Yesterday's Guardian carried an editorial reflecting on the arrest of eight young men earlier in the week in connection with the possible preparation of a terrorist attack. I could have blogged it then, but it was the morning of April Fool's Day and this was no laughing matter. By later in the day I'd lost the stomach for it. One doesn't like to dwell for too long, at any one time, on very unpleasant encounters - such as encounters with present-day Guardian-style liberalism tend to be. Anyway, having turned away from this particular encounter and now girded up my loins afresh (if you'll pardon that directness), I feel the time is suitably upon me. The leader writer of the Guardian, never slow to reach for a sociological explanation, begins thus:
Several details about the eight young men arrested in raids across the home counties this week stir much thought. They are all British born. They do not live in areas of high deprivation, but in places like Crawley, Ilford and Slough. Some have young families. None of them fits the conventional profile of Islamist terrorists as alienated, isolated immigrants. If this is suburban Islamism, it poses difficult questions about Britain's record in integrating the Muslim community and in fostering a secure, strong sense of a British Islamic identity.There's more, of course - including an international context which 'radicalises' the community disaffection of British Muslims 'into some individuals undertaking acts of extreme violence': you know, slow international response in Bosnia, then Chechnya, Palestine, the banning of the hijab in French schools, Iraq - but you've got as much as you need for the purpose at hand. The principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' may commend itself in some contexts but not, evidently, for the Guardian in this one. If a terrorist atrocity was in preparation here, then... we are all responsible, as a society, because of our failure to integrate the Muslim community. How can the writer possibly know this without knowing a very great deal more about those arrested men? For one thing, he or she would need to know that they are not merely arrested, but also guilty of what they're suspected of. Otherwise one can infer nothing at all from their social profiles. Oops! But let us assume, just for the sake of a standard piece of dnoc hand wringing, that the men are in fact guilty as suspected. Wouldn't one then have to know rather a lot more than the Guardian possibly can do at this point, about the precise lines of cause and effect between their backgrounds, their experiences, their characters, ideological influences on them, their motives, and so on, before being able to draw big broad conclusions about why they were planning what they were? Unless, that is, we're all guilty of the crimes to be committed against us until we're actually blown to bits (and even then we may be guilty of them in some people's eyes).
For an antidote to this, read the historian Michael Burleigh in yesterday's Telegraph (registration required). Burleigh makes one statement here - 'Where people get killed, talk of human rights seems superfluous' - that is open to interpretations with which I'd want to quarrel; but otherwise he has a properly acerbic view of the kind of stuff laid out in that Guardian editorial. He writes:
An implacable scepticism among those who shape public opinion towards lame excuses for terrorism would also go some way to denying the perpetrators the moral justifications they still appear to need.(Hat tip: EG.)