There is something euphemistic about 'terror', with its connotations of illicit frissons and Disney World rides, rather than mutilated bodies and the dour business of loss and mourning. Thinkers analysing terrorism add, however inadvertently, to the sanitised image. In his polemic Al-Qaeda: And What It Means To Be Modern, John Gray disputes the view that the group is a medieval throwback. He's right. A global network with technical and media skills is a brand whose packaging bears little relation to its objective of recreating a seventh-century caliphate. Its soldiers fly planes, commit cyber-crime and go to prep schools. Al-Qaeda, commercially acute and offering an elastic franchise, is the Starbucks of terrorism. Modernity makes it more graspable but also more terrible.
Mary Riddell
The Observer May 18, 2003
more Mary Ridell here
Mary Ridell on SARS:
First war, now pestilence. In these days of hi-tech doom, the riders of the apocalypse (plague division) have switched from horseback to airline business class. Despite the travel upgrade accorded to the Sars virus, events in twenty-first century Toronto and Beijing are not so different from the medical picture of London in 1665.
The disease spread by the ship's rat, a stowaway from South Asia, started slowly. Physicians died first, then the people, wiped out at the rate of 8,000 every week. Just another of nature's culls, sandwiched between the Black Death three centuries earlier and the 1918 flu that killed 30 million.
