Robert Sharp

I was talking about free expression at an event the other day, when the subject of incitement to violence cropped up.  I mentioned the formulation that Aryeh Neier (President of the Open Society Institute) gave at GFFEx last year, regarding whether the person doing the violence agreed with the person whose speech provoked it.

Blasphemy or religious defamation are essentially insults against a person or group of persons on the basis of one’s religious, or it could be another form of group defamation, where one is attacking or insulting members of a particular race or a particular nationality.  But it doesn’t have the effect of inspiring the supports of the speaker to engage in violence; rather it is the opponents of the speaker who might engage in violence.  So hate speech incites; blasphemy and religious defamation provoke.

That seems to me very important.  I think there limited circumstances in which it may be appropriate to punish those who engage in hate speech.  I think there are virtually no circumstances where it is appropriate to punish those who engage in in blasphemy or religious defamation, that is the circumstances in which they have provoked others to attack them.

An interesting retort to this, was to ask whether King Henry V was engaging in incitement to violence when he gives his famous, rousing speech?

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.

My only response was to suggest that, yes, the French would probably consider Henry’s speech an ‘incitement to violence’ and worthy of censorship, if only they could!  But in practice, such political speech is usually seen as exempt when matters of war and national survival are at stake.  Governments and their populations are usually comfortable with placing extra restrictions on our human rights during times of crisis.

However, there are times when this special exemption might not be as clear cut as we think.  Who, on 14th September 2001, objected to President George W. Bush giving a memorial speech for those killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre just three days earlier?  Yet it was in that speech that he first used the phrase ‘War on Terror’, a formulation that has become hugely problematic and inciting.  The following week, when America was still reeling from the shock and in need of rousing leadership, the word ‘crusade’ slipped into the President’s remarks, which not only provoked the Islamic world, but certainly had the effect of inciting certain elements of American society to violent, disproportionate action.  The last film I went to see, My Name is Khan, deals with the aftermath of such words.

Exactly three years ago, I attended an event with Clive Stafford-Smith, the Director of Reprieve who has worked with the prisoners at Guantanamo.  I asked him how many of them he thought were innocent:

During the Q&A session, I ask him if he thinks there are any genuine terrorists at the camp. He says there were probably about two or three to begin with. Now there are probably about fourteen, he thinks. The rest have very tenuous evidence against them. Even if some had fought for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance in 2001/02, that does not mean they were Al Qaeda operatives, or that they were a genuine threat to western interests.

Now, while I am sure that Stafford-Smith’s claim is based on hard legal analysis, it nevertheless has an anecdotal air when he tells it.  As a long-time activist against the death penalty, and therefore a regular critic of the US Government, it is easy for politicians to pigeon-hole his complaints.  In the cynical merry-go-round of political debate, it is easy to dismiss such claims as the exaggerations of someone trying to win the argument.  A dismissal of the well he would say that wouldn’t he? variety that is tricky to argue against, without sufficent airtime and column inches.

Well, here is some more evidence to back-up Stafford-Smith’s claim.  British journalist Andy Worthington has been compiling The Guantanamo Files, a list of all 779 men who were incarcerated at the prison:

… at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism

And the British Government – a Labour Government, ostensibly on the side of the poor and marginalised around the world – provided succour and support to the Bush Administration as this prison was established and maintained.

News from last week:

The terror suspect who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound plane is the son of a Nigerian banker who alerted US authorities to his “extreme religious views” months ago, it was reported Saturday.

(Via Andrew Sullivan, who says he is ‘angry‘).

I am reminded of Cory Doctorow’s point at the Convention on Modern Liberty last year, about the problem of collecting too much information:

We’ve been told that we’re collecting larger haystacks of information in the hope that it will make the needles easier tio find.  If you look at the 9/11 Commission report, and you find out that in fact the America intelligence apparatus knew that the September 11th attack was happening – in hindsight – but they also knew a million other irrelevancies, and that an adequate approach to discovering it might have been to collect less information, not more.

The video is below:
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There has been plenty of outrage over the release of Lockerbie Bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. The scenes of him arriving in Libya to a hero’s welcome have provoked disgust in the UK.

Why cheer a terrorist? It’s worth considering the situation from the Libyan point of view. First, al-Megrahi’s conviction was not water-tight. The manner of his identification by a witness in Malta was, I recall, highly irregular. I remember seeing a documentary about the case last year, which made me worry about the certainty of the conviction. And if Ordinary Britons are uneasy about the case, you can bet that Ordinary Libyans will be too. The conventional narrative there will be akin to that of the Guantanamo detainees – a Western power pursuing a vendetta against and unfortunate scapegoat.

This doesn’t take al-Megrahi’s side, or excuse Libya’s stte terrorism. But it does give an alternative explanation for the crowd’s exhuberance. It is more an expression of Libyan nationalism, than simply barbarians cheering a murderer.

As politicians from all sides condemn the brutal killings in Northern Ireland, one word seems conspicuously absent from their comments: terrorism.  Gordon Brown seemed particularly careful to label the perpetrators “murderers”.

I am reminded of a Matthew Parris column from two-and-a-half years ago, comparing the British Government’s approach to violence in Northern Ireland, and the radical Islamist threat:

Let’s treat the plotters as common criminals, not soldiers in a global war

It is clear why this distinction is made.  Labelling the attacks “murders” suggests that these are isolated incidents, divorced from ideology.  Meanwhile “terrorism” would point to a Second Troubles.  No-one but the Real IRA wants that.  If/when we fall victim to another Islamist terror attack, it will be interesting to note what language the Government uses then, especially now that the “War on Terror” has fallen out of vogue.

Security expert Bruce Schneier on social networking technology:

We never realized how much our security could be attributed to distance and inconvenience — how difficult it is to recruit, organize, coordinate, and communicate without formal organizations. That inadvertent measure of security is now gone. Bad guys, from hacker groups to terrorist groups, will use the same ad hoc organizational technologies that the rest of us do. And while there has been some success in closing down individual Web pages, discussion groups, and blogs, these are just stopgap measures.

This reminds me of a post by DE at Minority Report, discussing ideas of privacy and anonymity (I’ve quoted it before):

Human detective work moves at human pace. The same bloke that linked the two pieces of data could have done a similar task by asking the station manager or a nosy newsagent. If someone is trying to track me down, then someone must think I really am worth the effort.

Its when computers talk to other computers that liberty disappears. Because a computer can correlate countless bits of data and create new records that would take many humans exponentially longer to do. And that gap, or grace period, is actually where anonymity lies, or did.

So technology makes it easier for crimminals and terrorists to target us, but also, one assumes, for the police to trace them.  But it also allows the State to erode our privacy.  Meanwhile, as chronicled many-a-time on this blog, ordinary citizens can use technology to pressure governments to be more open, to expose their lies, and counter official narratives.  The two types of security we desire – protection from crimminal elements, and protection from state intrusion – are often in tension.  It is interesting that new technologies don’t shift the balance one-way or another, but end up assisting all actors: Crimminals, The State, The Citizen.

The question is, does the technology ratchet up the tension, making violations and conflict more frequent?  Or does it pre-empt and head-off many of the flash-points, before they become a problem?

News gatherers and citizen journalists in Mumbai, 28th November 2008. Photo by Vinu

The way in which 24 hour news channels have changed the way we learn about, and witness, global events has been well documented and discussed. We saw the twin towers fall, live on TV.  I think its astonishing that the image of one of these young terrorists could be pasted across my copy of the Metro, whilst he was still at large in India.

The latest terror induced crisis, in Mumbai, takes our participation in these events a stage further. These attacks, made with assault-rifles over several locations, was in many ways more confusing than Al-Qaeda’s grand gesture of 9/11. It says something about how technology has developed, that this story was relayed as much by connected individuals – the mass of citizen journalists – as by major news networks. Via Peter Bradwell at Demos, I’ve found a Twitter feed giving information on the attacks. In a mirror of the Election Twitter, which captured the global exhilaration of the Obama victory, this Mumbai twitter conveys something of the confusion caused by these attacks.  As well as learning about the events, and witnessing them, it has come to the stage where we are experiencing them too.  The epicentre of the attacks are in India, but we experience the reaction everywhere.

Meanwhile, high quality images are available via Flickr (including Vinu’s excellent shots, which I’ve used to illustrate this and the previous post).  In this case the static, but high-resolution photos beats low resolution YouTube.  Either way, social media sites have been promising to empower the citizen journalist, and to cut out the middle-man of the mainstream media.  And of course, they also make it harder for government’s to force a certain narrative onto us.  In 2008, with the Obama campaign and the Mumbai attacks, I would say that social media has come of age.

Mumbaikars kept back from the scene of devastation, Colaba. Photo by Vinu.

Whoever these terrorists in Mumbai turn out to be, its clear that they are trying to sow division and hatred in a country of many cultures.  The fear is that Hindu will now turn against Muslim, and India will now turn against Pakistan.  This is certainly what the cynics expect.

I am hopeful, however.  Back in 2006, after the Malegon bombings, I was struck by the defiant attitude of the locals who refused to divide themselves along religious lines, as the terrorists (in that case, militant Hindus attacking Muslims) intended.

There is a lot of cynicism about the over-use of the word ‘Hope’, and about the potential of digital technologies to help create a genuinely new politics.  I think this atrocity, terrible though it is, presents an opprtunity to put these optimistic sentiments to practical purpose.  What is needed is a grass-roots response to the current crisis, similar to the We Are Not Afraid phenomenon, which wrestles the narrative away from a divisive blame-game.  Its a way in which advocates of peace, those who recognise our common humanity, can win another PR victory against these vicious ideologues.

As Obama consolidates his lead in the polls, there a plenty of analyses as to why he is seems to have got the better of Senator McCain. The meme that the Right would have us believe is that McCain has been hamstrung by the economy, and that under normal circumstances he would have been in with a chance.

I tend to a different view, which is that Americans have seen through the obfuscation of the Repbulican Party of George Bush and Dick Cheney, and they recognise McCain as being a continuation of that. Throughout, Obama has chosen calmer tactics than his opponents. When they attack, his “shrug it off” attitude has succeeded with the voters.

As I have said before, his ground game, that is, the growing network of supporters campaigning for him on a local level, provide a sort of chainmail. The tight network, connected via new technologies, can rebutt, or at least soften the impact, of any given attack. I predict that the coming smears – Add the Reverend Wright, Tony Rezko to William Ayers – will fail to penetrate in the way that Republican attackers hope. It is too late for an old scandal or impropriety to change people’s minds.

Looking at the polls, and crucially, looking at how they move in the Democrats favour after an apparently negative news cycle, I think even the dreaded endorsement of Osama Bin Laden, half-expected in the next couple of weeks, will fail to provide the swing McCain needs. If the grainy tape of the old bearded psychopath makes a comeback, watch as the media repeat the clichés that it is a “game changer”. Then watch as the polls prove the pundits wrong.

I’m sure there will be some who stick to the prevalent “don’t over-estimate the stupidity of Americans” view, but I honestly think we’re past the point where that is a credible dismissal. The USA never enthusiatically endorsed the madness of King George Bush. Now the polls show them enthusiatically rejecting him and his shadows, McCain and Palin.

Update

Over at the excellent FiveThirtyEight, Rany Jazayerli predicts Bin Laden’s October surprise. His chilling prediction:

With McCain lagging in the polls, bin Laden might even try a Hail Mary – with Sarah Palin on the ballot, I’d imagine that he’ll throw in some misogynistic comments about how a woman’s place is inside the home and that a nation led by a woman is sure to be cursed by God.

Writing in the Times, Amir Taheri warns of rising Islamism in North Africa, especially Morocco:

Women in jeans or mini-skirts have all but disappeared from public, along with all females who favoured the colourful dress of the Berber. One sees countless women draped in black that remind one of Hitchcock’s The Birds. … Fewer and fewer places serve alcohol, and parts of the main cities are becoming no-go areas for foreign tourists.

I was in Morocco less that two weeks ago on holiday, and this doesn’t sound like the place I visited. It was difficult, though not impossible, to get alcohol in the old Medinas, but outside the city walls it was not a problem. And I remember being surprised at seeing young, local girls in Western clothing – not hot-pants, admittedly, but certainly figure-hugging outfits, strappy tops, make-up and jeans. Likewise with the Berber outfits, of which we saw plenty. Indeed, it was the black-clad munaqqaba who stood out, because they were an unusual sight. Its true that hijabs reign, but that’s not in itself a sign of Islamic extremism.

Nor did there appear to be any no-go areas for tourists. Indeed, our favourite afternoon was in Meknes, where we cautiously wandered into the back alleys of the Medina, to escape the pungent smell of the souqs. Far from feeling threatened or harassed, we were greeted with smiles and ‘hellos’ around every corner.