When The BBC "Both Sided" War Crimes
I’m broadly a fan of the BBC, but one criticism often aimed at them is of taking such an overly pedantic point of neutrality that they’ll treat both sides of an argument as being of equal validity and worth, even if one side is rooted in truth and decency and the other in lies and iniquity.
Never was that more true than in November of 2015 when Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 lunchtime show hosted a phone-in discussion on the topic of whether we, the UK, should use nuclear weapons against Raqqa, then then so-called capital of ISIS’s then so-called Islamic Caliphate.
Just to be clear, the suggestion being debated was whether the UK should a launch a pre-emptive, first strike of a weapon of mass destruction, which would almost certainly be considered a war crime.
I listened to this episode in mounting horror. My recollection, which we can no longer check due to the episode no longer being available, was that Jeremy took his usual neutral view. (I saw usual, although he did once go in quite hard on a librarian who’d had the temerity to suggest that being a librarian is a skilled job, during which Jeremy claimed that he’d never realised that non-fiction books were filed by subject not author surname, before later conceding that he “probably got the tone a bit wrong on that item, tbh”.)
Now I know to have to check my privilege here. The people (and there were quite a few of them) who were phoning in to say that we should drop a bomb on Raqqa — incinerating tens of thousands of innocent people including children, and maiming tens of thousands more — weren’t necessarily evil people. They were scared and bewildered by an increasingly scary and bewildering world, and they weren’t thinking things through — especially the woman who said that innocents could be saved by dropping fliers warning of what was going to happen the day before, so the innocent could simply leave. (She clearly didn’t understand that children would not be able to leave their parents and that enslaved people would not be allowed to).
But they were still advocating an utterly evil act and they should have been quite bluntly informed of that fact, not treated as though they were merely making a reasonable suggestion as to how the parish council should spend its budget.
I should say there was more than one person who called in to say something along the lines of “this is utterly mad and evil and it beggars belief that you’re even discussing it”.
And those people were right. There are some opinions that shouldn’t be entertained because they are simply utterly unacceptable, and this is one of them. Allowing evil airtime doesn’t defeat it; it dignifies it. But the point here is that the suggestion that Islamist fundamentalism could be defeated by nuking it was stupid as well, and for my sins, I’m going to point out why.
The thing with the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism is that on one side you have people like ISIS, and on the other you have good, decent people living in the modern world like Sadiq Khan, and to be clear, the good, decent people living in the modern world vastly outnumber ISIS and its ilk. But in between those two groups is perhaps a pool of people who are good people, but might have perhaps what could charitably be described as a pre-20th century mindset, and while still only a small proportion of the Islamic world, they vastly outnumber ISIS.
And in many ways the struggle with Islamism is a battle for the hearts and minds of these people. We want to convince them that ISIS are terrible, and ISIS want to convince them that it’s we who are terrible.
And what better way to prove ISIS right than to incinerate and main tens of thousands of innocent people including children? What better way to prove ISIS right than to have pictures beamed around the world of blind toddlers with their faces burned off screaming in agony?
Or how about this? Let’s say ISIS got hold of a nuclear weapon and detonated it in Central London, around the Westminster area. Let’s say they did it on a day where the entire Royal Family were at Buckingham Palace, both Houses of Parliament were sitting (including all the Church of England bishops in the Lords), all the various other religious leaders were having an interfaith conference in Westminster, all government ministers were at their posts, all the metro mayors and council leaders from around the country were having a meeting in Westminster, the Association of Chief Constables was meeting in Westminster, and all the army, navy, and air force top brass were meeting at the Ministry of Defence, and what the hell, let’s say the First Ministers of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland were meeting the PM at 10 Downing Street.
At a stroke, ISIS would completely have decapitated the leadership of the UK (government, military, police, monarchy, religious). And let’s say, that in addition to that, they killed 60,000 UK citizens out of a population of around 67 million.
How would the remaining 66,940,000 UK citizens react? Would they immediately decide to throw off their previous beliefs and convert to fundamentalist islam?
Would they bollocks.
The suggestion is absurd. We would hate ISIS with a burning fury that would never end. And we find new leaders.
There’s something like 1.2 billion muslims in the world. Let’s say, just as a guess, that 1% of them could be described as Islamists. That would be 12 million. Let’s say we killed 30,000 of them by nuking Raqqa. Would that cause the remaining 11,970,000 of them to immediately renounce their Islamist beliefs in favour of moderate beliefs in harmony with a modern secular / multi-faith world?
Would it bollocks.
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