Isis has skewed our perception so much that we laugh off a hijacker and praise the man who took a selfie with him

There have been four big terrorist attacks in the past fortnight, and they are starting to skew our perception.

Istanbul was hit on on 19th March, Brussels on 22nd March, Iskandariyah (Iraq) on 25th March and Lahore on the 27th. Isis have raised the bar so much that when an Egyptian man hijacked a plane yesterday, people laughed it off because it was ‘just’ a grievance to do with his ex-wife. The President of Cyprus held a press conference after and said: “In any case it’s not something that has to do with terrorism… you know what I mean? Ha ha.”

In any other era, we would have been horrified, and a debate about airport security would have raged. Yet people on the internet this very moment are happily turning the man who forced a plane bound for an Egyptian city to Larnaca in Cyprus into a meme. Websites are collating funny tweets, and Ben Innes – the British man who took a photo with the pretend suicide bomber, complete with his fake suicide belt - is a social media star.

In this globalised-media era of terrorism, we are crossing boundaries faster than we realise. Even 9/11 feels like an era ago.

Thanks to Isis, other tragedies or serious events now pale into comparison. No one died thanks to a crazed Islamist militant? It was just some lone-wolf with an AK-47? Phew!

An event that would be considered extreme in the past is now greeted with relief. The social media glare ensures we assume the worst every time.

This means an Egyptian man can hijack a plane simply by pretending to be a suicide bomber. And even if the pilot knows this is unlikely given the heightened security, irrational fears ensure that people will take it seriously.

Basically, this man hijacked a plane with the Isis version of using a banana in his pocket. And it worked. That's alarming because others will copy him.

open image in gallery

Every crazed person with an agenda now knows they can play on fears of terrorism to get instant access to the world’s spotlight. We used to worry that excessive coverage of suicides could spark more copycat suicides. Now we are in a situation a hundred times worse: giving unlimited attention to an entire army of suicidal religious fanatics who cannot get enough of it.

Plus there’s the army of trolls who now accuse anyone of being an ‘apologist’ if they don’t immediately point the finger at Muslims.

We would be better off if we behaved differently: if we didn’t just laugh off a failed hijacking or give too much attention to Isis. But those debates are over. The precedents are set and we have bought into the culture of fear that we warned against. It’s not clear how we put the genie back in the bottle.

Whether we like it or not, we have all become complicit in Isis’ hunger for attention. The #ISISmediablackout efforts are over and Isis has won. The only question left now is how far we should go in showing gruesome images.

Slowly but surely we will all become more desensitised to them too. Could this cycle be broken? Perhaps, but I’m not sure how. Just asking people to behave differently is futile because our curiosity always gets the best of us.

All those graphs pointing out that we are far more likely to die from a lightning strike than terrorism? Well, Isis made them obsolete too.

The Egyptian hijacking exposed our warped new mindset, and how skewed our world-view has become. But it also exposed the fact that there is no way back.

Laughing it off with memes is now quite simply our default coping mechanism.