Want some do ya? Was the Spooks vs Mossad story somewhat rash?
Like most people who spend Monday nights at home, I'm a fan of the BBC's faster-and-furiouser-than-thou series, Spooks. In a media climate where government agencies tend to be represented as conglomerations of pure, mindless inefficiency, a series that pedals old-fashioned myths about agents who shoot first and tick boxes later is a welcome change.
Islamist extremist terrorists have, unsurprisingly, loomed fairly large in Spooks' thematic landscape. Maybe, then, the programme's editors were simply plying the journalistic oath of always putting two sides to every story when they decided on a double episode that would pit the battling MI5ers against the intricate plotting and ruthless activity not of extremist Muslims but of Mossad.
When it concerns questions of national interest, allied countries - particularly those with such a tangled and difficult history as that of Britain and Israel - are as often as not at political loggerheads, and it's not particularly far-fetched to suggest some kind of secret service involvement. And where, as in the Spooks storyline, Britain is busy serving its "national interests" by selling a nuclear power plant to Saudi Arabia, you can bet your bottom shekel that Mossad would try to do something about it.
The question is, though, whether they would pose as a bunch of Islamist terrorists in London organising a pretend suicide bomb-fuelled Armageddon and being particularly ruthless when it comes to sacrificing the lives of innocent civilians, both British and Saudi, to reach their objectives.
Actually, that's not the real question. The lip-service that fiction pays to genuine real-life possibility is not in itself a moral category. But where such a fiction implicitly posits a kind of moral equivalence - albeit a qualified one - between the legitimate if not always overly legalistic secret security service of a democratically elected government and stateless Jihadists whose aim is the destruction of everything they don't believe in, you've got to ask yourself whether the BBC drama department are playing with something a little hotter than their usual assemblage of daleks and domestic social issues.
In the present case, it's hardly that the question of moral equivalence could not be addressed - indeed, this was pretty much at the heart of Spielberg's Munich. Moreover, those with strong views on Mossad and Israel's counter-terrorism policy are numerous on both sides, and wouldn't find it difficult to engage with the issues raised by the episode and decide whether the treatment was spot-on or thoroughly inappropriate. But the actively engaged are one thing. Those sitting at home looking for some fast-paced relief from the shock of Monday's troublesome recurrence are another, much less likely to engage critically with the issues and much more likely to let a programme's tacit assumptions slip by unnoticed. And given that our un-thought through assumptions are responsible for the majority of our emotional responses, for the BBC to be pushing such controversial and potentially inflammatory ones is surely somewhat rash.
Mossad get something of a kicking in the next Spooks episode too. You've got to wonder whether BBC drama is busy grinding an axe better left to its more-practiced neighbours over at current affairs.
