IT WAS just a little parenthesis, but, between the commas, a
thread of prejudice was revealed. "Mr and Mrs King" began the
sentence. And then came the words "who are Jehovah's Witnesses". It
did not appear in just one newspaper, but in many of the first
reports of the story of five-year-old Ashya King, the boy with the
brain tumour whose parents had suddenly removed him from
Southampton General Hospital.
Others were more explicit, revealing that the thread was part of
a backcloth of bias. Brett and Naghemeh King had taken the boy from
hospital "despite" his suffering from a brain tumour. Jehovah's
Witnesses, they noted, "refuse blood transfusions on religious
grounds". Hampshire Police had issued an arrest warrant for
"cruelty to a person under the age of 16 years". The bad faith of
the Kings was taken for granted.
On Radio 4, the Today programme compounded the smear by
using the case as the introduction for an attack by the novelist
Ian McEwan on Jehovah's Witnesses; the interviewer, Mishal Husain,
invited him to extend his assault on religion more generally.
Mr McEwan's latest novella, which has been criticised for its
"formulaic" plot, centres on a High Court judge who must decide
whether a teenager who is not yet 18 should be allowed to refuse a
live-saving blood transfusion. "Sometimes religious views run right
against the grain of what seems rationally compassionate," the
novelist told Ms Husain, who tried to move the subject on to the
Trojan Horse plot and extremism in schools, perhaps hoping that Mr
McEwan would repeat his view that in the clash between the
religious and secular imaginations "the secular mind seems far
superior".
What the novelist, the media, and the hospital authorities had
in common was a degree of religious illiteracy. Jehovah's Witnesses
may oppose blood transfusions, but they offer no religious
opposition to the chemo- or radiotherapies that the hospital wanted
for Ashya. Mr McEwan has elsewhere complained about the
"uninterrupted monochrome" of religion. Those who criticise faith
have no credibility when they proceed from a basis of such
ignorance.
A little knowledge was a dangerous thing, the doctors in
Southampton probably thought, when Mr King trawled the internet for
alternative treatments for his little boy. But the same admonition
applies to those who so blithely parade their religious
prejudice.
Misinformation dogged this case from the outset. The Kings'
objections to blunderbuss radiotherapy were not religious: they
were medical. The parents wanted a more focused Proton-beam
radiotherapy, which is used in the UK to treat only eye tumours,
but is used on brain tumours in other countries. They did not from
remove him from Southampton "despite" his brain tumour, but because
of it. However misguided that may have been, it was
well-intentioned.
Perhaps that is true, too, of the authorities who told Mr King
that, if he questioned their judgement, they would exclude him with
a court order, and then issued a heavy-handed warrant, alleging
cruelty by the parents. The irony is that their fear of cruelty
ended in the actual cruelty of leaving a small child to lie alone
in a foreign hospital - while his mother and father were in prison
300 miles away - surrounded by strangers whom he could not
understand.
Paul Vallely is Visiting Professor in Public Ethics and
Media at the University of Chester.
www.paulvallely.com