Extremist politics - no comments

Muslim convert 'recruits' inmates:

A former British National Party activist who converted to Islam in prison is trying to radicalise young prisoners, the BBC can reveal.

I'm deliberately avoiding use of the term 'fascist', but doesn't this tell you all you need to know about those whose currency is political hate, whether on the 'left' or 'right'? Once the contempt for the mass of the population is there, trivial political and religious differences like these can easily be rationalised away.

Steve Gough, vice-chairman of the Prison Officers Association (POA), said the organisation had been worried about the situation for a number of years.

"This shows what we've been saying. If you can get someone that's so right wing converted then a normal prisoner is going to have absolutely no chance," he said.

Which is probably about the same amount of faith in the human race I'd expect from a Prison Officer.

Still no to 42 - 1 comment

Sadly the Government has still not managed to make a reasonable case for the extension of the detention-without-trial limit. If they cannot satisfy our concerns about the human rights of suspects; cannot provide any evidence that the extension from 28 days to 42 has ever, or is likely either to prevent terrorist incidents or to substantially increase the chances of information being extracted; and cannot provide any assurance that 42 would be a binding upper limit; then the proposal ought to be thrown out with as little fuss as possible.

Offering 'concessions' seems to completely miss the point. Whether you prefer to oppose 42 on principle, or over its likelihood of success, the whole idea of concessions seems irrelevant to the issue at hand, and, if anything, adds insult to injury.

The fact that the Prime Minister has staked his authority upon the vote is a problem he has made entirely for himself. The fact that the Conservatives and minor parties might profit - in the very short term, as Frank Dobson argues - is an unfortunate but necessary evil.

According to YouGov, 69% of the public supports raising the detention limit to 42 days "in exceptional circumstances". Firstly, the 700-odd people who stated this opinion are foolish to do so, but they can hardly be blamed for telling a pollster that they might agree to limit their own rights when the issue is not close to home, when alternatives have not been proposed, and when the issues have not seriously debated with them. What's more: they're no more foolish than those who cannot see that "exceptional circumstances" means different things to different people. Such circumstances appear to be the case right now for some; while for others, only some distant war might fit the bill. One doesn't need to be in denial of the terrorist threat to dismiss this argument; those who cite "exceptional circumstances" are responsible for clarifying what these circumstances are.

As it stands, the poll resolves nothing, thus honest commentators will take it with an appropriate shovel of salt.

The Telegraph continues:

The Government's case was boosted when Baroness Park, a Tory peer and former senior MI6 officer, came out in support of stronger detention powers. She told The Telegraph that the "frightening" scale and complexity of the global Islamic terrorist threat made the new laws a necessity.

"Everyone who knows the difficulties of investigating it is convinced," she said, adding that David Cameron and the Conservative leadership were wrong to be opposing the measures.

Needless to say, what 'frightens' a campaigner for a cause might not frighten a neutral party. The death cult that is Islamist terrorism is a pressing threat to any country, and to any individual (especially Muslims) that favours freedom, tolerance, and what makes human beings human. But Baroness Park's job is not merely to convince the Government, or the Conservatives, of the danger, but other Western politicians, plenty of whom are equally forthright in their opposition to terror, but who have not so far found the need to extend detention without trial. Let us take a cautious approach, then: once Baroness Park and the Government have begun to win over other politicians to their case, we can revisit the extension proposal. Until then, we treat her opinion as one among many.

Luke Akehurst makes the point, in supporting the Government's move, that the need to prevent atrocities is more pressing than concern for the liberty of suspects. Now, I am prepared to believe that the security services wouldn't abuse these powers in general. Sadly, this faith is not binding upon the security services, who are beyond my control, and your control too. The reason we have codified liberties is because all of us have a right to a private space, free of encroachment, and to protect us from good people as well as bad, because even 'well-meaning' States, authorities, and individuals cannot be relied upon to respect us. No need to invoke Shami Chakrabarti, or even George Orwell, here.

The Government's on much safer ground with its deradicalisation plan, via Norm.

P.S. This post delayed, due to Blogger, once again, refusing to play ball.

No to 42 - 1 comment

So many issues seem to have gone by without my comment, recently, but I'd rather not add the issue of the detention of terrorist suspects to the list. That said, Bob Piper has perfectly summed up for me the bloody-mindedness of the entire plan to go out on an international limb (so to speak), and increase the limit from 28 days to 42:

One of the most futile aspects of what is termed 'The Great War' was the trench warfare that claimed so many lives.

Armies dug into trenches fought for months on end over the control of a series of fields. Tens of thousands of men lost their lives and when you look back on it you have to think, why? What was that all about?

So it seems with 42 day detention orders. Of course, not in the degree of severity as the shocking conflict in the Somme and elsewhere, but in terms of the futility of the whole exercise.

Before Gordon Brown and his Home Secretary decide to order their troops to go over the top, the Generals should be asking the Chief of Staff.... why are we doing this? The cannon fodder should refuse to leave the treenches unless they get answers a bloody sight better than we have had so far [...]

The Government is busy making concessions to the anticipated Labour rebels, still without explaining why the UK needs a measure at all that goes far, far further than those taken by those liberal democracies who, by their very nature, are terrorist targets. It's thoroughly mystifying; justifiably concerning to the many political liberals who expect to be at home within the Labour Party; and if a defeat does prompt a no-confidence vote in the Prime Minister or Government, it would represent a staggeringly unnecessary own-goal, over an issue that means little to voters, and doesn't encapsulate any ideological principle of ours. The whole business is a vote-loser from start to finish.

As a matter of principle I have to hope the Labour rebels stand firm. Even if the immediate consequences for the Prime Minister are bad, the sooner the Government ends its obsession with unnecessary, grandiose, and illiberal criminal justice legislation, and focusses its entire attention on addressing the UK's social ills, and empowering the population - things that are achievable (if hard) and which can improve the lives (and win the votes) of millions.

Bin Laden speaks - no comments

Perhaps Osama's softening in his old age:

"It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interest of the peoples and their blood by sacrificing soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of the major corporations".

"I invite you to embrace [X]," the speaker says.

If you substitute X, you've got a pretty standard argument used by dictators and their acolytes throughout the past century, and which can be seen all too regularly from the kind of people who hang out at Comment Is Free (thanks to PooterGeek for this observation). A belief that freedom is a sham, used to perpetuate or disguise the power of shadowy forces, is the perfect start on one's journey to authoritarianism.

Offer Asylum to Iraqis Working for the British Armed Forces - 1 comment

I should have linked to this campaign much earlier, but I'm now displaying the banner in the left-hand sidebar, and here's a link to the Facebook group, which has now reached 400 members. Here's what it's all about:

"This is very simple: our forces went to Iraq (for right or wrong - that's not important right now) and needed support from local people, interpreters for example. Brave and intelligent people provided the support our forces needed and continue to do so.

But at a price. They are being kidnapped, raped, tortured and killed.

You may have heard that the Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Defence are looking into it.

Until policy changes we need to keep up pressure on the government to act. If you haven't written to your MP, please do: http://www.writetothem.com

Some guidance on what you might wish to write is here.

If you haven't signed the petition, please do - it takes only a moment.

If you would like to raise awareness:

1. Please invite people to join this group.
2. Watch and share the following video from Bloggerheads.
3. Keep everyone else posted with updates on the wall below.

And if you do hear from your MP, drop Justin a note at Chicken Yoghurt, so we can keep a tag on which of our representatives are responding."

An equal and opposite reaction - 1 comment

Just to prove that 'moderate' is a mere step away from 'extremist', and that looking like a recruitment consultant really does make you an enemy of all things human, yet another CiF post that spirals into madness towards the end, with two choice sentences:

Targeting and killing innocent people is wrong whether done by terrorists in London or via the illegal occupation of another country.

That sly little via. Who knows what horrors could conceivably occur at the end of a road that begins with the illegal occupation of another country? But I'm not buying that: I'm going to suggest the most reasonable interpretation is that the two possibilities must occur at the same time, at the same distance along their respective paths. That is, we're really being asked to compare 'targeting and killing innocent people' with 'illegal occupation of another country', and if Mr. Masroor feels this is debatable, how seriously can we take his earlier, less equivocating statements?

Don't think too hard, for this corker is just a full stop away (my link added):

To quote Sir Isaac Newton's definition of the laws of physics, our actions in Iraq must have equal and opposite reactions - our policies in the Middle East will haunt us for centuries and that is the price we will have to pay for our misguided former prime minister.

As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I think B4L's readers are intelligent enough to see the essential difference between fundamentals of mechanics and physics on one hand, and human decision-making on the other. It's something most of us have an innate feel for as we look up at the bars of our cots, and which all too many dangerous idiots train themselves to deny.

War on Terror - 2 comments

I don't quite understand the fuss made about Hilary Benn's comments on the phrase, "war on terror". This is a discussion about rhetoric, not about policy, and should therefore be of minimal importance to most people. Nonetheless, we - as liberal-minded democrats, and committed supporters of human rights and free speech - ought to be just as explicit in condemning things we should condemn, as affirming things we should affirm. To me, the phrase means something like:

Terrorism is the avowed policy of individuals, organisations, and governments around the world; it cannot be justified in any situation: it degrades both victim and perpetrator, breeds future conflict, and those who practise it should be countered with all the means at our disposal.

Or something. I don't share the view that it means:

There is a global conspiracy of terrorists, primarily concerned with destroying The West [this is only partly true], and only military defeat will break it.

Undoubtedly this view has attracted more attention, of late, than the former, thanks to those with a preference for military action, but we're talking not about the conduct of an ongoing "war on terror", but about the aptness of the term, and the underlying commitment of ours to actively and determinedly seek an end to the use of terror worldwide.

Nonetheless Benn continues:

"In the UK, we do not use the phrase 'war on terror' because we can't win by military means alone, and because this isn't us against one organised enemy with a clear identity and a coherent set of objectives.

"It is the vast majority of the people in the world - of all nationalities and all faiths - against a small number of loose, shifting and disparate groups who have relatively little in common apart from their identification with others who share their distorted view of the world and their idea of being part of something bigger. [...]

"The fight for the kind of world that most people want can, in the end, only be won in a different battle - a battle of values and ideas."

These are fine words of the sort we've come to expect from Benn, but where are the mainstream voices that disagree with those points? More importantly, amongst those values and ideas must be zero-tolerance of terrorism. So, just as we've had a War Against Want, and "wars" ("Crusades", even) against poverty, perhaps the "war on terror" is a rhetorical device that concentrates our minds on the problem, and that shouldn't be suppressed, or abandoned to hawks.

AC Grayling, in an article that finds it difficult not to drift off into irrelevance, offers the alternative: "peace-making on the various problems part of whose outcome is terrorism". It's hard to disagree with that goal, but it manages to incorporate the word "terrorism" without any negative connotation, and as if it were a natural consequence of a disagreement. Just as the "war on terror" device conceals the inevitable requirement for peace-making and diplomacy, Grayling's obscures the necessity that force be employed against terrorists, when all else fails. Moreover, his alone ("... it at least has the merit of being more constructive...") blurs the boundary between rhetoric and real-world politics.

Update (19/04): Once again I find that Norm has covered much the same ground already. He also makes a distinction I should have made:

First of all, choosing violence is not what characterizes terrorist groups, properly defined. It's that they choose violence against civilians targeted more or less at random. [...]