Fear the reaction to terror
The following is an excerpt from a column this week by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian:
Reacting to terrorist incidents in ways that do not play into terrorism’s hands may seem hard. A free media feels a duty to report events, as politicians feel a duty to show they can protect the public.
That it’s hard to show restraint is no excuse for actively promoting terror. Everyone involved in this week’s reaction, from journalists to politicians to security lobbyists, has an interest in terrorism. There is money, big money, to be made — the more terrifying it is presented, the more money.
We can respond to events in Brussels with a quiet and dignified sympathy, with candles and silences. To downplay something is not to ignore it. The terrorists have specific aims, deploying their atrocities for a political cause. But there is a defence against its purpose. It is to avoid hysteria, to show caution and a measure of courage, not (British Prime Minister) David Cameron’s lapse into public fear. It is not to alter laws, not to infringe liberties, not to persecute Muslims.
During the more dangerous and consistent IRA bombing campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, Labour and Conservative governments insisted on treating terrorism as criminal, not political. They relied on the police and security services to guard against a threat that could never be eliminated, only diminished.
Those who live under freedom know it demands a price, which is a degree of risk. We pay the state to protect us — but calmly, without constant boasting or fear-mongering. We know that, in reality, life in Britain has never been safer. That it suits some people to pretend otherwise does not alter the fact. In his admirable manual, Terrorism: How to Respond, the Belfast academic Richard English defines the threat to democracy as not the “limited danger” of death and destruction. It is the danger “of provoking ill-judged, extravagant and counterproductive state responses.”
The menace of Brussels lies not in the terror, but in the reaction to the terror. It is the reaction we should fear. But liberty never emerges from a bunker.