Feedback | 7 June 2003

Comment on Television creates terrorists by Patrick Sookhdeo (31/05/2003)

Dr Patrick Sookhdeo is the second Spectator contributor in the past few weeks to express the view that the world should hear and see a good deal less about the world than he thinks is right.

What we can do about the stuff that concerns Dr Patrick Sookhdeo isn’t all that clear: bomb the TV broadcasters he disapproves of? Already done in Belgrade and Iraq and Kabul, and we must be running out of nations that have little choice but to grit their teeth ad take it. Qatar, which your correspondent correctly names as the home of Al-jazeera, is a “friendly” nation used as general headquarters for the recent unpleasantness in Iraq.

I’m afraid your correspondent belongs to the long-lived burgeoning school that thinks it ain’t whut we does that matters, it’s whut them others says we does. In other words, kill the messenger. Hardly evidence of our superior civilisation: Saddam Hussein thought much the same.
Paul Kunino Lynch

I fear that Dr. Sookhdeo’s remedy of establishing a ‘sensible’ or ‘moderate’ TV station to get Islam back on the straight and narrow is somewhat fanciful. Given the volume of hysterical nonsense that is emanating from the Arabic and Farsi press, plus large sections of Islamic society in general, I believe that we may be witnessing a kind of collective nervous breakdown on the part of substantial areas of Islamic culture.

This would not be, I believe, historically unique. The German cultures of central Europe appeared to suffer from the same kind of moral and intellectual disintegration in the wake of W.W.1.

Defeat and humiliation led to a collapse in self-confidence, a flight from rationality and eventually mistrust and hatred of all those defined as ‘The Other’

The heartland Arabic cultures of Islam are showing exactly the same signs in the wake of defeat by Israel and seemingly irreversible social and economic decline.