London Bridge and Borough Market: intelligence in the response to terrorism

There are two fine responses to terrorism, one military and one civilian, and two that are far less intelligent – though far from uncommon.

Shrine to the victims of terrorism on London Bridge

The unintelligent military response is to go to war. For years, we’ve had a “war against terrorism”. It’s a meaningless notion. War can be directed against a territory (which may be a nation) or against its armies: war against Nazi Germany, against the rebel American States, against the Vietcong army or North Vietnam – whatever you think of their justification, these are meaningful concepts one can comprehend.

But war against terrorism? Who or what’s the target? Where do you invade?

The answer to that last question has been Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither war has been won and both have led to a far greater threat of terrorism, indeed a far higher number of outrages. The military action was gesture politics: it showed governments doing something, with no concern as to whether it was the right thing.

The intelligent military approach requires – well, it requires intelligence. Excellent security work has foiled terrorist plot after plot in Britain. As a way to keep us safe, it has proved far more effective than, say, invading Iraq.

Even so, not all outrages can be stopped. Which takes us to the civilian response.

The less intelligent reaction is to start enacting new legislation. This is rather like invading Afghanistan. It shows governments to be doing something, but with no concern as to whether what it’s doing is useful. After all, little that a terrorist does is legal anyway – murder doesn’t need new legislation against it, and conspiracy to commit murder or complicity in murder are also crimes. Collecting the weaponry for a terrorist attack is illegal too, as is incitement to commit a crime, or perversion of the course of justice to cover it up afterwards.

Most legislation proposed in the wake of an attack is concerned with limiting thought, not action. I don’t like the idea of a worldwide caliphate being established and would do everything legal within my power to prevent it. But how can ban people from believing it’s a good thing? Why, there are people who think Trump is a good thing. How can we make it a crim to try to persuade others of their point of view? It’s the very attempt to regiment thought that excites my dislike of the notion of a caliphate.

Let me be clear: trying to persuade people that a Caliphate is desirable should not be a crime; trying to persuade people to take up arms to make it happen is a crime, as it should be.

The biggest problem with attempts to limit thought by legislation is where do you stop? In Russia, for instance, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to speak out in favour of rights for homosexuals. That’s because many – possibly a majority – in the population and certainly in power see homosexuality as an abomination. But then banning belief in a Caliphate would be based on a sense that it too is an abomination.

Limiting freedom of belief opens the door to regressive, and repressive, behaviour which is likely to have far more damaging consequences than its backers imagine. Ill though-out, unintelligent reaction is unlikely to be effective against terrorism, but is highly likely to inflict wounds on ourselves. Let’s not forget that Maggie Thatcher, in my view not maligned anything like enough, made the attempt to ban teaching in schools if it was deemed to “promote” homosexuality. Putin would have been proud.

It’s a slippery slope and it goes a long way downhill.

So how about the intelligent civilian response to terrorism? It’s the reaction that says, “it’s not going to stop me living the life I choose to live”. Fortunately, it’s a widespread attitude and one that reveals an inherent strength in our populations. That makes it probably the best guarantee of our long-term success against the attempts to undermine us by terrorist means.

I was struck forcibly by that truth when I recently wandered through Borough Market, near London Bridge. Not a month ago it was the scene of a vicious and brutal terrorist attack: three men drove a van into a crowd on London Bridge, and then chased victims enjoying the evening in the pubs and restaurants, or just the streets, around the market. They killed eight and injured 48 before being gunned down themselves by police.

There’s still a shrine to the memory of the victims on the bridge. But I was inspired by the activity in Borough Market as I walked through at 8:00 in the morning. Things were only just getting going, with stall holders beginning to open their stands, food beginning to cook, and a few passers-by beginning to appear, to stop and look and occasionally to buy (breakfast, in my case).

Normality reasserted: Borough Market reopening for business as usual

Life was already back to normal. No one had forgotten the attack. But the rights of the living had been reasserted. So the terrorists had failed..

For that I’m profoundly grateful. And hopeful.

Despite the lack of intelligence of so much else of what we do.

Not Islamic. And nothing like a state

The terrorist group Isis has pretensions to being an Islamic State. That State, it claims, will be a new Caliphate. A claim that only demonstrates how little it knows of Islamic history.

Islam had its heroic period. Most cultures do. I’m not terribly keen on heroes or heroic periods, since they tend to cost a lot of other people their lives or their livings. I’m pretty certain that as the Arabs swept out of their peninsula, beat both the Persian and Byzantine Empires to their north, and then spread along the whole of the North African littoral, what happened on the battlefields was ugly in the extreme, and what happened immediately afterwards probably not much better. It was a time when men met in combat to damage each other brutally with steel, and did little that was wholesome to the civilian populations once they’d beaten their enemies. 

Just like today, in fact.

So I’m sure heroic Islam had its seamy side. On the other hand, it also did something remarkable. It didn’t hold grudges. The Islamic armies didn’t put their opponents to death; they didn’t even try to convert them. Their defeated enemies might be reduced to what was technically slavery, but they weren’t killed or tortured and they often found themselves being recruited into the armies that had just beaten them – where they could pursue careers under their new masters.

The result was that often within a generation, the newly subjected peoples were in the forefront of Islamic advance themselves. Now, that’s what I call true statesmanship: make an ally of your former enemy, and you strengthen him and yourself. What could be shrewder?

And what could contrast more starkly with what’s happening in Isis today? Where they go, they rape and murder. Those who are not of their religion are put mercilessly to the blade – literally, since beheading is one of their favourite rituals. Far from turning those they conquer into allies, they turn them into mutilated corpses.

Worse still, they even kill the individuals who are trying to help their people. Alan Henning, the latest hostage beheaded by Isis, was an aid worker trying to bring help to Syrian victims of civil war. Muslims, co-religionists of Isis. And yet he was killed too. Which is certainly not a response to service that Islam favours.

One of the most striking illustrations of how different the original Caliphate was is provided by the Muslim conquest of Spain. The army that took on and defeated the Visigothic Spanish kings, was predominantly Berber rather than Arab. And yet the Berbers had been overrun by Arab Muslims just a generation earlier.

Gibraltar: Jabal Tariq, where Tariq ibn Ziyad landed his
predominantly Berber force and began the Muslim conquest of Spain

Even once in Spain, the Muslims armies didn’t massacre non-Muslims. On the contrary, they brought peace to a mainly Christian peasantry, so that it kept producing the wealth the Caliph’s new province needed. Even the Jews, victims of persecution by the Visigoths, became allies who held one city when the soldiers moved on to attack the next.

Statesmanlike. And servants of Islam.

But nothing like Isis.

Speaking out for the rights of Morons

One of my favourite lines, from a film full of them, is spoken by Tom Cruise as a young naval lawyer in A few good men: ‘my client's a moron but that's not against the law.’

Tom Cruise as Lieutenant Kaffee: no moron he

Being a moron certainly isn’t against the law, and never should be, and not just because a lot of lawmakers would be in gaol themselves if it were. The prison population would explode to levels that would make today’s overcrowding seem trivial. And the worst of it: no-one would be immune. I like to think of myself as not a moron, but I wouldn’t be the judge; the thought that someone else could decide whether my ideas were sensible enough to justify my being left in freedom is one I'm not especially comfortable with.

All this came to mind when I saw that Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the ugly Front National ultra-right wing party in France, had lost his appeal against a conviction for denying crimes against humanity. The French Senate recently passed legislation banning denial of Turkish genocide against Armenians. Holocaust denial is a crime in numerous countries, most notably Germany.

Le Pen, on the other hand...

There’s no doubt that few people deserve gaol as much as Le Pen (not that he’s likely ever to go there), but in his cases it would be for demagoguery and the attempt to legitimise racism, not for his dotty opinions. His views on the extent and depth of the holocaust and other Nazi era crimes against humanity strike me as completely the wrong issues on which to attack him.

After all, what is holocaust denial when it comes down to it? I’m certain that Le Pen would accept, say, that several thousand Protestants were massacred in Paris in 1572. And yet the evidence for the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre is far less extensive and detailed than for the Holocaust. If we’re prepared to accept the evidence of the earlier crime, how can one explain the refusal to accept the much greater evidence of the later one? Except, that is, by assuming that the person doing the denying is, to use Tom Cruise’s technical term, a moron.

That, I repeat, shouldn’t be against the law. In fact, the law should get out of our heads. It shouldn’t be pronouncing on what we think but only on what we do. To take a completely different matter, I’m not convinced that the rule of the Umayyad dynasty, for example, would inspire many of us these days to want to bring it back. If others, however, believe in a revival of the Moslem Caliphate, I see no reason why they should not say so, or even debate the use of violence to achieve the aim: it could be argued that a debate on what is or is not legitimate violence is overdue. It might have been useful before Coalition forces invaded Iraq.

If, however, those who seek a new Caliphate decide to take their use of free speech to the point of inciting others to actual violence here and now, of neogiating the purchase of arms for that purpose, or of conspiring with others to wreak violence on the rest of us, then they have stepped beyond what the law should tolerate. Then it should intervene.

In other words, the law should prevent certain actions, even if they are only planned actions. It should not attempt to prohibit thoughts, or the open expression of those thoughts. However bizarre and ill-founded they are. 

Let’s remember: merely being a moron may be offensive, but it should never be regarded as an an offence.