The propaganda model
The coverage of 7/7 was awful journalism.
On 7 July, grisly, arbitrary death was visited on London, on a scale somewhat higher than that inflicted on Dublin and Monaghan in 1974 by loyalists and/or British agents, or that caused by negligence at King's Cross tube station in 1987.
For Meejit, what set 7/7 apart was not the tragedy, terrible as it was, but the awful journalism – worse than 9/11, when there was at least an initial flurry here of rational explanation for the atrocity.
This time, the media's propaganda impulse was soon overwhelming. For example: for a few brief hours we heard witnesses and survivors describe awful panic and slow responses from emergency services – then suddenly the story became how Londoners never panicked and the services ran like clockwork, and those voices vanished. (In New York it was nearly a year after 9/11 when we finally heard how poorly managed the rescue effort was.)
The 7/7 propaganda ran deeper than that, to be sure. The Irish Times featured reams of reporter Lynne O'Donnell's typical and risible stiff-upper-lippery: "Long used to dealing with the horrors of twisted imaginations – from Hitler's Blitz to the worst that the Irish Republican Army could throw at them – Londoners showed… that the city will endure and thrive." She also mentioned "growing evidence that the attacks were the work of religious fanatics fuelled by a hatred that turns all, regardless of colour or creed, into the enemy". Meejit knows forensic science has made huge advances, but O'Donnell didn't cite any specific "growing evidence" for this tendentious nonsense, propaganda barely disguised as reporting.
Is Britain at war?
In news and punditry here, this was a story about morality and character – intrinsically subjective categories – rather than politics and war. Apart from the letters pages, Iraq barely merited a mention, its thousands of dead civilians forgotten, Baghdad's bloody repetition of days like this unacknowledged, the aerial bombing and torture camps out of the reckoning.
No doubt some Muslims (like some Christians) genuinely "hate our freedoms", but surely Madrid told us their target is our policies. But whereas Spanish politics ensured that press coverage of Madrid's carnage focused on Spain's role in Iraq, you would search in vain for a London-bombs story mentioning, say, the number of British troops there or the crimes they've committed.
On radio, RTÉ's Brian Dobson implicitly justified the difference: "Spain's involvement in the war in Iraq was deeply unpopular even before last year's bombings." Remember, Brian, so was Britain's: on 5/5 Blair was punished by voters' anger at the war, and Londoners elected George Galloway, a media-demonised anti-war MP. Britain's role in America's criminal enterprise has not got any more or less wrong because of the bombs, and discussing it wouldn't mean succumbing to some Mediterranean weakness of will.
A force for change
Meejit loves London, but romance aside, we know when it comes to murderous barbarity against civilians, London (though not ordinary Londoners) has been far more sinning than sinned against. Pace Lynne, even "Hitler's Blitz" was no match for Bomber Harris's version, and it's now self-evident that the IRA could have thrown far worse at the city.
Leave history aside if you must. The case for today's "war on terror" was cogently presented by pundit Richard Delevan on 7/7: "Go where they come from. Stop them there. Persuade, cajole, bribe or if necessary force change in the societies that produce them." This conventional wisdom could hardly be more wrong: first, "they" may well come from Yorkshire; second, the war is mainly being fought in a society, Iraq, that didn't previously produce "them"; third, there's a yawning sociological gap where that word "change" sits ominously; and finally, apart from the rather coy last-resort positioning of "force", this could be al Qaida's manifesto.
Remove the distorting filter of propaganda, and it becomes clear that bin Laden's war and Bush/Blair's war are mirror images of terror, though the latter has shed far more blood, and only the former merits reflex condemnation from the media's moral arbiters.