That's why mums go to Iceland

Brendan O'Neill - Spiked: 'Evil' Iran vs a British mum

‘HOW DARE THEY’ bellowed this morning’s Sun, accusing Iran’s mullahs of ‘humiliating our troops’. (The paper went so far as to label the ‘video nasty’ a ‘war crime’, which makes you wonder what isn’t a war crime these days.) 

The press seems outraged that the Iranians have treated British soldiers like, well, soldiers. Turney is referred to everywhere as ‘a British mother’, as if she wandered into Iranian (or Iraqi) waters by mistake while shopping at a Middle Eastern branch of Iceland. ‘A British mother paraded on state TV’, says the Daily Mail; ‘Let mummy go’, said the Sun, imagining what Turney’s three-year-old daughter might be thinking. This ‘mummy’ has been in the Navy for nine years. Some claim the Iranians are behaving scandalously by pushing Turney to the front of their propaganda videos; it could be that they are exploiting the British media’s transformation of Turney over the past week into the nation’s Victim Mum.

The treatment of Turney is not only patronising (and borderline sexist) - it also reveals a shift in perceptions of the British military. From Afghanistan to Iraq to Iran, British soldiers seem to be discussed as mums, dads, sons or daughters. When a soldier is killed in Iraq, the headlines tend to say ‘Father-of-two blown up in Basra’; now Turney is a mummy lost in the Middle East. The British military abroad is seen less as a collection of soldiers on a mission and more as a group of vulnerable individuals at the mercy of others. Unable to justify HMS Cornwall’s presence in the Gulf in explicitly political terms - as a necessary measure to keep the peace or deliver democracy - the reaction to the seizure of the Navymen focuses instead on their individual vulnerabilities, their life stories, their desires to return home...