22 Mar 12 | Uncategorized
The horrendous rampage of Mohamed Merah, the French man who killed north African soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish children, has brought all the usual responses from the usual corners. Britain’s “anti-Imperialist” left the Stop The War Coalition’s Lindsey German, decided that it must, must be the fault of French institutional racism, the war in Afghanistan and even the 50th anniversary of the Algerian war. All these apparently excuses for the anti-Semitic murder of children.
The French hard right, led by Marine Le Pen of the Front Nationale, has blamed “politico-religious fundamentalists” and the liberal multiculturalists who apparently enable them.
The government, meanwhile, has blamed the internet.
President Sarkozy announced today, shortly after Merah was killed by French security forces, that people who frequent “websites which support terrorism or call for hate or violence will be punished by the law.”
This is now standard: When east London MP Stephen Timms was stabbed by Roshanara Choudhry in 2010, people were quick to point to YouTube as the source of her radicalisation, an argument I was sceptical of at the time (and remain so).
When Anders Brei vik went on his own spree in Norway, again immediate attention was drawn to his online habits, with some eager to make capital out of the fact he’d read populist writers such as Jeremy Clarkson.
A UK parliamentary report into online radicalisation earlier this year raised the spectre of “Sheikh Google“, playing a role in sending young men and women into ever more extreme and violent positions.
And now Sarkozy’s statement.
The web is always brought up in these issues, for two simple reasons: the fear of the new, and the fact that many in power still feel it is possible to stop the Internet. The reaction to the English riots last summer was a perfect distillation of this: Things are happening on social networks: they must by necessity be bad, and they must be stopped.
The thing that fuels this fervour is the fact that, to some extent, the Internet can be stopped. Sites can be blocked, bandwidth can be squeezed, usage can be monitored.
But blaming the web is as facile as it is attractive. Social unrest did not begin with BlackBerry Messenger. And extremist violence was not invented on the Internet.
06 Feb 12 | Uncategorized
The UK parliament’s reasonably sensible report on radicalisation was released this morning, focusing on the perceived terror threats to Britain and Northern Ireland; far-right racist individuals and groups, Islamist terrorists and “dissident” republicans.
A quick glance at, for example, the Republican Sinn Féin website is enough to tell the reader that your average dissident is not the most web savvy person. “Radicalisation” in Northern Ireland is not taking place on the web, but in the same small, tightly bound communities where extremism has festered in Ireland since, well, a very long time.
What of the other two groups? The report points out that white power radicals tend to pop up in isolation — think of Anders Breivik in Norway, busy writing his manifesto in suburban Oslo before unleashing his horror. At the time, many on the liberal left took a perverse glee in finding Breivik’s “manifesto” quoted, among others, Jeremy Clarkson and Melanie Philips, as if they somehow carried responsibility for the slaughter. I argued against this, pointing out that while his thinking may have been influenced by them, they could not be held responsible for one man going on a shooting spree. The mainstream writers Breivik quoted did not incite violence. The attack was something Breivik did off his own bat.
While I don’t think Breivik fits into our 20th-century idea of “far right”, many of those on the radical right in the UK seem to be following a similar pattern — paranoid obsessives acting alone, convinced of the coming race war, but fuelled by reading and discussion on the web.
Radicalisation of young Muslim youth tends to take a different slant. When Roshanara Choudhry stabbed her MP Stephen Timms, much of the coverage suggested that the east London woman had been radicalised on the web, particularly by the sermons of the (now dead) preacher Anwar al-Awlaki. At the time I suggested that it was disingenuous to suggest Choudhry would never have encountered these ideas until she stumbled across “Sheikh Google” as the report calls online Islamist extremism, and I still believe that to be true.
The issue is agency. While we should be thankful that the parliamentary committee does not recommend additional censorship powers (indeed, it advocates more free speech in the form of helping civil society groups make counterarguments against extremist rhetoric), the effectiveness of any form of online censorship must continue to be questioned. it is ultimately unpredictable what language will have what effect on whom. Context mean a lot more than content.
26 Jul 11 | Uncategorized
In the days since Anders Behring Breivik — the accused perpetrator of Friday’s deadly attacks in Norway — has been identified as a Christian right-wing extremist, some liberals in the US have descended on the episode as another opportunity to draw a straight line between hard-right political causes and actual violence. The meme has been gaining steam since the early rise of the Tea Party, a group that occasionally celebrates its Second Amendment gun rights by toting weapons to public rallies.
“Norway, US, Worldwide — is Right-Wing Violence endemic?” asks a blog post on the popular liberal Internet enclave Fire Dog Lake. Explains the writer:
“Right-wing supporters, here in the US and around the world, have a long history of resorting to, or actually embracing, violence. People from politicians, to preachers to doctors have all been shot because of their perceived (and perhaps real) left leaning political views.”
The author then proceeds to compile a list of recent incidents involving right-wing violence, including mention of the January shooting of Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
ThinkProgress, a liberal blog affiliated with the progressive Center for American Progress, has published an oddly beside-the-point revelation that the “Norway Terrorist is a Global Warming Denier“, as if this contributes further damning evidence of the ideological similarity between mass murderers and run-of-the-mill conservatives. In another post, the blog cites “evidence that [Breivik] was a fan of far-right bloggers and political parties.”
It then uses the occasion to chastise Rep. Peter King, who has refused to include homegrown terrorism threats – read: threats from neo-Nazis and other domestic right-wing extremists — in his congressional hearings investigating the radicalisation of American Muslims. King, since the Norway attacks, has held to that position.
Of course, it would be preferable for King to abandon the hearings all together rather than to add domestic political partisans to his already dubious investigation of the Muslim community. But the hint of “endemic” right-wing violence poses a different challenge – and that’s that we head down a tricky path in trying to draw systemic conclusions about political ideology and specific incidents of bloodshed.
It’s possible — as has turned out to be the case with Giffords’ shooter — that the defining characteristic of Breivik and other such violent rogues isn’t their politics, but their mental instability. And conflating the two could be problematic for political speech in the long run.
Sarah Palin was widely indicted after the Giffords shooting, which left six dead in an Arizona strip-mall parking lot, for having produced a map of political opponents targeted in the 2010 election with gun-sight symbols over their districts. Pundits speculated that such a map could have motivated Jared Lee Loughner to take Palin’s suggestion literally. (Subsequently, there was no evidence Loughner ever even saw Palin’s campaign graphic.)
Since then, Americans have been struggling mightily with the consequences of political discourse, with what it means to be “civil” at a time of rising political acrimony, and with the murky causal connection between words, ideas and violent action. It’s an important discussion. But chalking up the Norway shooting as another example that “right-wing ideas = violence” doesn’t add much to it.
Joshua Foust, writing in The Atlantic, is equally firm on this point:
“In order to tar all of Europe’s right, even just the upsetting xenophobes clothing themselves in worry about jihad, you must demonstrate a causal mechanism by which concern over cultural outsiders becomes murderous rage against the very people you claim to protect (in this case, ethnic Norwegians). Without being too trite, it requires an especially deranged mind already far outside the mainstream to decide to slaughter children at summer camp just because it is run by a left-wing political party. Associating that sort of mentality with the mainstream is not just wrong and lazy, it is hypocritical.
Indeed, much of the Western’s left’s quasi-triumphalism over the Norwegian tragedy revolves around it’s complete non-relationship to Islamic terror. Here, so many seem to celebrate, is the proof they had finally sought that right-wing politics are not just annoying and wrong, but actively dangerous.”
That argument may be politically profitable in the short term. But in the long run, suggesting political beliefs — whether liberal or conservative — are synonymous with incitement to violence could wind up undermining the rights of even those making such an argument today.
