Saturday, January 28, 2006
Terrorising with discretion
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" as the saying goes.
"Howard backs calls for Hamas to renounce violence" as the Herald says. (I eagerly await the sequel: "World calls on IDF to renounce violence too")
But there are bigger fish to fry in the world of contemporary terrorism: namely a Great White which "terrorised" a couple of Taranaki hicks by, err, swimming under one boat and between two others. Scary stuff that.
On my personal terrorism scale, where "large wild pig disturbs residents of Wellington's outer hills" ranks as a 0 (contrary to a Dominion Post story a while back), and invading Chile to overthrow a democratically elected government ranks as a 10, I'd give this one a fucking zero!
The NZ press should exercise a bit more fucking discretion in the use of words like terrorism and terrorist, perhaps moving closer to the position of the BBC. The terms are in danger of losing whatever specific, purposeful meaning it still possesses.
While I'm at it, something that has bothered me for, oh, at least 5 years. The NZ media relies almost exclusively on English-based reports for the situation in Northern Ireland, which are predictably hostile to republicans and their causes. These invariably describe Sinn Fein as "the political wing as the IRA". Given the actions of Tony Blair and colleagues over recent years, I look forward to the British Labour Party being described as "the political wing of the British military".
"Howard backs calls for Hamas to renounce violence" as the Herald says. (I eagerly await the sequel: "World calls on IDF to renounce violence too")
But there are bigger fish to fry in the world of contemporary terrorism: namely a Great White which "terrorised" a couple of Taranaki hicks by, err, swimming under one boat and between two others. Scary stuff that.
On my personal terrorism scale, where "large wild pig disturbs residents of Wellington's outer hills" ranks as a 0 (contrary to a Dominion Post story a while back), and invading Chile to overthrow a democratically elected government ranks as a 10, I'd give this one a fucking zero!
The NZ press should exercise a bit more fucking discretion in the use of words like terrorism and terrorist, perhaps moving closer to the position of the BBC. The terms are in danger of losing whatever specific, purposeful meaning it still possesses.
While I'm at it, something that has bothered me for, oh, at least 5 years. The NZ media relies almost exclusively on English-based reports for the situation in Northern Ireland, which are predictably hostile to republicans and their causes. These invariably describe Sinn Fein as "the political wing as the IRA". Given the actions of Tony Blair and colleagues over recent years, I look forward to the British Labour Party being described as "the political wing of the British military".
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