British at last recognize the problem; phase #1 of the cure is to punish themselves
Things proceed in phases. This must be understood and appreciated. Normally, you can’t go form A to Z; you must rather proceed from A to B to C and so forth. This is the way the mind appropriates new facts and new frameworks. People as a rule cannot see and appreciate a thing until the groundwork has been laid. Such has been the progress of understanding in this war.
We have seen enormous progress in the last five years in understanding the scope, magnitude and gravity of the danger that the West faces from dedicated and violent Islamic fundamentalists. We have written about the process of increasing understanding here and here, for example. From the Spectator article by Alister Heath on a poll of the British public:
73 per cent of respondents agree that ‘the West is in a global war against Islamic terrorists who threaten our way of life’ while only 8 per cent think that ‘Islamic terrorism is a regional problem that poses no real threat to the West’….
That’s a good beginning. “Islamic” and “terrorists” is something that Reuters, for example, still does not like to see in the same sentence. And we saw how the BBC abandoned all pretense of journalistic curiosity to avoid saying Islamic or Muslim in its early articles on the airplane bomb plot. So the British public recognizes the problem, in defiance of their betters, and have overcome their shyness in localizing the problem to terrorists of an Islamic bent. Good for them.
So what is the cure for the problem? The first instincts of the British today are to punish themselves, by restricting certain civil liberties, and to run away from America (see Thomas Lifson):
the public is convinced that the key to winning this new global war against terrorists lies in a much more aggressive foreign policy, as well as in severe reductions in civil liberties in Britain. One of the most important lessons from the Spectator/YouGov poll is the growing chasm between the views of large portions of the chattering classes, including most of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, and the views of the population at large.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the public’s extraordinary dismissal of civil libertarian arguments. In a bitter blow to the Conservatives and the Labour Left, who have long opposed the policy, the public supports Tony Blair’s favourite option of detaining suspects without charge for up to 90 days by three to one (69 per cent to 23 per cent). When asked whether Britain should change its foreign policy in response to terrorism, just 12 per cent say that it should be made more conciliatory, against 53 per cent who say it should become more aggressive and 24 per cent who don’t want to change the current relatively tough stance.
Perhaps most controversially of all, the Spectator/YouGov poll reveals that by a majority of 55 per cent to 29 per cent the public supports the introduction of ‘passenger profiling’ by the authorities in airports.
A policy of increased profiling and increased detention periods is helpful, but it is still phase #1 of an approach to the problem. The world is still extremely uneasy about tackling the ideological aspect of the Islamic nature of Islamic terrorism. That phase is still around the corner, and may well take the form of asking what is protected under freedom of religion and what is not, and raising the thorny question of just how is it that all the Islamic terrorists seem to misinterpret the Koran in precisely the same ways (see Irshad Manji).
Of course, we may be wrong about all this. After all, we can’t go from A to Z either. We are going from A to B to C just like everyone else in this terrible struggle.