The London Bombings and the Media

It is a distinction of our humanity that we can recognise how others feel. We all have some sense of injustice, we can empathise with the tortured, bereaved and humiliated, those who cannot defend themselves. Our solidarity may not go as far as taking an eye for an eye on others' behalf, especially now that it is our turn to lose our eyes. That should not stop us comprehending that for any young would-be bomber, becoming an avenger of injustice, a hero for millions, suggests an attractive sense of purpose in life. To truly understand the attraction we need theology and inter-faith understanding. Currently that's not on offer from the mass media.

A sense of being undervalued and excluded might be a big part of the equation for potential bombers. Many young people in Britain feel their voice is not heard, they don't see themselves or their views or interests represented in the media. They feel disenfranchised in the political sphere. Ethnic minorities feel the same. Religious minorities share the same feelings. Many face institutional racism and discrimination. We have a media that vilifies asylum seekers, tarring them all as parasites and fraudsters – in this sort of reporting, widespread undertones of cultural or racial prejudice are obvious. Ignored and despised, how can such youth have confidence that their voice will be heard, and that their frustrations will be noticed and addressed?

Many may also feel that conventional options for influencing political processes, if they haven't been exhausted completely, seem rather futile. Is frustration and powerlessness another characteristic of the environment that the large pool of our potential bombers come from? The biggest demonstration in London's history, against war on Iraq, wasn't just ignored. The public was lied to with impunity, and the misleading fabrications were fed to us by a largely unquestioning media. The exasperating cherry on the top is that the government is not only unaccountable, but that it was re-elected through lack of viable alternatives. When so many spoke out, so passionately, against the war but were treated with contempt it is little wonder that there is no confidence in, nor even respect for, the democratic process.

Here and abroad, in conventional military terms our superiority is so overwhelming, the security analysts tell us, that the only option of confrontation with us is irregular - that means outside the battle theatres we have determined and contained, using terrorist and guerrilla tactics.

The mass media mightn't tell us much about who is responsible, but we do know who has suffered this tragedy. The airwaves and newspapers brim with harrowing interviews of survivors, eyewitnesses, the bereaved, those still waiting to discover the fate of friends and family. They weep into the microphones and the world weeps back. We know and feel for those left behind, how a victim in life brought joy to others and how desperately they are missed. My eyes welled up this morning listening to a victim's sister, we all respond with our hearts. But because we have seen proportionally much less of the human tragedy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the effect is that we may feel our tragedy is far greater. In strictly statistical terms, we know that the suffering we have inflicted overseas is nearly incomparably more than we have endured here. But the effect of statistics is merely intellectual, statistics find it hard to break through to us emotionally. Our eyes don't well up over numbers.

Anyone who kills and maims in London is universally and instantly condemned in the media as a senseless criminal. At the same time there are no Iraqi heroes in the media, no freedom fighters, no Iraqis defending their nation from invaders, as you might logically expect there to be. Without a hint of hypocrisy, there is a widespread assertion in our mainstream media that only the killing done by coalition forces is morally righteous.

What happened in London and what was the wider context of the bombings remains one of the media’s great unasked questions. Were these isolated acts of terrorism, disassociated from anything else, or were the bombings a little part of a big war? We score quite low on the scale of war-awareness. At the other end of the scale, the inhabitants of Kandahar and Fallujah have an intense awareness that we are at war with them. Their sense of war has been sharpened by daisycutters and cluster bombs, by scared, trigger-happy Marines searching their houses in the middle of the night, by members of their community being detained and tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, by the pillage of national resources, by scarcity of food, clean water and electricity. We don't see much of that. Our sense of being at war has been dulled by the media contriving with governments to hide the collateral damage and the coffins of our dead soldiers, and to distort their numbers. For example, it seems that wounded soldiers are quickly flown to trauma centres outside Iraq, but if they die after take-off, or outside Iraq, they aren't counted as being killed in Iraq. Estimates put real coalition casualties at 9,000 dead and 16,000 seriously injured, not counting 'security contractors' – mercenaries, or 'our' Iraqi soldiers, or suicides. This is a war that is being hidden from us by the media. The bombings in London are some of the smallest explosions of the war.

This question 'why was London attacked?' is missing from most media coverage. The impression that we are given is that the attacks were completely senseless acts, without any logic behind them. It would be reasonable to suspect however that the bombings in London are a predictable reaction to something we've done—something like killing more civilians than we can count, for instance. In fact, massive provocation seems quite an adequate reason compared to our own. Our 'reasons' for going to war, as many of us suspected, were lies – such bad lies that they describe better than anything else the failings of our democratic system. Is there such little interest in 'why London?' to also avoid answering 'why Iraq?'. Our media tends mainly to ask 'why?' to reflect on the senselessness of other people's violence, not on our own, or on any possible connection between the two. The very fact that these ‘terrorist suicide bombers’ were born in Britain may help us to ask the ‘why’ question with a new global awareness.

It is a sad irony that as it breaks out of its geographical constraints and rebounds to London, this war affects individuals and communities in the UK who are resolutely opposed to war in the UK. Just as it does so in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, we cry out that we are hurt that one side and the other invoke God to justify horror and injuries. All manifestations of violence horrify us and strengthen our resolve, but not in the sense that Tony Blair and the mass media say 'this strengthens our resolve', co-opting human pain and solidarity to support the 'War on Terror'. Our resolve is for truth, for justice, for peace.

We call on people working in the media to ask more awkward questions, to help us understand how we are involved, and enable us to take the most effective actions to overcome violence.

In the sense that the attack in London was intended for politicians it is also a message for their spin doctors and the media that serve them, disappointment with them is on a parallel. We believe that the media's responsibility to promote peace and justice needs to be assumed with more vigour and urgency than ever. This is the true respect they can show for the dead.