I’ve a question. You’ll see in a moment why I’m tempted to call it a Trivial Pursuit question. Can you tell me when the worst suicide bombing in Europe since the 7/7 murders took place? I doubt you’d believe me if I said it was last week. I can hear your response: ‘What suicide bombing? What murders?’ Last week, six people died and nearly 30 were injured when a suicide bomber, widely thought to be acting on Iranian orders, set off a device on a bus taking a group of tourists from their charter flight to their hotel.
But if you got your news from the British media — the story was huge elsewhere — you would know almost nothing about it. The BBC news channel did mention the incident for a short while. But it wasn’t much interested in what the anchor described as an ‘awful accident’, soon diverting to other news. Maybe that was a slip of her tongue. What was no slip was the ticker that ran across the screen, which repeatedly referred to it as an ‘explosion’, as if a gas main had blown up rather than a suicide bomber planning and carrying out the murder of innocent holidaymakers.
The Financial Times decided that this didn’t warrant even a passing mention in its daily email of ‘European news headlines’.
I single out the FT and BBC but there was a near universal absence of serious coverage to the worst suicide bombing in Europe for seven years.
And here’s why. The victims were Jews. I could beat about the bush and say it was because they were Israelis. But that’s a cop-out. Too often, views about Jews are made to seem somehow more acceptable in polite society by being couched in anti-Israel camouflage.
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