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.

Charlie Hebdo and Causing Offence

"‘Je suis Charlie’. It’s a phrase in every newspaper, in every Twitter feed, on demonstrations in cities across Europe. The expressions of solidarity with those slain in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices are impressive. They are also too late. Had journalists and artists and political activists taken a more robust view on free speech over the past 20 years then we may never have come to this."

- Kenan Malik, "Je Suis Charlie? It's a bit late".

Two main streams come up whenever free speech is discussed, and I think they’re both misunderstandings. First is that people think free speech is peripheral, a luxury. Something we can have later, after other things are sorted out, important things like racism. It isn’t; it is the means to deal with these issues.

Second, people often misunderstand free speech itself. They think free speech means that each statement stands alone in a vacuum and cannot be challenged. That if you reply to what someone says, you are denying their free speech. You aren’t. Free speech is a two way process. It means that someone you dislike can say what they please, but it also means that you can respond. In that way, society at large can hear the exchange, can see the issues at stake, can learn from it. It will be easy to see who are the progressives and who are the racists, the reactionaries, because we will see the exchange.

And here’s the thing, free speech is either for everyone or for no-one. If you restrict it, if the state seeks to legislate on who gets it and who doesn’t, to put boundaries on it, then nobody has it. And this is where we hit the problem. People, for honourable reasons, will say it’s important not to offend oppressed groups. Of course, I want to be respectful; I’m on the side of the oppressed. But that reflex – shut down offence - misunderstands how a plural society can best operate. We are not a unitary culture, if ever such a thing can exist. There are many cultures, many ways of being in those cultures.

When people say it’s important to respect and not to offend oppressed groups, they are ignoring the fact that many of the writers who are vilified by fundamentalists, campaigned against, and often as a result shut down by mainstream society, themselves come from minority communities – Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. This discussion is not confined to what you can say about minority groups, but also – vitally importantly – within minority groups. It won’t do to say that those are middle class writers and that their concerns are middle class concerns, because what you’re doing, what has been done now for decades, is that you are shutting down dissent within these communities. You are handing power to fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, traditionalism, hard conservatism becomes the only acceptable, the only authentic expression of that community. And this is an important point – mainstream civil society, with all its power and laws, its state and its institutions, NGOs, and so on, put their power behind demarking and imposing what is authentic, what is valid, what it means to be a Muslim, a Sikh, a member of an ethnic minority in Britain today. And progressive strands are edited out of that, by the state and civil society.

So that we have the bizarre situation where people from the Muslim Council are outraged that they are criticised for making homophobic remarks. We are in a situation where we have sectionalised, isolated groups saying “I want to say that about you, but you can’t say that about me”. Not, please notice, “You are wrong in what you say”, but “You have no right to say it”.

The heart of this debate is what we mean by free speech in a plural society. Malik is right: people holding placards about free speech and Charlie Hebdo are too late, because in many ways we have already lost the war.

The question of offence needs to be better understood. We need the ability to offend precisely because we have a plural society. We need, rather than sublimate, to openly confront and resolve. We need, rather than to suppress our beliefs, to allow those beliefs to confront each other.

Today, progressives are saying whatever the principles of free speech and freedom of expression, it is important not to offend deeply held sensibilities, not to offend religious and cultural mores.

But that has led us to a situation where we now may no longer have blasphemy laws, but where blasphemy laws have been secularised.

Our ability to challenge power and oppression has been limited, is being limited, yes, by reactionary religious and cultural sensibilities, but also by liberal relativism, and by progressives afraid of causing offence.



Recommended reading: "From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy", by Kenan Malik.