It's difficult to know how to approach something as horrific as last week's bombings in London, or today's news of 24 children killed in Baghdad in a terrorist attack, so the article linked to below contains one person's attempt to make sense of it all.
In it is the transcript of the speech given by Marie Fatayi-Williams, whose son Anthony has probably died in the bus bomb, and comment by Tim Collins, the British army colonel who himself gave a powerful speech on the eve of the Iraq war. From a linguistic point of view, looking at the differences in the two speeches gives us a chance to see the variety of emotions and ideas that can be expressed through different rhetorical styles, ideolects and motivations; on a political level it's maybe grimly ironic that the war that followed the speech by Tim Collins could be one of the main reasons why suicide bombers are now targetting Britain.
Straight From The Heart
Tim Collins' speech to troops in Iraq
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