MH17

I was going to post something else today but I can’t. World events dictate a period of sombre reflection. We have become so bound up in the growing turmoil of the Middle East we Europeans have taken our eyes off the civil war on our doorstep. The threat of Jihadist terrorism is not to be ignored, but by far the greater threat to the security of Europe comes from the conflagration that is now Ukraine. We have heard nothing of it in our news reports recently – only sordid sex scandals and banal government reshuffles, so unless we purposely dug for it, we might be forgiven for thinking the Ukrainian crisis had gone away. It hasn’t.

Airline disasters are always humbling events, so many innocents meeting a violent end. We put ourselves in that aircraft, the cramped interior, the stale air, the engine noise. We have all thought about it, and tried not to. Air travel is the safest form of transport, I’m told, but on those rare occasions when it does go wrong, the losses are immense, and the nature of one’s demise so unimaginably terrifying. It takes a long time to hit the ground from 30,000 feet, a lot of time to think, to suffer and to see it coming.

298 lost.

It is not the first time a passenger jet has been shot down by military technology, either by design or by ignorance, but the implications are always politically explosive. While our thoughts must rest for now with those lost and those who mourn them, let us also refocus our minds in the days and weeks to come to a threat more tangible than any we have known in recent years, to an armed struggle on the borders of Europe where the risk of collateral damage has been so amply and so tragically demonstrated by the downing of flight MH17 yesterday.

And to the world’s media I say this: look again at what you headline, then you’re less likely to be caught out, harping on about the outfits of new lady ministers when violence on this scale is spilling on our borders. You’ll look less stupid, and less obscene as your horror radar recalibrates and screams for blame. But remember this also, the only enemy in war is war itself.

We have to find a way to resolve this conflict. This is Europe, 2014. There’s so much in the world we have achieved we can be rightly proud of, so much else besides of which we should be ashamed.