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In Christmas 2007, I’d taken my family to Karachi, Pakistan to attend a close family member’s wedding. It was our first visit and for the most part, a very enjoyable experience. One evening however, as we were getting ready to go out – my husband came into the room and said, have you seen the news, Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated. She was the then leader of the Opposition party and campaigning in another city. While shocked, I didn’t quite appreciate what this meant for our plans till he said, ` we can’t go anywhere now, either the roads will be blocked or there’ll be rioting on the streets. It could be that the whole city shuts down.’ I always think about this tragic violent episode at election times and how much I take the relatively peaceful transition of power in liberal democracies, for granted. Thankfully Donald Trump survived the weekend assassination attempt and while Joe Biden has said, "There's no place in America for this kind of violence. It's sick. It's sick’ it seems to me that violence is never far from politics wherever we are. Because in recent years, we’ve seen our own elected politicians become tragic victims. Joe Cox and Sir David Amess were both murdered and since their deaths its become clear that threats and intimidation have become part of our politics too. In the post mortem of our recent general election, we find that many of our politicians and others in public life, had become targets of persistent verbal abuse and harassment. We’re in danger of normalising this kind of divisive cultural environment and calling it the cut and thrust of politics. Yes, liberal democracies can’t completely eradicate the threat of violence from politics but they can maintain a culture in which ideological differences don’t turn into a dehumanisation of others – its easy to lose empathy, use harsher and harsher language about others and convince ourselves that the langue of intimidation isn’t really violence. As George Orwell wrote, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Growing up I would often read the prophetic hadith ` The believer doesn’t taunt others, he doesn’t curse others, he doesn’t use profanity, and he doesn’t abuse others.’ But I thought of this as almost naïve – we all do this to some extent in normal life don’t we? But as time has passed I’ve come to realise that there are images we evoke through our choice of language. If we only see violence as physical, we ignore all kinds of harm which we do to ourselves and others with words.