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.
