Let's put the focus where it should be

There have been terrorist attacks in the West Bank, Somalia, Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Chad, Cameroon, Italy and France so far this month.

In the first 12 days of November there were 84 people killed in some form of terrorist attacks around the world. On the 13th November a further 150 people were killed in Mount Hebron, Baghdad and Paris. A further 704 people were injured across a total of 21 - yes 21 (!) - attacks in the first thirteen days of this month. Those figures do not include the perpetrators in those heinous events, because I don't think that they are where the focus should be.

I grew up during the era of the IRA's campaign of terror. Born some ten months before the awful Birmingham pub bombs which exploded on 21st November 1974, I grew up less than twenty miles away. The fact that there were often reports involving IRA activity on the news meant that I and most of my friends grew up with a rather blase attitude towards the ongoing threat. I don't mean that we were any less disgusted or angry at the punishment beatings, kidnappings, bombs, murders and intimidation that the IRA routinely dished out both on mainland Britain and in Northern Ireland. What I mean is that it was simply a fact of life; you cannot go through life in a heightened state of fear, our bodies and minds don't do that when something is there all the time.

One thing that I still feel angry about is that there always seemed to be so much focus on the perpetrators and so little on the victims. How many people from my generation and older can actually remember the name of even one victim? Sure, there were a few well known victims, such as Lord Mountbatten, but on the whole the victims names are often left forgotten while media publishes article after article on the perpetrators.

Two of the many names that I made a point to remember are Johnathan Ball, aged 3 years, and 12 year old Tim Parry. They were murdered by use of a bomb, which exploded outside a Boots store in Warrington on 20th March 1993.

I started work at a government agency on 12th April 1993, which is one of the reasons I remember the Warrington bombing so well. The first few years of my time with the agency I worked at we had more than a few bomb alerts. We would end up spending hours at a time outside the building while we waited for a bomb disposal squad to arrive and conduct a controlled explosion. Yes, we all got blase about the bomb evacuations too.

Among all the anger and focus on the perpetrators that happens in news media and social media, people often forget about the victims and their families. There are numerous families in England and Northern Ireland who have never seen justice for the beating, kidnap & disappearance, injury or murder of their relatives. Some have been waiting over 40 years now, only to see their relatives names forgotten. I imagine that families across the world find themselves in the same position as they wait for someone in to help them. I hope that some day they will find answers and gain peace.  

With that in mind, I would like to ask a favour. Rather than getting involved in arguments over all the right-wing hate that I know is already spreading over the internet following Paris, can I ask that you make a particular effort to remember the name of one of the victims from one of the attacks? I think that it is important to remember the innocent victims in all the violence and anger that is happening across the globe.