The media and terrorism [English]

Fed with the same food, hurt

with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,

healed by the same means, warmed and

cooled by the same winter and summer, as a

Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison

us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we

not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we

will resemble you in that.

In the above oft-quoted lines from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (Act III, Scene I) Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, asserts his humanity in response to Christendom’s condemnation of his race. He makes an impassioned appeal to the essential sameness of human beings at the level of needs, sorrow, pain, suffering and joy. His denial of difference from the other, his interlocutor, is meant to stake a claim to equal treatment. And this includes the equal right of revenge when wronged. His disavowal of racism becomes simultaneously an exoneration of revenge.

Read in the context of the contemporary discourse on terrorism, these lines are ironic in the extreme. This could easily be an appeal that a Muslim might make to a Jewish person today; or a Palestinian, an Iraqi or an Afghan might make to the entire world. In a world without a moral compass – a world in which the boundaries between legal and illegal have become as blurred as the borders between moral and immoral – everyone seems to be groping for direction. The paths of right and wrong appear to have merged, collapsed to the extent that it is difficult find one’s way.

Two hundred people get killed in a senseless, deplorable, murderous attack in Mumbai. The world is rightly indignant. Indians are understandably enraged. The world media flashes images of the burning Taj or besieged Oberoi hotels and waxes eloquent over the outrage. The Indian media speaks in hyperbole and wants blood. The loud noise from the talking heads drowns out other sounds, some distance away in West Asia. These are the sounds that emanate regularly from the screaming children and wailing mothers in the Gaza Strip. No media outrage. Death here is a regular but silent visitor. Nobody is indignant and no blaring television screens speak the sorrow of these women and children for “they are terrorists, and the attack was in self-defence”! These miserable Palestinians are not human – they are different and do not bleed when pricked, do not laugh when tickled and do not die when poisoned. Driven from their homes, forced to live in hunger, misery and fear, deprived of their lands and bombed with a gruesome regularity, they endure the daily humiliations with a quiet resignation, for no anchorman aiming for media success is interested in their story.

Just as the massacre of 18,000 people in Sabra and Shatila was lost in the noise of unspoken horrors and unwritten histories, another brutal massacre also did not make headlines on the sanitised screens of a self-righteous media. Gujarat 2002 – the streets of Ahmadabad were red with the blood of Muslim men, women, born and unborn children. Babies ripped out of mothers’ wombs and burned, limbr cut out with sharp knives and dead bodies lay scattered after an orgy of murder carried out with the precision of a scientifically planned and minutely carried out military operation. No sound of outrage of the kind one now sees was heard on the international or Indian media. Muted criticisms by a few were drowned out in the noise of the constant dancing and singing routines on most TV channels. Over a thousand people were mercilessly butchered but no Secretary of State rushed from the US to express solidarity, no vociferous condemnations from the White House or 10 Downing Street. The “civilised” world maintained a curious silence. No hoarse shouts of “terrorism” were heard across the oceans.

The untold stories abound. There are no takers for them as those dying in these stories are “children of a lesser god.” They are guilty of unknown crimes for which they must be punished. The bewildered and perplexed Iraqis might wonder for what crimes over 1.2 million of them were sent to their agonising deaths; why were they tortured in Abu Ghraib and why the women were raped in jails. The hundreds languishing in inhuman conditions in Guantanamo Bay might wonder what stripped them of their humanity, leaving them bereft of any recourse to justice or rights. The women and children becoming displaced in their own land in Pakistan’s northern regions, with murderous drones hovering menacingly over them every day, may also plead their innocence with no ears to listen to them, no eyes to see them, no hearts to feel for them and no souls to prick anyone’s conscience. As flies to wanton boys are they to the Marines, they kill them for their sport!

The world seems to be divided into “civilised human” versus “uncivilised less-than-human.” The “civilised human” world is outraged and furious that 3000 people were killed on that fateful day when those planes flew dramatically into the three pillars symbolic of America’s military, political and economic might – the Pentagon, White House and Trade Towers. The one intended for the White House went astray but the other two hit their targets. The vengeful giant was rudely woken from his slumber and began to stamp anyone and everyone, innocent and guilty alike, in a fury borne of fear and incredulity. The years following the horrific event saw the genocide of millions in Iraq, several hundred thousand in Afghanistan and several thousand in Pakistan.

Yet, in a twisted way that only the corporate global media can contrive, the killers of millions were defined as victims and the victims as terrorists! The real terrorists on both sides of the cultural and continental divides – those who struck New York, Mumbai, London or Islamabad, as much as those who struck Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine – were overlooked. In a reversal of vocabulary, sheer terror came to be called ‘self defence’ and all legitimate freedom struggles against occupation came to be defined as “terrorism.” There was no language left to speak dissent. There were no words left to describe colonisation, imperialism or occupation. The terror of stealing language and denying vocabulary was unleashed by the media to silence all critique or opposition. In an Orwellian world of “war is peace” moral discourse turned upside down.

The Indian and global media needs to temper the rage arising from an insidious nationalism that characterises states today, and present a more holistic version of global terrorism that does not sacrifice complexity, nuance and sophistication in understanding the scourge of terror. The Pakistani media needs to assiduously avoid falling into the trap of a tit-for-tat reply, a childish mirror-imaging of the media across the border. It too needs to reflect on state and non-state terrorism, as well as colonisation and occupation of lands accomplished through terror, so that it can provide its viewers with a thoughtful analysis of the problem and a sincere attempt at solutions, rather than becoming jingoistic in response. The anger, often arising from fear, is understandable. But sheer puerile rage is infertile and becomes an impediment to understanding the intricate issues. A good place to start a detached, though engaged, analysis would be to explore the history of how or why any actor, state or non-state, turns to terrorism as a method of addressing conflict. Terrorists and victims of terror belong to all religions, races, nations and groups. This is a shared problem for all of us and its roots lie deep in historical struggles. Blaming one group of people as a whole, while absolving another as a whole, is a sterile approach that is likely to exacerbate rather than resolve the issues of terrorism that the world faces today.