London bombs

So most of the media were credulous about the London terror plot, reporting and repeating police claims and leaks without doubt or even attribution? Ho-hum.

By now readers may have noticed that's what journalists do: you can get stories done a lot quicker if you simply relay what the most powerful and/or convenient sources tell you. If you want to get all ethical about it you can stick in the word "alleged".

What was properly striking about the coverage was a minority strand of grumpy annoyance and incredulity. Partly people were voicing their mistrust of authorities who must have known for the last five years that the "massive security" they had been running at airports was still wholly inadequate.

But on Irish and British radio, especially, programmes featured callers, and sometimes presenters and guests, suggesting the "plot" could be a largely fictitious and politically convenient distraction. Ryan Tubridy, for example, seemed to acknowledge that there was room for serious debate about whether the whole thing was a "wag the dog" incident. A few decently informed responses came with raised eyebrows at the alleged role of Pakistan's intelligence services, spiritual home of al-Qaeda.

War criminals

That's all well and good, and perhaps a slight sign that the media have taken note of the reminders about "reliable sources" issued by the Metropolitan Police at Stockwell tube station and Forest Gate. But between reporting about the alleged plot in copious, cop-fed detail and pausing to cast down on its reality, the press largely bypassed a rather important and terrible point: it is very, very plausible that otherwise normal people would plan to blow up civilian airplanes, and that very many other people would think it was justifiable to do so.

For all the horrified intakes of breath, Daily Mail images of 9/11 and talk of potential "loss of life... on an unprecedented scale" (nonsense copyright John Reid), a "successful" plot along the lines we've heard about might have killed as many civilians as have died in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine in the last seven weeks alone. That's an awful lot of people, to be sure, and in the Middle East they're really dead, not potentially so, but that continuing slaughter hasn't landed George Bush or Ehud Olmert under a police interrogation lamp.

Is it any wonder that some Muslims think that briefly raising the Western civilian death toll to such wholesale levels would represent some sort of justice? Luckily Hezbollah and Hamas tend to act with more restraint than such peripheral jihadists.

Alan Ruddock in the Sunday Independent says there is no room for Middle East negotiation "precisely because there is no sane reason why anyone would want to blow apart an airliner". Leaving aside the civilian airliners blown apart by, for example, the CIA's Cuban agents and the US navy, probing the highly subjective matter of military/terrorist sanity gets us precisely nowhere. Since in the next sentence Ruddock urges readers to "recognise that you are in a war", one wonders how he expects the outgunned enemy to "sanely" fight it.

Acting non-violently

Thankfully, in the Western societies that are responsible for, or complicit in, the Bush-Blair-Olmert crusades, there are good people prepared to use non-lethal means to resist the cruel logic of war. In Ireland, the nine people who occupied the Derry premises of military contractor Raytheon join the roll of honour that has been inscribed at Shannon Airport – itself still the likeliest Irish target for those whose idea of resistance is more deadly.

The media here remains terrified of giving "oxygen of publicity" to such non-violent direct action. RTÉ radio could scarcely bring itself to mention that the dramatic occupation was taking place, or to report its outcome, though Raytheon defendant Eamonn McCann has been a frequently heard voice there for many years – especially under Section 31, when he was as near to the Provos as RTÉ dared to go.

This blackout represents a notion of journalistic "responsibility" that is light-years from the (alleged) basic principles of our craft. Ironically, back in those Troubled Section-31 days, liberals often complained that Northern nationalists hadn't stuck with civil disobedience rather than resorting to arms. Nowadays, civil disobedience may represent our best hope of driving today's war from these shores. By neglecting it, the media make violence all the more likely.