The right questions Avedon Carol writes a long, excellent post about the media’s preference for polarizing views, whether we’re really “at war,” and the urgent necessity of actually preventing terrorism. Avedon is an American who’s lived in London since 1985, a co-founder of the UK group Feminists Against Censorship, and appears on radio and TV often enough to have a good sense of how the media’s institutional needs distort any discussion:

[…T]he discussion is far more nuanced and complicated than pro-war v. anti-war. I suspect that the problem is less one of the debate within the left itself as the preference of so many editors to resort to simplicity and polarized questions rather than to examine the complexities of people’s responses. I have no doubt that it’s much the same with this issue as it is with the ones I deal with as a sometimes talking head and quotomatic source: The less polarizing, the more complex and nuanced my answers to a journalist or television researcher are, the less likely I am to be invited onto a show or quoted in an article. […]

I’ve mentioned before that I live in shaking distance of the Docklands—that is, when the bomb went off there, we not only heard it, but felt it. I’ve worked in that neighborhood, and I have friends who work there, and I know how close it was. On a previous occasion, it was only by accident that I wasn’t in the John Lewis store the night I’d planned to go there to buy a coat—the night another bomb went off there. And the people who set those bombs off were not dark people, did not wear turbans, did not use alien words or read Arabic. They could not be identified by unusual clothing, swarthy complexion, foreign-language books; they looked like everyone else: white English-speakers in a white, English-speaking country. (Their funding, it is well known, has come in large part from Americans.)

So I want to know how you fight terrorism and win, how you make your people safe while keeping to the highest moral and ethical standards possible, yet still securing your nation, your neighborhood, your future. I’m not interested in figuring out who gets to go to Hell as a result of each terrorist act; that’s not my call. While it’s true that I have the deep-down feeling that you damn yourself when you choose to commit such acts, the immortal souls of terrorists are just not a question for me; I am more concerned with my own responsibility to affect the decisions that will make further such acts less likely. I know that no one individual is responsible for the fact that the war in Northern Ireland has gone on for hundreds of years, but many people bear the burden of responsibility for that fact, and those people aren’t necessarily all career terrorists. What an awful lot of them are is politicians whose decisions have more to do with retaining their seats in office or consolidating their own wealth and power than they do with actually eliminating the causes of terrorism.

That’s just a sample. Read the whole thing. [02:03 PM]