Two Sevens Clash
It’s an over-familiar sight where TV news bulletins are concerned, one of the predominant clichés employed to emphasise what often seems a curiously testosterone-fuelled competition between broadcasters to bring the scene of the crime into the nation’s living room, as though each news channel was competing in a pissing contest. Whichever reporter first gets to stand where the incident occurred is declared Alpha Male No.1. It’s no longer regarded as sufficient to have the newsreader recite the headlines; he has to be dispatched to where the action took place. High school massacre, flood, famine, earthquake, plague of locusts – our man on the spot is there, LIVE!
I don’t know if any of you reading this have ever actually had the media circus set up camp on your doorstep, but I once had that dubious honour. This was in the wake of the 7/7 bombings, which took place exactly ten years ago today. When police belatedly arrived at the stable door after the proverbial horse had bolted, it brought them to Burley in Leeds. For those not in the know, Burley is the…erm…less refined poor relation of Headingley; whilst the latter revels in its reputation as the scene of many a memorable Test Match, home to the odd poncy restaurant and the nearest Leeds has to a tree-lined, St John’s Wood-like neighbourhood, the former is a corner of the city I knew as home for roundabout eight years and got to know, if not necessarily love.
Burley’s population, certainly at the time I lived there (1996-2008), consisted of perhaps 60% students, 30% Asians, 5% old ladies who’d resided in the area since the war, and 5% hard-drug users (the group I unfortunately belonged to for three of those years). Lazy phrases such as ‘The Muslim Community’, which imply there is a specific bus-route to some exclusively Islamic ghetto, don’t reflect what I remember of Burley, in which the various ethnic and social groups seemed to overlap in a fairly congenial manner.
Anyway, when it emerged that two of the suicide bombers responsible for the deaths of 52 innocent civilians in London had travelled to the capital from their homes in Burley, the media descended upon my neighbourhood. As more background on all four bombers was revealed, some of the connections were disturbing for me personally; one of the four, Mohammad Sidique Khan, came from Beeston in Leeds. Beeston is the other side of the city to Burley, but Khan worked at a primary school across the road from where a close friend of mine lived at the time. Another – Germaine Lindsay – was from Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, home to yet another close friend of mine at the time. The fact that the other two, Shehzad Tanweer and Hasib Hussain, had both lived round the corner before stumbling upon a fast-track short-cut to Paradise, made me feel like some Forrest Gump figure, as though sharing the same geographical space as these twisted, nihilistic individuals somehow put me on the periphery of events I had no participation in. I could have walked past any of them prior to July 7 2005.
It was certainly a strange sensation to switch-on the TV in the days following 7/7 and observe the same sight on screen as was available via a two-minute trot on foot. As police roadblocks barred motorists from the street in question, reporters from both regional and national news took advantage of no traffic whilst I marvelled at the surreal novelty of seeing familiar locals joining the chorus line of background bystanders wherever the camera pointed, giving the watching world a rare opportunity to study 80s fashions being worn without a sense of irony. We’ve all seen it on TV when this method of reporting is used, but it is undoubtedly weird when it happens barely 200 yards from your home. Of course, as is customary, another story breaks and the on-the-spot reporters relocate to the scene of the next crime; but for a couple of days in 2005, it felt as though the whole media had moved into the area, and the effect on house prices was the least of my concerns.
It’s a horrible coincidence that the tenth anniversary of the 7/7 bombings should take place a couple of weeks after another gruesome slaughter of British citizens has dominated the headlines, even if this latest one occurred on a foreign field. 7/7 was the first large-scale terrorist incident to have been carried out on British soil since the heyday of the IRA. When the Peace Process came to Northern Ireland, Brits assumed all that business was over and done with. We didn’t anticipate a fresh wave of terrorism claiming both lives and headlines. With the benefit of hindsight, the confused and blinkered reasoning of the 7/7 bombers transmitted via their video messages recorded before their day trip to London foreshadowed everything that has sadly become all-too commonplace in the decade since.
‘Radicalisation’ appears to be the current euphemism for ‘Brainwashing’. When the US soldier played by Laurence Harvey in ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ undergoes his conversation into a subconscious assassin at the hands of America’s enemies, the process is one firmly in the hands of the Chinese security services, one of the Dark Arts that was then the exclusive property of clandestine government agencies and something that required years to perfect the psychological techniques of. Today, the democratisation of technology has enabled such tactics to be transmitted across the world by untrained amateurs; the Global Village now has the online equivalent of the disturbing parochial customs often hidden beneath the surface of flesh-and-blood villages. Nobody involved in the genesis of the internet anticipated it would one day become the ultimate bedroom brainwashing tool, especially effective in seducing susceptible young Englishmen who feel they have no stake in the future of their actual country and fall back on some deluded romantic notion of a fabricated culture they have no direct experience of. Seeing oneself as a sabre-wielding Ottoman horseman is certainly a more appealing image than sitting behind a desk in a factory farm call-centre with a dozen redundant degrees to your name, even if this fantasy still means you’re merely Billy Liar with a beard.
Since the awful events of July 7 2005, the British public have been repeatedly warned the repetition of such an atrocity is inevitable. As if to justify this warning, whichever government happens to be in power (and Blair was still reigning ten years ago) has come to the conclusion that the civil rights and legal liberties of the innocent have to curbed and cut back in order to keep them safe, essentially criminalising the majority for the crimes of a minority. It’s like being at school when the whole class is forced to stand with their hands on their heads because one solitary member of it drew a cock & balls on the blackboard.
I suppose the main difference between 2005 and today is the widening of the Jihadist industry sales pitch, no longer exclusively targeting the young and impressionable, but inviting mum, dad, granddad and granny to join the party as well; the recent case of a British Muslim family of every conceivable age voluntarily vanishing in Syria appears to underline this. And how ironic that the second-class status of the fairer sex has been upgraded in one explosive area; who says Radical Islam doesn’t value women? So, onwards, brothers and sisters! I don’t wanna a holiday in the sun; I just wanna go to the new Belsen.
Petunia Winegum
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July 7, 2015 at 9:46 am -
These days the internet is used for good and evil. Before the internet we had video, and before that radio. It matters not in what period you live there will always be good and bad people, who will use whatever tools are available for both good and evil purposes. The fact that the internet is used to “brainwash” gullible fools does not make the internet bad per se. People will always be influenced by what they see or hear or read. I could argue that the movie “Braveheart” had a huge impact on Scottish Nationalism. The (crap) novel “Catcher in the Rye” was blamed for John Lennon’s murder. Various video games, such as Manhunt, have been blamed for encouraging young people to commit acts of violence. Indeed, it could be said that both the Bible and Koran have been responsible for inciting atrocities.
As far as the media circus goes, the only experience I’ve had of it was attending the Conservative Party conference the year of the Brighton bombing. Watching the evening news coverage each day made me wonder if I’d actually been at the same event that was being reported on.
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July 7, 2015 at 9:50 am -
I remember reading the immediate post-war juvenile crime wave (as portrayed in ‘The Blue Lamp’) was blamed on Cagney & Bogart gangster movies, so I think that’s a fair point. There does seem to be something psychologically different about the way the internet can be used, though – reminsicent of the way in which potential assassins are seduced by a subtle questionaire in ‘The Parallax View’.
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July 7, 2015 at 9:57 am -
Distribution of de Sade’s tomes….perverting a nation?
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July 7, 2015 at 10:03 am -
Indeed. You’d think by now those who apportion blame to cultural influences would have twigged that some people do bad things. No doubt there was a caveman who clubbed his missus to death and then his actions were blamed on those bloody cave-paintings.
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July 7, 2015 at 11:44 am -
It was always said that in order to get good people to do bad things, you just need religion. Maybe we should add the internet to that now.
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July 7, 2015 at 11:48 am -
T.V., movies, video movies, electronic games, comic books, and Rock Music have combined to steadily desensitize the children of the last three generations, to the point where so many of them have rock hard hearts, hearts that are filled with self love and violence, rather than the tender love of Jesus Christ. Such a thing has happened once before, in Germany in the first three decades of this century. Children filled their minds so completely with the occultism inherent in the old Germanic, Nordic legends, that they became terribly desensitized, and filled with violence. So many millions of young Germans were this type of person, that Hitler found more than enough men who would willingly slaughter Jews, Gypsies, and those “living lives unworthy of life”, i.e., the handicapped, the insane, the retarded, the elderly. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has documented this terrible condition in his new book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans And The Holocaust”. If you want to see what lies in store for America in the time just ahead, read this book. You see, just as the crowds cried out, in support for David, against King Saul, “Saul has killed his thousands; David has killed his tens of thousands”, so it is with the coming Antichrist and Hitler. Hitler may have killed his millions; Antichrist will kill his hundreds of millions!
http://www.cuttingedge.org/news/n1019.html
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July 7, 2015 at 11:32 am -
I think not; merely preaching to the perverted…..
Turgid and repetitive at best, but I suspect deliberately written that way; de Sade that is, most definitely not the regulars of this hostelry.
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July 7, 2015 at 10:12 am -
The baffling thing to me about the way folk are behaving with the internet is that it not only provides the questions, it also provides the answers. Yet people do not want answers, they do not even look for counteracting evidence to their own prejudice. In fact I think that folk refuse to look for anything that is against what they like/want to believe is “true”. They then just quote their bit of the internet as proof their beliefs are the right ones and seek majorities via things such as “Likes” or “Retweets”. And then they “block” or use the tldnr acronym to indicate to everyone that you are a weird geek. So often when discussing factual information people just resort to the comment, “Well how come you’re the only one that thinks this?” rather than defeat the factual information with better evidence. Like the Greeks they really believe that the truth and reality is something that is democratic.
In this they mimic the modern media, which has abandoned it’s virtue of reporting the story from all angles so it is certainly fair to say that Journalism has groomed the nation, but only because the people lie on their backs to be groomed.
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July 7, 2015 at 10:06 am -
I can understand TV reporters going to the scene of some event, there might be something to see. But the stupidest thing to me is the TV reporter standing by the rotating sign at Scotland Yard reading out a statement issued by the police. Similar reporters can be seen outside the Foreign Office telling us about the government’s position on, say, Greece, or outside the Home Office talking about immigration.
Instead of listening to what is being said, I’m usually thinking about the waste of money for the reporter and camera crew!-
July 7, 2015 at 10:13 am -
It does seem a very infantile way of visualising a story for the audience. This is a story about the Met, therefore I’m standing outside Scotland Yard, just in case you thought I might be talking about salmon-fishing in the highlands.
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July 7, 2015 at 10:18 am -
Blame short attention spans… if you have one talking head going to another in the same studio… Yawn! A revolving sign or a stretch of desert give something new/extra to keep the eye/ear/mind engaged (in theory).
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July 7, 2015 at 10:24 am -
Last time I watched (early 2012) the news-readers were distractingly striding around the newsroom all the time, a habit whose prime motivation seemed to be to resolve the Angela Ripon Conundrum without any need to involve the Light Entertainment Division. That men in trousers had to be included was just an inconvenience of the equality movement. Venezuela of course have taken matters further. Socialism needn’t be taxing after all and it really can give the people what they want.
http://images.hngn.com/data/images/full/98831/yuvi-pallares.jpg?w=650-
July 7, 2015 at 11:12 am -
That would put me off my tea…
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July 7, 2015 at 11:14 am -
Football. Opium of the masses.
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July 7, 2015 at 11:27 am -
The speaker isn’t always on the site, but may be in the studio and is ‘green screened’. This stops idiots photo bombing the announcer. They have to be there if they are interviewing someone.
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July 7, 2015 at 11:42 am -
Does anyone else suffer from an inability to watch the rotating New Scotland Yard sign without recalling that amusing sketch on ‘Not The 9 O’Clock News’ which traced the mechanism all the way back to a crude crank-handle on the Commissioner’s (Mel Smith’s) desk ?
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July 7, 2015 at 10:15 am -
At the time of the Irish terrorist attacks, some sad twat broke into my wife’s car and stole her briefcase. Finding nothing of value, he threw it away under another car. She just taped up the broken window and got on with things, but someone spotted the object, police were called, and the bomb disposal team, and lo and behold, we had the mainland’s first deployment of the robot shotgun!
I had also gone to work oblivious of these unfolding events.
Having two cars and only one garage (which was small and difficult to get into) we were prey to car break-ins. Thieves never got anything of value, but often wreaked huge damage on our cars. For example on another occasion they caused £2000 of damage to my Lotus Éclat in stealing a radio that didn’t even work! (And that was 30 years ago when two grand meant more than it does now, and the object was simply filling the hole in the dash.) This brings me to the point of noting that poverty doesn’t cause crime (an insult to the poor everywhere) – crime causes poverty. Similarly, terrorism isn’t the result of race hate or anti-Muslim or anti-Irish sentiment from us Brits – but by fuck, it causes it!
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July 7, 2015 at 10:43 am -
I seem to remember after the Dunblane masssacre of Primary school children, the BBC dispatched someone to present the Today programme from there. Other broadcasters no doubt did similar things.
The worthy people of Dunblane soon got fed up with the media circus, and told the assembled lot of them to **** off back home, and let the locals get on with their grieving, as they had had enough dumb questions of the type: “How does it feel to be [insert tasteless topical inanity here]…?”
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July 7, 2015 at 2:07 pm -
Same in West Cumbria after Derek Whatsisname went loopy and shot umpteen people. Many a local front door sprouted a small notice saying ‘No Reporters’.
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July 7, 2015 at 12:27 pm -
Englishmen? Do you really consider these idiots to be Englishmen? I don’t & would heavily question the patriotism of anybody who does…
I remember the press had a field day when “Linda” was complaining about how hardly any state resources were available to treat her poor “James”s PTSD & how we are all headed for a Paris style disaster if we don’t cough up the Jizya. They couldn’t print their Anglicised names enough.
I suspect that if the proles were allowed a say, they might enthusiastically support the engagement of an entirely different set of state resources be hurled up against the problem than their handwringing Guardian elites might envision deploying from the arsenals of their vast diversity outreach artillery.
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July 7, 2015 at 12:34 pm -
Englishmen? Do you really consider these idiots to be Englishmen? I don’t & would heavily question the patriotism of anybody who does…
Of course they are -assuming they were born here (although I might personally dispute Leeds being in England) or grew up here since they were knee high to a chapati. Infact, knowing how badly our colonial, native deflowering, Forefathers behaved during the Raj then there is a high chance that those you consider ‘non-English’ have more British DNA in them than some of us who comment here.
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July 7, 2015 at 12:41 pm -
I thought the acid test was which national cricket team you cheered loudest for?
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July 7, 2015 at 12:51 pm -
As an aside, Little Sister Dwarf is a librarian…being the black sheepette of the Dwarf Clan and actually having meaningful paid employment. New members to the library have to answer those ‘ethnicity’ questionnaires. You would be surprised by how many white British, whom we should suppose are literate by dint of them wanting to join a library, think their ethnicity is…
.. “CoE”!
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July 7, 2015 at 2:02 pm -
Mind you, Rod Stewart thinks he’s Scottish.
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July 7, 2015 at 2:10 pm -
So does Sean Connery. He hasn’t been near the place in several decades.
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July 7, 2015 at 2:10 pm -
Mind you, Rod Stewart thinks he’s Scottish.
And Big Country were as scottish as lager…for all their restless bagpipery tartaness.
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