killers must be held to account, spare a thought for all the thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, for example, who have seen loved ones slain but will never receive justice. Last week The High Court ruled that the task force responsible for investigating hundreds of allegations of abuse and murder of Iraqis by British troops was failing to meet the UK’s obligations under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights to investigate “suspicious deaths involving the state”.
An ex soldier told me that he felt he was brainwashed by the army to do things he never thought possible to another human being. He said “they fill your head full of horror stories, lies, about what they [Iraqis] do to their children so that you see them as animals and treat them accordingly”. This man suffers Post Traumatic Stress and struggles with what he did on a daily basis. He and others like him have been let down by the war mongerers and their successors. It was reported in the news today that incapacity benefit is being unceremoniously withdrawn from many disabled veterans.
Austerity measures (a euphemism for stealing from the poor to give to the rich) seemed to escape media scrutiny in all this. Even before the recession, minority ethnic young men, such as the alleged Woolwich attackers, were more likely to be excluded from school and be over represented in prison, social and psychiatric services, and twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts. A recent report showed that, although this has been known for decades, nothing has been done to stem the crisis.
It’s an affront to a long suffering British public that the political elite defend bankers’ right to obscene bonuses (funded in part by shutting down youth centres and taking away incapacity benefit from the disabled soldiers) on the grounds that they take enormous risk. The fact that the risks are with other people’s money and the consequences are negligible to them is ignored. When you compare the risk those women who stepped into the breach in Woolwich took, it holds a mirror up to society. The image I see is twisted and ugly. They risked their lives for the greater good. In contrast, the reckless risk taking of the bankers has had crippling societal, as opposed to personal, consequences. They have left a trail of broken hearts and minds in their wake.
A generation of young people are faced with the prospect of long term unemployment, alienation and anger. Inequality and injustice on this scale is a recipe for social unrest. Terrorists are filling a position made vacant in the minds of some of our most disaffected young men by a society that will bail out miscreants in suits but starve our youth of investment, care and any hope for the future. If you have nothing, there’s nothing left to lose.
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