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CHAPTER 1

TERRORISM

MORE DEADLY IN THE 1970s & 80s

Source: Statista from Global Terrorism Database.

Sunday, 11 January 2015

SAME STORY, DIFFFERENT ACTORS

They say that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. The “Charlie Hebdo” atrocities of last week are many things; frightening, terrifying, atrocious, a horror, an attack on what we stand for. But, as a phenomenon they are not new, or exceptional or uniquely Muslim.

You do not have to be a young Muslim living in the 21 century to be subject to radicalisation. It has always, down the ages been possible to persuade young men (and a few – a very few young women) of all faiths and none to the believe that is noble to kill innocent people in pursuit of what they have been persuaded is a great cause. As far back as the first century, the Jewish Zealots did it against Roman rule. In the 11 century the Shia Muslim Hashashin added another word – assassin – to our vocabulary of terror by their attacks on the Persian Government of the day. In our own time we have had to deal with our own “home grown” so called “Catholic” terrorists of the IRA (who by the way killed and destroyed far more than the current wave of jihadist outrages) – as well as the outrages perpetrated by the anti-imperialist urban terrorism of young middle class white Germans in the Bader-Meinhof Gang and its successor the Rot Armee Fraktion.

Perhaps the closest parallel to what we are seeing now is the Anarchist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. All entirely “home grown” and without any kind of formal command structures, they too were a collection of “lone wolves” inspired by texts and prepared to kill and maim to abolish states and replace them with borderless self-governed entities which, leaving aside that they were based on a political idea rather than a religious one, bear a striking similarity to the caliphate model of today.

In pursuit of what they called “the propaganda of the deed”, they too killed and maimed by bomb and gun, large numbers of innocents – as well as an extraordinary number of the most powerful and prominent. On June 2 1919 simultaneous bombs attacks in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Patterson in New Jersey killed a mayor, a state legislator, three judges, two businessmen a policeman and a catholic priest. A year later perhaps the earliest “car bomb” blew up outside Wall Street killing 39 and injuring hundreds more. These were no more than the last lethal splutterings of a spate of anarchist attacks which had been going on for more than 30 years. In 1893 an anarchist bomb in Barcelona’s opera house killed or injured 72. That same year, a hungry, vagabond, socially outcast Frenchman threw a bomb into the French Chamber of Deputies. A year later another Frenchman threw a bomb hidden in a lunch box into a café killing or wounding more than 20 perfectly innocent diners. He died shouting “We who hand out death know how to take it”.

Among the very ordinary casualties of the “anarchist years”, were also some very prominent ones, too. Those assassinated included a US President, a Russian Tsar, the empress of Austria, the President of France, the King of Spain on his wedding day, the heir to the Austrian empire on the corner of a Sarajevo street, the King of Italy and countless European Ministers of the Interior.

Then, too as now the security forces complained they needed more powers to tackle the threat. After a bomb in the city, the Chicago police, even went so far as to recycle the same piece of gas piping as evidence to support the fact that they had “foiled” three subsequent bomb outrages.

None of this of course is to say that recent events are not serious. Or that we are not under threat. Or that we do not now have to respond in a serious and thoughtful manner.

But if we are to react as we should, then it is as well to remember that what we face is NOT new. And it is not unique and it is not just Islamic and we have been through this before and we should not panic or over-react. Almost every recent generation has had to respond to these kind of phenomenon.

And almost every recent generation has managed to do so without fundamentally undermining our freedoms or setting our societies at war with themselves.

It is worth recalling that throughout those same bloody anarchist years around the end of the nineteenth century, the long march towards the European ideal of states founded on individual liberty, tolerance and human rights, continued unchecked. Defending the Charlie Hebdo principle means refusing to allow either terrorism or our fear of it to deflect us from that path.

Paddy Ashdown

Monday, 25 July 2016

CAUSES RARELY SIMPLE

Everyone remembers great headlines. They also recall, with re-lived astonishment, the terrible ones. The Sun has probably provided more than its fair share of the former, but also a few of the latter. A memorable example to have sparked outrage reported that the boxer Frank Bruno had been taken to a psychiatric hospital: “Bonkers Bruno Locked Up”. For good measure, the story that followed described Bruno as a “nut”.

In the years that followed that 2003 error of judgement, media coverage of mental health was subjected to considerable scrutiny. It also improved significantly. Prejudicial descriptions of people suffering mental ill-health – “nutter”, “bonkers”, “loony” – began to lose their prominence in the tabloid lexicon. Vitally, the media came to a better understanding that mental illness and violence are not inextricably linked. Scare stories that lead readers into thinking that any person diagnosed with schizophrenia is probably a killer in waiting have become relatively rare.

The avoidance of stereotypes is back on the agenda after the raft of acts of violence across Europe in recent months. Today, the most likely reaction when we hear about a shooting or stabbing or other atrocity is to wonder if religion has played a part. If the perpetrator turns out to be a Muslim, the assumption is that he or she must – to one degree or another – have been inspired by Isis or guided by their faith.

I wrote last week about the initial reporting of an attack on French tourists in the Alps. The alleged perpetrator was said to be Moroccan-born and to have acted because his alleged victims – a woman and her daughter – were wearing skimpy clothes. Those details alone were enough to lead some to conclude an Islamist motive, though the claim about offence having been caused by the women’s attire was quickly dismissed.

After I wrote about the case, further information emerged that suggested the man might have taken offence at a gesture made by the victim’s husband. And it was said that when questioned by police, the suspect shouted “Allahu Akbar” – though his defence lawyer told local media that his client had used the words simply because he felt oppressed during his interrogation.

So will religion prove to be the underlying motivation in this case? Maybe. Maybe not. Ultimately, though, it felt like a relatively uncontroversial thing to suggest last week that we should be cautious about linking religious belief to violence until we are confident that that there really is a causal connection. It’s nothing more than the hallmark of good journalism.

Over the weekend, one Twitter user took me to task, however, for being on the side of “Islamopsychotics”, and for defending them “to the end with the mantra of whoever complains is Islamophobic”. Putting to one side the modest overreaction, I was struck by the use of the term “Islamopsychotics”, which seemed to combine several stereotypes in one.

On the face of it, the term seems self-contradictory. If a person is suffering a psychosis, they might not be criminally responsible for their actions, and so their religion per se as a motivation becomes irrelevant, except insofar as their radical interpretation of it is held to be a symptom of their illness.

But stop for a moment to consider the narratives the media constructs when it comes to terrorism or terror-like offences. The first stage is almost always to consider possible religious conviction on the part of the accused. Next – and often notwithstanding the answer to the first point – comes the question of whether the alleged perpetrator had a disturbed mind. This may reasonably mirror the enquiries of the authorities. But the consequence is that we see apparently competing reports, such as in the case of Nice attacker Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who was described by Isis as its “soldier” and by his family has having had a long history of mental illness. The authorities initially painted a picture of a man who had been quickly radicalised, then suggested a much longer period of planning.

It is certainly true that “lone wolves” (i.e. those acting without direct planning by or support from a wider network such as Isis) often have mental health issues. Research cited by Interpol suggests that perpetrators in more than a third of “lone-actor attacks” carried out in Europe between 2000 and 2015 suffered some sort of psychiatric disorder. Yet all too often there is little detail about the exact nature of those illnesses, if indeed they exist at all beyond anecdotal remarks made by friends and family. The effect is that we gloss over the specifics in favour of creating a kind of homogenised bogeyman figure – a religious fundamentalist afflicted by mental illness: immune to rationality, a threat to know.

This is dangerous because we run the risk of conflating religious devotion with mental illness (atheist jokes aside) and of simplifying and demonising both. Worse, by alighting on a stereotype that will rarely live up to reality we miss the complexities that lie behind both the fomenting and manifestation of lone wolf violence. And that really is bonkers.

Will Gore