A couple of hours before the Paris atrocities, I was queuing to pass through a cumbersome security cordon in Tunis. Since the grisly attacks on the beach at Souss and at the Bardo museum, every hotel and tourist restaurant here has been fitted with airport-style scanners and metal detectors.
“This is a classic example of displacement activity,” I airily told a fellow politician as we bleeped through. I went on to quote Nassim Taleb on how we falsely project the past into the future, failing to grasp that much of what is coming is unforeseeable.
Then I said something that, as I recall it now, feels more than a little eerie. “You can’t stop someone who is picking soft targets and is prepared to lose his life. They won’t attack a beach next time. They’ll attack a concert or a supermarket or a nightclub.”
There’s a reason we call it “terrorism.” It is intended to scare us. Human beings are bad at computing risk. Never mind the old chestnut about how much more likely we are to die on the roads than in a terrorist attack. We are 110 times more likely to die from contaminated food than from terrorism; we are 452 times more likely to die from unprotected sex than from terrorism; we are 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than from terrorism. But, of course, it’s the terrorist attacks that catch our imagination.
A curfew was imposed in Paris for the first time since the German occupation, and the City of Light fell dark. In Tunisia, strongly tied by migration to Paris, even as people gawped in shock at television screens, a group of local terrorists sawed off a teenage boy’s head, while another group shot a police officer. As far as I’m aware, neither incident made the news outside Tunisia; and even in Tunisia, they were barely noticed, because people were transfixed by the Paris abominations. That’s why terrorists launch what Irish Republican Army terrorists used to call “spectaculars.”
Our nervous systems are designed to respond to a sense of threat. The chemistry of our brains alters. As it dawns on us that these attacks are becoming almost normal, our feelings become coarser. Politicians don’t need opinion polls to make them react. Across Europe, border controls are being reimposed. Visible security measures are introduced — measures which, like the scanners in Tunis, are decorative rather than functional, designed to show that something is being done.
The reason I’m in Tunisia is to support local politicians who, secular or religious, have decided to work together within a pluralist democracy. The best way to defeat a bad idea is with a good idea. The best way to defeat the jihadis is to offer a better model. But, in the current climate, few will want to hear that message.
It’s sometimes said that terrorism is intrinsically counter-productive, rendering governments less able to make concessions. True. A handful of people may react to the murders by saying, “Let’s have nothing to do with the conflict in Syria”; but many more will say “Let’s root out these Islamic State murderers.”
In another sense, though, the terrorists are making headway. They aim to convince Muslims that they cannot be loyal citizens of Western democracies. It’s a message that has some resonance with some disaffected young men, suffering from that alienation that is common among second-generation immigrants. In proportionate terms, the number of European Muslims sympathetic to the terrorists is tiny; but tiny numbers can do great evil.
Never mind that Muslims are by far the most common victims of the bombers. Never mind that, in Syria and Iraq, casualties in this scale are suffered almost every day. The terrorists hope to create a sense of civilizational clash, and they are succeeding. At the scene of the massacre, President Hollande declared: “Nous allons mener le combat. Il sera impitoyable.” “We’re going to wage war. It will be merciless.”
It’s natural, in the aftermath of an atrocity, to cast around for proportionately strong language. Still, it’s worth thinking about what effect such talk might have on the next generation of losers looking to make a splash.
Because it’s losers we’re dealing with. Don’t romanticize the gunmen by taking them at their own estimation. Don’t accept their claim to be acting according to some higher principle. Look at them, for heaven’s sake: young, angry, vain, self-obsessed. We should no more accept their self-justification at face value than we did the me-me-me ramblings of, say, Dylann Roof, the Charleston murderer.
How will President’s Hollande’s words be heard by the next generation of saddos trawling the web from their mother’s basements? It’s the sense of civilizational struggle, of war and its associated glamour, that attracts these misfits in the first place — rather as it attracted young narcissists to the Red Brigades or the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
We can’t starve the jihadis of publicity: We are free countries with free media. Nor can we decree that the news coverage should be mocking. We can’t oblige news anchors to laugh at these idiots with their underpants bombs and their shoe bombs and their pleasing tendency to blow themselves up in error and their curious belief that you can set glass-and-concrete airport terminals on fire by driving into them.
Scorn might be our best weapon, but we won’t deploy it. We are human. After an event like this, no one feels like laughing. Our palpable horror will attract the next set of alienated young men. And so the cycle continues.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
