Over on the BBC is a story about a guy who dressed up like a suicide bomber in protest over the cartoons published in a Danish news paper. Of course he's apologised and we of course forgive him for his very public screw up but the whole thing left me wondering. All the media outlets report that this guy was dressed up like a suicide bomber but not one actually tells us what a de facto suicide bomber looks like. We all know what a house burgular looks like they have a little mask for their eyes, a stripy black and white jumper and a bag with swag written on it. What does a suicide bomber look like though?
A quick wander over to the BBC site reveals a picture of this young man and it was not what I was expecting. Picture in your own mind what you think your typical suicide bomber would look like. To me they are of Asian appearance with a big black beard, crazy looking hunted eyes and a big ruck sack (which is perhaps going tick or beep and has wires coming out). I'm not so nïeve as to think that anyone that matches this description must be a suicide bomber but that is the picture the media has drawn for me. In fact I would be no more scarred of someone matching this description that I would be of anyone else simply because my chance of dying in a terrorist attack is so vanishingly small there is no point in being worried about it.
Anyway, I have drifted a little off topic. This young man that dressed as a suicide bomber apparently affected his masterful disguise by wearing a pair of gloves, what looks like a tool belt / jacket affair, urban combat bottoms and a bandanna. Yep, anyone wearing a tool belt, gloves an sensible work gear, like a workman say, looks like a suicide bomber. Is anyone else a little bit shocked by this? I admit that walking around London wearing a tool belt is a little strange but then so are a lot of sights in London. In fact if you actually compare how this this person looked to the real suicide bombers the difference is quite shocking. There are no really good images of how the people that carried out the 7/7 attacks were dressed on the day but it is fairly clear from the one fairly good CCTV shot that none of them were wearing combat bottoms, none seemed to have a bandanna, it doesn't appear any are wearing gloves and none are wearing a tool belt / jacket.
Admittedly it's hard to be 100% sure about that as the image isn't very good but I wouldn't say any of them looked like the protester. In that case what actually made people think he looked like a terrorist? My guess would be it has more to do with social conditioning than real facts. If we are going to give into our fears then lets at least have a decent caricature suicide bomber. At a minimum we should make him carry around a large black sphere with BOMB written on the side. Perhaps it should also have a burning fuse coming out the top.
I'm not saying this young mans actions were acceptable, he was certainly insensitive, but we need to maintain a sense of reality here. Did his actions warrant headline news? Hardly. Surely we must have something that is more news worthy than a guy putting on a not very good costume? Should he be sent back to prison? Maybe, it could be argued that he disturbed the peace and therefore broke the law but the problem is that without all the media hype surrounding the case probably nobody would have even noticed he was there. In fact without the media constantly telling us to “be afraid of people that look like this” we probably wouldn't have even given him a second glance. He would simply have disappeared in to the crowd of generally rowdy young men with too much time on their hands and not enough brains in their heads. Perhaps it is actually the media that are disturbing the peace by constantly whipping the people up into a state of frenzy about every little thing. That is something to think on I feel.