Risking freedom to fight terrorism
EDITORIAL: WHAT OTHERS THINK
Britain has been through this before. Irish nationalist bomb-planters carried out a long string of terrorist attacks in Britain through the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, but did not scare the U.K. into abandoning Northern Ireland. The London Bridge killings on Saturday night, following attacks on Westminster Bridge in March and the Manchester concert bombing two weeks ago, are also unlikely to bring Britain to its knees.
The bad news, however, is that this may continue for a long time and may involve many casualties, harsh measures by the authorities and terrible injustice to innocent people. A few ruthless terrorists can commit spectacular crimes. The police dragnet designed to catch them may sweep up plenty of lawabiding people and falsely accuse some of them. Canadians watching Britain’s escalating struggle with jihadi terror should brace themselves for a long and brutal campaign.
The Islamic State group uses the internet to encourage its sympathizers in European countries, Canada and the U.S. to get a truck or a knife and use it to kill defenceless people in the streets. Their aim, apparently, is to scare the European and American armies away from Mosul and other IS enclaves, where they are slowly strangling the self-proclaimed caliphate.
The recruiting tool of the internet reaches into every home with a computer, all over the world. Suicidal maniacs in Canada may be just as likely as those in London, Paris and Brussels to rent a truck or pick up a butcher knife and strike a blow for the caliphate. Canada’s intelligence services and police forces need to pay close attention to events in Britain: Scotland Yard and MI-5 are finding out the hard way how jihadi recruiting works and how cities can defend themselves.
Canadian agencies should not be far behind, because similar crimes have been carried out and attempted here in the past and there may be further incidences in the future.
Free online expression may be an early casualty in the struggle. North Americans usually deplore tight police controls on internet use in China, where users who complain about the government are quickly shut down.
But free online expression as it is enjoyed in the West leads, in practice, to IS recruiting people to go out and commit mass murder.
Somewhere between the shackled East and the wild West, there may be a system of internet expression that allows wide freedom but does not instigate slaughter in the streets.
The police will need plenty of informants in the Arabic-speaking communities of western countries to find out who is listening to IS propaganda and what they are up to. This may sometimes seem to cast suspicion on large numbers of innocent people.
At the moment, the police have files on far more people than they can ever hope to watch closely. The science of discerning which IS sympathizers are most likely to take action needs to be developed from careful study of those who have already struck.
A multinational agency such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization may be the best means of pulling together the experience of all terror-afflicted countries and snooping on people who have, up to now, committed no crime.
So much for privacy and freedom of thought! But the alternative is to let murder plots proliferate and let terrorists dictate our foreign policy.
Our free societies may have to become a little less free until this is over.