Jonathan Dimbleby has been frightening late-night audiences on ITV with a documentary called the New World War. Using interviews with Ethiopean coffee-producers and reels of library footage of hurricanes, Dimbleby explains his thesis: ‘Global terrorism, global poverty and global warming form a toxic trio that promise a catastrophe that will make the horrors of 9/11 look like the Boston Tea Party.’
‘Do I exaggerate?’ he asks in an accompanying article in the Observer. In a word, yes. Terrorism, poverty and global warming may be linked in the minds of the Observer-reading classes, but is al-Qa’eda really motivated by the refusal of Western consumers to buy fair-trade bananas? Inasmuch as bin Laden has a manifesto, it appears to revolve more around the establishment of a worldwide Islamic theocracy, where women are suppressed and burglars’ hands removed.
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