Indigo Jo Blogs

Politics, tech and media issues from a Muslim perspective

Latest BBC scare story …

by · 9th December, 2004

The BBC has been much criticised in recent months for airing a series of scare stories about “what might happen” in a number of given situations. There was a gridlock story, I think, and more recently a dirty bomb story. Tonight, it was The Man Who Broke Britain, a story about the collapse of a fictional bank (this coming January!) which looks like it might be an al-Qa’ida terrorist conspiracy.

It starts with a bomb attack on an oil installation in Saudi Arabia, which sends oil prices rocketing. An Arab “derivative” dealer in the fictional London bank disappears, and is later found to have killed himself. They find a picture with him standing next to a bunch of other Arabs including a Syrian tycoon with the improbable name (for an al-Qa’ida terrorist!) of Khalid Pharaon, recently added to the Bush no-no list, and the dragnet goes out (with the usual “it’s a terrorist attack, safety comes before civil liberties” talk) and one of the trader’s Muslim ex-colleages is arrested.

The colleague had discovered contracts with clauses which would render them null and void if the price of oil rose above a certain amount. It turned out that these clauses had been drafted by someone else, before the Saudi had even joined the bank, as a way of making a quick and easy buck for himself. So it wasn’t a terrorist conspiracy, nor even fraud, just (criminal) recklessness in pursuit of easy money, but it resulted in an unprecedented security operation. It also led to the total collapse of the bank, and of the German bank which had recently bought it out, and sent shockwaves (they even had an aerial view of London, with the wave rippling through all the big buildings) through the entire financial community. Within a year, the country was in the grip of a huge depression; pensions had collapsed, unemployment had risen by a huge margin, and towards the end riots were going on.

I think the BBC has obviously learned from the criticism of the dirty bomb story - here, the issue was that Muslims were mistakenly implicated in a disaster which was caused by other people’s greed. What is realistic is that innocent Muslims would get swept up in the dragnet (remember what happened to Dr Taha Jabir al-Alwani and his family after the 9/11 attacks); in both this and the last story, Muslims were actually shown helping the police against the villains. (People actually criticised the BBC for not showing Muslims as victims of the attack itself, which given that the fictional dirty bomb went off outside Liverpool Street station, they certainly would have been - Brick Lane is just a few streets east of there). The program really did amply demonstrate that what could look like an obvious terrorist attack at first - and it had me believing that - could prove to be something completely different. Some will say that the “what if” format is turning into a cliché, which it may well be; as for it not being realistic from an economic point of view, I’ll leave that to the economists.

Possibly Related Posts:


Share

You may also like...