Je Suis Charlie

Interestingly, many other bloggers today have been showing support and offering condolences following the cowardly attack in Paris yesterday.  Now, I am not a political person at all and think that something as personal as politics is best not discussed but this event has hit home.

I come from a family of journalists: my grandfather was editor of Films and Filming and Dance Band Journal, my uncle was associate editor of the Daily Mail and editor of the Sunday Dispatch, my aunt worked for BBC news and my mother was beauty editor of Woman's Own.  Even my sister worked at the Church of England Newspaper in her year off between school and university.  My journalistic output has been much less exalted and at school and university on the art direction side (school magazine, Isis and the Oxford Union Magazine).  These days my writing is confined to trade magazines with the occasional foray into men's magazines and genre magazines under a number of noms de plumes.  However, I do consider myself both a writer and an artist and in a alternative life could have well seen myself working at a magazine.  So an attack on a magazine's offices, because of its output, does give me cause to think.  Now, I do think that journalists have become rather too precious as regards their importance (there was a lot of self-righteous nonsense around the UK phone hacking scandals last year) and the job itself has been demeaned by the rise of social media and internet  news "writers" but they do have a key role in speaking out and challenging views in any society

One of my friends on the Oxford Union magazine, Phil Geddes, did go on to be a journalist and was killed by the IRA bomb outside Harrods in 1983.  He had heard about the alert and went to the scene to investigate (which is one of the reasons I tend to lose my cool over people who wargame Ireland 1916 or any form of terrorist game).  

My sister worked, for many years, as an anti-terrorism expert (she is the person responsible for the ban on litter bins in British railway and underground stations for so many years) for a secretive government organisation.  She spent two years at British Army HQ in Northern Ireland and travelled all over the world advising other organisations like the FBI, the Sri Lankan and Greek governments on counter-terrorism.  She left the service before the Gulf War, so never had to deal with the threat of Islamic terrorists but I do remember her saying to me that you could deal with Irish terrorism (from both sides) to a large extent because the perpetrators had some rules and basically thought like us.  This, she said, is not the case with Islamic terrorists.  You can never beat them, just try to stop as many attacks as you can, principally because they don't care if they die.  This is, of course, a source of frustration for those who believe that some military war on terror will work.  It won't.  Basically, we're stuck with this situation.  It would be nice if there was a simple solution but there isn't and movements like this will always attract the psychotic, disadvantaged and vengeful.

All we can do is try to contain it and that will involve some loss of freedoms which, no doubt, the same freedom of speech proponents outraged at this attack will decry.  Personally, I don't object to identity cards or my location or emails being monitored.  A few years ago I was speaking to the government of a Canadian city about the London Oystercard, which they were interested in.  They were horrified when I told them that one of the key requirements of the project was to provide location details of each card holder to the authorities.  Equally, they would not support the congestion zone system we have as it is based on licence plate recognition, However, we are in a war and in a war you have to give up these freedoms.  

The west is under attack from groups of people (not all Muslims but some Muslims) who follow a completely different ethical path from most of us.  Now, principally, one of the key questions is to what extent is this really a religious war or is religion being used as a front for those with other agenda?  There were elements of this in Northern Ireland. The American security forces spend a lot of time using Muslim religious leaders to explain to terrorists how what they are doing does not accord with the teaching of Islam but that, of course, assumes the proponents really are genuinely religious.

There are only two routes we can go: carry on as we are and suffer increasing numbers of attacks or fight back in such a way that we descend to the same level as our attackers (which may be exactly what they want, as it increases recruitment).  I suspect the latter is not likely given the recent outrage here over supposed torture being used on terror suspects in Gauntanamo Bay.  Our own civilised nature will prevent us from taking the sort of extreme measures needed.  

The best way to fight an evil idea is to not be frightened by it.  After all, Islamic militants in Syria use terror to convert "infidels" which is not a very good advertisement for the validity of their belief system.  I did consider not mentioning this issue today as someone I was speaking to said your blog, at least, could become a target for Islamic militant hackers.  While I think this is very unlikely indeed that just confirmed that I should, indeed, say something.  As Bob Cordery pointed out, in his far more eloquent post, it is those who do not speak out who contribute to the success of terror.