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Canberra Today 22°/26° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Moore / Safe in the certainty of political fear

FEAR shapes political action and reaction. It fuels uncertainty, hate and divisions within society. Fear is used to concentrate power, undermine human rights and leads inexorably to the loss of personal freedom.

Michael Moore
Michael Moore.

Terrorist attacks grab our attention. Hardly a week goes by without another devastating attack confronting us in the newspapers, on television and in our social media. Of course people are fearful.

The constant barrage of horrific acts encourages belief that there is no escape from terror. An impression has been created that there can be no escape as the Islamic State has sent its terrorists out all over the world to wreak havoc on non-believers.

And yet the western world has never been safer. The vast majority of deaths from terrorism have been of Muslims. Terrorist attacks have increased across the world over the last 45 years with dramatic increases in places such as Iraq and Nigeria. However, according to figures released by the Global Terrorism Database, since 2012 while there has been a dramatic rise in such deaths across the world since the early 1990s, the figure has decreased in places such as Western Europe.

David Miller, professor of sociology at the University of Bath, is reported in “The Guardian” saying: “The figures would tend to suggest that there is much less of a threat from terrorism overall. I think we pay more attention to it because it’s happening here [western Europe] and not there. People point to the fact that there are many more people dying outside the west and we just don’t think about them as they’re not ‘worthy victims’.”

Fear and politics are a heady mix. The recent election campaigns in Australia and the US reflect the growing fear of Islam. The anti-Islamic rhetoric of people such as Donald Trump and Pauline Hanson falls on fertile ground in the mistaken belief that attacks in Western countries by Muslims are common. Terrorist attacks are horrific. Their random nature intensifies fear. The murder of the French priest Fr Jacques Hamel by Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean in a small town in Normandy is an example. Even worse was the ploughing down of crowds by a truck in Nice on Bastille Day.

Queensland Coalition MP George Christensen’s response to the Merrylands Police station attack is illustrative of how politicians can use fear of terrorism.

Christensen, who has been vocal against Syrian refugees, blamed the attack on “radical Islam”. Even when it became clear that the incident was domestic and had nothing to do with terrorism, his back down was, at best, equivocal. His attack no doubt was designed to appeal to parts of his conservative constituency around the area of Mackay and Townsville.

National Party Leader and committed Catholic, Barnaby Joyce, provided a stark contrast when he put Islamophobia into context. He argued “comparing all Muslims to terrorists was like equating all Catholics with the ‘crazy criminals’ of the Irish Republican Army”. He went on to reject calls for a ban on Muslim immigration, “because of a person’s religion? What happens when you turn that on its head and you start banning people because they are Catholics or because they are Protestants or because they’re Jewish?”

Christensen has a background as a journalist and a newspaper editor. He should know better. The role of the media is vital. However, there are media ethical codes in which the most significant test is one of public interest, for example, around suicide.

Unpackaging the public interest in the case of terrorism is much more complex than consideration of a single suicide. On the one hand there is a public right to know. On the other hand, exaggeration of the risk, over-inflation of the reporting and the publication of horrific images and gruesome details amplifies the problem and increases fear.

Over-inflating the instances of terrorism is what the terrorists want. The media are playing into their hands. The excuse that such stories will be distributed on social media is not enough. They circulate much more widely when picked up by the mainstream. Publicity is a key tool for terrorists who use it to fuel hate, religious intolerance and xenophobia, to encourage extremist politics and to build more divisiveness into society.

There can be little doubt that increased powers and better co-ordination of intelligence services have played a key role in minimising the number of attacks.

However, such reassurance comes at a cost to personal freedoms. A rational discussion would include the role of the media and politicians and consider an ethical approach examining the extent of public interest in the light of the hyperbole and perpetuation of improbable fear.

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Michael Moore

Michael Moore

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