During these past months, Islamic terrorism has been the obscure protagonist of many newspapers. While some claim that terrorism is nowadays the first-world's main problem, others argue that excessively biased press coverage will lead to a politically and socially polarised world.
Lee Rigby, a 25-year-old drummer of the
British army, was strolling around his native neighbourhood in South London
when two men, armed with rudimentary kitchen knives, stabbed him to death. His
life ended that day, as so his mother's, father's, families and friends'. His running blood changed the black pavement to crimson that afternoon, holding the
world's breath for a moment.
His killers, moreover, not only did not
leave the corpse behind, but also chose to display themselves in front of an
audacious pedestrian's camera to justify their heinous crimes without showing a trace
of repentance.
Up to this point, any sensible reader will
assuredly emphasize with the deceased soldier, and show utter disgust for the murderers.
But, what if the killers had acted in the name of Islam? The story changes then: protests in central London crying "Muslim killers, off our
streets" to the sky, xenophobic comments in the media and, worse of all, a notable
compacting of the occidental 'compatriots'. One protester firmly stated,
"Islamic extremism is probably the number one threat to Britain".
However, this demonstrator clearly showed not to be in acquaintance with UK's crime
statistics: terrorism does not even appear in the Office for National
Statistics Trends in Crime report.
This incongruence between actual crime and
media coverage is, seemingly, not applicable to all other offences, ranging
from rapes to domestic abuse. In our modern dipole society, Islam is considered
immiscible with our ethnicity, phenomenon that many occidental governments
eagerly approve and promote. Today, society is shaped like dough by media's strong hands,
which is, of course, an obvious reflection of the regimes wills.
I claim that, in our biased society, we are
able to hoist from the pasturing crowd an instant in order to get a zenith view of our puppeteer-automated
society, to see the trapped stream we are within the hands of giants who crowned themselves kings of our world.
Our brave new world.
I must say that we do not make eye to eye on this subject.
ReplyDeleteIn our modern world, a new type of combat has superseded full-blown wars: intelligence. Since the cold war, countries have used information to threat other countries, in many cases reaching to critical diplomatic situations. Terrorism is obviously not a stereotypical type of war, because the aim is not to conquer territories or attain riches, but rather to create a state of fear in the people, using innocent people's welfare to trade for conditions the terrorists impose.
In my opinion, this kind of attacks is the most hurtful for a developed country, as it is the only type of crime that will target a society's happiness, the utmost goal of any nation. I believe that it is simplistic to say that terrorism is overstated, as the other kinds of offenses are, as heinous as can be, targeting individuals for individual causes. While there are clear victims in terrorist attacks, do you really believe they are the real targets? For this, I do believe that terrorism is a developed country's major threat.
Moreover, you seemed to imply that governments use fundamentalist terrorism, as a tool to polarise a society and induce hatred towards the enemies believes, commonly religions and even whole cultures. While I agree that press and governments bias information, I believe you missed out an important point: if terrorism were a major threat, why would governments want to overdo it? Publicizing terrorism excessively will only lead to agitation and terror, basically accomplishing the terrorist's intentions.
As a whole, while I do agree with you about how governments can manipulate information to aid them, I do not upon your theory of terrorism being merely a tool for diverging alien cultures from ours. Terrorism is undoubtedly a seed of social alarm and fear, targeting people's welfare therefore the worst type of crime for any developed country that will aspire to achieve the highest indexes of welfare and happiness.