Philip Hammond and the "responsibility of apologists".

Philip Hammond, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, was widely reported yesterday to have told a meeting of the defence and security think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, that "apologists" for those who commit acts of terrorism are partly responsible for the violence.

His words, in context, were:

"We are absolutely clear; the responsibility for acts of terror rests with those who commit them.

"But a huge burden of responsibility also lies with those who act as apologists for them."

We should be wary of this line of thinking for three reasons.

First, it continues to propagate the superficial and facile account of how “radicalisation” occurs, an account that does nothing to tackle the reasons that some people are attracted to Islamism and other terrorist creeds; secondly it raises the notion of restricting what the state will allow people to say, while being vague, yet again, about what constitutes being an apologist; and thirdly it seeks to widen the definition of “responsibility”.

How is being an apologist to be defined?  And who does the defining?

Definitions are important. It is quite easy, for example, to be accused of defending views you actually despise simply by opposing state intervention against those who utter the views. And which acts of barbarism are to be beyond the pale?  I consider the Israeli state’s actions in Gaza to be a reign of terror; will those who support the Israeli state be considered by Hammond to share the burden of responsibility for that violence? It seems unlikely.

But what of acts that attract wide consensus: don’t we all agree that ISIS are bloodthirsty murderers? Well, I certainly do, but we need to examine more closely what Hammond might mean by saying someone is an apologist for those types of acts.

A recent poll of 1000 Muslims in Britain got a lot ofcoverage. It was a Com Res survey for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.  One finding that provoked coverage was the response to the question, “do you agree or disagree with this statement?”: “I have some sympathy for the motives behind the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in Paris”.

Much of the reporting picked up on the fact that 27% said they agreed with the statement.  But look at the question more closely. It’s vague.  The possible motives were not suggested; respondents were left to guess what the motives were.  Furthermore, importantly, note that having “some sympathy with” a motive does not necessarily mean you think that the motive justifies carrying out murder. 

It was assumed in the media that this 27% approved of the Charlie Hebdo murders, but the poll does not justify that reading.  Since motives were not suggested in the question, respondents were providing their own list, many of which perhaps even I would have “some sympathy” with. I say perhaps, because I don’t know – nobody does.  The question, however, does not ask people to agree or disagree with the statement that ‘The motives justify the murders’. So we don’t know how many, if any, of that 27% thought so.

Does Hammond have these people in mind?  Does he think a “huge burden of responsibility” for the Charlie Hebdo murders “also lies with” that 27%? If he does, then he is clearly just looking for people he can pin blame on. 

Let’s say the state decides to ban people saying something even as mild as that they have “some sympathy with” what they assume to be “some of the motives behind” an atrocity.  What effect would that have?  First, it would create resentment.  Some of those assumed motives might include just grievances.  But even if some of the motives are based on intolerance and bigotry (and let’s make no bones about this, there do exist some pretty unpleasant and reprehensible ideas), criminalising their expression will not stop those ideas - they will fester and grow, and their causes will not be addressed. Secondly, the act of state repression of the ideas will give them currency and a certain “legitimacy”; merely by seeking to silence them, the state will add weight to them.  “See how they suppress our beliefs!”

The ideas will still be there.  The reasons they arose will not have been tackled (indeed, they’ll have been exacerbated).  And the net will have been cast far too wide.

Let us not forget that the definition of “domestic extremism” used by the police has been ludicrously loose, and has been used to justify surveillance of journalists and that “dangerous” Green party peer, Baroness Jones.

If they can be caught up in these loose and meaningless definitions, then so can you and I.

What, then, is Hammond’s statement all about?  It’s about selling an idea that “radicalisation” is caused by “hate speech”, and that the way to stop radicalisation is to clamp down on what people are allowed to say.  But more importantly, it’s about the state wanting to look as if it’s doing something.

So what is “radicalisation”?

According to forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, who has studied the issue in some depth, “The notion that there is any serious process called 'radicalisation', or indoctrination, is really a mistake. What you have is some young people acquiring some extreme ideas - but it's a similar process to acquiring any type of ideas. It often begins with discussions with a friend.”

Kenan Malik picks up the thread in his article “The Making of Wannabe Jihadis in the West”.  He writes:

“Simplistic narratives about ‘radicalisation’ miss the complex roots of homegrown terrorism. Proposed solutions, such as banning organizations, pre-censoring online hate speech, increasing state surveillance, and so on, betray our liberties without addressing the issues that has made Islamism attractive to some in the first place”.

Instead, we need to look at the processes by which people might become “disembedded from social norms”, but to recognise that the “radicalisation” notion looks at them the wrong way round.  

Malik says “the ‘radicalization’ argument looks upon the jihadists’ journey back to front. It begins with the jihadists as they are at the end of their journey – enraged about the West, and with a black and white view of Islam – and assumes that these are the reasons they have come to be as they are.”

For Malik, we need to recognise that society has become fractured, but that the issue is not that the “Muslim community” has become disengaged with wider society. The term itself encourages a misunderstanding - there is no one “Muslim community”, any more than there is a “white community”, for example; instead, we should refer to a Muslim population. No, the issue is that wider society itself is fractured and atomised, with many individuals finding themselves adrift and looking for identity and belonging, and this includes, but is not particular to, Muslims.

The way to address this is not to drive in further wedges and intensify feelings of alienation, but to engage, to challenge, to demonstrate which ideas are ridiculous, not to drive those ideas underground.

But then maybe just saying all this makes me an apologist in some people’s eyes.