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What the British Papers Said on the Second Anniversary of the London Bombing

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What the British Papers Said on the Second Anniversary of the London Bombing ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place. Wellington, July 2008 What the British papers said on the second anniversary of the London bombing Nahid Kabir and Lelia Green Edith Cowan University Dr Nahid Kabir is a Research Fellow in the School of Communications and Arts at the Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. Dr Kabir is the author of Muslims in Australia: Immigration, race relations and cultural history (London: Kegan Paul, 2005). Email: [email protected] Professor Lelia Green is co-chief investigator, with Professor Mark Balnaves, on an ARC Discovery Grant on Australian responses to the images and discourses of terrorism and the other: establishing a metric of fear. The author of Technoculture (2002, Allen & Unwin), Lelia is also Associate Dean, Research and Higher Degrees, Faculty of Education and Arts, Edith Cowan University. Email: [email protected] Abstract1 In our previous refereed ANZCA conference paper, presented in July 2007, we discussed what the British newspapers (four British broadsheets and four tabloids) said on the first anniversary of the London bombings. We discussed the pattern of reporting, whether it was “nationalistic”, and whether it was “discriminatory”. In this paper we examine the same newspapers and evaluate how they reported on the second anniversary of London bombing and what that says about the continuing development of the British response to this terrorist attack. In this paper we take our argument beyond perceptions of “nationalistic” and “discriminatory” to raise the issue of whether such coverage can be construed as inspiring terrorists to commit more violence for media publicity. Introduction It is said that terrorists desire “three Rs: Revenge, Renown, Reaction” (L. Richardson, 2006b, pp. 95-132); and when the media pays attention to terrorist acts, it gives them both reaction and renown. Given this hypothesis—that terrorists crave media attention (L. Richardson, 2006b, pp. 95-132; Doran, 2002, p. 73; Perl, 2002, pp.143-145)— then it is possible that the alleged terrorist acts at Glasgow airport just before the second anniversary of the London Transport bombings occurred partly because the perpetrators were expecting publicity on the anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings. This dynamic had also been seen the previous year when the suicide video of Shehzad 1 Acknowledgement: We express our sincere gratitude to the anonymous referees for constructive comments that helped shaped this paper. ANZCA08: Power and Place: Refereed Proceedings: http://anzca08.massey.ac.nz 1 ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place. Wellington, July 2008 Tanweer, one of the 7/7 bombers, was released to Al Jazeera on the eve of the anniversary. In our previous study, “What the British papers said on the first anniversary of the London bombing” (Green & Kabir, 2007), we found that the press was heavily focused on the newly-released London bombers’ video footage, which emphasised to the reader the “enemy within”; and that there was arguably a meta-communication that “they (the terrorists) resent our (superior) culture”. In light of this, it was decided to follow up the evolving discourse and examine what the British press said on the second anniversary of the 7 July 2005 bombings. Further, it was hypothesised that terrorists might provoke additional coverage by acts to attract British press publicity on the eve of the anniversary of the London bombings: this was the impact in part of the alleged Glasgow airport terrorists (discussed next). It is possible to infer that there is a strategic ‘exchange’ whereby terrorists attempt to stage high profile events on an emotive anniversary but are aware that law enforcement agencies ramp up surveillance as anniversaries approach, thus moving possible terrorist activity earlier than the anniversary in question. Just before this second anniversary of the London bombings, Britain was shocked to experience further bomb plots, though in these cases the attempts ultimately failed. Two car bombs were discovered and disabled in London on 29 June while on 30 June a burning Jeep Cherokee, packed with explosive material, slammed into the airport terminal building in Glasgow, Scotland. Two men, a British-born doctor of Iraqi descent, Bilal Abdullah, and an Indian engineer, Kafeel Ahmed, were engulfed in flames. Kafeel Ahmed received burns to 90 per cent of his body, was taken to hospital and treated in intensive care, but later died (Jackson, 2007). It is alleged that this act of terrorism was retaliation against the Western occupation of Iraq. Bilal Abdullah said he was deeply disturbed by the deaths of his friends in the “resistance to the occupation” of Iraq (Page & Lister, 2007, p. 10). Abdullah had spent some years in Iraq, where he received his medical degree in 2004. He had been registered as a doctor in the UK in 2006, and employed as a locum at the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley (Macdermid, 2007, p. 3). In Britain, Abdullah was associated with a group of hard-line Muslims (Page & Lister, 2007, p. 10). Kafeel Ahmed had arrived in Britain in 2001 and obtained his PhD in the UK. He ANZCA08: Power and Place: Refereed Proceedings: http://anzca08.massey.ac.nz 2 ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place. Wellington, July 2008 subsequently worked for some time in India, where he apparently came under the influence of the al-Qaeda ideology (Bin Laden’s Speeches, 2007), then moved back to Britain in 2007. A few hours after the Glasgow incident in June 2007, Kafeel’s brother, Dr Sabeel Ahmed, who was working in Britain, was taken into police custody. He was charged with knowing every detail of the plot and not informing the police. Sabeel had received a text message from his brother Kafeel before the attack on the Glasgow Airport. Less than 48 hours after the failed attempt, the Australian Federal Police arrested Kafeel Ahmed’s cousin, Dr Mohammad Haneef, at Brisbane International Airport as he was attempting to board a one-way flight to India. Haneef was held for 12 days before being charged with providing support to a terrorist organisation, allegedly as a result of giving his mobile phone SIM card to his second cousin, Sabeel Ahmed. The charge was dropped a fortnight later when it was found that there was no reasonable evidence against Haneef (Jackson, 2007). About to grieve the second anniversary of the 7/7 tragedy that had killed 52 people on London Transport buses and trains, the British nation was alarmed and distracted by these bomb plots. In this paper, we compare the reporting pattern of the British newspapers (four broadsheets and four tabloids) on 7 July 2007 to that in evidence on 7 July 2006. First we outline our research methodology. Second, we examine the existing literature on media focus on minorities, particularly Muslim minorities in Western nations, and see whether the press representation of Islam and Muslims fits within the conceptual framework of the existing literature (the “Us” and “Them” scenario), and third, we consider whether media publicity given to terrorists could be counter-productive in fuelling terrorist activity. The research methodology As with our previous study (Green & Kabir, 2007) on “What the British papers said on the first anniversary of the London bombing”, for this study we also conducted a snapshot analysis which is in keeping with a constructionist interpretative approach (Ogle, Eckman, & Leslie, 2006; Weaver & Carter, 2006; Kabir, 2007). This means that the same methodology was used to examine British papers on both the first and second anniversaries of the 7/7 London bombing. We examined the language ANZCA08: Power and Place: Refereed Proceedings: http://anzca08.massey.ac.nz 3 ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place. Wellington, July 2008 (headlines and content) used in the newspapers in terms of what these signified to readers (O’Shaughnessy & Stadler, 2002, p. 41-43). We also examined the photographic and other images associated with the news reports/content, which are designed to further the audience’s understanding and engage readers more deeply with the people, events and issues in the news (O’Shaughnessy & Stadler, 2002, p. 55). In our previous study (Green and Kabir, 2007), we particularly wanted to investigate whether Elizabeth Poole’s (2002) observations of the British print media’s reporting of Islam (or Muslims) was consistent with our findings. For example, in Reporting Islam, Poole (2002, pp. 5-7; 84) had noted that some Western print media worked hard to be inclusive of Muslim writers’ opinions (for example the UK newspaper The Guardian) whereas others, such as The Times, leaned more towards a conventional establishment or ‘Christian’ perspective which was counter pointed against representations of Muslim extremism and set up a ‘clash of cultures/faiths’ discourse. Poole also identified (2002, p. 84) some defining themes in Britain’s broadsheet coverage of Muslims and Islam prior to the London 2005 bombings, as follows: • Muslim involvement in deviant activities threatens security in the UK; • Muslims are a threat to British ‘mainstream’ values and thus provoke concerns about integration; • There are inherent cultural differences between Muslims and the host community, which create tension in interpersonal relations; • Muslims are increasingly making their presence felt in the public sphere. In our previous study (Green & Kabir, 2007), we found some consistency with Poole’s observations regarding mainstream British print media reports on Islam, while there were also some counter-indications. For example The Guardian, which had been identified as ‘inclusive’ of Muslim opinions, conveyed an ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ message to their readers on the first anniversary of the London bombings, and there was no opinion piece from a Muslim columnist. ANZCA08: Power and Place: Refereed Proceedings: http://anzca08.massey.ac.nz 4 ANZCA08 Conference, Power and Place. Wellington, July 2008 Further, from Poole’s observations of the broadsheet press, it was expected that all tabloid press would represent Muslims in an ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ framework.
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