The London Blasts: Media Review

DAY 88: 3 October 2005

Contents

Bali - Hints Of Realism

Semi-Realism - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Repression - Walter, The T-shirts, And The Cameras

BALI

HINTS OF REALISM

Daniel McGrory has a long article in The Times about Jemaah Islamiya, the group believed to be behind previous bombings in Indonesia (though some think the current bombing is the work of an autonomous sub-group). McGrory's main thesis is summed up in the headline: 'The campaign that began 50 years before bin Laden'.

But just because it began a long time ago doesn't mean that it is the same campaign as fifty years ago, or that activists have the same motivations for their actions as fifty years ago. In passing McGrory acknowledges this:

'Images of the bloodshed in Iraq fuel Muslim anger in Jakarta as much as it does elsewhere but investigators are sure this latest team of suicide bombers will prove to have been recruited, funded and organised locally by a group which cares more about damaging Indonesia than contributing to the notion of global jihad.'

See yesterday's Media Review for more on this.

BALI AND REPRESSION

Incidentally, The Times editorial on the latest bombing notes in passing that one of the challenges for the Indonesian Government is to

'push through reforms of its notorious security apparatus, whose past brutality has helped to foster jihadism and separatism alike.'

Not something that is receiving a great deal of attention in the media, but an escapable part of insurgencies throughout the world. There is a mention of the same issue in the Independent editorial today (paid-for access here).

SEMI-REALISM - ALIBHAI-BROWN

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the first and only Muslim woman columnist in the British 'quality' newspapers, discusses the roots of terrorism today in the Independent, and, after see-sawing, comes to a rather equivocal position.

After a tentative and defensive beginning (which takes about two-thirds of the column) in which she refers to 'guerrilla networks of discontented Muslims fighting for disparate, at times clashing causes or pure nihilism', Ms Alibhai-Brown moves into her substantive section:

'There are indeed Muslims who do loathe the west for its progressive values and free societies. They want to impose a global Islam by any means. Decent Muslims are exhorted by Western leaders to sort out their faith and its radicalism.'

'Who dares tell them to do the same with their unethical policies, which have annihilated so many lives in so many states? Or to play fair when it comes to Chechnya and the Palestinians? Or to deal with the institutional injustice of Guantanamo Bay?'

'... Refusing to admit to the wrongs we do and changing the rules of the game when it suits us creates a generic mistrust of Western policies, exploited by the Bin Ladens of this world.'

Hmm. the word 'mistrust' seems hardly adequate to describe the kind of rage that we see in Muslim communities around the world.

This seems to point to what we've called in this column a 'realist' position on the roots of al-Qaeda, following the analysis of CIA bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer that US/UK foreign policy is the driving force of the insurgency.

But we take a sharp right turn:

'The irony is that there are key people on in the Muslim Ummah who are also great at reductive, self-serving propaganda. Leaders of failed, dictatorial and corrupt Islamic countries have become as adept as Blair and Bush at providing us with stock reasons for bomb attacks, which kill and maim mostly innocents.'

'The usual list arrives after each atrocity. The bombers object to Israeli power, to double standards, to the war in Iraq. They distort Islam and are demented.'

'Were the bombers in Bali bothered about the Palestinians or even Iraqis? I don't think so.'

This is a curious position to take, because earlier Ms Alibhai-Brown had fierce criticisms of those who presume to know what the bombers think:

'As soon as Bali blew up this week, the Western leaders were up and about claiming the bombers hated our freedoms and way of life. How do they know? Should they not find out first and spout later? Why should we believe them?'

Let's press on:

'I too am disenchanted and furious about these places and standards. But I don't turn to weapons to placate my fury.'

'What I want to know is why do Algeria and Saudi Arabia, for example, produce and import so many lethally angry young men?'

She says:

'Only potential suicide bombers can tell us why.'

This is followed by the second major error in her column:

'The bastards who elect to blow themselves up have eschewed words and chosen death.'

Actually, many of these 'bastards' have left behind 'words' (and videos), and we can also determine their thinking from the 'words' of those who inspire them to action.

If we study what they say carefully, we find that it is the policies of the Western states in relation to Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, and so on, that is the driving force of the al-Qaeda insurgency.

This is the opinion not only of dictators and corrupt Muslim rulers, but also Western intelligence agencies, Western foreign policy experts, Western business, and, as we all know, the Home Office and Foreign Office, in their Young Muslims and Extremism report.

Why does Yasmin Alibhai-Brown characterise realism about the foreign policy roots of the insurgency as 'stock reasons', and 'reductive, self-serving propaganda' put out only by 'failed, dictatorial and corrupt Islamic countries'?

In a sense it is true, as the title of her article says: 'There is no simple reason why bombers kill'. To understand why any particular person becomes an al-Qaeda bomber one needs to understand their particular character and situation.

But it is also true that there is a 'common rage' (in her words) that connects many of the al-Qaeda bombers, and it is a rage over the suffering of Muslims around the world at the hands of the West, or with the silent complicity of the West.

Why can't she say this, and why can't she start from this point, instead of starting with the following paragraph?

'I find it hard to breathe as I write this next sentence. Tony Blair is right when he warns that since the rise of al-Qa'ida, the world faces dangers which are extraordinary and prodigious, protean and various, fatal yet unstoppable. It feels as if under the ground we walk on, there are tunnels from north to south, east to west, guerrilla networks of discontented Muslims fighting for disparate, at times clashing causes or pure nihilism.'

There is a near-national consensus on this issue. There is no need to be defensive. There is no need to fudge or evade the simple truth about the threats we face.

REPRESSION

REPRESSION - WALTER AND THE T-SHIRTS

More on this from Marcel Berlins' legal column in the Guardian. He says of Walter Wolfgang's detention under section 44 of the Terrorism Act:

'I don't believe the police had any legal right to do what they did. I've been reading section 44 and it's absolutely clear that its purpose is to give the police the power to stop and search. Not just to stop someone, full stop. The stopping is only there to lead to the searching.' [See full text of section 44 here]

'But there is nothing I've seen in any of the reports to suggest that Mr Wolfgang was searched. If that's right, then the police were not entitled to use section 44. The whole act, as its title suggests, is specifically aimed at terrorism. Section 45 says that authorisation to carry out a section 44 stop and search "may be exercised only for the purpose of searching for articles of a kind which could be used in connection with terrorism".'

'So even had a search been authorised and carried out, it would probably have been illegal. Whoever decided to use the Terrorism Act to stop Mr Wolfgang from returning to the hall didn't know what he was doing - but achieved the objective.'

Mr Berlins moves onto John Catt and his terrorist T-shirt (see yesterday's Media Review), also stopped under section 44:

'There is obviously a problem in the use of section 44. It was used prolifically against protesters around the Brighton conference centre. I am sure Sussex are not the only force using section 44 essentially as a tool of control. The police know very well that the vast majority of the people they're stopping have absolutely no hint of a suspicion of any link with terrorism. But the Terrorism Act is all they've got, they argue, to ensure that gatherings like party conferences and G8 meetings go off smoothly.'

'When Tony Blair and Charles Clarke tell the chief constable of Sussex that they want no trouble at their conference, and if that can only be achieved by wrongly using the anti-terrorism laws to stifle freedom of expression, freedom of movement and the right to protest - tough. That is not the way a democratic state should behave. But don't just blame the police for exceeding their powers. The government is conniving at every stage.'

In the Telegraph, columnist Philip Johnston also discusses section 44, at even greater length, under the headline 'The police must end their abuse of anti-terror legislation':

'After the carnage in the capital on July 7, those of us who live and work there want the police to have the powers that improve the chances of intercepting potential bombers. But Section 44 is often deployed against people who would normally be regarded as protesters, not terrorists. In the financial year after the Act came into force - which included the period of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington - there were 8,500 stops and searches under the Act. The following year, there were 21,500 and for the financial year 2003-04, the last for which figures available, there were 29,407.'

'Although these interceptions led to some arrests for terrorism-related offences (though not of terrorists themselves), people stopped under Section 44 powers were eight times more likely to be arrested for other offences, including motoring infractions. This suggests, at the very least, that the powers are being used in a pretty arbitrary way, despite assurances from the Government that they would be deployed only when there is "a good reason to believe that there is genuinely a terrorist threat". In his annual review of the Terrorism Act, Lord Carlile said the use of Section 44 "could be cut by at least 50 per cent without significant risk to the public or detriment to policing".'

Some of those on the receiving end have been dozens of protesters outside Europe's biggest arms fair, DSEI, in London's Docklands in 2003.

'When the legality of the use of Section 44 was tested by Liberty, the civil rights organisation, the High Court said the police commander had been entitled to apply the powers because the arms fair was controversial, was happening near an airport and was close to the site of a previous terrorist incident.'

'However, the Appeal Court said that if the police were given exceptional powers because of threats to public safety, they had to be used with the "appropriate circumspection" and it was "a fairly close call" as to whether they had been in this instance, though police were given the benefit of the doubt.'

Others hit include a group of trainspotters detained and searched under Section 44 at Basingstoke station, which was on a list of possible terrorist targets drawn up by the Home Office.

'By taking photographs of carriages and noting down serial numbers, the spotters were accused of behaving like a reconnaissance unit for a terrorist cell. They were forced to empty their pockets, explain their actions and prove their identity.'

Then there is the famous Fairford Coach case when

'anti-war protesters - many of them elderly veterans of 1960s ban-the-bomb marches - were stopped under Section 44 on their way to RAF Fairford, Glos, used by American B-52 bombers during the Iraq conflict. Again, these were quite clearly demonstrators. At the time, David Blunkett, then home secretary, said: "Powers under this legislation are applied solely for the prevention and investigation of acts of terrorism." Yet among those stopped was an 11-year-old girl, who was required to empty her pockets, before being handed a notification slip under the Act - one of more than 1,000 issued to protesters.'

'In July, a cricketer on his way to a match was stopped at King's Cross station in London under Section 44 powers and questioned over his possession of a bat. The police thought he might have been travelling to Scotland to cause trouble at the G8 summit. Maybe so. But why use anti-terror laws for what was a potential public order offence at worst?'

The answer is that under anti-terror laws, as Johnston notes earlier, you don't have to have a 'reasonable suspicion' to stop someone, you can have an unreasonable suspicion and still get away with it.

REPRESSION - TERRORIST CAMERAS

You don't believe it? Read all about it in today's Media Guardian supplement. (Registration required.)

REPRESSION - HAPPY BIRTHDAY HUMAN RIGHTS ACT

We have to mention another long article about Britain's human rights record, this time in the Independent (page 6) assessing Britain's attempts to get around the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Human Rights Act.

JNV welcomes feedback.